If the PBS television special, “Deadlock: An Election Story” really wanted to have a conversation about how politically polarized Americans can find common ground, it should have had more political diversity on its panel.

“The current climate of American discourse finds us deeply entrenched and overconfident in our own beliefs,” said moderator Aaron Tang, a left-leaning law professor at the University of California-Davis said in a statement promoting the show. “Deadlock aims to illuminate how, for many of the difficult challenges facing our nation, the honest answers are nuanced and complex. Our goal is to spark open-mindedness and help people find the middle ground instead of retreating to our usual corners.”

But the show retreated the usual corners for two reasons: the premise of the discussion had a left-leaning tone, and the discussion featured mostly Democrats or left-leaning panelists, including:

Rachel Bitecofer, a Democratic political strategist;  Adrian Fontes, the Democrat Arizona secretary of state;  left-leaning Eddie S. Glaude, Jr., the James S. McDonnell professor of African American studies at Princeton University;  left-leaning Astead Herndon, a national politics reporter at The New York Times; Democrat Jeh C. Johnson, former secretary of Homeland Security and former general counsel to the Department of Defense;  Elise Jordan, of NBC/MSNBC, an anti-Trump political analyst; Katie Harbath, a Republican who has said she never voted for Trump and a former Facebook executive who supported the decision to ban Trump from the platform; Russell Moore, editor in chief of Christianity Today and well-known author of

There have been many calls for lowering the temperature between the first assassination attempt against Donald Trump on July 13, 2024, and the second on Sept. 15, 2024. Yet only two hours after last week’s attempt on Trump in Florida, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries lambasted “extreme MAGA Republicans,” saying “We must stop them,” leaving listeners to guess to whom he referred and how “they” should be stopped.

It’s part of a constant pattern since Trump emerged on the political scene, starting with assassination fantasies with “the resistance,” continuing through the Russian collusion hoax, and aided by protective agencies’ refusal to secure conservative figures.

It’s not just the typically aggressive political rhetoric. Leftists have openly engaged in direct assassination fantasies for years. A conspicuous movement to dehumanize one particular person in America has continuously expanded since early 2016, when “the resistance” formed. Madonna infamously proclaimed, “I have thought an awful lot about blowing up the White House,” signaling the cultural zeitgeist controllers would wage a no-holds-barred siege against Trump.

Kathy Griffin followed in kind, publicizing an image of herself holding Trump’s dripping severed head. Shortly afterward, nightly showings of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar in New York’s Central Park were capped by the assassination of an unmistakably Trumpian Caesar. Feelers for assassination were going out.

As of 2017, “the resistance” could claim, consequence-free, that Trump deserved anything he got, up to and including murder. The cultural left intended to not only marginalize Trump, but also to fully demonize and dehumanize him. The

The old aphorism calls a picture worth 1,000 words. But in at least one case, a series of pictures can be worth more than $1 trillion.

A recent report from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) provides helpful charts showing the many problems associated with the current federally subsidized loan program. As with many crises caused by government, the problem with student debt has many causes, and Democrats’ proposed “solution” — making all taxpayers responsible via massive “loan forgiveness” — would only make the problem worse.

Students Not Repaying ‘Loans‘

The CBO analysis examined federal student loans that began repayment from July 2009 to June 2013, tracking those loans through 2019. The period analyzed came after the worst of the Great Recession and before the Covid pandemic scrambled the economy and led to a massive student loan amnesty in 2020.

Over the four years examined, the percentage of borrowers who chose income-driven repayment (IDR) more than tripled, from 10 percent in the first year to 33 percent in the fourth year:

As CBO explained, while fixed payments remain constant throughout the entire repayment period, the IDR process “allow[s] repayment over a longer period — typically 20 or 25 years instead of the usual 10 — after which any remaining balance is forgiven,” and can require “payments” of as little as $0, which “still count towards the total number of payments required for forgiveness.”

Unsurprisingly, the number of debtors choosing this option has grown “as plans with smaller expected payments and