It’s pretty rare in politics to find a policy that is considered across the political spectrum as a true win, win. In the most recent primary election, Maricopa County implemented a new process that may actually be considered a win, win, win for elections.
Win number one: more options for voters, not fewer.
Win number two: faster election results.
Win number three: more integrity in the process.
What is it? On-site tabulation of early ballots. That’s right, a policy we spearheaded with Senator J.D. Mesnard in 2022. Then, it was SB1362. It was introduced on the heels of an election taking weeks to get election results and one of the largest drivers of the delay were early ballots that voters did not mail back, did not drop off during early voting, but instead held onto until election day and dropped them off en masse at polling locations. Hundreds of thousands of ballots dropped off, that later had to be transported to the county, signature verified, cured, removed from the envelope, and finally tabulated.
That wasn’t novel, and you can see why so many would choose to vote this way. For some, they simply forgot to return their ballot in time. Now it is election day, they don’t want to wait in line to fill out a two-page ballot again, so they drop it off. Or they filled out their ballot at home, and they don’t trust the mail to get it delivered and would prefer the assurance of dropping it off themselves. Or they like filling out their ballot at home, but they also like to go to the polling place on election day. Whatever the reason, a large portion of voters choose to do it every year. Most of them do not realize it delays results for weeks.
SB1362 began as a mandate on the counties, requiring them to provide this option to voters. Believe it or not, the counties fought it tooth and nail the entire session. Eventually, the bill was amended to make it optional for counties to implement. They still opposed it. Why? They knew that if voters found out that their county officials could be doing this but are refusing to do so, voters would get mad at them.
By U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Brooke L. Rollins |
Recently, I visited the port of entry in Douglas, Arizona, which has been traversed by cattle nearly 150 years. Last year alone, over 57,000 live cattle were imported into the United States from Mexico through the port—that is, until we closed it in May 2025 to protect American livestock from the New World screwworm (NWS). Thanks to our round-the-clock efforts, in partnership with state and local animal health officials, it is now safe to begin a coordinated, phased reopening of southern cattle ports.
Every model showed NWS entering our country by late summer of 2025, but by increasing oversight of containment efforts in Mexico and strengthening border protections, we bought critical time to prepare. Since January 20, 2025, the Trump administration has invested a record $1.3 billion in emergency funding to combat the pest—one of the largest animal health responses in U.S. history.
Our defensive plan is robust. We have expanded the number of staff working on NWS by 1,000 percent, and over the past two months, we have conducted more than 1,000 drone flights observing over 21,000 wildlife in Texas. To prevent NWS from reproducing, we are also dropping 100 million sterile flies per week over Texas and Mexico. This spring at Moore Air Base in Texas, we opened a new sterile fly dispersal facility and broke ground on a sterile fly production facility. Last month, a production facility we helped upgrade in Metapa, Mexico, officially opened, and another facility we support in Panama is currently producing sterile flies at maximum capacity.
But we’re not stopping there. In Arizona, I announced a $25 million U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) investment to construct a brand-new sterile fly dispersal facility in the Grand Canyon state, which is coming into being thanks to the visionary leadership of Arizona’s own U.S. Representative Juan Ciscomani. Ranchers can rest assured that we are working with state officials to advance this project as soon as possible. Sterile flies were key to eliminating NWS from the U.S. in the 1960s, and they remain so today.
Just as important are surveillance and preparedness on the ground, which are led in Arizona by the Arizona Department of Agriculture, and in Texas by Governor Abbott, the Texas Animal Health Commission, and the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department. The Trump administration is reinforcing their efforts at every turn, including by ramping up outreach to producers and veterinarians and monitoring over 120 dedicated NWS traps and over 8,000 fruit fly traps along the border.
The results have been remarkable. Since the first confirmed case of NWS in the U.S. on June 3, the same month only saw 31 total cases within our borders, all of which are now inactive. Even better, July saw just 12 cases, and only 3 cases overall are active today. To put that in perspective, Mexico had over 30,000 cases last year alone. Clearly, our efforts are bearing fruit.
