Category: The American Spectator
The 2026 map tilts left if Republicans ignore what voters just told them
The Associated Press told us a partial truth after the November 4 elections: Republicans delude themselves when they brush off their losses. AP then added its usual spin, claiming GOP leaders deny that “affordability” drove their defeat. According to AP, soaring costs and economic uncertainty explain why Republican candidates collapsed across several high-profile races.
Republicans did not simply underperform. They were routed. GOP candidates lost in the marquee races in New Jersey and Virginia, and Democrats came within striking distance of a supermajority in the Virginia legislature. Democrats even clawed back ground in places like Luzerne County, Pennsylvania — a longtime working-class stronghold that had tilted red for decades.
The left treats politics as a total struggle. Republicans cannot keep treating it as a polite debate.
The GOP took a real shellacking.
AP captured only part of the story. Republican leaders keep denying the obvious, insisting the mid-cycle results followed the usual pattern for a party out of power. That excuse collapses when measured against the magnitude of the losses.
In New Jersey, a scandal-scarred, aggressively pro-LGBTQ Democrat crushed a strong Republican challenger by more than 14 points — in a state battered by high taxes, rising crime, and deep voter frustration. Jack Ciattarelli was supposedly running neck-and-neck with Mikie Sherrill. The final tally proved otherwise.
Virginia delivered an even starker picture. A hyper-progressive Democrat won the governor’s race against a conservative black Republican woman. The new attorney general prevailed despite revelations that he sent violent, disturbing text messages expressing rage toward a Democratic opponent and his children. Voters shrugged and voted for him anyway.
This election was not routine. It was a decisive, unmistakable rejection of the party in power. The results cannot be explained away by economic anxiety. Voters responded to ideology and identity — not affordability indexes.
Democratic voters turned out as a unified bloc against what they have been conditioned to believe is a dangerous, authoritarian movement. Media outlets, universities, Hollywood, and most major cultural institutions spent years drilling that narrative into the public. The left absorbed it fully and voted accordingly.
It’s hard to square AP’s affordability argument with the fact that voters rewarded Biden’s economically disastrous administration in the 2022 midterms — and continued to do so in these off-year races. By every major metric, economic conditions have improved dramatically since Trump returned to the White House. Inflation fell. Energy prices dropped. Markets hit record highs. Food and housing costs remain problems, but they remain high largely because the Federal Reserve refuses to cut rates — something Trump intends to fix when he replaces the current chair.
Meanwhile, Biden’s border catastrophe flooded the country with roughly 10 million illegal migrants, burdened taxpayers, and fueled a surge of crime. Yet he paid little political price. Voters did not punish him or his party.
To understand why, look at a recent Atlanta Journal-Constitution poll. Georgia Republicans list inflation and the economy as their top concerns. Georgia Democrats list something else entirely: a “tougher response” to Trump and MAGA Republicans. They rank economic issues and even abortion behind their desire to defeat an ideological enemy. For them, politics is a moral crusade.
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Photo by Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images
This reveals the central mismatch. Republicans speak the language of policy: inflation, taxes, energy, spending. Democrats speak the language of existential struggle. They believe they are at war with a malevolent force, and that belief animates them far more than grocery bills or mortgage rates. Trump derangement syndrome is very much alive and well with these voters.
Republicans just want to return to normal politics — debates over issues, clean contests, and sportsmanlike disagreements. Their media allies keep telling them nothing has changed since Trump beat a ditzy, verbally inept opponent in 2024.
Wrong. Everything has changed.
Republicans face a massive, highly motivated voting bloc determined to strip them of power. Democrats aim to defeat and humiliate their opposition, not negotiate with it. Their rhetoric against ICE, their nonstop attacks on Trump, and their saturation campaigns across media and education paid off. They fought harder. They fought longer. And they won nearly everywhere that mattered.
The GOP cannot afford to treat this moment as another cyclical setback. The left treats politics as a total struggle. Republicans cannot keep treating it as a polite debate. Until the GOP grasps the scale of the conflict, election nights will keep looking like this one.
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Selective Transparency
“Selective Transparency,” editorial cartoon by Tom Stiglich for The American Spectator on Nov. 19, 2025.
The Spectacle Ep. 300: Why Movies Suck: Screenwriter Lou Aguilar Tells the Story
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Democrat Stacey Plaskett Faced Criticism Over Epstein Ties in 2016, Years Before She Claims To Have Learned About Pedophile’s Misdeeds
U.S. Virgin Islands delegate Stacey Plaskett (D.), under scrutiny for texting disgraced pedophile Jeffrey Epstein during a House hearing, has given differing accounts of what and when she knew about the notorious sex predator’s crimes, according to a Washington Free Beacon analysis.
The post Democrat Stacey Plaskett Faced Criticism Over Epstein Ties in 2016, Years Before She Claims To Have Learned About Pedophile’s Misdeeds appeared first on .
Iran’s freedom fighters put America’s No Kings clowns to shame
Liberals in the United States keep pretending to “resist” a democratically elected president they smear as an “authoritarian.” Meanwhile, real resistance fighters push back against a real authoritarian regime — in Iran.
