Vape shops in Britain have been a rogue industry for years now, with unlicensed, unvetted proprietors selling dangerous products not just in plain sight, but radiating with the neon glow of dozens of garish window displays. In fact, 90 percent of vapes in the United Kingdom now come from China.

These are proving to pose a threat not just to public health, with teachers and healthcare workers sounding the alarm over a terrifying surge in teenage psychosis linked to illegal, often spice-laced vapes sold to minors, but to the public realm, with an unregistered vape shop in Glasgow causing a fire that gutted a 175-year-old landmark building and shut down Scotland’s largest railway station for over a week this past March.

The Government is acutely aware of the growing problems associated with vape shops. Earlier this year, Britain’s Home Office had to allocate £30 million and dozens of National Crime Agency agents and police officers to a special task force to do something about the estimated £1 billion in illicit cash laundered through vape shops and other high street businesses by organized crime. Police forces have also brought a number of cases against dubious shop owners and staff using them as bases to lure and groom children with colorful, flavored products.

So the question is, why is it still the case that anyone can open a vape shop, without a license, without an inspection, without even a background check? Why won’t the Government impose some order?

ON THE BOOKS, BUT NOT IN FORCE.

In fact, it already has. The Tobacco and Vapes Act received Royal Assent on April 29, 2026. It includes a belated but much-needed requirement for vape shop owners and their staff to acquire personal licenses and premises licenses to sell. It also bans vapes from effectively being marketed to minors with bright colors, childish branding, and synthetic flavors. Crucially, it includes a range of stringent new penalties for rogue operators who fail to abide by the new rules.

Are vape shops already a solved problem, then? No, because having a law on the books is no use if it’s not in force, and the Tobacco and Vapes Act is nowhere near being in force. Ministers have the weapons they need, but they haven’t drawn them, with license requirements and display bans not set to come into force until after a lengthy “consultation” process. Not only is this process not near completion, it still hasn’t started. It doesn’t even have a start date.

This lack of urgency is hard to understand, given the scale of the problem the country is facing. Two illegal vapes a minute are being seized nationwide, and this figure would likely be far higher if Trading Standards funding hadn’t roughly halved over the last decade, while the number of vape shops has exploded by 1,200 percent over the same period.

THE COST OF WAITING.

Every month that passes without action, the problem grows more unmanageable, and the threat to public health increases. All it takes to get a vape on a British shelf is filling in a simple online form; there’s no safety inspection, no testing, and no meaningful verification of the ingredients. Many of these products are sold to children. Researchers are increasingly finding that they are contaminated not just with illicit drugs like spice, but with dangerous, neurotoxic heavy metals like lead and cadmium.

Meanwhile, legitimate businesses are being penalized for doing things the right way. Regulated, traditional tobacconists are steadily declining, and for every new vape shop that springs up, seven licensed local pubs close down. The status quo is not tenable for business, not tenable for public health, and not tenable for the authorities struggling to keep a lid on a sector spreading too far and too fast for them to keep up with.

Ministers have the powers to tackle this. They need to use them, and they need to use them now, not years from now.

Image by Nathan Salt.

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Another week and another circus surrounds Reform UK leader Nigel Farage, who has been pursued by the nation’s political, media, and parliamentary establishments over private gifts he received, prior to becoming a Member of Parliament, as well as money he has earned being a spokesman for a gold bullion company.

The press has hounded him for months, and this weekend saw the final straw for Farage, as Sky News journalists turned up at his daughter’s house while he was in the United States celebrating America’s 250th anniversary with the Vice President and Trump cabinet officials.

Much like the circus of cases against President Trump, the allegations against Farage are entirely baseless. At worst, they accuse him of failing to file some paperwork. For such a heinous error, the establishment claims, Farage should lose his parliamentary seat.

“Enough is enough,” was Farage’s response on Tuesday. Instead of letting the media harass him and his family every day, he has decided to resign his seat in parliament voluntarily, in advance of any formal parliamentary rebuke (a set up to chide him and take his seat away, regardless of guilt or innocence), and fight a by-election (special election) to defend it.

In other words: let the people decide.

“If I win, you win,” he told the voters of his constituency in Clacton-on-Sea yesterday. “If I lose, they win,” he concluded, pointing to a political establishment that includes the Conservative Party, the Labour Party, the Green Party, the Liberal Democrats, and even the recently constituted “Restore Britain,” which enjoys the backing of trillionaire Elon Musk, and openly takes its cues from the center-left “Conservative” Party.