The fight is not over, but as the presence of NWS declines, so does the threat to our ranchers. That’s why it is now safe to reopen U.S. livestock ports of entry on our southern border, which have historically played a critical role in the American cattle trade—especially in recent years, as the U.S. cattle herd has reached a 75-year low. Live imports from Mexico make their way to U.S. feedlots and eventually end up on dinner tables across America.
The port in Douglas will be the first to reopen on August 24 due its low-risk profile and because the bordering Mexican state of Sonora remains the lowest-risk Mexican state for NWS and maintains some of the strongest livestock inspection and movement controls anywhere in Mexico. After evaluating the success of the initial reopening, we will then consider reopening the ports in Santa Teresa, New Mexico, and Columbus, New Mexico, to live cattle, bison, and horses.
Make no mistake, these reopenings are contingent on Mexico making continued forward progress and meeting all enhanced USDA requirements. Every animal entering the U.S. will fully comply with our comprehensive import protocol, which requires preventive treatment for NWS, multiple inspections before an animal approaches our border for import, and inspection by USDA for any trace of NWS.
If at any point we determine there is an imminent threat to our domestic herd, we will not hesitate to immediately pause the reopenings. Protecting American livestock will always come first, and we will continue using every tool at our disposal to support the ranchers who raise them and to eliminate NWS once and for all. Our nation’s food security—and, therefore, our freedom—depend on it.
Brooke Rollins serves as the U.S. Secretary of Agriculture
Anyone who can look you in the face and lie without batting an eye is a morally reckless person.
I watched the KTAR interview featuring Peoria USD board members Jeff Tobey and Becky Proudfit. What should have only taken 13 minutes took me nearly two hours to digest with all the pausing. I struggle listening to people shamelessly weave false narratives. There’s no way I can stay silent.
When host Mike Broomhead asked if mandated reporting laws were followed in the case of former Centennial High School teachers Haley Beck and Angela Burlaka, Tobey claimed he was “evidence driven, process driven” and that Peoria PD “said there was no misstep when it came to mandatory reporting.”
Common sense tells me that Peoria PD’s initial investigation was primarily focused on finding evidence that would lead to the arrest and prosecution of suspected child abusers. Mandatory reporting isn’t exactly a high priority for PUSD employees since these kinds of failures have occurred before without consequences. Is it not possible for investigators to miss something, especially if sufficient evidence was withheld?
Thankfully, PUSD board member Heather Rooks sounded the alarm after she read the police report, reviewed state statutes, and discovered more laws were broken.
When Broomhead said:
“The board president [Rooks] was removed for not following protocol…I thought it was a bad look for the district that you went after somebody that was saying ‘I just want to protect kids,’ and it looked in the end like she was right that there needed to be a further investigation.”
Proudfit declared:
“I don’t think that’s a fair assessment. And I think there were a number of things that led to that change in the board presidency…The former prosecutor who would have done the in-house investigation encouraged us to wait until after the police had wrapped up their investigation for fear that we would meddle up [sic] the investigation.”
Once Rooks learned that a mandated reporting probe wouldn’t interfere with open investigations, she went to the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office in her capacity as a parent and taxpayer. Rooks was within her First Amendment right to speak. It’s also her duty as a civil servant to pursue truth, even while her left-leaning colleagues vote against it.
When Broomhead stated:
“It’s been reported that, Mr. Tobey, you are the one that requested that your attorney try to limit the search warrants. So, is this full cooperation if you were trying to limit the search warrants? Did you try to limit the search warrants?”
Tobey replied:
“So, the misinformation on that part was I proofread something that was drafted by legal. So, our superintendent is the de facto executive of the district and is responsible for making those decisions. As the board president, I am the legal liaison with the board and the attorney. It’s my role to kind of have that interface with the attorney and the superintendent. So, it wasn’t my direction at all. It was the direction of the district.”
So, you took part in a coup to remove Rooks from the board presidency only to abdicate your authority and defer to your subordinates in a time of crisis? Some leader you are…
On July 6, 2026, 12News reported, “The police department had previously served a search warrant earlier this year to PUSD in order to obtain documents related to the investigation into the Centennial High controversy. Attorneys representing PUSD filed a motion in Maricopa County court to restrict their access to certain records.”
