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.

The concept of privacy is foundational to America. Indeed, the Fourth Amendment prevents unlawful searches and seizures. The Fifth Amendment prevents self-incrimination. The First Amendment prevents the government from compelling Americans from making disclosures. Some places, like Montana, explicitly list the right to privacy in their state constitutions.

But in the digital age, the lines on what constitutes a warrantless search continue to blur. Under current law, section 2705(b) of the Stored Communications Act (SCA) allows the government to impose a “gag” order on tech companies when they want to access your data. Worse, the procedure is entirely ex parte (one sided, private conversations) and under seal. The customer has no notice, no opportunity to be heard, and no ability to challenge the search. Only the provider knows, and the provider is the only party in a position to push back, which most don’t have the resources or incentive to do.

THE STORED COMMUNICATIONS ACT.

When the government wants stored emails, cloud files, account records, or metadata from large tech companies without you knowing, it uses a law called the Stored Communications Act. The Act provides the government with narrow subpoena power that allows the government to obtain basic subscriber information. They can also seek orders for non-content records provided that they can provide “specific and articulable facts” to justify the measure. The law even gives them the ability to surreptitiously seek a warrant for content so long as they have probable cause – a low bar.

Usually, the provider would be free, or even required, to notify the customer. However, the Act allows them to override that obligation if the government files a companion application asking the court to bar the provider from telling anyone about the request. This is basically a government-imposed gag order.

There are some good and valid reasons why law enforcement would want to have these in place. These measures can be critical for law enforcement to conduct covert investigations, prevent criminals from fleeing their jurisdictions, or ensuring that evidence doesn’t get destroyed. But if our Fourth Amendment or due process is to mean anything, there has to be limits.

The Act, and its predecessor the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA), were enacted when applications, like email, were in its infancy. Today’s digital world is a completely different animal. With the allure of free services, we provide details about our most intimate selves to trillion-dollar tech companies who, in turn, make an enormous profit off the data they collect.  They know everything about us. What we like to eat. When we sleep. Where we live. Where we are. Our beliefs. Our fears.

This is far more data that was even cognizable at the time Congress enacted SCA and ECPA.

NO CAP.

Worse, the statute itself sets no cap on how long they can keep the data. It simply says the order is for “such period as the court deems appropriate.” For decades that meant indefinite gag orders were routine, sometimes lasting years or forever. That is until Microsoft pushed back and sued the government for violating, among other things, its users’ Fourth Amendment right against unlawful searches and seizures. The lawsuit prompted the Department of Justice (DOJ) to issue a memo (i.e., the 2017 Rosenstein memo) that set a default cap of one year to hold user data. Keep in mind, this is not legally binding. The DOJ can simply ignore or rescind the policy at any time.

Frankly, we need an update to comport with contemporary times and set better guardrails.

Thankfully, Congress has actually found a compromise that better assures that our rights are protected under the Fourth Amendment and traditional notions of due process, while allowing law enforcement to keep us safe. The bill is called the Non-Disclosure Order (NDO) Fairness Act, which would require prosecutors to show specific, articulable facts that notifying the customer would cause a defined harm (like flight, evidence destruction, or witness intimidation). It would also cap the gag order at a limited duration with renewals requiring fresh justification, and push courts to apply a tighter constitutional standard rather than rubber-stamping requests.

Better yet, it’s bipartisan. And it is easy to see why. Let’s start with the obvious: customers have a right to know when the government rifles through their data so they can challenge over-broad searches, and indefinite secrecy undermines due process.

Lest we forget the potential for the government to weaponize this information. This is not hypothetical. Recent revelations from Arctic Frost showed prosecutors obtained records of journalists, congressional staff, and members of Congress under sealed orders during the Trump-era leak investigations.

Given this reality, the balancing of equities weigh in favor of passing the NDO Fairness Act.

Earlier this year, iRobot, the company that made the Roomba, filed for bankruptcy and was sold off to a Chinese supplier. The cause was a decision made in Brussels, three years ago, to block Amazon’s rescue offer. Thusly, an American company was regulated out of existence by a foreign bureaucracy. A Chinese competitor inherited the spoils, which is a fair summary of how the European Union’s (EU) so-called consumer protections work in the real world.

iRobot is no isolated case. The EU has built an entire regulatory architecture for precisely this purpose, with two pieces of legislation: the Digital Markets Act (DMA) and the Digital Services Act (DSA), marketed as consumer protection but functioning as industrial policy directed at firms headquartered in the United States.

In fact, five of the seven companies Brussels has designated as “gatekeepers” under the DMA are American. European competitors, on the other hand, are usually spared, and Chinese firms face notably lighter compliance pressure. It’s hardly an accident.