But so far, every party, Restore included, has said they refuse to fight against Farage in Clacton.

Firstly, he’s far too popular there, and that’s why they’re really afraid. Clacton is one of the most white, working-class, pro-Brexit seats in the country. Labour would stand no chance, the Tories would get shellacked, and Restore in its current state of “are we or aren’t we ethnonationalists?” would likely end up fighting amongst itself more than anyone else.

Secondly, none of these parties actually care about the voting public having a say in any of this. They’d prefer to litigate against Farage in kangaroo courts and closed committees, as has been the case so far. Asking ordinary people to have a say!? How detestful!

ENTER ‘COUNT BINFACE.’

It strikes me as remarkably appropriate that all these parties have now stood aside to let a joke candidate stand against Farage in Clacton – a Monty Python-style sketch character who has stood against Rishi Sunak, Boris Johnson, and even in the London Mayoral race.

In fact, it is even more appropriate that the representative of the establishment regime is a bin, or “trash can.”

While Westminster thinks its hilarious that Farage’s political future rests on him beating a caricature, it strikes ordinary voters as contemptuous and insulting.

The man behind the mask is Jonathan David Harvey, an almost 50-year-old comedian who has made most of his earnings from working with the globalist, TV license-funded British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC).

Far from his irreverent stage persona, Harvey is a liberal Oxford graduate who loathes working class voters, Brexit, and takes himself very seriously as an actor and writer, despite his own webpage being blank on the writing section.

For Americans, Binface is something like Vermin Supreme, but without the political conviction.

In British politics, however, ridicule can be a lethal weapon.

With the rest of the parties too afraid to stand against Farage, an unholy alliance on Count Binface voters is likely to return the character the most votes he’s ever had, though the idea of him cobbling together the 21,000+ he’d need to beat Farage in the special election is highly unlikely.

Instead, Farage is likely to be returned as the Clacton MP once again. A poke in the eye for a political establishment that will no doubt try to remove him yet again, in just a few months, when their pre-scripted, weaponized report against his private finances emerges.

When Donald Trump calls Comcast “Concast,” he is making a specific allegation about one of the most powerful media companies in the world: that it presents political hostility as journalism. Sky News (known by many as “Sly News”) which is owned by Comcast, recently denied hounding Reform UK leader Nigel Farage’s daughter at her house, before being caught out lying by CCTV footage. The network has now admitted its reporters had indeed approached the property.

Trump has repeatedly gone after Comcast and its chairman, Brian Roberts, by name. In February 2025, he accused MSNBC of being “an illegal arm of the Democrat Party” and referred to Roberts as the “Lowlife Chairman of ‘Concast.’” He has also blasted Comcast, NBC, and Roberts as a disgrace to broadcasting. The language is Trump’s, but the underlying point is one many conservatives have understood for years: large corporate broadcasters now behave like political actors while demanding the deference once given to neutral institutions.

They also feel like they can turn up at politicians’ doors, but be exempt from the same treatment themselves. Something which has to change.

CONCAST OWNS SLY NEWS.

Comcast bought Sky in 2018 after a bidding war with 21st Century Fox, paying about £30.6 billion. The deal gave the Philadelphia-based media and telecoms giant control of Sky’s television, broadband, mobile, streaming, entertainment, sports, and news operations.

The ownership chain is simple enough. Sky News is owned by Sky Group. Sky Group is owned by Comcast. Comcast is chaired and controlled by Brian L. Roberts.

Comcast’s political operation is not especially subtle, either. The company has long maintained a major Washington presence. David Cohen, one of the most politically connected figures in Comcast’s orbit, served for years as Comcast’s chief lobbyist and senior executive vice president. Before Comcast, he was chief of staff to Ed Rendell in Philadelphia. Later, Joe Biden made him U.S. ambassador to Canada.

British viewers who still think of Sky as a purely British broadcaster are looking at an old map.

THE RHODES CONNECTION.

Sky News Group is chaired by David Rhodes, an American media executive featured by the World Economic Forum. Rhodes happens to be the brother of Ben Rhodes, Barack Obama’s former advisor, who has his own public history of hostility toward Farage.

