On October 17, during a scheduled Livestream Mass in Ecuador. Father Molinari was struck in the head by giant wooden cross that was directly behind him.

The Parish posted:

As the Redemptorist family, we join in prayer for the eternal rest of his soul and we ask the Lord to grant comfort to his family, his brother priests and all the faithful who cherish his legacy and memory with gratitude.

Big Brother is watching, but who is watching Big Brother?

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Trump’s remarkable return to the White House was a miraculous turnaround for the Country. Throughout his ‘24 campaign he has made several ambitious promises, pledging to restore America and bringing us to the “Golden Age”, and putting America First.

During his first term he delivered on his promises. However, his second term has proven challenging, which raises concerns of if he can deliver this time around.

Promises like: ending the Russo-Ukraine War within 24 hours. It has been over 4 years since anything has happened. As of now the Trump Administration has reached a deal with Russia to allow Russian diesel to be sold in the market which he said:

It was agreed that Russia will immediately supply over 300,000 Tons of Diesel Fuel to the American and Global Marketplace, another 500,000 Tons during the month of November, and 1,000,000 Tons immediately thereafter….

This is a short fix which will possibly bring down fuel prices. However, this will keep the Russian War machine going for awhile. This was a political gamble which created an expectation that was difficult to meet from the beginning.

The other promise for this midterm is to give every adult in the US $5000 if the Republicans win the midterms.

If Republicans win the House of Representatives and the Senate in the 2026 Midterm Elections, I’m going to give all Adult Citizens in the United States of America $5,000…

I do not want to be that guy but there has been other promises for DOGE and Tariffs dividends which never panned out. I would like to believe this will be true but actions speak louder than words.

This midterm will be a doozy but affordability is on everyone's mind lately. This second term for Trump is surely going to be difficult, granted Sleepy Joe left us with this mess. I pray that this administration brings us back to pre-COVID normality.

We are just 30 days away from the 2026 midterm elections. Make no mistake these are the most important elections in recent memory. The choice is clear: Republicans or Communists/Socialists.

According to Polymarket, the Democrats have a 65% chance to retake the Senate and a 94% chance to retake the House. The latest Gallup data shows that only 21% of Americans say they are satisfied with the way things are and while 77% are dissatisfied. Housing costs remain high, gasoline ($4.38) and diesel ($6.38), and inflation sits at 3.4%. These are real pressures working families face every day. Granted, the previous administration left a mess behind.

I am not oblivious to the full picture. I understand that the Biden administration’s policies and “presidency” have left the Trump Administration with a hefty work load. Alongside global instability. Affordability is not within reach for all Americans. Right now, voters are angry and rightfully so. With less than a month until Election Day, Republicans must fight with everything to keep the Senate and House. The Democrats are pulling all the stops, and if they succeed they will only hinder progress.

Republicans if you see this, please do your job and door knock/phone bank for candidates, but candidates it up to you all to work twice as hard and address issues that everyday Americans are going through right now. If not, do not be surprised if this feels just like 2022.

But later this month, on October 14th, is the first anniversary of the day that my life - at least the only version of it I thought was possible at the time - would end.

That sounds morbid, and maybe it is. But it’s the truth. And if I’m going to tell this story, the truth is the only way I can do it.

If you have no idea what I’m talking about, let me save you the Google search.

Last October, POLITICO published what would later become an award-winning exposé involving 28,000 leaked messages from a young Republican group chat on Telegram.

I didn’t just belong to the group. I created it.

The group was private and had no more than a dozen members, most of them my close friends and political allies. The messages spanned roughly seven months during my campaign to lead the Young Republican National Federation, the Republican Party’s national youth auxiliary.

Many of the messages were exactly what you’d expect from a private chat between young political operatives: daily life, family, politics, memes, jokes, and the kind of nonsense people say when they believe nobody is watching.

Admittedly, some messages shouldn’t have been sent. According to POLITICO, among those tens of thousands of messages were more than 200 uses of epithets and slurs. Many of the phrases used were no different than those you’d hear in an edgy Instagram reel or read on X.

That didn’t stop people from being offended.

Now, this is the part where I could tell you it was a political hit job. I could call it the work of the liberal fake news media. I could tell you that we were set up.

In some ways, that is all the truth. But I don’t see a benefit in relitigating the past.

The bottom line is that I made stupid jokes that offended people. I am not racist. I do not “love” Hitler. I am not antisemitic. I am, however, a guy with a dark sense of humor who sometimes finds himself funnier than he actually is.

And for that, I, along with nearly a dozen other young leaders, paid a heavy price.

For me, it was the painful end of a career I had spent 13 years building, and the people I once considered friends and colleagues who disappeared overnight. It was the thousands of hateful messages I received online, the anonymous voicemails left in the middle of the night, and actual letters in the mail warning me to “sleep with one eye open.”

I was doxxed. My personal information had been posted publicly on Reddit and other online message boards. And it didn’t stop there. People with way too much time on their hands didn’t just come after me - they went after my family and friends too.

There are still people obsessed with me, even a year later.

In hindsight, the public fallout lasted only a few weeks. But those few weeks felt endless.

Every morning I woke to the same thing all over again: another headline, another reporter asking for comment, more text messages and voicemails, more people asking what happened, and more people I thought I could trust suddenly gone.

It was like Groundhog Day - except it was October, I wasn’t the fictional weatherman Phil Connors, and there was absolutely nothing funny about it.

To ordinary people - those living outside the bubble that is political life - what was actually happening went much deeper than what the headlines or talking heads would tell you.

Because of the people involved with the leak, as well as the professional network surrounding me and those in the chat, the story triggered a panicked reaction throughout the Republican political world. Party officials at the state and national levels held emergency meetings. Even at the White House, the President and Cabinet officials were briefed to prepare for the fallout.

What began as a private group chat among a handful of young political operatives became, for a moment, a national political scandal and institutional crisis that reached the highest levels of party leadership and our government. That is the real measure of how thoroughly this story was weaponized.

And it also exposed a larger problem inside the Republican Party that has become increasingly difficult to ignore: we have, in many ways, become the party of pearl-clutching.

When a crisis or scandal hits, too many of those in elected office jump to react - sometimes issuing the strongest condemnation, demanding resignations, and, in this case, treating stupid jokes as if they were a formal policy platform.

Ordinary people do this too, but elected officials and those holding positions of leadership have a special responsibility not to feed the frenzy.

The media plays a role in this as well, obviously. Headlines today are engineered for clicks, not context. The incentive structure rewards the most dramatic possible framing because outrage travels faster than nuance.

But the decision to amplify that framing still belongs to the people who hold power, and for many of them, overreaction has become the default setting in today’s political environment.

The absurdity peaked, however, when the story jumped from political news into pure entertainment. Those of us in the group chat became a part of every opening monologue on late-night television. Jimmy Kimmel, Stephen Colbert, and even Saturday Night Live all took cheap shots at the group chat and its members.

Then there were the grandstanding politicians, like Gavin Newsom, who called for a federal investigation and congressional hearings into the group chat. It highlights, once again, just how thoroughly this scandal had been weaponized. It was never about accountability - it was purely performative.

Truthfully, though, the public humiliation and professional destruction were not even the hardest parts.

The hardest was what came after, when everyone finally moved on.

The past 12 months have felt like a prison sentence.

I know that sounds dramatic, and I don’t really care.

Being publicly humiliated is one thing. Losing your career is another. But being suddenly cut off from the world you spent your entire adult life building is something else entirely.

I was depressed. There were days I felt too anxious and too hopeless to be around my own family, days I didn’t leave my bed, and days I barely ate. I felt as if I had lost control over my entire life.

Maybe that’s difficult for people to understand if they didn’t know me before all of this - before I lost almost everything.

I’ve spent most of my adult life always on the go. I was always working, always thinking, and always talking to someone on the phone to plan what came next. I was comfortable living at a pace that most people would probably find exhausting.

To go from that to near-complete isolation - almost overnight - is difficult to comprehend, let alone accept.

I don’t say any of this to elicit your sympathy. I don’t want it, and I certainly don’t need it.

But by now you’re probably wondering: Peter, how did POLITICO get access to your private messages?

Friendships in politics can be a double-edged sword. Your ally on Monday can become your enemy by Friday. I learned that lesson the hard way.

What began as a gesture of goodwill intended to build trust between another leader in the Young Republicans and me backfired. I later found out that a member of our group was being extorted by that same leader for a complete transcript of our messages. And it would later come to light that the same leader had been colluding with a POLITICO reporter to fabricate several hit pieces on me.

Those of you who know me know that I am obsessed with Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas. There’s a line in that movie that has shaped the way I’ve operated in the political arena for many years. It’s the scene where Jimmy Conway tells a young Henry Hill that he just learned the two greatest things in life: never rat on your friends, and always keep your mouth shut.

I guess some people aren’t a fan of the classics.

But, seriously, this is all a shining example of one of the dirtiest parts of the business that most people, including my own parents, had no idea existed.

The individual who engineered that effort has, by multiple accounts, been shielded by the president himself despite recommendations from senior aides and cabinet officials who wanted him dismissed from his role within the administration. He has continued to receive that protection despite a string of incidents that have, quite frankly, put the administration in a bad light.

I won’t name him or any of the operatives who supported his nefarious actions. Those individuals all know who they are. They know what they did. And they will be labeled as dishonest and untrustworthy for the remainder of their professional careers.

The point, however, is simply this: the same system that moved with remarkable speed to isolate and discard me somehow found a way to protect the person most responsible for putting the entire episode in motion.

That isn’t a grievance. It is an observation, and it is one I will leave there.

Sometimes justice isn’t expedient. Sometimes it is not obvious. And sometimes the only way to move forward is to leave the past where it belongs.

Hate and vengeance do not get me out of bed in the morning. They never did, and they never will. What gets me out of bed is the burning desire to do something incredible with the time I have on this earth.

It’s why I excelled in a career in public service. It’s why I got involved in politics. It’s why I poured so much of myself into transforming my state’s young Republican organization into a political powerhouse that raised more money, elected more young candidates, and grew its membership further than at any point in its more than 90-year history.

And with all that success came the opportunity - and, I believed, the responsibility - to speak my mind.

As a rising leader in the party, I became an outspoken critic of Republican leadership at every level. I was not afraid to say when Republicans were failing to connect with voters, failing to mobilize them, or simply failing to do their jobs. There were even times when I supported candidates the party establishment did not.

I did not ask permission. I did not kiss rings. I made decisions based on what I believed to be right.

And in a political system that often rewards blind loyalty and fealty, that can make you dangerous.

It was never a secret that some people did not like me. It was never a secret that some felt threatened by me. And it was certainly never a secret that some wanted to stand where I stood.

But truly, what made the experience increasingly stomach-churning was the selective outrage following the exposé’s publication - and no, I’m not talking about Democrats. In today’s political environment, that is simply par for the course.

I’m talking about fellow Republicans - the people I once considered close colleagues, friends, and political allies. At the time, I tried to justify their reactions as the nature of our business. In politics, sometimes you have to sacrifice one to save the herd.

But the media’s treatment of these messages was something else entirely. Take, for example, the message that became the headline and, ultimately, my permanent brand: “I love Hitler.”

In the actual exchange, someone reported that a Young Republican group had promised to vote for “the most right-wing person” in the national leadership race.

My response was a sarcastic, deliberately over-the-top joke: “Great. I love Hitler.”

