There is a poll that popped up this week and it explains most of what you see in the news. Did you see it? It has the Democrats actually all the way down at 26 percent approval. That poll explains why they’re doing the things they’re doing. And those things explain the 26 percent. This edition of the 5QT is going to examine some of those, so sit back and enjoy the ride. 1. You’re Not Fooling Anybody, Gov. Fatty Illinois’s corpulent governor, J.B. Pritzker, wants very badly to run for president, but he doesn’t seem to want to do anything that would make him electable. In this way, he’s both the perfect embodiment of the spoiled rich brat who thinks the world revolves around him and the entitled radical politician whose contempt for the public prevents him from moderating his worst impulses. As such, Pritzker, who at least ought to look into semaglutides as an option — the camera puts 15 pounds on you, governor, and that’s much more than you can absorb given your appearance — has decided his best means of getting earned media and becoming relevant in 2028 is to out-shout the other Democrats when it comes to Donald Trump. It’s strange because Trump won’t be on the ballot in 2028. Certainly, Trump Derangement Syndrome will still infect most of the Democrats’ voters, but that would almost certainly be a given for those candidates making the race that year. Being the most obnoxious Trump critic doesn’t do a lot to make you presidential. Of course, neither does running Illinois into the ground. Nevertheless, when earlier this week Trump signed an executive order that included a voter ID requirement as part of a host of election integrity measures most people would find entirely reasonable, Pritzker decided he had to blow his top once again… Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker on Tuesday had a forceful response to President Donald Trump’s executive order signed earlier in the day to overhaul elections, including requiring documentary proof of citizenship to register to vote in federal elections. “Voting is a fundamental right and sacred responsibility of every American. Yet, once again Donald Trump is ignoring the rule of law and circumventing Congress,” Pritzker wrote in statement released Tuesday evening. And a little more… “We will not blindly follow illegal orders because Donald Trump wrote them down on a piece of paper. Illinois follows the laws of the land — not the decrees of an aspiring king hell bent on disenfranchising millions of voters who deserve to have their voice heard.” “Millions” of voters? Oh, shut up, you gelatinous gasbag. This has been said, and I’ll repeat it for those who haven’t heard it: there is zero reason to object to an ID requirement for voting other than to promote cheating. None. We require ID for common commercial transactions, travel, and all kinds of things, and any American adult who can’t produce one is so checked out of society that they’re virtually certain not to care enough about our elections to actually want to vote. Almost nobody objects to voter ID. Black people, the supposed victims of such a scheme, overwhelmingly support voter ID in poll after poll. It’s only hard-core leftist Democrats who object, and the only reason they do is that voter ID interferes with plans to dragoon illegal aliens to the polls and manufacture votes for the machine. That’s it. And Pritzker, the Chicago pol living off a family fortune made a century ago, is about as consummate a machine Democrat as it’s possible to be. Does he want to make this his signature issue? By all means, please do. Take your whole party with you and own it. 2. The Nothingburger — or Maybe It’s a Big Deal After All I had a column and a podcast on the stupid Signalgate scandal saying essentially the same thing, which is that this is a ginned-up fraud of a scandal and a pathetic attempt, at that. For most people it died almost immediately, and it’s only the Beltway blob attempting to keep it alive. (READ MORE: From Watergate … To This?) By now, anything involving Jeffrey Goldberg and the Atlantic ought to be dismissed out of hand. But after Goldberg posted the entire text exchange from the Signal thread involving high officials in the Trump administration as they discussed the impending airstrikes against Houthi terrorists who had fired on U.S. naval vessels well more than 100 times and have all but shut down commercial shipping in the Red Sea corridor, it seems like maybe Goldberg ought to be taken more seriously. Goldberg alleged that the officials, and for some reason, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth most prominently, had discussed “war plans” in the thread before scaling that back to “attack plans.” In truth, even that is far too pungent a claim. Nothing about the operational details