In 2017, Ben Rhodes compared Farage to Putin-aligned critics of NATO and the EU, writing: “Like Putin, Trump and Bannon have talked down NATO / the EU, lifted up EU critics like Farage, worried leaders like Tusk and Merkel.” The following year, replying to the Labour Party’s David Lammy, he wrote: “Perhaps Farage could just go to Moscow so that he can take his instructions directly.”

Rhodes was caught publicly mourning the loss of Hillary Clinton in 2016, who herself attacked Farage after he appeared on the campaign trail with then-candidate Trump in Jackson, Mississippi, making him one of the first major global leaders to back the 45th and 47th President.

So the man overseeing Comcast-owned Sky News is not even a product of the old British broadcasting world, but of the left-wing American media establishment. His politically prominent brother has openly treated Farage with hostility.

When Sky News is caught out over Farage’s family, it is not paranoia to ask whether Britain’s supposedly neutral broadcaster is operating inside a much wider American establishment culture that has viewed Farage as an enemy for years.

THE LIE UNRAVELS.

The Farage row matters because it shows the culture problem in plain sight. First came the denial. Then came the later disclosure. Then came the studio defence that doorstepping is just normal journalism. Well, perhaps it is “normal” journalism. That is the indictment.

The press spends half its time demanding transparency from everyone else while hiding behind evasive corporate wording when the questions turn inward. Sky’s own statement may have been narrowly constructed, but the wider public heard what we heard: you said you had not contacted his family, then we learned reporters had indeed pulled up at the property, blocked the driveway, and attempted to contact his daughter inside.

🚨NEW: Nigel Farage has released CCTV footage of Sky News journalists turning up at the door of his daughters home

He is demanding an apology pic.twitter.com/EIotl9XJe1

— GB Politics (@GBPolitcs) July 7, 2026

If a politician tried that kind of parsing, Sky News would devote a panel to it before lunch. Which brings us back to “Concast.”

Trump’s critique has always been that these companies are not merely biased in the old-fashioned sense. His argument is that they are protected political institutions: wealthy, corporate, self-regarding, and convinced that their own intrusions are public service while everyone else’s complaints are threats to press freedom.

Sky’s handling of the Farage doorstep row looks like a British exhibit in the same case.

WHAT CAN YOU DO?

Consumers can stop paying Comcast and its subsidiaries, now.

In Britain, that means cancelling Sky TV, Sky Sports, Sky Cinema, Sky Broadband, Sky Mobile, and NOW (formerly NOW TV). It means refusing the little retention discount when the call centre tries to save the subscription. It means telling Sky, in writing, that the cancellation is because of Sky News and its handling of the Farage family row. It means not feeding Sky News clips on social media where outrage still counts as engagement.

There is also the regulatory route. Viewers can complain to Ofcom if they believe Sky breached broadcasting standards. But companies understand revenue faster than they understand public anger.

Trump called it “Concast” because he believed Comcast had become a byword for corporate media corruption dressed up as public interest journalism. After this week, plenty of British viewers may finally understand the nickname.

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WATCH:

A BIG FAT GIANT BACKPEDAL FROM SKY NEWS just now, as they final admit that yes, they did hound Nigel Farage’s daughter at a property The Times revealed last week was her residence.

This is ABSOLUTELY DISGUSTING. Watch as Adam Boulton pivots from their line of “Nah we didn’t do… pic.twitter.com/bXTV1suQiU

— Raheem J. Kassam (@RaheemKassam) July 7, 2026

2025 was one of the worst years for farmers in years with bankruptcies skyrocketing by 46% from 2024 levels.

Prices are down, costs kept climbing. Some of that traces back to trade disruptions with China, though rising input costs are just as much to blame. Things like fertilizer, fuel, machinery, costs more than half what it did in 2011. Meanwhile the price farmers are receiving when they sell has only increased by 21% in that same stretch. Do that math for yourself.

Farmers needed help fast, so the Trump administration announced $12 billion in bridge payments to farmers to help them be able to plant their crops this year. It’s a lifeline for thousands of small family farms. Nobody’s arguing otherwise and the Trump Administration did the correct thing by cutting the checks.

But here’s the problem: Bailouts like this don’t fix anything for next year. They just cover this year’s losses. Whatever caused the drop, weather, higher fuel and fertilizer costs, oversupply, a trade war with China, doesn’t really matter. The fix is always the same: another check, funded by taxpayers.

But there’s a bill sitting in Congress that could make the whole cycle unnecessary going forward. It’s called the Grown in America Act.