There was even a smiley-face emoji.

It was the same kind of dark, exaggerated humor that has become commonplace among young people in online political spaces. It was not a manifesto. It was not a declaration of ideology. It was, simply, a stupid joke about supporting the furthest-right candidate in an internal election for a youth political organization that most Americans don’t even know exists.

Yet that single sentence, stripped of everything surrounding it, was transformed into evidence that I was an antisemitic monster.

The context was always irrelevant because the narrative needed a villain, and I was convenient.

The double standard became even harder to ignore when, at the same time, Democratic Virginia attorney general candidate Jay Jones faced scrutiny over text messages in which he fantasized about putting two bullets into the head of a Republican House speaker and ranked that person ahead of Hitler and Pol Pot as the person who should die.

Those messages involved explicit political violence and the family of a sitting lawmaker.

The media coverage and institutional reaction were noticeably softer, more temporary, and far less career-ending for the man involved. Jay Jones now serves as the Commonwealth of Virginia’s 49th attorney general.

The pattern, however, didn’t stop there.

In the year since my situation became public, there have been several other leaks involving group chats of young political operatives, and the reaction from both sides of the aisle, as well as the media, seemed overwhelmingly muted.

For Democrats, the silence is hardly surprising.

But for Republicans - including many of the same people who publicly condemned me - the response has ranged from total silence to a far softer version of the outrage they once performed.

It’s frustrating because, if the principle were really about the content of private messages, the reaction would be consistent.

It wasn’t. The outrage was selective.

It makes you wonder whether the original response was actually about principle or politics.

Examples of this exist on both sides of the aisle. The point isn’t to celebrate anyone’s private messages, but rather that the rules of cancellation are applied selectively, and the application almost always tracks with who is useful to destroy and who is useful to protect.

That realization has forced me to answer another question I have been asked repeatedly over the past year: Why remain loyal to a president and political party that did not stand with you when it mattered?

The answer, again, is not that simple.

Ronald Reagan’s Eleventh Commandment - “Thou shalt not speak ill of any fellow Republican” - no longer exists in any meaningful form.

And maybe it never really did.

But I was raised in this business by mentors who taught me something slightly more important: Republicans should still try to work together even when they disagree. The foundation of any relationship is trust and loyalty.

Outside of simply being good at what you do, loyalty is one of the most valuable qualities anyone can possess. That is true in politics as it is in life.

The problem, however, is that too many people in politics today treat trust and loyalty as one-way streets. They demand it from everyone around them while feeling perfectly comfortable abandoning it the moment it becomes inconvenient.

I was taught differently. And even if some of the people who taught me those lessons ultimately failed to live by them when the pressure arrived, it is my choice to stay loyal to the broader mission of the Republican Party - to the institution and people that, for the most part, still defend and advance the values I believe in.

That’s also why, despite everything that happened, I would never become a Democrat.

I’m not going to trade one set of problems for another simply because people on my own side disappointed me. I still support the Republican Party. I support President Trump. And I believe in many of the policies that are outlined in our party’s platform.

The fact that I am still willing to fight for them is evidence enough that I still care.

Now, if you’re wondering whether I have any remorse, that answer is also complicated.

I regret the pain that this episode caused my family and loved ones.

I regret the stupidity of putting certain jokes in writing.

But I do not regret who I am. I do not regret the work I did. And I do not regret refusing to pretend that a private group chat of young political operatives trading memes, barbs, and dark humor was the equivalent of a neo-Nazi manifesto.

And, probably more importantly, I don’t regret standing up for myself.

Cancellation is not a single event. It is a process.

First comes the leak. Then the headlines. Then the ritual condemnation from people who once sought your help. Then the quiet professional blacklisting. Then the isolation that follows once the cameras move on.

Eventually, you’re left with knowledge that something you said privately can be weaponized by anyone who gains access to it and has an agenda.

And you learn that the same people who demand accountability rarely apply it evenly.

I’ve spent the past year writing, thinking, and rebuilding on my own terms.

The desire that got me into politics in the first place - to do something incredible - has not gone away. If anything, it’s become sharper.

And perhaps that’s the greatest thing this experience took from me: the illusion that success, friendships, or years of hard work somehow make you immune from being discarded. They don’t.

But it also gave me something I didn’t have before: perspective.

I know now that my career was never the total of my life. I know that political power is temporary. I know that people who seem indispensable today can disappear tomorrow.

And I know that the only thing I ultimately control is what I choose to do with the time I have.

So, to all my critics and the many rivals who hoped this episode would end me: I am not going anywhere.

I plan to remain an active voice in politics, in New York and across the country, whether they like it or not.

The people who thought a single leak could permanently silence someone who spent 13 years building something real are about to learn just how wrong they were.

HIGHLAND WEATHER HELENE REMEMBRANCE

September 27th, 2024, Hurricane Helene made it’s way into the Carolina’s, devastating the community, and breaking records.

Hurricane Helene first formed in the Caribbean, in which the first forecast models noticed a chance of this system making it’s way into the mountains. The National Hurricane Center put the Carolina’s in the track within a week out.

As we drew closer to that time, a cold front stalled in the Tennessee Valley as Helene grew in the Gulf, making it so the outer bands of Hurricane Helene pushed over Western North Carolina, saturating soils, and increasing the flood threat well before the arrival of Hurricane Helene. During that time, the dam at Lake Lure was starting to fail, prompting the National Weather Service to issue a “considerable” Flash Flood Warning for areas near around Lake Lure, 11 hours before Helene, and many flood alerts including downtown Asheville.

At around 12 AM September 27th, Hurricane Helene made landfall along the Florida Panhandle, before pushing it’s way up into the mountains of the Carolina’s. At 3 AM, the National Weather Service issued the first Flash Flood Emergency for Lake Lure due to imminent dam failure. This was only the first, as rain continued to fall, prompting the Greenville-Spartanburg National Weather Service to issue Flash Flood Emergencies for all of the Western Carolina mountains.

At or around 9 AM, Helene finally started to move out of the Carolina’s, but winds from 55-65 MPH continued. By this time, millions of customers were without power. By 12 PM, skies finally started to clear up, but that’s when the devastation showed. Interstates were flooded, houses gone, communities missing. Many customers then started to lose water by 2 PM, as many pipes were damaged from Helene, costing millions of dollars of damage. At 3 PM, all cell towers cut out, making it impossible to contact love ones. That didn’t return until 3 AM Sunday morning.

Helene is a storm here at Highland Weather we will never forget, and always will remember in our prayers and thoughts, to see the devastation in the community was something we hope will never see again, and thank everyone who listened to Highland Weather when we said to please evacuate.

Damage can still be found in the River Arts District in Asheville, and some locations, but as the damage gets cleaned up, our minds will never forget that day.

September 19, Ms. Polo was assassinated in cold blood at the Caraz Market. She was running for Governor in the Huaylas Province. The investigation is still ongoing, but they have two people in custody.

It looks to be a contract killing, days prior Polo recently stated that she received threatening phone calls from prisons and a police general (who has not been charged) for bringing to light corruption. Polo had investigating corruption and her YouTube channel, China Polo Dominical, exposed everything.

We pray for the family and friends of Susy Ysabel Aponte Polo. Political violence has no place in this world.

The post-Cold War order, where America sat comfortably at the top and everyone else largely played by the rules written in Washington, Brussels, and New York, is giving way to a harsher, more competitive arrangement. Russia, China, and the United States are the main players, and everyone else is either a piece on the board or trying hard not to become one.

This isn’t a declaration of war. Trade still flows. World leaders, despite their differences, still meet. But the underlying contest for leverage, resources, and security is real, and recent American actions under President Donald Trump have only accelerated it.

Let’s start with Iran.

Talking heads will tell you that the conflict is either about Israel or oil. Those points matter, but Iran’s importance goes further.

The country, led by a radical regime that sponsors terrorism worldwide and threatens its neighbors, sits astride the Strait of Hormuz, one of the most important energy chokepoints in the world. A serious disruption there does not stay in the Middle East. It eventually reaches American consumers through gas and grocery prices. That’s a painful reality we are already living.

But Iran is also deeply connected to the larger competition between Washington, Beijing, and Moscow.

Russia has maintained a close relationship with Iran, formalizing it with a strategic pact signed early last year. China has been the dominant buyer of Iranian crude, taking enormous quantities of oil at discounted prices. Those purchases provide Tehran with money and give Beijing access to energy outside the traditional Western-aligned system.

That matters. Cheap energy is not just an economic advantage. It’s a strategic one.

It keeps factories running, trucks moving, and militaries supplied. When two countries are trying to challenge American influence, a reliable source of discounted energy is extremely valuable.

That’s why you can’t view Iran in isolation.

For more than four decades, Washington has tried to contain the Iranian regime through sanctions and diplomacy. Trump took it further using military force.

Regardless of your view on that policy, the larger point is clear: Washington is treating Iran as part of a broader strategic problem rather than simply another regional dispute - and that problem has two pieces: Russia and China.

Russia and China Are Playing a Different Game

I shouldn’t have to tell you this, but the Russia of 2026 is not the Russia of 1999. And China is no longer the China of 2001.

Vladimir Putin’s Russia has spent years moving away from economic integration with the West. The invasion of Ukraine accelerated that process. Xi Jinping’s China has moved from being primarily an economic beneficiary of the American-led global system to trying to shape the system itself.

Putin wants a larger sphere of influence and a security architecture in Europe that gives Russia greater freedom of action.

Xi wants China to have greater control of technology, supply chains, energy, and the industries that will determine economic power in the next century.

Their interests are not identical. They are not formal allies, at least not in a way Washington’s treaty allies are. But they have discovered something important: they share a common interest in a world where American power has become less dominant.

That’s enough to create cooperation.

Even still, the relationship between Washington, Moscow, and Beijing remains far more complicated than a simple three-way confrontation.

Trump met Putin in Alaska last summer. He then traveled to Beijing earlier this spring, and Xi is expected to visit Trump in Washington later this month.

That is the paradox of the new world order - no pun intended.

The United States can regard Russia and China as strategic competitors while still negotiating with them. In fact, competition makes negotiation more important, not less.

The bottom line is that the United States needs leverage. But so does everyone else.

The Flashpoints

Look at Ukraine.

Russia’s 2022 invasion fundamentally changed Europe’s security forecast. NATO rallied around Ukraine, European countries began increasing defense spending, and the United States became Kyiv’s central military supporter.

Moscow, meanwhile, has long argued that NATO expansion represents a threat to Russia’s security.

Those two positions are incompatible.

The war has demonstrated that Europe still depends heavily on American military power, even as European politicians grandstand about building greater strategic autonomy. The result is a Europe that is spending more on defense while also simultaneously trying to figure out its long-term relationship with the United States.

The war may eventually end, but the underlying argument about Europe’s security will not.

Just look to the east.

Taiwan is arguably the most dangerous flashpoint in the U.S.-China relationship.

The island sits strategically along the first island chain and is essential to the world’s semiconductor industry. Beijing has long considered Taiwan part of China and has never renounced the possibility of using force to achieve unification.

Even under Trump, Washington has maintained its longstanding policy of strategic ambiguity while providing Taiwan with military equipment and maintaining extensive economic ties.

That arrangement works precisely because nobody is ever completely certain about where the red lines are.

It’s also why Taiwan remains one of the most consequential pieces on this geopolitical chessboard.

Then there’s Venezuela.