President Trump has so far been one of the very few Western leaders willing to spend political capital pushing back on this, and his administration’s opening move was instructive. Last July, at the President’s direction, the Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR) launched a Section 301 investigation into Brazil over what Ambassador Jamieson Greer called Brasília’s “attacks on American social media companies,” alongside a longer catalogue of unfair tariff, anti-corruption, and market-access practices.

Brazil’s framework closely mirroring Brussels is a giveaway, since the European original is where the larger problem really originates.

PRECEDENT SET.

The administration deserves credit for using the Brazil case to put down a marker that digital protectionism dressed in regulatory clothing is still protectionism, and that Section 301 is the right tool for confronting it. The House Judiciary Committee even underscored that point in a letter to Brazil’s finance ministry, warning that the proposed competition bill would “mainly capture American platforms” and amount to a non-tariff trade barrier, with the same logic applying with even greater force across the Atlantic.

The U.S.-EU framework agreement signed last August included a polite commitment from both sides to address “unjustified digital trade barriers,” though that commitment has proven entirely one-sided. Brussels, so far, has offered no meaningful concessions, and EU competition chief Teresa Ribera has publicly declared the digital rulebook “not up for negotiation,” ludicrously characterizing American pressure as “blackmail.” European Commission officials have even signaled that 2026 will see enforcement escalate further, with landmark cases queued up against Google, Meta, Apple, and X, with a €120 million fine on X marking the start of greater enforcement.

THE ASYMMETRY.

The two-tier digital economy Brussels has constructed was always its intended outcome. Europe can’t build a competitive technology sector, so it built a regulatory one, and is now using that apparatus to distort markets.

The censorship dimension is, if anything, worse, since the DSA empowers Brussels to dictate how American platforms moderate content, including speech that is plainly lawful in the United States. The administration grasped the seriousness late last year when it imposed visa restrictions on former Internal Market Commissioner Thierry Breton and others, with Secretary of State Marco Rubio describing the targets as “leading figures of the global censorship-industrial complex,” and that signal now requires substantive follow-through.

WHAT MUST FOLLOW.

Section 301 is the obvious next step, since the statute permits USTR, on Presidential direction, to investigate foreign acts that are “unjustifiable,” “unreasonable,” or “discriminatory” and burden U.S. commerce, all three of which the DMA and DSA meet comfortably.

A formal investigation would produce a record of how Brussels’ regulatory architecture functions as a trade barrier, test it against the framework commitments the EU is now openly ignoring, and generate genuine leverage, the one commodity polite diplomatic correspondence doesn’t produce on its own. As the Brazil case has already shown, the prospect of retaliatory tariffs concentrates minds in foreign capitals far more reliably than remonstration.

While that is the likely case, the U.S. could be forced to act even further if the EU does not roll back its DMA and digital services tax regulations, potentially even imposing similar restrictions on EU companies operating in the U.S., like Nokia, SAP, and DHL.

The Trump admin should keep pressing Brazil until its digital regime is meaningfully recalibrated, and it should open a parallel Section 301 case against the European Union without further delay, since the Brazilian bill was modeled on the European one. Closing down the imitation while leaving the source untouched would amount to a strategic half-measure of the sort Brussels, judging by its current posture, would happily exploit.

If the EU insists on writing American rules from a desk in Berlaymont, Washington has the tools to make them cost prohibitive. President Trump should use them without apology.

WESTMINSTER, LONDON — Last week, Reform UK leader and perpetual thorn-in-the-establishment’s-side, Nigel Farage, told the press he intended to be on the streets of Havering in East London on the morning of Friday, May 8th, celebrating Reform UK’s first capital city breakthrough. Sure enough, the borough is now his, with the once-dominant Conservative Party relegated to ZERO seats in the white-van-and-mortgage belt of London.

These results are being replicated up and down the nation, with over 5,000 council seats up for grabs in Thursday’s elections, and Reform UK already picking up around 1 in 3 of them. It’s a nightmare scenario for the governing Labour Party, which is still being led by one of the most unpopular political figures in modern political canon.

“I can honestly say you are witnessing an historic shift in British politics,” Farage told the assembled press, insisting that “this is now the most national of all parties.”

GETTING STARMER OUT.

Asked whether the result was a protest vote against Labour, he was blunt: “It cannot continue to be a fluke or a protest vote.” He compared his party’s gains to clearing Becher’s Brook in the Grand National, telling assembled reporters at the Reform UK headquarters in the early hours of Friday morning: “if we cleared Becher’s Brook and land well, we go on to win the Grand National.”

While there isn’t a General Election scheduled in the United Kingdom until 2029, the British parliament does technically have the ability to dissolve itself and “go to the country” earlier. If the Labour Party manages to oust Starmer – an increasingly likely prospect – a new leader may want a snap election to try and gain some public credibility. That situation would, at least currently, likely end in further disaster for Labour.