It doesn’t ask for more checks to be cut, but creates a new incentive structure that boosts America’s family farms by pointing our tax code in a different direction.

Here is how it works: American companies get a tax credit if they buy their ingredients from American farmers. The credit kicks in once half of what they buy is American-grown, and the credit increases from there as they buy even American grown products. Buy foreign instead, and the company gets nothing.

There’s no government check involved at all, no emergency, just a standing reason for companies to keep buying American, built straight into the tax code, whether there’s a crisis that month or not.

A tax credit costs the government money too. There’s no getting around that. But it’s a cost built into the budget ahead of time, not an emergency expense the government has to scramble to cover.

Yet even more importantly we are fixing a broken system that jumps from one emergency bailout to the next to creating a customer for American family farms who keeps showing up.

Congress should pass it. Trump’s already bailed farmers out once since December 2025. He shouldn’t have to do it again just because Congress can’t get a tax bill across the finish line.

Give farmers a customer instead of a check, feed America with American grown agriculture and create a whole new incentive structure that allows American family farms to thrive year after year.

Nigel Farage is living through an experience that will feel remarkably familiar to American conservatives—especially President Donald Trump.

Britain’s political establishment long comforted itself with the belief that Farage could be contained, marginalized, or simply waited out. Instead, he has become the dominant force in British politics. As Reform UK continues to lead national polling, the tactics deployed against him have begun to resemble those used against Trump during the run-up to the 2024 election.

The first parallel is media hostility.

Much like Trump, Farage faces a press corps that often appears less interested in covering his rise than explaining why it should not be happening. Britain’s state broadcaster, the BBC, alongside much of the national press, treats Reform’s popularity as a problem to be solved rather than a political phenomenon to be understood. Every gaffe, controversy, or disagreement receives saturation coverage, while policy successes or growing voter support are frequently downplayed.

This approach mirrors the American media environment that surrounded Trump for years. Constant negative coverage was intended to weaken his standing. Instead, many voters interpreted it as evidence that entrenched institutions feared the disruption both men represented.

The second parallel is the increasing use of legal and regulatory institutions against political opponents.

Trump’s supporters watched prosecutors, judges, and bureaucratic agencies become major actors in the political arena. Whether one agreed with every case or not, the cumulative effect was clear: legal battles became inseparable from electoral politics.

Farage has encountered a British version of the same phenomenon. From the debanking scandal that saw NatWest subsidiary Coutts effectively attempt to remove him from the financial system because of his political views, to ongoing efforts by regulators, activists, and establishment figures to constrain Reform’s momentum, many voters increasingly view Britain’s institutions as participants in political warfare rather than neutral referees.

Trump benefited politically when millions of Americans concluded that the system itself was being deployed against him. Farage is beginning to generate a similar reaction among British voters.

The third parallel is the emergence of billionaire-backed alternatives designed to stop the insurgent candidate from consolidating support.

In the United States, many donors, consultants, and influential figures rallied behind Ron DeSantis as a vehicle for moving beyond Trump. Elon Musk was among those who initially encouraged DeSantis’s presidential ambitions. The effort ultimately collapsed because Republican voters remained loyal to Trump.

Britain now appears to be witnessing a similar experiment through Restore Britain and other projects seeking to create a supposedly more respectable, establishment-friendly alternative to Farage’s movement. The theory is familiar: keep the populist message while replacing the populist messenger.

History suggests that strategy NEVER succeeds. Voters generally recognize when a political movement is organic and when it is being engineered.

Most importantly, the attacks are not producing the intended result.

Despite years of relentless criticism, legal controversies, institutional opposition, and efforts to divide his support, Farage remains at the top of British politics. Reform UK has led or shared the lead in well over 300 consecutive national polls, an extraordinary achievement for a party that only recently emerged as a genuine challenger to Britain’s century-old political duopoly.

This may be the most important lesson for American observers.

The more the establishment attempted to destroy Trump, the stronger he became among voters who believed the attacks confirmed his outsider status. Farage appears to be benefiting from the same dynamic. Every attempt to isolate him reinforces his argument that Britain’s governing class is disconnected from the electorate.

The Atlantic Ocean may separate our two countries. The political script, however, is increasingly familiar.

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David Shelton has built his campaign for Indiana Secretary of State around a single, carefully chosen word: professionalism. The Knox County Clerk and county Republican chairman promises to strip “personal branding and self-promotion” from the office and to “re-establish the office as a nonpartisan institution.” Shelton’s is a tidy pitch, but on paper it is the pitch of a man who would change as little as possible about how Indiana counts its votes.