For years, Venezuelan oil found a major market in China, often at discounted prices. That relationship became another example of how countries under U.S. sanctions could still find ways to move energy and generate revenue.

But the United States’ military intervention and removal of Nicolás Maduro earlier this year fundamentally changed that equation. Venezuelan oil flows have since been redirected toward other markets, including the United States and Europe.

It’s not simply how many barrels are moving from one port to another; it’s who controls the flow, because energy is leverage.

Greenland is Not a Joke

And finally, there’s Greenland.

Trump’s interest in Greenland was initially dismissed by world leaders and much of Washington as a bizarre distraction. But it’s truly something else.

Greenland sits between North America, Europe, and the Arctic. The United States has held Cold War-era authorization to operate Pituffik Space Base there, one of the most important American military installations in the Arctic. Plainly, the island matters because it is a strategic position for missile warning, space surveillance, and monitoring Russian activity.

It also sits in a region where the strategic importance of commercial shipping routes and critical minerals is expected to increase in the coming years.

That makes Greenland valuable. Very valuable.

Just last Friday, Washington announced a new security agreement with Denmark and Greenland that would expand the American military presence and restrict non-NATO military bases and certain investments on the island.

The United States isn’t acquiring Greenland, and the agreement keeps Greenland under Danish and Greenlandic sovereignty, but it is securing something strategically important: a much stronger position in the Arctic.

It’s exactly the sort of thing that looks insignificant until you take a step back and look at the map.

The Next Battlefield is Silicon

Then there is the piece of this realignment that may ultimately matter more than oil.

Artificial intelligence.

The AI race between the United States and China is no longer some futuristic competition discussed at technology conferences. It is already a geopolitical contest.

The United States still holds important advantages in frontier AI, private investment, computing infrastructure, and leading AI companies; however, China has closed much of the gap far faster than many American policymakers expected.

Chinese companies such as DeepSeek, Z.AI, MiniMax, and Alibaba are producing increasingly capable models, often at dramatically lower costs. Some are releasing open-weight models that can spread rapidly and be modified by other developers. It was recently reported that leading Chinese systems were roughly seven months behind the top U.S. labs on some measures - not years behind like some had once assumed.

That should get America’s attention, because AI isn’t just chatbots.

It affects military systems, intelligence analysis, manufacturing, scientific research, cybersecurity, and economic productivity. Whoever develops the best systems and has enough computing power and energy to deploy them at scale will have a major advantage in the next phase of the global economy.

Trump has repeatedly framed the competition in those terms. And his administration has tried to balance two competing objectives: keeping America’s lead in advanced computing while preventing China from gaining unrestricted access to the most sophisticated American chips.

The administration has loosened some restrictions on less-advanced Nvidia chips, while maintaining controls on the highest-end technology. Meanwhile, U.S. officials have accused Chinese companies of using techniques to reproduce capabilities developed by American firms. Beijing, obviously, disputes those accusations.

But this is where the AI race connects directly to everything else in this story.

AI requires chips.

Chips require factories.

Factories require energy.

And all of it depends on access to the minerals, infrastructure, and talent necessary to keep the system running.

The new geopolitical contest is not being fought in one place. It’s being fought everywhere at once.

America is Rethinking Its Alliances

Trump’s foreign policy etiquette is not designed to make traditional allies comfortable.

Tariffs have created serious friction with Canada and Europe; his public criticism of NATO allies has been blunt; and he has repeatedly demanded that countries that have relied on American security guarantees for decades take greater responsibility for their own defense.

Indeed, some of that approach is controversial, but there is a strategic logic behind it.

For decades, the United States effectively subsidized a global security architecture that benefited American allies as much as it benefited America. Washington provided the military umbrella, Europe spent comparatively less on defense, and American companies and consumers operated inside a global trading system that assumed the United States would remain the ultimate guarantor of stability.

But that arrangement was never meant to last forever, so the question is: What replaces it?

Trump’s answer is another question: What does America get in return?

That doesn’t mean abandoning alliances, but it does mean treating them as relationships with obligations on both sides.

At the same time, Trump is strengthening relationships with countries such as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates while deepening commercial and strategic ties across Asia.

The goal is not to withdraw from the world. It’s about having more options within it.

This is America First

None of this is abstract.

Americans don’t need to find the Strait of Hormuz on a map to understand what happens when energy supplies are disrupted.

They don’t need to follow semiconductor policy to understand why a shortage of computer chips can shut down an auto factory.

They don’t need a degree in Arctic studies to understand why Russia or China gaining a strategic foothold near North America would be bad.

And they don’t need to be AI experts to understand that the country controlling the most important technology of the next generation will have enormous economic and military advantages.

This is how the world is changing.

Energy. Technology. Critical minerals. Supply chains. Military access. Finance.

Those are the real pieces on the board.

The post-Cold War assumption that American dominance would simply continue indefinitely is gone.

That’s not an un-American take; it’s just reality.

The United States still has extraordinary advantages, such as geography and energy production. American universities, entrepreneurs, and technology companies remain enormously powerful. The dollar remains the world’s dominant reserve currency. And the U.S. military can project power anywhere in the world in a way no other country can match.

But advantages do not protect themselves.

They have to be used. That is the bet behind Trump’s approach.

Whether it works will depend on execution, domestic political stability, economic performance, and how America’s competitors respond. You can bet there will be setbacks. There will be bad deals and unnecessary fights. But there will also be moments when pressure produces results that quiet diplomacy simply cannot.

That is the nature of great-power competition.

The world is not going back to 1995 or 2005. America is entering a much harsher environment, where energy, technology, geography, and military power are all connected.

The countries that understand this will have more leverage. The countries that don’t will spend the next decade reacting to decisions other people made.

The realignment is already underway.

The only question now is whether America intends to shape it, or simply survive it.

Who remembers the good ole days of BCS 2000s college football every Saturday? Alabama always winning (as an Arkansas Razorback fan that stings)? Football athletes that wanted to be there at the programs instead of switching every year for a bigger paycheck?

There was a special thing about the pre NIL era. Athletes go to the programs to become men, but its not that way. Did you know the highest paid NIL player is Darian Mensah (Oregon QB) who is making $6.5 million? A 21 year old kid getting $6.5 million? Crazy.

The other thing that is also a bigger issue. LSU headcoach, Lane Kiffin, recently made headlines by suggesting bringing in Pro NFL athletes back to college. As a Razorback fan that just grinds my gears. The SEC brought a lawsuit against them. But a Louisiana Judge issued a preliminary injunction allowing him to bring NFL players who used to play for him back at Ole Miss.

Where’s the honor to just play for a team for the four years instead of jumping teams every year. And i don’t know, if the title is College Football maybe the players should be college athletes.

There needs to be an official government intervention soon, because the college football world is changing. Hell, soon we may see Aaron Rodgers (42-Pittsburgh Steelers QB) come back to College Football or Ryan Williams (19-Alabama WR) staying until he’s 27. BRING BACK COLLEGE FOOTBALL LIKE IT WAS PRE NIL!!!!

That was the spark. Within a day the post had hundreds of millions of views. Members of Congress started weighing in. Rep. Lori Trahan called for legal guardrails and said bipartisan support had reached a tipping point. Bernie Sanders announced he would introduce legislation to ban superintelligence. Other lawmakers from both parties began floating kill-switch bills, audit requirements, and pauses. At the same time, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, who has been calling for stronger government oversight for months, published another essay arguing that the industry needs to deliberately slow the pace of capability improvements so safety work can catch up. OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Google DeepMind’s Demis Hassabis, and even Elon Musk publicly agreed that the current speed is too fast. Suddenly the same people who have been pouring tens of billions into the race were telling the public and Congress that someone needs to hit the brakes.

Then the counter-reaction arrived, mostly from the Trump administration, Fox News, and the free-market corner of the tech world. The argument is that this sudden chorus of “we need regulation” is a Trojan horse. These companies have spent ungodly amounts of money racing each other. The training runs are getting absurdly expensive. The competitive pressure is intense. So now, the theory goes, the leaders want government rules that would slow everyone down, especially the smaller labs and open-source efforts that might eventually threaten their lead. Vice President JD Vance said out loud what a lot of people were thinking: it feels weird watching frontier AI companies beg the government to regulate them. It feels a little like a Trojan horse. President Trump went further, calling the existential-risk talk a hoax and insisting the only guardrail needed is a strong president who won’t let China win.

Here’s the part that requires actual nuance, the part most of the coverage refuses to hold: both things can be true at once.

The risks are not imaginary. A system that can improve itself, that can operate across the internet, that can find novel ways around the constraints we try to put on it, is a different category of technology than anything we’ve regulated before. People who have spent years inside these labs are saying the alignment problem is not solved and may not be solvable on the current timeline. That alone should make any serious person pause. On top of the speculative catastrophe risk sits a concrete, measurable one that is already happening. Data centers are straining power grids in multiple states and countries. The water required to cool these facilities is projected, by serious research, to reach levels that could equal the basic annual domestic needs of more than a billion people by 2030. Local communities are already feeling the pressure on electricity prices, water availability, and land use. These are not future hypotheticals. They are present costs being socialized while the profits remain private.

At the same time, it is completely reasonable to be suspicious when the same executives who spent years maximizing speed and capability suddenly discover the moral urgency of slowing down, right around the moment their competitive position is strong and the capital requirements are becoming prohibitive for newcomers. Self-interest does not vanish because someone writes an eloquent essay about safety. Regulatory capture is a real phenomenon. Rules written by and for the current leaders tend to entrench the current leaders.

But what feels even more off, at least to me, is the set of “professionals” and experts who are being amplified by the Trump administration, by Fox, and by large parts of the mainstream press. Dig into the backgrounds and a striking number of the loudest voices either currently work for AI companies, recently left them, or have substantial financial exposure to the sector. That doesn’t automatically make their analysis wrong. It does mean we should treat their framing with the same skepticism we would apply to any other industry that is both regulating itself and writing the talking points for the people who claim to be regulating it. When the same circle of people keep appearing as the authoritative sources on both the danger and the solution, something about the information environment has gone wrong.

The deeper problem, the one that actually affects daily life right now, is overconsumption and over-reliance. We have let AI colonize the ordinary texture of the internet at a speed that still feels unreal. Google has effectively replaced large parts of its search engine with AI-generated answers. Open any social feed, any content platform, any creative marketplace and you are swimming in AI-generated text, images, video, and music that is just good enough to flood the zone and just hollow enough to make the real thing feel rarer. Writing that sounds almost human but never quite is. Visual art that has the surface sheen of skill without the awkwardness or the soul. Entire corners of the web that used to feel like places people made things now feel like places something else is producing content at industrial scale. We have become so dependent so quickly that a lot of people barely notice how much of their information diet, their entertainment, and even their thinking has been outsourced.

I don’t think the answer is a total ban, and I don’t think the answer is pure free-market acceleration either. Both of those are fantasies that ignore different pieces of reality. The harder, more human path is figuring out how to stop the mindless overconsumption. How to push back against the assumption that every search, every draft, every creative decision needs an AI intermediary. How to demand transparency and accountability from the companies building these systems without simply handing them a regulatory moat they can hide behind. How to keep the physical costs (the power, the water, the land, the local communities) in the conversation instead of treating them as externalities. And how to protect the small, messy, inefficient, beautiful human activities that AI is very good at flooding out of existence.

