NUMBERS DON’T LIE: You may have noticed big-city public school students who were encouraged to protest capitalism on May Day. I did and it prompted me to look at the numbers that tell the story of how public education is a national disgrace. One might expect school districts with the highest per-pupil and teacher salary spending to be doing the best job of preparing our kids for productive, rewarding careers. One doing that would get it exactly wrong, as I report today on The Washington Stand.

BAFFLING TUCKER: The New York Times has a lengthy interview with Tucker Carlson that Richard Pollock dissects in his latest Substack piece as “disturbingly revealing.” The two-hour discussion that is the interview of Carlson by the Times’ Lulu Garcia-Navarro is extremely complicated in part because Carlson can be difficult to follow.

Here’s Pollock’s core takeaway:

“Put together, it is a searing indictment of a man who presumably is super-intelligent and who has gone down the rabbit hole of delusion and hate. And I take it personally, as he claims the land of Israel, the land of my ancestors, doesn’t have a right to exist.

“But there’s more. He now seems to be tilting toward a progressive critique of our economy, even praising Occupy Wall Street. He says that violent revolution could be just around the corner and he has many Leftwing friends who could lead it. He further calls for a new political party and says he would heartedly support it.

“Astonishingly, he also takes the side of the Iranian Mullahs. Not once does he acknowledge that the Mullahs murdered 45,000 men, women and children earlier this year as widespread civic demonstrations erupted. He further claims Iran isn’t a military power. Tell that to the Gulf States.”

Pollock, like so many on the Right, formerly thought he knew Carlson, observing that “As my readers know, I once was a die-hard Leftist, then turned to a life-long career in journalism, including as the Washington producer for ABC’s ‘Good Morning America.’

“Decades later I landed as the senior investigative reporter for the Daily Caller News Foundation [DCNF]. The foundation was established and led by none other than Tucker Carlson. I spent a good deal of time with Tucker. So…I thought I knew him.

“But not now.”

Pollock came to the DCNF as a member of an investigative reporting team I had launched and managed at the Washington Examiner (WEX). He was unjustly let go by the WEX powers-that-be over my impassioned protests, which was a key reason for the subsequent move to DCNF.

I made sure he was able to join the rest of us at DCNF because I knew Pollock was (and is today) one of the finest investigative journalists in Right media. His assessment of Carlson is a hard but necessary read.

MORE IMPROPER PAYMENTS BAD NEWS: America’s biggest employer-based health insurance program is sending out beaucoup checks to dead people, for people who aren’t eligible for benefits and service reimbursements far in excess of what is allowed, according to a blistering report by the Government Accounting Office (GAO). Trumpers are trying to eliminate the causes, which were largely ignored during the Biden years. More here on The Washington Stand.

HILL AIDES SEE MISCONDUCT? Well, assuming the latest CNCT Capitol Pulse survey is indicative of the actual situation, it appears few aides working on Capitol Hill claim to have seen sexual misconduct by anyone on the congressional campus. Check it out on HillFaith.

LEFT CAN’T ABANDON ITS VIOLENCE: Richard Pollock says the Left will not, indeed cannot, abandon its addiction to deadly violence against its political opponent because it’s permanently embedded in its ideological DNA. Among much else, Richard cites this passage from Saul Alinsky, who literally wrote the Rules for Radicals:

“Alinsky felt the doctrine of revolutionary change means that ethical standards are not important. ‘That perennial question, ‘Does the end justify the means?’ is meaningless as it stands; the real and only question regarding the ethics of means and ends is, and always has been, ‘Does this particular end justify this particular means?” (Italics in the original).

“Again, showing that ethics doesn’t govern the revolutionary activist, Alinsky counseled, ‘in war the end justifies almost any means,’ adding, ‘Ethical standards must be elastic to stretch with the times.'”

Alinsky’s rationalization for doing whatever the Left thinks it can get away with in its pursuit of absolute political power vividly reminds us that politics is downstream from morality, which is downstream from theology. If you are your own higher power, sooner or later you will practice “anything goes” as your morality.

Richard Pollock is particularly insightful on these matters as he came out of the same New Left that put the Democratic Party on the road to its present and growing fascination with revisiting the French Revolution, Stalin’s genocides, Mao’s purges, and so, so much more blood in the modern era. One of his first Substack columns was on this very topic and is well-worth re-reading today.