The people lining up behind Shelton are precisely the people a conservative might expect to favor the status quo. His most prominent backer is Connie Lawson, who ran the Secretary of State’s office for the better part of a decade before stepping down in 2021. Lawson may be the definition of the “old establishment guard,” and Lawson’s blessing tells delegates exactly what kind of officeholder he intends to be: a careful steward of the status quo, rather than a reformer willing to tear up any of the bad rules.

THE DEMOCRAT YEARS.

Start with the matter of party, because Shelton’s is more recently acquired than his county chairmanship might suggest. In 2011 he allowed the Democratic candidate for mayor of Vincennes, Bob Lechner, to mount a large campaign sign on his business property. The following year he ran for the Knox County Commission himself, and he ran as a Democrat, finishing third in the Democratic primary with just 455 votes, around 14% of the field. He was still at it in 2015, the year Donald Trump came down the escalator, when Shelton applied to fill a vacant county council seat as a Democrat, a process that under local party rules required him to have voted in the most recent Democratic primary. Destiny Wells, the Democratic nominee for this very office in 2022, later remarked publicly that Shelton “used to call” her. A man entitled to change his mind is one thing; a man who wishes to be entrusted with the machinery of Indiana’s Republican-run elections while his conversion to the party is barely a decade old is quite another, and Indiana delegates are entitled to ask when, and why, the switch occurred.

JOHN RUST.

The company Shelton keeps now does little to settle the question. Campaign finance filings show a contribution of $1,041.02 from John Rust of Seymour, dated 16 March 2026, and Rust has publicly endorsed the campaign as well. Rust is the former chairman of the egg producer Rose Acre Farms, and Hoosier Republicans will remember him as the man who tried to challenge Jim Banks for the United States Senate in 2024 and was thrown off the Republican primary ballot for his trouble. The bipartisan Indiana Election Commission voted to remove him, the Indiana Supreme Court upheld the decision, and both bodies found that Rust failed to meet the state’s party-affiliation statute because his two most recent primary votes had not been cast as a Republican. He had voted in the Democratic primaries of 2010 and 2012. Banks, never one to soften a blow, dismissed his rival at the time as a man disqualified “because of his Democrat voting record.” That a candidate now helping to fund Shelton’s bid to oversee Indiana’s elections is himself a man the courts ruled could not lawfully appear on a Republican ballot is the sort of detail that, in a campaign premised on institutional trust, refuses to stay in the footnotes.

AN AWKWARD RECORD ON ELECTION INTEGRITY.

Shelton’s central claim is competence at the one thing the office actually does, and his record as a clerk is where that claim should be strongest. Instead it is where the questions multiply.

He has been openly dismissive of the very voters who care most about election security. In 2024 he described Hoosiers who believe elections are “hacked and rigged and stolen” as “election enthusiasts,” a group he said “can be intimidating,” even as he conceded Trump had carried Indiana comfortably. That same year he recounted how his electronic poll books had flagged a voter for what looked like an attempt to vote twice, and explained that because he could not establish the voter’s intent, he simply let the matter drop rather than refer it onward. A chief elections officer who treats a flagged double-voting attempt as a shrug, and treats integrity activists as a nuisance, is an unusual fit for a Republican electorate that has spent four years demanding the opposite posture.

His instincts on how Hoosiers should vote have wandered too. At the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020, Shelton told the county council, “I’m really going to push those mail-in ballots,” and set about mailing absentee applications widely. Barely a month later he was on social media warning that mail-in voting was “a system that can easily be used in a fraudulent manner.” Which of those two Sheltons would show up to run the state’s absentee system is anyone’s guess. In the 2023 county budget he secured higher pay for poll workers and set Democratic judges at twenty-five dollars a day above their Republican counterparts, explaining that the Democrats simply carried more of the logistical load.

Then there is the night the results did not come.

After a 2023 municipal election, the county’s contractor hit a firewall and could not post returns to the website, and Shelton, by his own account, halted the effort and locked up the courthouse before eight o’clock because he “was ready to go home.” He had pushed the figures to the state system and to social media, but “IT issues plague city election” is not the headline a man running on flawless administration wants following him to Fort Wayne.

PUBLIC SERVANT OR PRIVATE VENDOR?