Both the people warning about civilizational risk and the people calling the regulation push a Trojan horse are describing real dynamics. The danger is genuine. The self-interest is genuine. The environmental strain is already measurable. And somewhere underneath all the high-stakes rhetoric, the rest of us are quietly becoming more dependent on systems that were never designed to care about beauty, truth, or the ordinary texture of a human life. That last part is the one we still have some power over, if we’re willing to notice it and act like it matters.

2,977 total deaths. The Twin Towers fell, millions of people were exposed to debris and harmful chemicals, and our country was forever changed.

It has been 25 year since that disastrous day. A lot of us remember where we were when it happened. For me, I was 5 years old and in kindergarten. I remember the sadness and expressions on my teacher’s faces. It wasn’t until I got older and started learning more about our history that I developed a deeper respect for the people who experienced 9/11 firsthand, especially those who lost their lives and those who put their lives on the line to save others.

According to recent data, 51% of Americans are in favor of making 9/11 a federal holiday to commemorate those who lost their lives, while 26% are opposed. A CBS Poll found that 74% of Americans thinks its very important for us to remember 9/11, while 20% believe its somewhat important, and 6% don’t thinks its important.

At the same time, we have seen some people on the far left and in socialist circles that have made incredibly disrespectful remarks about 9/11. From Hasan Piker’s “America deserved 9/11” quote, to Mayor Zohran Mamdani appointing a chief legal counsel who reportedly had ties to defending a convicted Al-Qaeda operative whose family member was one of the hijacker, to Representative Ilhan Omar’s “some people did something” comment, and Michigan Democratic candidate, Abdul El-Sayed’s many disrespectful tweets that he is now deleting.

I don’t think we should ever forget what happened that day.

Remember, today is not just some ordinary day. This 25th Anniversary of 9/11 deserves a pause. Stop. Reflect. Remember. And pray for our Nation.

As Republicans gather in Dallas for tonight’s kickoff to the first midterm convention in the party’s 172-year history, it’s a show that’ll be hard to miss.

Two nights at the American Airlines Center, more than four dozen speakers, and appearances by President Donald Trump both nights. Vice President JD Vance will deliver a keynote, alongside top Cabinet officials, governors, senators, House members, and candidates running in some of the country’s most competitive races.

And, as at previous conventions, pastors, border agents, factory workers, and ordinary Americans will speak in support of the party’s policy achievements.

The symbolism is obvious. But the question I’ve been asking is what Republicans will actually do with the stage.

A few weeks ago, in Average American News, I argued that Dallas would only matter if Republicans used the opportunity to talk about the issues voters are actually thinking about, particularly the economy and the cost of living, instead of two nights litigating the political battles that energized the base for years.

A recent Pew Research Center poll painted that picture pretty vividly. When registered voters were asked what they most wanted congressional candidates to talk about, economic issues came out on top. Cost of living and affordability alone accounted for 15% of responses, while the broader category of economic issues reached 29%

And the underlying economic mood is still pretty sour. Only 24% of Americans rated economic conditions as excellent or good. Healthcare, housing, and energy remain major concerns, while concern over gasoline prices jumped significantly from earlier in the year.

So what does the Republican convention look like through that lens? I’d say pretty deliberate.

Republican Midterm Convention: Night One

Tonight, September 9th, opens with “Working Families Tax Relief.”

That is no accident.

The first programming block begins at 4pm ET and is built around the Working Families Tax Cuts Act, the permanently doubled standard deduction, Trump Accounts, and an expanded Child Tax Credit. It also moves into housing assistance, including the Trump administration’s efforts to address improper payments and fraud, as well as healthcare affordability and the $50 billion Rural Health Transformation Program.

From there, Republicans can establish the broader contrast they want voters to see: two different approaches to governing.

Tax policy is at the center. Election integrity and public safety are part of the program, but they are woven into a larger discussion about border security, criminal offenders, and government accountability rather than being allowed to consume the entire evening.

Throughout the night, the candidates’ showcases follow the same basic formula.

There is “No Tax on Tips.” There is the enhanced Child Tax Credit. There are speeches about immigration enforcement, manufacturing, trade, and the reshoring of American jobs. School choice and parental rights get their own block, as do healthcare fraud, public safety, and policies that Republicans claim have driven economic expansion through lower taxes and lower costs.

There’s even a programming block about banning members of Congress from trading individual stocks.

The lineup itself tells you something about what the party wants this convention to be. Republican Chairman Joe Gruters, House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, Majority Whip Tom Emmer, Senators Tim Scott and John Barrasso, HUD Secretary Scott Turner, CMS Administrator Mehmet Oz, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, and Florida gubernatorial nominee Byron Donalds are among those taking the stage on night one.

Clearly, this is not just a rally.

It’s an attempt to present an argument about Republican governance.

Republican Midterm Convention: Night Two

Tomorrow night, September 10th, sticks with a similar theme.

The night begins at 4pm ET with speeches from American families who’ve benefited from changes involving tips, overtime, and Social Security. From there, the programming moves through government accountability and congressional stock trading again, education, hostage recovery, small business growth, food security, and public health.

According to the Republican National Committee’s official schedule, there will also be a tribute to Charlie Kirk and a 9/11 remembrance featuring children and families of first responders.

Later in the night, prescription drug costs get their own focus, including TrumpRx and Most-Favored Nation agreements. The “Make America Healthy Again” agenda gets a segment of its own too, with an emphasis on chronic disease.

And, once again, the final stretch returns to the economy: trade, American energy production, and direct tax relief.

As expected, Texas Republicans will be playing a major role. Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick, Senator Ted Cruz, and Governor Greg Abbott will all be part of the program, along with other Texas candidates and elected officials.

The administration’s presence is just as significant on night two, with HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., former White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, and Donald Trump Jr. among the speakers.

Then, Vance and Trump will close it all out.

This is the frame Republicans want, and the most notable thing may actually be what it does not do.

This is not a convention built primarily around settling old scores or litigating past elections, even if those subjects remain part of the broader Republican political conversation.

Instead, Republicans are putting taxes, healthcare, housing, manufacturing, drug prices, immigration enforcement, and the cost of living front and center of the program.

That makes sense given where voters are right now. That Pew survey I mentioned earlier showed that neither party held a clear advantage when voters were asked which party they agreed with more on economic policy: 37% chose Democrats, and 36% chose Republicans.

That last part is important.

Republicans cannot simply tell voters that the economy is doing well and expect the argument to end there. Lived experiences ignore talking points.

If the party wants credit for its economic agenda, it has to explain what actually changed.

What did the tax cuts mean for a family making $60,000 a year?

How are tariffs affecting prices?

Are the administration’s energy policies actually lowering costs?

Are prescription drug prices really becoming cheaper?

What does “reshoring” mean for a worker who has not seen a meaningful increase in their paycheck?

Those are the questions that ultimately matter.

And that same principle very much applies to foreign policy.

The ongoing conflict with Iran makes the economic argument even more complicated. Republicans can argue that American strength and a clear foreign policy doctrine serve a larger strategic purpose, but voters are still going to notice what happens to the price of gas and groceries.

Pretending there is no tradeoff is unlikely to be persuasive - but Dallas is a chance for Republicans to make the argument on their own terms.

There is another reason this convention matters, however.

Putting dozens of people on stage in a packed arena is easy compared to getting voters to believe that a political party is actually making their lives better.

That’s the real challenge.

Midterm elections have historically been difficult for the party in power. Turnout is always projected to be low as enthusiasm fades. Voters often use the election as an opportunity to express their frustration with the party occupying the White House.

And still, Republicans have another problem: the coalition that gave them their 2024 mandate cannot be taken for granted.

Pew’s July survey also found that Democrats were more engaged with the midterm election, with 39% saying they had thought a lot about congressional elections compared with just 22% of Republicans.

That doesn’t mean the outcome is predetermined, but it does mean that Republicans have more work to do.

This convention gives Republicans a national audience for two nights, with nearly every major figure in the party featured to make the case for what they have done and what they intend to do next.

They are choosing to put affordability and economic issues at the center of that argument.

That is a conscious choice.

Whether voters believe the claims, whether the policies have produced the results they can actually feel, and whether that message reaches beyond the Republican base will be determined long after the lights go down at the American Airlines Center.

I previously said that Dallas won’t decide the midterms. It won’t

But it can help determine what Republicans are talking about when they soon enter the final stretch of their campaign.

The good news, at least, is that the party appears to understand that the most important political conversation is not happening on cable news or inside the beltway.

It’s happening at the kitchen table.

It wasn’t all that long ago that Italy was the punchline of every joke about European politics.

The country’s governments came and went. The debt never seemed to go away. Skyrocketing youth unemployment pushed an entire generation to look for opportunities abroad, while Rome developed a reputation for being unable to get much done.

The Eurozone crisis in 2009 only made things worse. Banks were under pressure, economic growth was stagnant, and Brussels seemed to be watching Italy with equal parts concern and frustration.

Italy’s political divisions ran just as deep. Immigration became increasingly hot-button, only fueling the divide between north and south. And after years of out-of-touch technocratic governments, with constantly shifting coalitions, many Italians were simply tired of the politics as usual that seemed to produce more instability than results.

To many, including the outside world, Italy appeared stuck. Now, that picture is changing.

First, a dose of reality: Italy is not suddenly an economic powerhouse, and many of its old institutional problems remain; however, the country has regained a degree of political and economic credibility that seemed impossible to imagine a decade ago.

Unemployment has fallen to levels Italy has not seen in years, borrowing costs have eased, and the government deficit has reduced significantly. Furthering this transformation is Italy’s rise as an assertive player within the European Union, where it’s become increasingly active on issues such as migration and energy, as well as strengthening relations with Africa.

But this transformation didn’t begin with Giorgia Meloni. In many ways, Silvio Berlusconi helped lay the groundwork.

Berlusconi changed Italian politics after the collapse of the old party system in the early 1990s. He demonstrated that a center-right coalition could win nationally and govern for an extended period. He introduced a very different style of communication into politics never before seen at the time, one built around television, personality, and popular culture rather than the traditional language of Italian party politics.

Admittedly, his governments were hardly models of stability. They were often chaotic, and Berlusconi’s legal and personal controversies frequently became distractions. But his importance to Italy’s right is difficult to overstate. He helped normalize the idea that Italy could be governed from the center-right without the country immediately descending into crisis.

When the sovereign debt crisis eventually forced Berlusconi from office in 2011, the political realignment he had helped create didn’t disappear. It simply needed someone else to carry the torch.

That person was Meloni.

Her Brothers of Italy party (Fratelli d’Italia) had spent years on the political sidelines. It emerged from the post-fascist fringe of the Italian right and, for a long time, was a relatively small force in Italian politics. Meloni stuck with it while other parties took turns governing, compromising, and eventually disappointing voters.

But by 2022, the political environment was ripe for change. The traditional parties were exhausted, the Five Star Movement - Italy’s first major anti-establishment party in the digital age - had lost much of its momentum, and the country had just come through the technocratic government of Mario Draghi.

Meloni offered something different: a clear ideological identity combined with a promise to actually govern.

She became Italy’s first female Prime Minister after her coalition of Brothers of Italy, Matteo Salvini’s Lega, and Berlusconi’s Forza Italia won the 2022 election.

And just last week, Meloni’s government officially became the longest-serving government in Italy’s postwar history, surpassing Berlusconi’s previous record. That is a particularly significant achievement in a country that has had 68 governments and 31 prime ministers since the republic was established in 1946.