In any case, Starmer refuses to go. He told the media on Friday morning: “The results are tough, they are very tough, and there’s no sugarcoating it. We have lost brilliant Labour representatives across the country. And that hurts, and it should hurt, and I take responsibility. The voters have sent a message about the pace of change, how they want their lives improved. I was elected to meet those challenges but I’m not going to walk away from those challenges.”

Labour’s MP for Hartlepool, Jonathan Brash, told reporters overnight: “I don’t think Keir Starmer should survive these results,” adding that “we have to be bolder, and we have to go further.”

By noon on Friday, when still only a fraction of the 136 English councils had reported, Reform’s net seat gain was already past 420, with Labour shedding more than 250, and the Conservatives (Tories), dropping near 200.

POLL POSITION.

Sir John Curtice, Britain’s elections guru, told the BBC that “however you look at it Reform are in poll position.”

Across East Anglia, the very part of England the Tories have spent decades treating as ancestral land, Reform was the party that prospered.

Basildon delivered eleven new Reform councillors on a night when both Labour and the Conservatives lost ground. Brentwood and Southend each handed Reform another seven. Peterborough returned four more, making Reform the second-largest party there. By the time Friday afternoon’s county counts begin in Norfolk, Suffolk, and Essex, the only real question will be the size of the Conservative defeat, with Essex County Council widely expected to fall to Reform outright.

The mood at Reform UK HQ on Thursday night and well into Friday morning was ebullient. No party worked harder, traveled further, recruited better, or staved off more attacks than Farage’s Reform. Indeed by every metric, Farage outpaced his competition, criss-crossing the country for nine weeks straight, proving that actually putting the hard work in and meeting voters where they are – the old fashioned way of doing politics – works.

But Reform UK also outpaced across digital platforms too, with a quicker, savvier, and more engaging online operation than the other major British political parties. Their Thursday night “spin room” – in a swanky skyscraper in Westminster – was adorned with floor-to-ceiling television screens blaring every latest detail of every count across the nation. All this while the other parties sat huddled around old laptops in stuffy old digs.

THE OLD GUARD.

For the better part of 40 years, the Conservative Party has insisted that it alone speaks for shire England. Voters in the shires, on the evidence of the past 24 hours, no longer agree. Tory leader Kemi Badenoch’s defenders will note that they defied some expectations in pockets of London, holding Bexley and Kensington & Chelsea and even adding seats in Wandsworth as Labour collapsed there. But these are skirmishes won on the edges of a war that is being lost in the middle. A Conservative Party that cannot hold East Anglia is not, in any meaningful sense, a national party of opposition.

The Green Party, advertised by sympathetic leftist media as the great progressive alternative, has not arrived either. Curtice noted that the Greens had picked up roughly an eight-point swing in vote share but were converting almost none of it into actual council seats. By the early hours, their net gain stood somewhere in the low 20s, a figure that is a footnote, rather than a foothold.

Green Party leader Zack Polanski – who has faced weeks of scrutiny over his party’s rampant, internal anti-Semitism – went into Thursday promising historic gains in London, Sussex, and Hastings, and a breakthrough in Wales. It hasn’t happened.

WHAT NEXT?

Keir Starmer’s problem is that the public quite plainly treated yesterday’s vote as a referendum on his premiership, and answered no. It was a national vote of no confidence in a man who has promptly presided over one of the worst political and cultural eras in modern Britain.

Just two years into a five-year mandate, he now faces the question of whether the parliamentary Labour Party, which has never previously removed a sitting Prime Minister, will continue to defer to a leader whose approval ratings have spent eighteen months at historic lows.

The devolved picture is in some ways more striking still. In Wales, Labour, the natural party of government in Cardiff Bay since devolution began in 1999, was on course for its worst Welsh result in over a century. Plaid Cymru and Reform were expected to emerge as the two largest forces in the new 96-seat Senedd.

In Scotland, where counts get under way on Friday afternoon, the far-left Scottish National Party (SNP) is expected to remain the largest party but well short of a majority, while Reform UK, which had no Members of the Scottish Parliament whatsoever after 2021, was forecast to enter Holyrood as either the second or third-largest force, displacing the Conservatives and rivaling Scottish Labour.

The immediate consequences for council control are substantial. Reform now governs more of England than at any point in its history, with Havering joining the 10 authorities already captured last year, and the Essex, Norfolk, and Suffolk counts still to deliver verdicts that look likely to extend that map further. The party will be administering services, setting council tax, and running a DOGE-style efficiency programme in places where, two years ago, it held no seats at all. Every council it controls becomes both an opportunity and a test. If Reform delivers, the case for a Reform government writes itself; if it falters, the legacy parties will ensure nobody forgets.