HARD DATA SHOWS CHURCH RESURGENCE, ATHEIST DECLINE: More data is showing up indicating that Christianity is no longer declining but rather growing among Americans, even as the atheist/agnostic/nones elements is moving downward, according to Rod Martin.

“Ryan Burge, statistician and professor at the Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University, finds that the secular surge may not merely have stalled. It may be going into reverse. His numbers, based in part on the newly released 2025 Cooperative Election Study, show that the share of Americans identifying as atheist, agnostic, or nothing in particular fell from 36.2 percent in 2022 to 35.6 percent in 2023, 34.1 percent in 2024, and 31.8 percent in 2025,” Martin writes.

“Burge notes that the decline is statistically significant, and that the General Social Survey points in the same direction, with religious “Nones” down to just 25.2 percent in 2024. That doesn’t prove a full-scale revival. Not yet, anyway. But it does prove that the old story is dead,” Martin continues.

And Martin offers this spirited observation about the churches:

“There’s no longer any benefit to your business, or to your personal prestige, that derives from pretending to be a Christian. There is no financial gain that comes from sitting on the second pew. To be a Christian today means you have to really mean it, or you just wouldn’t bother.

“And they don’t. So the half-believers left. The brunch Christians left. The ‘Jesus was a socialist community organizer’ crowd left. The people who wanted the church to baptize abortion, transgenderism, Critical Race Theory, and every other fashionable madness of the age left.

“So the half-believers left. The brunch Christians left. The “Jesus was a socialist community organizer” crowd left. The people who wanted the church to baptize abortion, transgenderism, Critical Race Theory, and every other fashionable madness of the age left.”

Much, much more in this excellent column.

HONEST WEIGHTS AND MEASURES: One major factor behind the confusing and complicated financial records of government at all levels in this country is the fact the most widely used accounting standards allow what amounts to bookkeeping sleights-of-hand concerning promised but unfunded future benefits. Check out my Washington Stand piece on Sheila Weinberg and Truth-in-Accounting (TIA).

GAO SAYS IMPROPER PAYMENTS ZOOMED IN 2025: Wait a minute, didn’t Trump and DOGE expose this long-running scam last year? Looks like no easy fix is going to get rid of this problem.

BERNIE SANDERS, MEET JUST FACTS: The Vermont Independent socialist’s spiel about the alleged virtues of renewable energy survives about three nanoseconds when subjected to a Just Facts analysis, as I explain in my latest PJ Media column.

IT’S NOT JUST PEOPLE BLUE COUNTIES ARE LOSING: When the people move out of blue counties and cities, they also take with them taxable income and spending inputs to the local economy. And not coincidentally, Open the Books also found that many of the counties former blue residents are moving to have fewer government employees.

WHY ACT BLUE’S NOOSE IS TIGHTENING: If you haven’t read Rod Martin’s in-depth analysis of the interim congressional report on the Democratic fund-raising Goliath, you are missing an opportunity to see in brutal, frank terms just how comprehensively this money machine’s operators broke election law.

BUT, OF COURSE: Fairfax County (Virginia) Elections Office spokesman refuses to respond to allegations of mail-in voting fraud in Tuesday’s statewide referendum on the Democrats’ massively gerrymandered redistricting plan.

FRAUD GETS BIG BEAUTIFUL BILL: A group of 14 GOP senators led by Sen. Joni Ernst of Iowa have pooled into one big proposal 17 anti-fraud bills they had previously separately proposed. The result, as I report today for The Washington Stand, is The Protecting American Taxpayers Act.

The bill addresses controlling and ending fraud in federal spending from multiple angles, including one introduced by Sen. Gary Peters, the Michigan Democrat, to strengthen legal protections for whistle blowers who come forward with information to expose fraudsters.

IS AI THE KILLER HACKING TOOL? The Washington Stand’s Bob MacGinnis looks at a recent IBM assessment and warns:

“This is no longer a warning about the future. It is the present reality in every home, business, and institution that depends on a computer or a phone. Cybersecurity has always been a contest between offense and defense, with defenders holding a workable edge: even when attackers found a gap, there was time to patch, reinforce, and adapt. That assumption is collapsing.