Longevity alone does not make a government successful; however, in Italy, longevity is meaningful because political instability has been such a defining feature of the country’s postwar history.

So why has Meloni managed to endure?

Part of it is that she has been more disciplined than many people expected.

Meloni took a party with extremely complicated historical baggage and moved it toward a broader form of national conservatism centered on immigration, family policy, national sovereignty, and Italian interests. She has also managed to keep her coalition together despite the very real differences between Brothers of Italy, Lega, and Forza Italia.

But also, just as importantly, she has shown a willingness to be pragmatic in government.

The Meloni who campaigns in front of a partisan crowd can sound very different from the Meloni sitting across the table from European leaders or international investors. That flexibility has allowed her government to maintain relationships with Brussels and Italy’s European partners while still presenting itself at home as a nationalist alternative to the political establishment.

While the country’s economic picture remains more complicated than some might suggest, there are genuine improvements worth recognizing.

Italian unemployment has declined, and the European Commission expects the government’s deficit to fall from 3.1% of GDP to 2.9% by the end of this year.

This doesn’t mean Meloni’s government has solved every problem, but it does mean that, for once, Italy finally looks like a country that is not constantly on the verge of making its problems worse.

That distinction matters more than some might realize.

Still though, the country’s economic growth is weak. Its debt burden has shrunk but remains enormous. The South continues to lag behind the North. Real wages and purchasing power are among the concerns discussed nightly at the kitchen table. The country’s demographic situation is particularly serious, and its population is projected to shrink substantially over the coming decades, creating yet another challenge for its workforce and welfare system.

Meloni has also benefited from circumstances that sometimes had little to do with her personally, however. European Union recovery funds gave Italy additional support following the pandemic, and energy prices, migration, and geopolitical tensions created political openings for a government willing to emphasize national security and economic stability.

For instance, her government pursued the controversial Mattei Plan for Africa - which opponents on the left view as modern neocolonialism that prioritizes European energy needs over African development - and has positioned Italy as a more prominent player in the Mediterranean, particularly on energy, migration, and trade.

Speaking of immigration, it remains one of the most politically important issues within Italy. Meloni campaigned heavily on reducing irregular migration, and her government took steps to adopt tougher asylum and anti-smuggling measures. Arrivals have fallen substantially from some of the peaks seen earlier in the decade, yet migration pressures have certainly not disappeared.

But, despite all of this, there is a broader change that is even harder to measure.

For decades, Italian politics often seemed to be about surviving until the next government rather than building something that would last beyond it. That mentality has not disappeared, but Meloni’s tenure has disrupted it.

Berlusconi showed that the Italian right could win and build a durable political coalition.

Meloni has shown that it can stay in power without the constant political drama that once seemed almost inevitable.

Again, that doesn’t mean Italy has solved all of its problems.

But Italy today is different from the Italy that struggled through the Eurozone crisis a decade ago. It has more political stability and a government that has established itself as a serious player in Europe and on the world stage rather than a perpetual source of anxiety for Brussels and financial markets.

Whether that becomes a lasting political realignment or simply another period of calm before Italy’s next political storm remains to be seen.

For now, though, Italy no longer looks like a country waiting for someone else to rescue it, and, at least to some extent, it has found its footing again.

That’s no small achievement in a Europe still wrestling with its own instabilities.

President Trump recently has allowed for 80,000 metric tons of lean beef trimmings from Argentina to help offset the cost of beef in the United States which has drawn both criticism and support all over the country.

President Trump recently posted to Truth Social, “As we work to rebuild this herd and help our ranchers, for the next 90 days, the United States will allow up to 300,000 metric tons of product for ground beef to be imported with no out of quota tariff. We have a commitment that this beef will be sold at 25 percent below current market prices. This deal will reduce prices for Americans while giving space for our Great American Beef Herd to grow again”.

That is the administration’s case. A lot of ranchers are not sold on it.

Affordability is on everyone’s mind this upcoming midterm election. Everything from gas, diesel, groceries have all skyrocketed and people feel it.

Its stated via, The White House: “the United States herd has fallen to its lowest level in 75 years” (https://www.whitehouse.gov/fact-sheets/2026/09/fact-sheet-president-donald-j-trump-supports-americas-ranchers/). It may be easy to import beef from other countries to ease the sticker price but it doesn’t fix the long term ramification.

I recently interviewed an Oklahoma rancher who knows a thing or two about this issue. Stephanie Hodges of Stigler, runs a 320 acre cow-calf operation. The costs of keeping it going is real.

She stated, “Diesel and feed (about $290 a ton) keep climbing and I’m lucky to see a profit”. Hodges feels the effects of decisions made in DC. She and other producers and residents, I spoke with believe the Argentina imports and other countries hurt American cattlemen and producers. “Stigler is not happy with Trump’s beef initiative”.

She said that larger chains are taking advantage of the moment, which is why people should only by local not through big grocery stores. This is a short term solution to a long term problem. Americans wants American beef not imported beef.

Do not get me wrong, I support President Trump, but I have disagreements with this specific issue. Right now, Trump and his administration is taking steps to stop the bleeding. The first order is removing the grey and Mexican grey wolves off the endangered species list allowing farmers to protect their herd. Then the second order is to allow farmers to process their own meat to sell on the market. This will be an interesting fight and needs to be addressed before the midterm.

For around a week the country carried out something that it had not done for years. It reached an agreement. Accounts associated with MAGA and accounts linked to the Democratic Socialist party were both posting messages of condolence within hours of one another. Trump instructed the flags to be lowered and referred to her as irreplaceable, while Bernie Sanders called her a hero of the working class. Pelosi stated that she had made America kinder. The country radio stations stopped broadcasting their normal programmes and instead played her music continuously. For a few odd days the nation, which is normally unable to agree on almost anything, agreed that Dolly Parton was one of the good ones.

Then the week ended. The flags went back up. Everybody went right back to hating each other. Which, if you think about it for more than five seconds, tells you almost everything you need to know about where we are right now. It took an 80-year-old woman from a one-room cabin in the Smoky Mountains dying of cancer to remind us we’re even capable of agreeing on anything anymore.

That’s worth sitting with longer than a news cycle usually lets you. Because Dolly wasn’t just a singer people liked. She was proof. Walking, breathing, rhinestone-covered proof that the American Dream used to actually be real, not the bumper-sticker version of it, the real one. A kid with nothing. A country with enough room left in it for her to become something. And a woman who spent the back half of her life making sure that room stayed open for other people too.

That dream died with her. Not because she was the last human being on earth capable of living it, but because the country that made it possible for her doesn’t really exist in the same way anymore, especially not for the generation that needs it most right now.

A Cabin, Twelve Kids, and No Plan

Start at the beginning, because the beginning is basically the whole argument.

Dolly Rebecca Parton was born in 1946 in a one-room cabin on the Little Pigeon River in Sevier County, Tennessee. Fourth of twelve kids. Twelve. Under one roof, in one room, with two parents trying to keep everybody fed in one of the poorest corners of Appalachia at the time.

Her dad, Robert Lee Parton, worked constantly, farming, laboring, taking whatever job he could find in a place where jobs weren’t exactly lying around, just to keep food on the table for a family that size. Her mom, Avie Lee, stayed home and did the equally exhausting, equally unpaid work of raising twelve kids, which is its own job; nobody clocks out of that one. There wasn’t extra money for anything. Dolly told the story for decades of a coat her mother stitched together out of fabric scraps because there was nothing else to make it from- the coat that eventually became “Coat of Many Colors.” Kids made fun of her for wearing it. She wore it anyway. It was what she had, and her mom made it out of love, and that’s basically her whole childhood in one garment.

No training wheels on this story. No family business waiting for her. No college fund. No connections in the industry, none. No safety net if any of it went wrong, and a lot of it could have gone wrong. Just a cabin, a guitar, a big family, and whatever grit a kid could scrape together in a place where scraping by was the only option most people had.

She graduated high school in 1964 with no five-year plan and no backup career. What she had, by her own telling, was a bus ticket to Nashville and a dream. That’s it. She got off that bus in a city she didn’t know, with a sound nobody was asking for, and bet the whole thing on hope.

Try picturing that today. Now picture doing it today as a broke 18-year-old carrying student loan debt for a degree you were told you needed, applying for the entry-level job that used to not require a degree at all, and getting told you’re still not qualified. That gap, between what a leap of faith bought you in 1964 and what it buys you now, is basically the whole argument of this piece, and we’ll get back there. First though, what she did after getting off that bus is the part that actually matters, because this isn’t just a rags-to-riches story. What she did with the riches is what makes it the American Dream and not just an impressive career.

The Riches, and What She Did With Them

Dolly didn’t just make it in Nashville. She took the place apart.

Over six decades, she built one of the biggest careers in American entertainment, full stop. Dozens of top-ten country hits. Pop crossover stardom in the late seventies and early eighties. Movie roles that made her one of the most recognizable faces in the country: “9 to 5,” “Steel Magnolias,” take your pick. Songs like “Jolene” and “I Will Always Love You” have completely outlived every trend that came and went around them, still getting covered and sampled by artists who weren’t alive when she wrote them. She sold more than 100 million records worldwide. Not the best-selling country artist. Best-selling artist, period, one of the biggest of all time.

She built Dollywood and turned her home region into one of the biggest tourist draws in the South, creating thousands of jobs in a part of East Tennessee that badly needed them. By any normal measure, she became a business empire in her own right, the kind that could have pushed her into billionaire territory if she’d played it the way most people at that level do, holding on to everything, optimizing for the number instead of the impact.

She didn’t do that. She chose, over and over, publicly, not to. That choice is really the hinge the whole story turns on.

Instead of stacking her fortune skyward, she spent decades pouring it back into the place that raised her. Sevier County. East Tennessee. The mountains. She built an industry where there hadn’t been much of one. She created jobs for people who, without Dollywood and everything that grew up around it, might have had to leave the region just to find work, which is exactly the kind of exodus that’s hollowed out small towns across this country for generations. She kept the wealth local instead of shipping it somewhere else.

Then she went bigger, national even. Her signature program, the Imagination Library, mails a free book to a kid every single month from birth to age five, no cost, no strings, just a book with the child’s own name on it showing up like something worth waiting for. By the time she died, the program had given out more than 300 million books and was shipping something like 3.4 million a month to kids across the US, Canada, the UK, Australia, and beyond. That’s not a marketing campaign. That’s not a tax write-off wearing a charity costume. That’s real, sustained, decades-long infrastructure for literacy, funded by one woman who remembered what it was like to grow up without books in the house.

It didn’t stop with kids she’d never meet, either. She turned that same instinct on the people who actually worked for her. Free health insurance. Free childcare. Continuing education and tuition help. Not because a law made her do it. Not because some PR consultant said it would poll well. Because she remembered what it felt like to not have any of that, and she had the means to make sure her own employees didn’t have to live that way.

This is the part people skip past when they talk about her success. It’s easy to admire the bus ticket to Nashville. Easy to admire the number ones and the movie roles and the theme park. But what actually makes her the embodiment of the American Dream, the real one, is what she did once she had the money. She didn’t hoard it. She didn’t chase a bigger number just to have a bigger number. She looked at the place and the people who shaped her, and spent the second half of her life making sure other people got a shot at what she got.