The sharpest questions concern where Shelton’s public office ends and his private ventures begin, because the line runs through several of them. He owns Shelton Specialties LLC, which holds a patent on a stabilizer bracket for electronic poll books, a device the federal Election Assistance Commission credited to the “County Clerk’s Office” and which his company now sells to counties across Indiana at $35 apiece. Whether the sitting clerk developed and patented that device on his own time or is profiting from work done on the public payroll is a question that deserves a straight answer before he is handed authority over every county that might buy it. He also runs a redistricting consultancy, Redistricting Refined LLC, and has turned up before neighboring county commissions presenting maps in a capacity that is never quite defined as helpful neighbor or paid contractor. In 2020 his firm applied for a $5000, taxpayer-funded COVID grant administered by the very county he serves.

DAVID SHELTON’S CHARACTER.

The administrative calm Shelton projects is not borne out by his history. His business record includes a 1999 aircraft-refurbishing venture that collapsed into a Chapter 7 bankruptcy within two years, 64 creditors listed, alongside a string of state tax warrants in 2001, 2002, and again in 2013. His judgment in public has been combustible: in a 2011 feud with a city inspector over a sign permit, Shelton demanded the man’s arrest at a council meeting, accused him of voter fraud, and threatened to bring in the FBI and the state’s Homeland Security department, conduct that prompted the city attorney to write that Shelton presented a “personal threat” and to invoke the memory of an Indiana mayor murdered by a constituent. His social media, under the handle @omnicientdave, supplies the rest: a 2018 jab at the Special Olympics, a 2019 quip about vibrators, and a 2021 crack about the suicides of police officers.

Even his green credentials lean in a direction his prospective electorate may not love. As a housing authority board member he spent the mid-2010s championing energy audits, low-flow toilets, a recycling program, rooftop solar on a low-income housing project, and a “Knox County Green Partnership” built on stacking, in his words, “grant upon grant upon grant” of federal money.

A word on his household, which voters can weigh as they see fit: his wife, Rachel, is a distributor for Pure Romance, the multi-level marketer of adult products. The Pure Romance website advertises vibrators, anal toys, cock rings, butt plugs, bondage products, and even your very own “Pure Romance” party experience.

The company has run corporate campaigns urging customers to oppose what it calls anti-trans legislation. Indeed, in 2018 the Pure Romance CEO donated $2 million to the Cincinnati Children’s Hospital for transgender patient care.

The company’s website also includes a transgender-advocacy page asking people to encourage their elected officials to oppose “anti-trans or discriminatory legislation” and commit to “learning and using gender-inclusive language.”

THE CHOICE IN FORT WAYNE.

None of this requires inventing a villain; Shelton’s own record does the work. The delegates gathering in Fort Wayne on 20 June are being asked to install as Indiana’s chief elections officer a man who ran for office as a Democrat within the last dozen years, who waves off election-integrity activists as paranoid, who let a flagged double-voting case go, who pushed mail-in ballots before denouncing them, and who is part-funded by a man his own party kept off its ballot for voting Democrat. He calls it professionalism. They should call it what it is, and choose accordingly.

For one brief moment the federal government proposed to do something it almost never does, which is to concede that its own machinery had been turned into a weapon and to offer the people it crushed a route to redress. The now infamous Anti-Weaponization Fund was seeded with a deliberately symbolic $1.776 billion drawn from the Judgment Fund under the settlement of the President’s suit over his own leaked tax returns.

That is precisely what they moved to crush it.

A single federal judge in the Eastern District of Virginia froze the fund within days, with a hearing on whether to extend the block set for 12 June, and the same establishment that spent a decade swearing the agencies were neutral suddenly located deep constitutional misgivings about compensating the agencies’ victims.

Democratic governors and legislators raced to smother any payout that survived the courts, with Gavin Newsom even vowing to tax California recipients at 100 percent and copycat bills appearing in New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, and Wisconsin, alongside a federal measure its own authors were proud enough to brand the SLUSH FUND Act. That this single idea provoked so much coordinated outrage is a massive tell.

Stephen K. Bannon was wrongly prosecuted and imprisoned over a congressional subpoena of the precise kind that, aimed the other way, yields a sternly worded letter and nothing further. Peter Navarro also went to prison. Michael Flynn was put through years of an investigation that the government’s own records later showed it had cause to drop long before it chose to.