of the airstrikes against the Houthis was discussed on that Signal chat, and in fact, the only real reason for complaint was the question of how Goldberg was “mistakenly” included in the thread. (RELATED: This Aspect of the Atlantic’s “Scoop” Is All Wet) But what everybody seems to be missing is that if Goldberg’s self-promoting claims are true, then the scandal isn’t about the negligence of Hegseth or National Security Advisor Mike Waltz, on whom the invitation to Goldberg was pinned. No. The negligent and irresponsible party here is Jeffrey Goldberg. Who should have known that he had no business being on that chat, and who had an ethical duty to make himself known and then excuse himself from the conversation when he realized what he was seeing, and who certainly should not have disclosed anything from that chat to the public. And if, in fact, Goldberg’s claims are true that state secrets were included in the chat thread he’s now alleging he fully published at the Atlantic, why, that’s…treason, isn’t it? It certainly would be a violation of the Espionage Act. Maybe the Trump administration ought to take this “scandal” seriously and punish not the victims of it but its perpetrator. Perhaps we should see footage, shot live by Newsmax and Fox News cameras, of an FBI SWAT team storming Jeffrey Goldberg’s house and dragging him out in his underwear in a pre-dawn raid. That’s what they did to Paul Manafort and Roger Stone, isn’t it? Then we’d know this is as serious an affair as the Democrats want to make it out to be. Certainly, Goldberg’s arrest and prosecution must precede any resignations of Waltz or Hegseth or anyone else on the Signal chat, no? I’d like to see that pre-dawn raid just for the whiplash attendant in the Left suddenly realizing there was no “there” there in Signalgate. And no, I don’t expect such a drastic reaction. It would surely be instructive, though. I do note that this was all spun up almost immediately after polls started showing Trump’s popularity at all-time highs and the Democrats’ approval numbers reaching all-time lows. That alone was enough to dismiss this asinine “scandal.” But while I’m not serious (or at least not fully serious) about sending in the SWAT team for Goldberg, it would certainly seem that the Trump administration needs to impose some unpleasant consequences on those people actively seeking to sabotage it. And we haven’t seen those yet. 3. Jasmine Crockett I don’t need to say much about this nauseating fraud of a congresswoman, other than to note that she’s the product of expensive private schools all the way up the line. And this “hoodrat” routine of hers, which most notably this week involved her trashing Texas Governor Greg Abbott, who has been in a wheelchair for three decades after having a tree fall on him while he was jogging in a freak accident when he was a young man, as “Governor Hot Wheels,” isn’t genuine. (RELATED: Five Quick Things: Our National Crazy Eurotrash Girlfriend) Jasmine Crockett says the rude and hateful things she says because she thinks the people of the majority-black congressional district in south Dallas that she represents like that kind of conduct from their House representative. In other words, she thinks her constituents are trash, and so she acts like trash in order to represent them. That’s the contempt. That’s the cynicism. And that’s why Crockett’s party is at 26 percent. 4. The Random Appearance of James Boasberg So it just so happened that the Signal Affair hit as soon as the Trump-versus-Democrats popularity split became a yawning chasm, and it just so happened that leftist sleazeball attorney Norm Eisen had a lawsuit on behalf of a nonprofit advocacy group ready immediately after the “scandal” broke, and it just so happened that the case randomly landed in the court of James Boasberg, the embarrassingly biased kangaroo-court judge in D.C. whose absurd rulings demanding the repatriation of illegal-alien Venezuelan gangsters from the designated foreign terrorist organization Tren de Aragua after Trump had shipped them off to El Salvador. (RELATED: Dictatorship of Obama Judges) It just so happened, you guys. Benny Johnson had Rep. Jim Jordan on his podcast to discuss this, and the dripping sarcasm of the reaction was indeed appropriate. Rep. Jim Jordan Says it’s ALL Been Planned and It’s NO SURPRISE Rogue Judge Boasberg Was Assigned To The Signal Messages Lawsuit: “Supposed to be random. He could recuse himself from the case if there’s a bias.. he won’t. There’s a history. They had lawsuit readt. Go figure.” pic.twitter.com/rQ2MpZbmlt — Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) March 26, 2025 But the question for Jordan is this: Congrats on recognizing all of this as the put-up job that it is. Now what? Will Congress