For 30 years, the British political class has insisted that the Faragist tendency in British politics could be ignored, contained, or laughed off. On the morning of 8 May 2026, on a pavement in Romford, that consensus died.

On Thursday, voters across England, Scotland, and Wales head to the polls in the most fragmented set of British elections in living memory — with projections pointing to the simultaneous collapse of two-party politics across all three nations.

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If you were to walk into a New Jersey pharmacy and ask for a year’s supply of Eliquis, a blood thinner that millions of Americans take to prevent strokes, the list price will be in the region of $7,100. The same drug, manufactured by the same two American companies, Bristol Myers Squibb and Pfizer, at the same plant, could cost you just $770… if you lived in Berlin, Germany.

Now do the same calculation with the increasingly popular Ozempic. The list price in Cleveland is $969 a month, but in Copenhagen it costs just $122. In Berlin it’s as low as $59.

None of this is a quirk, nor is it down to cunning European negotiation. It is, in fact, one of the oldest rackets in international trade.

Americans foot the bill at both ends of all this, by the way: once as taxpayers, by publicly funding organizations like the increasingly scrutinized National Institutes of Health (NIH), which underwrites scientific developments, and a second time at the pharmacy counter, by paying the prices that allow drugmakers to absorb the discounts Berlin and Paris demand as their cost of market access.

European governments operate single-payer health systems, which they use as bottlenecks: they tell pharmaceutical companies what price they’ll pay for a given drug, and the companies, unable to walk away from entire national markets, take what they can get. And in some countries the squeeze doesn’t even stop at the register: governments use “clawbacks” to reach back into the pockets of American drugmakers after the sale and demand a refund on medicines already delivered. Whatever margin is squeezed out of Germany or France inevitably gets recouped from the one large market that does not impose statutory price controls: America’s.

Brussels calls the whole process “price negotiation,” which is one of those European terms that means the opposite of what it is.

Take Germany — Europe’s largest economy and the country that lectures the loudest about “solidarity.” For years, Berlin has forced mandatory price cuts on American medicines the moment they cross its border, suppressing what American companies can charge and sending the bill for the shortfall back across the Atlantic to American patients.

LONG-TERM MALIGNANCE.

For 70 years European governments have spent below NATO defensive spending targets, redirecting the savings into their welfare states, which the United States effectively subsidizes. The same mentality drives the medicine racket: why fund your own research when the Americans will do it for you?

Europeans often lecture Americans about the supposed cruelty of America’s “for-profit healthcare,” while running an entire continent’s pharmacopoeia on profits extracted from American patients. European Union Commissioner Ursula von der Leyen condemns capitalism during Davos, but then dispatches her negotiators to enforce the price controls that depend on it. When President Trump suggested at the same conference in January that Emmanuel Macron might consider letting French citizens pay something closer to what Americans pay for the same medicines, the French presidency dismissed the comment as “fake news.” The more accurate translation is that they consider the question itself an impertinence.

Over the past year, President Trump has expended significant effort on this.

His May 2025 ‘Most Favored Nation’ executive order put the principle on paper. By December 2025, 17 of the world’s largest medicine manufacturers (accounting for about 86% of the branded drug market) had signed deals committing to align American prices with the lowest paid in comparable developed countries.

BRINGING PRICES DOWN FOR AMERICANS.

This February, TrumpRx.gov went live, with the cash price of Ozempic falling from $1,028 to around $350 and Wegovy to as low as $149. The British, to their credit, read the room: on 1 December 2025 London signed an agreement to raise the net UK price on new drugs in exchange for tariff relief. The model, in short, works, and now needs to be turned on the governments that still refuse to apply it.

Germany didn’t learn from the UK. It is racing in the opposite direction and will likely be the first EU domino to fly in the face of Trump’s policy. Earlier this month, Berlin published a new cost-containment bill that piles fresh rebates and price cuts on top of an already rigged system.

The administration’s existing Section 301 investigation into the European Union, opened on 11 March 2026, currently focuses on things like excess industrial capacity. But it should be extended (or a parallel one opened) to cover European pharmaceutical price-setting regimes directly.

The language was written for exactly this kind of behavior: foreign government practices that are “unreasonable or discriminatory” and burden the American taxpayer and the nation’s commerce.

For half a century the deal has been that Americans pay for the discoveries and Europeans enjoy them at cut rates. Under Trump, that arrangement is coming to its end. Britain has accepted the new terms. Germany is testing whether the Administration means it. France is watching. They will all likely accept these terms in time, or they will discover at last what it feels like to pay for their own science, their own medicine, and their own defense, all of which the United States has been quietly funding on their behalf for the better part of a lifetime.