And there are a number of cases that never reach cable news. We at The National Pulse have heard testimony from a number of people who have reached out to us to explain how they were persecuted, having assets seized, their homes raided, placed on no fly lists. Some of these cases are still unresolved.

White River Energy Corp is another example. A small Arkansas oil and gas firm which built a business around Native American sovereign tax credits. Its filings were processed without incident until one of its referral agents, Billy Long, was nominated to run the IRS, at which point it became a target of convenience.

The company maintains the credits are legitimate, but what followed was not quiet enforcement but a public campaign, with Senator Ron Wyden firing off letters demanding a Justice Department investigation and branding the arrangement a fraud in the press, after which the agency’s posture conveniently hardened. All because Wyden wanted to stop Billy Long. For White River, however, the damage is done.

The pattern here is precisely the point. The pressure didn’t begin inside a neutral tax administration applying the code without fear or favor; it began with a U.S. Senator hunting a political scalp, amplified by a sympathetic press, and it landed on people with neither the profile nor the war chest to fight back.

It is more than fair to ask how impartial that administration is. We know, because she posted it herself, that a serving IRS Appeals Officer – Niki Wilkinson – used her own public LinkedIn account to defend a central figure from the Lois Lerner-era targeting scandal, to dismiss congressional concern about political bias as a “farce,” and to accuse the sitting President of corruption, all while occupying a role whose entire legitimacy rests on the appearance of neutrality.

While many outlets have reported that Wilkinson was fired from the IRS, it remains unclear as to whether she simply got demoted, instead.

A tax authority cannot demand that citizens trust its impartiality while its officers editorialize against half the country on a public social media feed.

This is exactly why the fund was right, and why letting it die would be a lasting mistake. Weaponization cannot be resolved by waiting for the offending officials to retire on their whopping full pensions. As we have previously said, the people must be compensated, and the next politician who reaches for the IRS or any government agency as a campaign instrument must know that the bill eventually arrives.

The water-usage argument against artificial intelligence has become the climate left’s favorite scold. The pitch runs as follows: every time you ask ChatGPT a question, somewhere a data centre guzzles a bottle of water to keep itself cool, and the planet pays the price. Stop using AI, the lecture concludes, or you are complicit in environmental ruin.

The numbers, however, tell a different story (if anybody bothered to check them).

A single pair of cotton jeans takes roughly 1,800 gallons of water to manufacture, the equivalent of somewhere between 136,000 and 681,000 ChatGPT queries, depending on what you’re asking.

A single almond, the smug snack of the wellness influencer class, requires a full gallon of water to produce, and there are around 300 almonds in a standard bag. Yet no one on TikTok films themselves weeping over Trader Joe’s, and no one is writing essays about the moral catastrophe of denim.

I asked a family friend whether she’s using AI (she’s in high school) and her response was: “I try not to because I heard AI uses a lot of water”

I don’t know how to process that interaction.

— Marty Kausas (@marty_kausas) March 7, 2026

The figure that launched a thousand finger-wags came from a 2023 paper out of UC Riverside and UT Arlington titled “Making AI Less Thirsty,” by Pengfei Li, Jianyi Yang, Mohammad A. Islam, and Shaolei Ren.

Its central claim is that roughly 500 milliliters of water, the size of a small bottle, is consumed by data centre cooling systems for every 10 to 50 medium-length responses from GPT-3, the model in circulation at the time. The study went viral on TikTok last year. Subsequent research has noted that the water footprint of an AI query varies enormously by location, depending on the energy source feeding the data centre, the cooling system in use, and the surrounding infrastructure. A query routed through Iceland is not the same as query routed through Phoenix, for example.

AI obviously consumes resources. But a sane argument about scale and proportion has been abandoned, once again, due to climate alarmists.

If water consumption is a genuine concern, their targets should be more obvious. Agriculture accounts for around 80 percent of the nation’s consumptive water use. The almond industry alone uses roughly 10 percent of California’s agricultural water. Fast fashion, much of it worn by the same influencers lecturing the rest of us, is among the most water-intensive sectors on earth. Then there are golf courses in the desert, lawns in Las Vegas, and the bottled water industry itself.

None of these generates anything close to the moralizing fervor reserved for a chatbot.

The reason is not difficult to identify. AI threatens the professional and ideological monopoly of a knowledge class that has spent two decades insisting it alone could be trusted with the truth. The water argument is the convenient cover story, dressing an old anxiety about losing the gates in the green language of environmental virtue.