“AI-driven tools can now comb through digital environments, identify weaknesses, simulate attack strategies, and keep trying — automatically, continuously — until they find a way through. The defenders, meanwhile, are still largely operating systems built to catch threats they already recognize, not intelligent agents they have never encountered.”

More here.

TWO AGENCIES, ONE BUILDING: From the Story You Don’t Hear Every Day Department, the General Services Administration (GSA) and Office of Personnel Management (OPM) are, respectively, the federal government’s “housekeeping” and “human resources” offices, with nearly 15,000 employees between them.

Presently, GSA and OPM occupy two separate buildings, but sometime this summer, the former’s workers will start showing up at the latter’s building and will continue doing so until major renovation of their building are completed sometime in 2028. When the renovation is complete, both agencies will then begin operating out of the GSA’s freshened facility.

Officials say, as I report today for The Washington Stand, that such a consolidation of two major agencies into one shared structure has never before happened. But there are plans afoot in the Trump administration for a parade of such happenings in the near future.

SLOWLY GRINDING WHEELS OF JUSTICE: April has seen the resignation of three Members of the House of Representatives, even without full disclosure of all the sexual misconduct hush payments made with tax dollars on behalf of congressmen accused of sexual abuse and assault against congressional staff. But more is coming, as I report tonight for The Washington Stand.

WHO PAYS FOR FEDERAL WASTE AND FRAUD? All of us do, because hundreds of billions of tax dollars are lost every year to waste and fraud in the federal bureaucracy. It’s one of those issues on which everybody pretty much agrees, but nobody has bothered to quantify its cost to individual Americans. Until now, that is.

James Agresti and his colleagues at Just Facts did a deep data dive on the issue and, as I report today for The Washington Stand, found that every one of this country’s 132 million households will in the normal course of things lose more than $140,000.

And because that figure only applies to losses due to fraudulent activities like Medicare benefits going to non-existent hospice patients, the ultimate total will grow when the impact of losses due to waste and other forms of irresponsible management are calculated.

SPEAKING OF THE GEN Z AWAKENING: We are hearing a lot these days about the growing interest among Gen Zers, and especially the guys, in Christ, Bible reading and church attendance. But when was the last time you encountered someone who says it was a book on Quantum Physics that led him to faith?

SPEAKING OF IRAN: Richard Pollock recounts the multiple ways in which leading Senate Democrats, including especially Schumer, have been proven wrong in their assessments of Trump’s military aims, negotiating tactics and mental condition.

FAITH SIDE OF IRAN CONFLICT: Rod Martin, a key leader in the anti-woke movement within the Southern Baptist Convention, opens his Substack column to a Baptist Report analysis that finds the fall of the mullahs could open the way to “the most significant spiritual shift in the region in centuries.”

CONGRESS MUST COME CLEAN: Swalwell scandal spotlights the depth of hidden corruption that has plagued Congress for decades. It’s time to shine the cleansing light of transparency, beginning with making public all of the heretofore secret settlements and associated hush fund protecting others like Swalwell, past and present. Check out my new column on PJ Media.

CALIFORNIA DEMS LOVE MEDIA CENSORSHIP: And just days after indy Internet journo David Delaiden won his 11-year battle against multiple spurious charges filed by then-Attorney General Kamala Harris, Democrats in the California Assembly filed legislation that is clearly aimed at giving state officials media censorship tools. But Democrats using government to censor pro-life/Conservative/Evangelical media and researchers is nothing new. Check out my report today for The Washington Stand.

A MODEST TAX-DAY PROPOSAL: There they go again, those rebellious minds behind Issues & Insights, thinking thoughts contrary to the accepted wisdom on just about any and every issue of which you can think. Today’s thoughts concern getting rid of the current tax code, lock, stock and barrel, and replacing it with either a Flat Tax or a Fair Tax (i.e. a national sales tax on consumption).

WHO LOST THE WAR ON POVERTY: A sharp young research associate at the Cato Institute, a sharp somewhat older econ prof at George Mason University and others marshal a massive data-driven case for concluding Washington’s “War on Poverty” was a bust, compared to the benefits of economic freedom beforehand.

DATA SHOWS RED STATES BEST FOR FAMILIES: Nine out of the top 10 states for healthy, intact families are Red, compared to eight out of the bottom 10 being Blue states, according to new analysis. Ya think there might be a connection there?