take action to blow up this cabal of political operatives corrupting the judicial system? The obvious thing to do is to drop a nuke on the entire federal D.C. circuit. Just eliminate it and reassign the judges to other judicial districts. Put that in the next round of must-pass legislation, which will be the bill raising the debt limit. Or at least, put that move on the table. Let the other side lose their minds over it, and when the screeching dies down, take the position that you won’t kill off that circuit just yet so long as all of these judicial usurpations go away. That’s not a negotiation to be had with the Democrats, by the way. It’s a negotiation to be had with John Roberts, the Supreme Court Chief Justice, who is quite tardy in policing the judicial branch’s excesses and needs to be presented with the negative consequences of his negligence. (RELATED: This Mess Is of Your Own Making, Chief Justice Roberts) Just saying. I know, I know — this is an awfully spicy version of the 5QT. 5. Adolescence Is a Big Deal, But Not an Especially Good Deal I’m only one episode in of Netflix’s #1 show, Adolescence, a British police drama that has kicked up a significant fuss on both sides of the pond, so I’m not in a position to pass judgment on it yet. My only hard-and-fast observation so far is that Stephen Graham, a terrific actor who has been in some iconic roles (he played Al Capone in Boardwalk Empire and Jason Statham’s goofball sidekick Tommy in Snatch, among dozens of other memorable characters), is absolutely excellent as a middle-class father faced with the devastating revelation that his 13-year-old son is a murderer. There’s a scene at the end of the first episode where that becomes unmistakable which is amazingly powerful. Is this based on a true story? Well, yes and no… The four-part Netflix series Adolescence is already making waves after its debut on Friday, with many wondering if the tale of a teen who has been accused of killing a female classmate is based on a true story. The young boy, played by Owen Cooper, is quickly revealed to be guilty of the crime in the first episode, and the series begins a larger, steeper dive into incel culture and gender violence that has been promoted by influencers such as Andrew and Tristan Tate. “In the U.K., there’s a real problem with knife crime, certainly in the younger generation. There have been a series of of young boys who were killing young girls with knives, and it was really upsetting,” director Philip Barantini told TheWrap this month. “That was the seed that we wanted to explore, and send a bit of a message and maybe spark a bit of a conversation.” Writer Jack Thorne also said he didn’t want to come up with a story that immediately blamed Jamie’s parents for his crime. “I don’t want to make this easy and blame the parents. I want to create a complicated portrait,” he explained. After a female colleague suggested he explore incel culture online, Thorne soon realized he had a starting point for Jamie’s radicalization. So it’s an examination of “toxic masculinity,” is it? And because it is, the ruling class in the U.K. has taken to the show like fish to water. Evita Duffy-Alonso absolutely shredded this narrative, and good for her… Netflix’s “Adolescence” is anti-white, anti-male propaganda—an attack on red-pilled Western boys the liberal order fears. pic.twitter.com/hJbVU2AA18 — Evita Duffy-Alfonso (@evitaduffy_1) March 21, 2025 There has been a lot of talk that the makers of Adolescence were really producing a show about the Southport stabbings, that were perpetrated by an African teenager, and cast a white British kid (Owen Cooper, who is really incredible in the role) as the murderer. I don’t know if that’s true, but Duffy-Alonso is absolutely right to note that if there’s a social problem in Britain that needs a hit Netflix show bringing it to light it’s the Pakistani rape gangs, not the Andrew Tate and Connor McGregor fans watching YouTube podcasts and making memes about feminists. Much of this controversy is valid in America as well, of course, but at least here we seem to have broken the fever on our woke mind virus infection. That has not happened at all in the U.K. (RELATED: You Get (and Deserve) What You Tolerate. That Isn’t Good News for the UK.) And on a related note, this would be a sensational opportunity for you to pick up your copy of From Hellmarsh With Love, the novel I wrote last year, satirizing the horrible government in that benighted country across the pond. READ MORE from Scott McKay: From Watergate … To This? RFK Jr. and the Approaching Death of Major Media Five Quick Things: The Well-Deserved Disgust of the American People The post Five Quick Things: The Party of Vote Fraud appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.