Quoting PUSD Chief Communications Officer Danielle Airey, the article said, “‘Because the Governing Board has not voted to waive attorney-client privilege, legal counsel has an obligation to preserve those protections and comply with federal student privacy laws unless directed otherwise by the board or ordered by the court.’”
In other words, Tobey could have called for a vote to waive attorney-client privilege at any time. That’s what Rooks would have done if she were still board president. Tobey—who works for Phoenix PD—should know a criminal search warrant supersedes FERPA, Title IX, and all administrative rules.
As I’ve explained in previous posts, Tobey didn’t have the popularity to get elected. He relied heavily on Rooks’ support and the grassroots campaign led by West Valley Parents Uniting (WVPU). In a twist of irony, Tobey and Rooks were two of WVPU’s founding board members. They served in the organization together until they both resigned to run for public office.
A few years later, on a quest for power, it would be Tobey who teamed up with leftists and accused Rooks of political grandstanding as she aspired to higher office. Rooks also supposedly broke protocol by speaking to the media as an active board member.
But wait, there’s more.
On July 21, 2026, this same Tobey character appeared in an ABC15 interview to address Peoria PD’s days-long raid at the district office. Tobey said he was speaking up now because “it’s important to reach more individuals in the community…and I want to be able to share what I can.” While explaining his vote to appoint Darien Schoolcraft as Centennial’s new principal, Tobey verbally identified himself as an active board member. This fits the definition of a hypocrite: A person who tells other people how to behave or claims to hold certain moral, religious, or political beliefs, but then does the exact opposite in their own actions.
To everyone attacking and plotting against Rooks—including the RINOs on LD28’s executive leadership team who publicly supported her demotion—you seem to have lost the real narrative. Let me refresh your memory.
This entire situation, which has gone national and inspired action from the U.S. Department of Education, started with district employees who allegedly victimized their students. Following accusations and concerns from students and community members, former Centennial principal Scott Hollabaugh (and other employees) failed to notify law enforcement.
This is not a matter of perspective or interpretation. For all the “evidence driven, process driven” hypocrites watching this saga unfold, the reality of it all can be ascertained from the investigation report. What difference does it make whether you “like” Rooks or think she’s out for political gain—she’s trying to protect children! Rooks isn’t the issue. Cover-up culture is the issue.
Proudfit—who also serves as LD28’s 4th Vice Chair—voted with Tobey and Melissa Ewing to ineffectively silence a voice calling attention to the alleged sexual exploitation of PUSD students. When Broomhead pointed out the possibility that school leadership ignored students’ complaints about Beck and Burlaka, Proudfit deflected and said:
“This is the part of the story as a mother that makes me see red…We don’t have [a] record of any of those students coming to actual authorities, but instead they went to TikTok and it became a social media centered conversation…As a school district we don’t have control over what your child does on social media. And that’s where I think it’s really important to remember that the number one mandated reporter is parents. They also fall under that [law]. The system only works when everyone is cooperating.”
Is this not what “social emotional” gurus call victim blaming? Again, the lie about there being no record of students approaching administrators is debunked by the police report and is most likely contained in those documents Peoria PD had to pry out of the district’s hands. Hm…it seems there was a lack of cooperation somewhere that caused the system to fail.
School board members are not elected to parent the district. They sit as a body of government to hold official proceedings, not family therapy sessions. Everyone knows students use social media to express themselves. What we don’t know is how they’re responsible for employee misconduct. And why would a public official think it’s appropriate to lecture parents about their kids’ online activities when PUSD is being vetted for alleged child sex crimes that started and/or occurred on campus?
Unless I missed it, by the end of the KTAR interview, Tobey or Proudfit never condemned the alleged perpetrators’ actions. There was no warning for district employees to conduct themselves with professionalism and self-control. No apology was offered to any alleged victims or their families. I swear they were both reciting passages from a restorative justice handbook, or something. It was truly bizarre. Now do you see why it took two hours to watch?