That’s really the whole idea, when you strip it down. Get rich, sure, nobody’s saying don’t. But then build something bigger than yourself with it. Put money into the people around you instead of just walling yourself off with it. Dolly did that as completely and as publicly as anyone this country has produced in the last hundred years. It’s not a side note to the American Dream. It is the American Dream. Getting rich is just the setup. What you do after that is the actual point.

A Week the Country Forgot How to Fight

Which brings us back to what happened after she died.

Something happened in the days right after that hasn’t happened here in a long time. People stopped fighting, at least about this.

Trump ordered flags at the White House and federal buildings flown at half-staff for a full week and said losing her felt like losing family. Bernie Sanders, who’s built a career fighting basically everything Trump stands for, called her one of the great entertainers of her era and praised her decades of work on literacy and education. Pelosi said her voice and her spirit made America kinder and more hopeful. The Democratic Socialists of America, an organization that exists in direct political opposition to most of what this administration represents, put out a statement calling her a hero of the working class.

Sit with that. Trump and the DSA. Pelosi and Mike Johnson. People who can’t agree on the time of day found themselves saying almost the same thing about the same woman within hours of each other. One post that went viral put it about as well as anyone could: we probably won’t see anything like this again for the rest of our lives. Somebody else called her the last person that everybody liked.

And it wasn’t only politicians performing grief for the cameras, though sure, some of that happened too; it always does. Radio stations across the country dropped their regular programming and just played her catalog for hours. Taylor Swift, Reba McEntire, Miley Cyrus, Oprah Winfrey, Beyoncé, Celine Dion, artists who rarely show up in the same sentence together, were all publicly mourning the same woman within 48 hours of each other. Fans showed up at her statue in Sevierville and outside the Country Music Hall of Fame with flowers, candles, and handwritten notes. Someone painted a mural of her in Costa Mesa, California, three thousand miles from her home county, and people drove out just to stand in front of it for a minute. Her music shot back to the top of the streaming charts within hours, and nobody had to push it there. Millions of people just decided, independently, at basically the same time, that they needed to hear her voice again.

For about a week, this country remembered it’s capable of feeling something together that isn’t outrage.

That matters more than a week of tribute segments. Ask yourself honestly, when’s the last time a single person’s death made Republicans and socialists say the same thing about anything? It wasn’t a policy. Wasn’t a court ruling. Wasn’t an election. It was a woman from a one-room cabin who spent her whole life refusing to pick a side, who once said flat out she was an entertainer, not a politician, and backed it up for sixty years by just being kind to whoever crossed her path, no matter what they voted.

That’s a nearly impossible needle to thread in this country right now, and she didn’t thread it with some clever strategy; she threaded it by actually meaning it. She wasn’t neutral because it was good for business, though it probably was that too. She was neutral because the values she actually lived by- generosity, hard work, faith, taking care of people who have less than you- don’t fit neatly into either party’s branding, and she never pretended they did. She just lived them out loud for six decades until living them became one of the last patches of common ground both sides could still stand on without feeling like they were betraying anything.

We don’t have many of those left. If we’re being honest, we might not have any left now.

That’s a loss worth grieving on its own, separate from grieving her music or her movies or even her philanthropy. We lost one of the last threads the whole country could still hold onto together, across every divide we’ve built for ourselves. And the fact that it took her dying to remind us we’re even capable of holding onto something together should worry us a lot more than it should comfort us.

What the Dream Actually Required

Here’s the part that’s harder to sit with. Dolly’s story isn’t just inspiring; it’s also, if you actually look at it closely, a list of ingredients that mostly don’t exist anymore, at least not in the combination she had.

She grew up poor, genuinely poor, but she grew up in a household where a dad working multiple jobs could actually keep food on the table, and a mom staying home to raise twelve kids was a hard but workable way to run a family. She graduated high school and, within days, moved to a city to chase a dream with basically zero capital behind her, and found a path into an industry that still had room at the bottom for someone with nothing but talent and nerve. She built a career in a media landscape where a distinct voice and years of grinding could actually turn into stardom, without you needing to already be famous or connected or independently wealthy enough to bankroll years of unpaid exposure first. She built a business in a place where the cost of living, relative to what a working person could earn, still left room to get ahead instead of just barely keeping your head above water.

None of that is a knock on her. She worked for every bit of it, harder than almost anyone. But hard work inside a system that has room for it to actually pay off is a completely different thing than hard work inside a system that’s quietly closing the doors behind you as you go. Dolly’s hope and a dream worked because the road, uphill as it was, actually went somewhere. That’s the part that’s changed.

The Ladder Gen Z Is Standing Under

Gen Z isn’t lazy. People keep throwing that word around, usually people who built their careers in an economy that doesn’t exist anymore, and it needs to be said plainly: it’s not laziness. It’s arithmetic.

We’re watching entry-level jobs, the exact kind of foothold Dolly needed and found in Nashville in 1964, get automated out from under us before we even get to apply for them. Companies are bragging to shareholders, openly, about replacing junior roles with AI tools- the same roles that used to be how you got your start, learned the ropes, and worked your way up from nothing. That’s not some future threat. It’s happening right now in newsrooms, customer service, coding, design, law- exactly the kind of entry-level industries where an ambitious kid with no connections used to be able to break in on talent alone, the same way Dolly broke into Nashville with nothing but a voice and a bus ticket.

We’re doing the math on a starter home and coming up with a number that just isn’t in our bank accounts, not after years of saving, not after doing every single thing we were told to do. Home prices have outrun wage growth so badly that the old markers of adulthood, buying a house, starting a family, putting down roots somewhere the way Dolly’s parents did, have quietly turned from a goal you work toward into a fantasy you’re supposed to let go of without complaining.

We’re told to work hard and save, the same advice every generation before us got, in an economy where wages haven’t come close to keeping up with rent, groceries, healthcare, insurance, any of it. The math just doesn’t add up. You can do everything right, work the hours, skip the coffee, live well within your means, and still end every month further behind than when you started, because the cost of simply existing has outrun what a normal paycheck covers for the first time in a long time.

And the people who benefited most from the old version of this economy- plenty of boomers, plenty of the wealthy elite who oversaw or profited from, or in some cases actively built the policies that got us here- are the ones standing at the top calling us lazy and entitled and unwilling to work for it. You don’t get to kick out the rungs and then blame the kids at the bottom for not climbing fast enough. You don’t get to offshore the jobs, automate what’s left, inflate housing past reach, gut pensions, saddle a whole generation with debt for degrees you told them were mandatory, and then act shocked that the generation living with the consequences is anxious and cynical and running out of patience.

Dolly’s story worked because the pieces were still there. A shot at a stable job. An industry you could break into on grit instead of a resume padded with unpaid internships you couldn’t afford to take in the first place. A cost of living that didn’t eat your paycheck before you’d even cashed it. Pull those pieces out, and hope and a dream stop being a strategy. It becomes magical thinking, the kind of thing you tell yourself to get through the day rather than an actual plan with real odds of working.

And there’s the tragedy underneath all the tributes, the flags, the whole strange week of unity. We spent seven days honoring a woman who proved the system could work, while living inside a version of that same system that mostly doesn’t anymore.

Why Her Death Hit This Hard

Part of why the grief was so instant and so universal, cutting across every generation and both parties, is that Dolly represented something almost nobody left on the public stage represents anymore: proof of concept. Living, singing proof that the story we all grew up hearing about America- start with nothing, end up somewhere extraordinary if you work hard enough and treat people right along the way- actually happened to somebody. Not in some vague, black-and-white-photograph way. In our lifetime. On camera. With receipts.

People weren’t just mourning a singer. They were mourning the clearest remaining evidence that the story used to be true.

And they were doing it together, briefly, because grief over losing that kind of proof doesn’t split along party lines. It’s not a policy fight. It’s not a culture war flashpoint. It’s just loss, the plain kind, the kind that reminds you that whatever you vote, you were rooting for the same thing when you watched her interviews and heard her songs: a version of America where a poor kid from a one-room cabin could actually make it, and then choose, on her own, to spend the rest of her life making sure other people got a shot at the same thing.

That’s not really a Republican value or a Democratic one. It’s just a decent human value, the kind this country claims to be built on every time it tells its own founding story. Dolly didn’t just tell that story; she lived it, from the cabin to the theme park to the Imagination Library trucks pulling up to another kid’s door with another free book, month after month, decade after decade, without ever needing it to be about her.

What We Do With This

None of this is a call to just feel sad for a week and move on, which is exactly what usually happens after a week like the one this country just had. The flags go back up. The tribute specials wrap. The unity fades, and everybody heads back to their corners as if nothing happened.

If Dolly’s death is going to mean anything past a good week of TV, it has to mean something harder than that. It has to mean actually reckoning with the gap between the country that produced her and the one we’re leaving behind for whoever’s coming up next. It has to mean asking, honestly, whether a kid born today in a one-room situation, literal or otherwise, poor, disconnected, armed with nothing but hope and a dream, would actually get anywhere close to the shot Dolly got in 1964. And it has to mean admitting that for a huge chunk of young people right now, the honest answer is no. Not because they lack her talent or her grit. Because the ladder itself got kicked out from under an entire generation by the same people now standing at the top lecturing them about laziness.

Dolly never lectured anybody, for what it’s worth. She built things instead. Gave away books instead of speeches. Paid for her employees’ healthcare instead of bragging about how hard she worked to earn her own fortune. Put money into her home county instead of parking it offshore somewhere. If there’s one lesson in how she actually lived that the people in a position to fix any of this should take from her, it’s that one. Less lecturing. More building.

None of what she pulled off means less because the world around it got harder. If anything, it means more, and it’s more of a warning too. She’s proof of what’s possible when a country still has room left for someone to climb out of nothing and build something real, both for herself and for everyone who came up behind her. The question this country needs to actually sit with now that she’s gone, once the flags come back up and the specials stop airing and the unity fades out the way it always does, is whether that room still exists for anybody else.

Right now, for most of a generation trying to find its footing, it doesn’t. Not the way it did for her. That’s not a reason to give up. It’s a diagnosis of exactly what needs rebuilding, and a reminder, courtesy of one woman from a one-room cabin in Tennessee, of what it actually looks like when it’s working.

Dolly Parton was what America is supposed to be.

The Sunday Paper

Hey everyone,

It’s been a few weeks since our last edition and I owe you an explanation. Not because we went quiet, we’ve actually been busier than ever. We’ve had so many active projects running at once that something had to give, and unfortunately it was this newsletter. So let’s catch up.

What we’ve been working on

The biggest story we’ve been chasing is the ongoing situation with Taylor Sharp. A few weeks back he reached out to us directly, and we sat down and talked with him. That turned into this piece:

I Spoke To Taylor Sharp

Not long after that, we heard from his soon to be father in law, who had a very different story to tell. We published what he told us here:

Exclusive: The Father Of Taylor Sharp’s...

We’re going to keep following this one wherever it goes. That’s the job.

We also had a genuinely great piece from Peter Giunta breaking down James Fishback’s loss in Florida and what it actually means. If you haven’t read it yet, you should:

James Fishback’s Moment, And Why It...

And then we lost Dolly Parton.

Dolly Parton, Dead At 80

Her passing hit different than most celebrity news does, and it reminded us of something we needed reminding of. Not everything has to be political. Some things are just human. We wrote about that here:

Politics Isn’t Everything, And It’s...

The Top 5 Headlines This Week

1. Dolly Parton has died at 80. Tributes are pouring in from every corner of the country and honestly, they should. Few people earned that kind of universal love.