For well-to-do white liberals, “resistance” amounts to a bumper sticker, a hashtag, a chant, and a safe protest march. No American faces arrest for opposing President Trump or his policies. Police never cracked down on thousands of No Kings demonstrators. The government never shut down the internet. No American risks execution for demanding new leadership.
Partisan voices push the false claim that Americans must choose between sending troops or doing nothing. Anyone who actually listens to Iranian dissidents knows better.
Iranian dissidents face all of that and more. Their resistance carries the cost of blood, freedom, and life.
Last weekend, I saw real resistance up close. More than 1,000 Iranian dissidents gathered in Washington, D.C., for the Free Iran Convention to plan for a future free from the mullahs’ rule. Panels featuring scholars, women, young activists, and even voices from inside Iran painted a picture of a regime on the brink.
As the regime clings to power, it leans harder on censorship, torture, and public executions to keep Iranians living in fear.
This crackdown unfolds against an economy collapsing under its own weight. More than 80% of Iranians live below the poverty line. Inflation punishes the entire country. Unemployment keeps climbing.
The harsher the repression, the more Iranians recognize the only path forward is regime change.
In 2018, 2019, and 2022, Iranians took to the streets in nationwide uprisings. Thousands died. Tens of thousands went to jail. As 2025 unfolds, the question no longer asks if another uprising comes — only when.
The West now faces its own question: Will we be ready to support the Iranian people when that moment arrives?
Here at home, partisan voices push the false claim that Americans must choose between sending troops or doing nothing. Anyone who actually listens to Iranian dissidents knows better.
A third option exists — the one championed by Maryam Rajavi and the National Council of Resistance of Iran, a coalition that rejects both the shah’s dictatorship and the mullahs’ theocracy.
Rajavi, elected by the NCRI as president for the transitional period after the ayatollah’s ouster, puts it plainly:
Neither appeasement nor war, but regime change at the hands of the Iranian people and their organized, legitimate, and just resistance. We do not seek money or weapons. We only ask that this resistance be recognized.
This resistance already lives and breathes inside Iran. The People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran stands as the largest and best-organized opposition movement in the country. Resistance units operate in all 31 provinces. They have carried out thousands of attacks on the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and Basij — the regime’s main instruments of suppression.
These units organize protests, strikes, and anti-regime campaigns. Their intelligence network exposed Tehran’s clandestine nuclear program and uncovered terrorist plots funded by the regime.
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Photo Illustration by Sheldon Cooper/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images
The cost has been staggering. Since 1981, the regime has killed more than 100,000 PMOI/MEK members. Countless others have been imprisoned, tortured, or targeted in state-funded smear campaigns.
The idea of negotiating with the Iranian regime belongs to the realm of fantasy. No meaningful difference separates so-called hard-liners from so-called moderates. Both factions produce economic ruin at home and terrorism abroad. Young Iranians see the truth plainly.
During the Free Iran convention, Seena Saiedian — an Iranian American and law student at the University of Virginia — captured the desperation:
The landscape for the youth in Iran is bleak: hyperinflation, high unemployment, censorship, repression. Iranian youth see no hope for moderating or reforming the current regime. By every metric, life gets worse. The root cause of every challenge Iran’s youth face is the current regime.
The Iranian dictatorship will collapse. History guarantees that. The only question: Will the United States shorten the Iranian people’s suffering or extend the mullahs’ reign of terror?
If we want a secular, democratic Iran — one capable of fostering peace in the region — we must say clearly that no negotiation can salvage the current regime. No deal will reform it. No diplomatic fantasy can tame it.
We must tell the Iranian people and the brave resistance units operating inside the country that the United States stands ready to recognize their efforts and their right to chart a future for a free Iran.
The United States doesn’t need to send money, weapons, or troops. The regime is already on the brink of collapse. The Iranian people are already mobilizing. They need moral clarity from the West — not silence, appeasement, or more excuses.
Supporting freedom against tyranny is the American way. It always has been. And standing with the people of Iran honors the moral foundations that built this nation.
Panic at CNN Over Rumored Sale to Saudis: ‘It Scares the Hell Out of Me’
Washington Post journalist and CNN contributor Jason Rezaian sounded the alarm Tuesday, saying the left-wing network’s rumored sale to Saudi Arabia “scares the hell out of me.”
The post Panic at CNN Over Rumored Sale to Saudis: ‘It Scares the Hell Out of Me’ appeared first on .
How I Found Out My Journalist Side Piece Was Cheating on Me With Her Fiancé
The humidity unfurled in torrid pulse-strokes drenched with soft-skinned summer musk, swooning like a locust swarm up and down Fifth Avenue. Chaos lingered in the waning wreckage of a strawberry moon. Shadows whispered under Saturn’s winking eye. American flags flailed recklessly as darkness hunkered down. I wallowed in the pale dusk, still reeling from a nuclear aftershock of psychosexual delusion. Red and white, seared together pink as flesh. The stars were out. I sang the blues.
The post How I Found Out My Journalist Side Piece Was Cheating on Me With Her Fiancé appeared first on .