2. The Postal Service is appealing the court ruling that blocked Trump’s mail in voting order, setting up what looks like a real Supreme Court fight ahead of the midterms.

3. Wildfires in Spokane have torched more than 900 structures, and families are still sifting through what’s left.

4. Far right commentator Milo Yiannopoulos was arrested by federal immigration authorities, a story that’s still developing.

5. Flock surveillance cameras are getting torn down, blocked, and vandalized in at least 36 states, as more communities push back on automated license plate tracking. More on that below, because we have thoughts.

Our take: the backlash against Flock cameras is justified

Speaking of Flock, I want to talk about it for a second because the anger is real and it’s growing, and honestly, we think it’s earned.

Here’s our stance. America should not become a mass surveillance state. Full stop. We understand the pitch. These cameras can help find a stolen car or a missing person, and there are real cases where they have. Nobody’s arguing that never happens. But that’s not the whole story, and it’s not close to it.

We’ve now seen multiple documented cases of police officers using this exact technology to stalk their exes. We’ve seen a sheriff’s office track a woman who may have had an abortion. We’ve seen departments quietly sharing data with federal immigration agencies. This isn’t a hypothetical slippery slope. It’s already happening, in real departments, to real people who did nothing wrong.

And that’s the trade we’re being asked to make. Give up your privacy, let a network of cameras track everywhere you drive, every doctor’s appointment, every trip to church, every time you pick your kid up from school, on the slim chance it might someday help solve a crime. Meanwhile the same tool is sitting there ready for any officer with a grudge and a login.

That math doesn’t work for us. A tool that can be this easily weaponized against ordinary Americans isn’t worth what it occasionally gets right. People vandalizing cameras and cities canceling contracts isn’t some fringe overreaction. It’s a pretty reasonable response to being watched without ever agreeing to it.

We’ll keep an eye on this one too.

Thanks for sticking with us. More soon.

- Kameron Rudat, Editor in Chief

I get it, we live in an age where everyone wants everything to have a huge meaning, but here’s hoping that conservatives don’t take this next step, which I do not believe is conservative-friendly at all: that there are some things that are just about the thing itself. Just because we can twist it all into the culture wars doesn’t mean we should always do that. There are some things that are about the person, the tragedy, the song or the sermon or the moment, and we should not try to take even that away from people. It’s not healthy.

When Trump Made Dolly About Himself

Dolly Parton has died this week at the age of 80, and for around twelve hours, it was rare to see anyone in this country disagree about something. Everyone from Hollywood to Nashville, from the White House to the most politically disengaged neighbor, was paying tribute. Parton has always kept herself out of politics for the majority of her six-decade-long career, refusing the presidential medal of freedom twice so it wouldn’t seem “political,” and she was one of the last remaining cultural icons that managed to keep her appeal across the aisle.

President Trump’s first reaction was perfect, as he ordered flags to be flown at half-staff and called her irreplaceable - the kind of gracious, unifying thing he’s been great at in times like these.

He then apparently couldn’t contain his excitement to talk about something else entirely, and on the Glenn Beck radio show the next morning, he jumped right into the hot seat, going from a eulogy for Dolly Parton to talking about how much she apparently liked him, calculating the number of fans he could lose, and talking about his poll numbers in the next election. Many of his fans probably wish he could’ve kept it about Dolly for once, and this is, yet again, an example of how this president just can’t seem to let anything be about itself.

Is it a big deal? Not really, but it’s a shame, and it’s a shame that reflects badly on the kind of discourse we want to have in this country. It’s an unfortunate statement about our society that we feel the need to politicize even a brief, shared moment of unity and grief for something as non-political as a country music icon.

Democrats Do It Too - Usually Faster

Before conservatives go all self-righteous about this, let’s keep in mind that both sides do this kind of stuff. The left has a habit of politicizing pretty much everything, usually faster and louder. When a mass shooting happens, before the perpetrators are even caught, everyone on the left is already on camera talking about how gun control is going to change because of it. When a natural disaster happens, the first questions are about climate change before anyone even thinks about what can be done to help the victims. The last time Texas had those deadly floods, before any of the rescues had even finished, already some partisan warriors on both sides were fighting about whose fault it was, with the Democrats eventually realizing on the air that it was impeding their ability to help. The reflex is the same on both sides, with the only real difference being the subject they’re screaming about.

Now They’re Coming for the Church

This next one is actually really scary. For a long time, the only place where politics weren’t actually about politics was in churches. It was one of the few places where Republicans and Democrats could get along, but now it seems it’s trying to become another battleground. With pastors openly endorsing candidates, congregations splitting up based on their political views, “Christian nationalism” becoming a bad word for wanting to bring faith into government, and conservatives doing the same things with MAGA hats and Bible verses, it’s becoming more difficult for everyone to see themselves in something bigger than their political identity.

They actually aren’t the same thing at all. Jesus was hardly ever about politics. He did not support the “political” party of his time, he confused the political zealots of his day, and he baffled the religious leaders by refusing their questions about paying taxes to Rome. When they tried to trap him, he said to “render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s, and unto God, what is God’s.” He didn’t endorse either side and stopped them from making him a political figure. As soon as we began applying political tests to faith, we stopped believing in faith at all.

Some Things Should Just be Allowed to be What They Are

Not everything has to have a hot take, not every disaster needs to become a political discussion point, and not every church needs to have an official stance on everything. We’ve become so used to having an opinion about everything, all the time, that we forget that the most human thing we can do is simply to enjoy a moment, to appreciate someone for what they are, not what they can give us. Dolly Parton has spent her life doing that, and maybe now is a good time for the rest of us to try it too.

AVERAGE AMERICAN EXCLUSIVE: Throughout our reporting on Taylor Sharp we have received tips, testimonies, and accounts, sometimes anonymous. We treat these as claims, not established facts. Taylor Sharp is presumed innocent unless and until proven guilty in a court of law. We attempt to fact-check where possible and to report what both sides tell us with accuracy.

Today’s account comes from the father of Taylor Sharp’s fiancée, Gianna Carlson. He has gone on the record describing alleged encounters with Sharp and the impact he says those encounters had on his family. The statements below are his claims. They have not been independently adjudicated, and no criminal charges related to these specific allegations are known to have been filed at the time of publication.

Who is Scott Carlson?

When I spoke with him on the phone for over an hour, he had all the strength and passion of the man that I read about. He is best known for being a decorated and distinguished firefighter who sacrificed his career in favor of his values by refusing to take a COVID vaccine, a story I know all too well even in my own family. But Proverbs says that Children’s greatest glory is their fathers, and Scott is the father of 3, including Gianna, the now Fiancée of the embattled Taylor Sharp.

“There’s not enough time in this call to describe how amazing Gianna is,” He said, speaking about his daughter. He told us many things, from the coffee dates they used to go on to the mission trips she took, including one deep in the Amazon, where they didn’t have contact. “She raised the money herself. Dana and I didn’t encourage her at all. She said, I want to go to the Amazon.” Scott recounts how they were scared, particularly her mother, and she said in response “If it’s for God, I’m going to be fine.”

Scott’s First Impression of Taylor

“So the first time I met him, I thought he was insecure. Because he talked so much, and he constantly wanted to tell me all the people he knew, like, oh, I’m friends with Ken Paxton. Oh, I can call Greg Abbott right now, he was just flexing.” He recounts telling his wife of his first impression of Taylor, saying he thought he was just young and immature.

Scott recounts an alleged interaction he had with Taylor during dinner one night. I chalked it up to being immature. “I was cooking dinner for him, and he’s like, what are you guys eating? And I was like, oh, I’m barbecuing chicken. He goes, I don’t eat chicken. Taylor allegedly took Gianna’s car and drove out to buy a wagyu steak to grill, saying “This is how Americans eat.” there was allegedly a buildup of small incidents leading up to that.

The Buildup

Another incident he recounted was in their home when Taylor was allegedly watching Nick Fuentes on their TV. Scott told Taylor to turn it off, citing Fuentes’s inflammatory and often racist rhetoric. “The biggest thing I hate in this bullying, any form of bullying, I consider racism a form of bullying.” He asked them to turn it off and walked away, but when he got back it was still playing, which upset him further. He recounts talking to Gianna about it the next day, and that she allegedly downplayed it and made it out to be a big joke. “That was the first time that I was taken aback, that she was okay with something that she would have never been okay with herself. She herself was against people that acted like that.”

He also recounted another incident involving another person very close to the Carlson Family. “soon after, when he left, my middle kid was dating a boy named Mason. And he’s Latino. And he had made some comments to him that weren’t very kind.” he recounts that Gianna’s sister resorted to commenting on Sharp’s posts and trolling him on TikTok. “There was a bunch of times that Taylor’s responses were just pure racist. So I went to Gianna and I said, you know what, even if your sister’s trolling your boyfriend, no, absolutely not. I will not tolerate that. That is inexcusable. And he owes him an apology.”

How Has Gianna Been Affected?

Scott talked extensively on the things that changed since Taylor came into the picture. “Before him, we had a great relationship, like phenomenal relationship. Gianna and I had a road trip to Oxford, Mississippi. Just her and I, we just stayed there to do the JD Vance, TPUSA thing. I stood in line with her for four hours just talking in the rain, just her and I just hanging out. And then she won a National Photography Award. And that award was in Savannah. So her and I drove there, and we stayed there for a week together, had a great time. When she was debating on going to college, we flew to Liberty University, just her and I. Her and I were so close. And we talked every day.”

He talks about how Gianna became more withdrawn from her family and from her life leading up to her departure. “We verbally talked every day. And then once she met Taylor, she sat in her room, and she disappeared. And I was just like, okay, puppy love, whatever. And a lot of us didn’t pay much mind because we just thought it fizzle out because we all thought he was a tool. But then when she decided not to come home, she didn’t even call us, she sent us a text and said, I’m 18, I can do what I want. I’m not coming home.”

How Did Gianna Leave?

He recounts how what started as a 4 day trip to Prescott, Arizona, turned into Gianna refusing to come home. “Gianna kept selling us. She goes, no, listen, we won’t even go to Denise’s house. We’re going to go to his grandparents house.

And they’ve been married for 60 years. And they’re super Christian. I was talking to Dana about it, I was like, well, they’re going to be at the grandparents. They’re not going to be just sitting in the city. Maybe, you know, we could look the other way.”

He laid out some ground rules for the two. One boundary he set was he wanted her only to stay with Taylor’s grandparents and not his mom, Denise. He also said he didn’t feel comfortable with Gianna accompanying Taylor to a protest, a request they allegedly ignored. “That was the last real interaction I had. I tried to text and try and do things. And the next time I heard anything from her is when she texted Dana and I saying that she was 18 and she could do what she wants, so she’s not coming home.”

When I asked him what that was like, he said “Panic. In an instant, all the things that I’ve just told you came flooding back to me as bright red flags. The moment she texted me like that, I was like, That’s not who my girl is. And it was sheer panic.” He recounted that he called anyone he could, from Gianna to Denise, and nobody answered. It got to the point where they all blocked him, which further added to the terror. “I was loading the car up and I was ready to go. Like, I was gonna get her home because in my in my heart, she was being kidnapped. She was being held against her will. There’s no way my girl would act like this.”

Responding To Claims Made By Taylor

During his conversation with Average American Chief Editor Kameron Rudat, Taylor claimed that the Carlsons withheld Gianna’s diploma. Scott heavily disputes this. “Where Taylor is absolutely lying and saying that we’re withholding it, Gianna didn’t complete her classes. Once she met Taylor, she stopped logging online and stopped attending the in-person classes.” For context, Gianna attended a local homeschool co-op where she took an in-person class, and she also took separate online classes (not affiliated with the co-op). All of these were administered by her mother, who is herself a schoolteacher. “She had multiple classes there that she never went to again. She left here in early February, they didn’t graduate until May. So how would we possibly withhold a diploma when a student didn’t set foot in a class or finish her classes from early February through May?”

Another claim Scott denied was that Taylor was well liked among the people in their circles before this all climaxed. Scott listed off the names of many family friends and townspeople, including their pastor, who allegedly voiced their concerns with him behind Taylor’s back. “So when [a family was] driving home, the dad called me and he’s like, dude, that guy’s a tool. I don’t know how you’re letting that guy hang around with you. He’s a no for me.” Scott alleges that many of them saw him as a “tool” who was “Full of himself” and “couldn’t stand him,” among other quotes Scott gave me. “They’re presenting themselves in a manner that is not accurate to what they’re portraying.”

“If you could say one thing to your daughter, what would it be?”

“Just that I love her. We love her and we just want her home. This is not what we want at all. We just miss her terribly.”

One specific claim Taylor made was that Gianna’s parents hate him because “she chose him over them.” Scott vehemently denies that this is the reason; it’s a multitude of things: the feeling of their daughter being allegedly “taken away” from them, Taylor’s remarks regarding women, Taylor’s actions while visiting them, and what Scott calls his “manipulation” of their daughter, because he says she wouldn’t have said or done most of these things until she met Taylor.

Closing

Since Average American published its article on what Taylor Sharp shared after reconnecting with Editor-in-Chief Kameron Rudat, Sharp has cut off all communication with this outlet.

That silence follows our refusal to pursue a separate story he pushed us to run: an investigation into Faith Merrill’s finances, prompted by his stated dislike of what he called her “lavish lifestyle” and his suggestion that questions be raised about where her money comes from.

We said no. Average American doesn’t report on people’s personal finances based on speculation, personal grievance, or a source’s discomfort with how someone else lives. We held that line with Taylor Sharp throughout this investigation, and we’re holding it here now. If real evidence of wrongdoing regarding Faith Merrill’s finances is ever brought to us, we’ll look at it and evaluate it on its merits, the same standard we apply to every claim in this story. Until then, it isn’t a story. It’s an accusation without a foundation, and we’re not going to print it.

Videos provided by Scott Carlson. Content has not been independently authenticated as complete or unedited by Average American News. The statements and allegations contained in or accompanying this video remain unproven. Taylor Sharp is presumed innocent. We have made minor edits to shield the identity of the individual shown in the videos.

With roughly 48% of the vote, the congressman from Southwest Florida easily outpaced Lieutenant Governor Jay Collins and the rest of the field, including James Fishback. As we’ve seen over and over again this cycle, Trump’s early and full-throated endorsement mattered. So did institutional money and name recognition. Some things, they say, never really change.

That doesn’t mean the contest wasn’t interesting.

Fishback, a 31-year-old investor with social media savvy and a talent for occupying the spotlight even when the cameras were pointed elsewhere, polled in the double digits and forced serious coverage for months.

In a different era, a candidate running on property-tax elimination, a ban on new AI data centers, and a 50 percent “sin tax” on OnlyFans creators would have been dismissed as a novelty act. In 2026, he was treated - at least for some time - as a real factor. That, by itself, is worth paying attention to.

But first, Donalds. He entered the race with the resume of a conventional rising star.

Born in Brooklyn and raised by a single mother, he moved to Florida, earned a degree in finance and marketing, and built a career in banking and insurance before winning a state House seat in 2016. He jumped to Congress in 2020 and quickly aligned himself with the House Freedom Caucus.

His record on school choice, fiscal restraint, and border security is straightforward. Trump’s endorsement early last year gave him an immediate institutional advantage that no amount of online energy could erase. And even without a formal blessing from the Florida GOP or from the man he hoped to succeed, Governor Ron DeSantis, Donalds still controlled the institutional lanes that matter in a statewide primary.

Fishback, however, had something different: the internet.

His campaign was built almost entirely on digital reach and cultural provocation. He understood that attention is a form of currency, and he spent it aggressively. Clips of him attacking “DEI Republicans,” warning about data centers draining Florida’s water and power, and promising to scrap the state’s three-day gun waiting period circulated widely among the younger, online-right crowd.

He also drew sustained attention for his sharp criticisms of U.S. support for Israel, including calls to end Florida’s investments in Israeli bonds and rhetoric that frequently veered into territory that many mainstream Republicans considered inflammatory.

He framed himself as the purest defender of “Old Florida,” the version that existed before the explosive growth seen in the last decade. For a segment of voters who felt like the state’s rapid transformation had outrun their ability to keep up, that message resonated.

And yet the same qualities that made Fishback magnetic online also limited his ceiling. Primary electorates still reward candidates who look and sound like they could govern a large, complex state.

Florida is not a political laboratory. It is a place where insurance rates, property taxes, hurricane preparedness, and workforce housing often dominate the kitchen table.

Promising to eliminate homestead property taxes is extremely popular in the abstract, but explaining how local governments would fund schools and first responders without them is harder.

A tax on OnlyFans income sounds like a morality play, but it’s also a policy that invites legal challenges and does little to address the actual drivers of housing costs or energy prices.

Opposing AI data centers taps into legitimate concerns about water use and grid strain, yet Florida’s economic model has long depended on attracting capital-intensive industries. Voters may have shared Fishback’s frustrations, but they were less certain they wanted a governor who treated growth itself as the enemy.

And there is a deeper cultural point here that goes beyond just one candidate, though. We live in a political moment where a non-trivial share of the electorate holds views - on immigration, cultural change, and social costs - that they hesitate to express openly. The fear of social exclusion remains powerful. Online spaces lower that barrier. They reward intensity and punish nuance.

A candidate who masters those spaces appears larger than they really are because the people who agree with that candidate are often louder and more concentrated than the broader primary electorate. Fishback’s double-digit showing was real, but it was also a reminder that intensity is not the same as breadth.

None of this is to say that Fishback’s central grievances were imagined. Florida’s property tax burden is high. The state’s rapid population growth has strained infrastructure. Cultural questions that once stayed on the margins now sit in the center of politics.

The problem, however, is translation. Ideas that generate applause in a Telegram chat or on X do not automatically survive contact with the broader Republican primary voter. It has been tried and tested before. Those people want competence, predictability, and a candidate who can win a general election in a state that, for all its redness, remains demographically complicated.

Donald’s now moves on to face Democrat David Jolly in November, and he will do so with the usual advantages of a Trump-backed nominee in a Republican-leaning state.

But whether he can expand beyond the coalition that nominated him is a different question.

For young politicos, this primary offers a serious lesson worth remembering.

Social media can force a candidate into the conversation. It can even make a 31-year-old political newcomer a legitimate contender for governor of one of the country’s biggest states.

But rarely is it a substitute for the slower, less glamorous work of cultivating relationships and building a majority.

Fishback proved that he could capture the spotlight. He just never proved that he could win the room.

Well, here we are. Dolly Parton is gone.

It hardly seems real to type that. The rhinestones, the banjo, the laughter, the heart of gold - it all belongs to a woman who passed away today, Aug. 25, 2026, in her Nashville home. She was 80. Her nephew Bryan Seaver announced the sad news in a statement exactly as she requested years ago, saying she had passed in the “light” and “in the arms of Jesus.” There is no official word on the cause of death - only that she left us peacefully.

If you’re anything like me, you’re feeling a mixture of conflicting emotions upon reading this news. I don’t think I’m alone in saying that Dolly Parton was a complicated woman to follow. As a conservative, I couldn’t agree with all of her public stances. She kept her politics largely private, but it’s no secret that she generally favored the Democratic party over the Republicans. Parton had fans on both sides of that fence, and she always kept her support of socially liberal causes like Planned Parenthood out of her public discourse. That’s fine, but it’s also understandable that others might criticize her for it. We can’t all be best friends, after all. Adults are allowed to disagree

What we can all agree on, however, is the legacy of positivity and generosity that Dolly Parton leaves behind.

She was the daughter of Robert Lee Parton and Avie Marie Parton in a poor family of twelve children living in a one-room cabin in the Smoky Mountains. The only book they owned for a long time was the family Bible, which her mother would read aloud to them. Dolly’s father was a hardworking man who could barely read, and that fueled a fire in young Dolly to better her future. When she grew up and found success, she made sure to use her resources to give back to those less fortunate.

This is where some of her most notable philanthropy comes in.

In 1995, she created her Imagination Library, which provided free books to children up to the age of five. It began in her hometown as a tribute to her father, but it has since expanded to provide over 300 million books to children across the globe. 300 million books! That means that hundreds of millions of young people who might have struggled to learn to read now have the ability to explore new worlds through the written word.

That’s a pretty incredible legacy to leave, if you ask me

She gave endlessly to her community, funding scholarships for local students, donating to hospitals and disaster relief funds, and even private institutions for COVID-19 research when the pandemic first hit.

She gave to her community in the form of jobs, too, through the creation of Dollywood. This theme park not only serves as a fun vacation destination for millions of people each year but has put thousands of people from her region to work in the meantime. Dolly Parton could have easily used her wealth and fame to indulge in selfish behavior or to stoke the flames of class warfare, but she chose to give selflessly to the same small towns that raised her.

Throughout all of this, she never lost her strong Christian faith.

While Dolly Parton might not have been a theologian, she knew that God had blessed her tremendously, and she wanted to share that generosity with the world. She spoke openly and publicly about her faith and even performed gospel music, despite criticism from some who said that it was divisive and shouldn’t be shared in public discourse. Dolly Parton knew who she was and where she came from, and she wasn’t afraid to share it, even when it was inconvenient

She balanced her faith effortlessly with her life in Nashville and never seemed to compromise one for the other. In fact, she carried her faith with her wherever she went, speaking on it publicly, sharing Scripture, and keeping a Bible in her personal possession. When asked to stop talking about her faith, Parton always replied that this was her personal relationship with God, and it was important to her. She shared her faith not in an annoying, preachy way, but in a generous, open way that many people likely felt in their hearts.

In a world where so many hide their faith or act as if it’s an embarrassing secret, Dolly Parton wore hers like a badge of honor.

She genuinely loved the Lord, and it showed in the way she lived her life. It showed in the music she made, the way she spoke to her fans, and the way she treated everyone she met.

Time is a privilege we’re all too aware that we don’t have enough of. Dolly Parton knew that as she neared the end of her life, and she chose to make the most of it, as we should all strive to do. She took the struggles of her past and turned them into music we can still enjoy today. She turned her fame and fortune into opportunities for children from underprivileged areas to succeed. She took her relationship with the Lord and made it something others wished to have in their lives, too. And so many people from all walks of life are now remembering this beloved entertainer with nothing but kind words, as they should

Dolly Parton made the most of the time she had, and now the rest of us are left trying to do the same.

We can give back to our communities, pay it forward, and show our children and grandchildren the same kindness and love that she did. This incredible woman left this world far too soon, but she did so with a legacy that will inspire us all to live life to the fullest for as long as we’re granted it.