It’s worth noting that Tobey and Proudfit have privately acquired a PR team. I guess this means we can expect their media charade to continue. No worries, keeping the record straight is what I do and I’m not going anywhere. I see 2028 on the horizon.
School board candidates often campaign on “truth,” “transparency,” and “accountability.” Tobey specifically ran on “student safety.” These are the promises K-12 parents want to hear—need to hear—before entrusting someone with their kids. I’m sorry to say those in the highest leadership positions have betrayed the public’s trust. All promises were broken the day Rooks was removed from the board presidency.
I don’t know about you, but I can clearly see who’s in this for political gain. We are where we are today because we have people in power who choose to protect institutions over children.
On July 29, 2026, the American people watched Dr. Anthony Fauci sit before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, chaired by Sen. Rand Paul, and refuse to answer more than 100 questions.
He invoked the Fifth Amendment repeatedly, claiming Sen. Paul’s “unhinged obsession” and public calls for accountability left him no choice. That performance was not the act of a public servant who had nothing to hide.
It was the calculated silence of a man whose private diary entries, public statements and policy influence during the COVID-19 pandemic demand thorough investigation, arrest where warranted and prosecution.
Sen. Paul released more than 1,100 pages of Fauci’s pandemic-era diary in the days leading up to the hearing. Those entries reveal a stark contrast between what Fauci wrote privately and what he told the American people.
In late January 2020, he noted that the Wuhan wet market “was not the source, it was the amplifier.” On a Feb. 1 conference call with leading scientists, his own notes recorded that most participants believed deliberate insertion of genetic material was possible.
Publicly, the narrative pushed natural origin with little room for the lab-leak hypothesis. Americans were told one story while the man at the center of federal infectious-disease policy recorded another.
The hearing itself produced no substantive answers. Fauci declined to address questions on National Institutes of Health (NIH) funding related to research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, gain-of-function work, the scientific basis for lockdowns and school closures, mortality assessments and prior congressional testimony.
Sen. Paul warned that obstruction of a congressional investigation carries consequences and scheduled a vote on contempt. A presidential pardon issued in the final days of the prior administration does not erase the need for a full accounting, nor does it immunize against new findings or perjury related to earlier sworn statements.
As a commander who spent more than three decades in uniform, including time in the Pentagon on Sept. 11 and leading combat operations, I understand the difference between honest error under pressure and the systematic mismanagement of truth.
Public health leadership during a genuine crisis requires candor. When private records show awareness of lab-related possibilities while public messaging closed off debate, when policy recommendations contributed to widespread economic shutdowns, educational losses and eroded trust in institutions, and when the same official then refuses to answer under oath, the public has every right to demand more than silence.
The costs were real. More than a million Americans died. Children lost years of schooling. Small businesses closed. Military readiness suffered under vaccine mandates that sidelined trained personnel. Public confidence in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, NIH and broader health agencies plummeted.
Fauci’s influence as the most visible federal voice on the response amplified every decision. Accountability is not vengeance; it is the baseline requirement for a free society that funds science and expects honest stewardship of that authority.
Prosecutors should examine the full record: the diary, emails, funding decisions and prior testimony for evidence of false statements to Congress, obstruction or other violations of federal law. Contempt of Congress is a serious matter.
If evidence supports criminal charges, whether related to misleading Congress on research funding, origins or the scope of federal guidance, then the Department of Justice has a duty to act without fear or favor. No official, however decorated or long-serving, stands above the law. The Fifth Amendment protects against compelled self-incrimination; it does not erase the underlying facts or prevent investigation based on independent evidence.
Sen. Paul’s committee has done the hard work of bringing the diary into the light and forcing the appearance. The next steps belong to the Justice Department and, if necessary, the courts.
Holding Fauci to account would not rewrite history or undo the losses of 2020–2022. It would demonstrate that power exercised in the name of public health remains subject to the same constitutional standards that apply to every other citizen. Without that standard, trust cannot be rebuilt, and the next crisis will meet even greater skepticism.
The American people funded the research, lived under the guidance and paid the price. They deserve answers, not another round of procedural stonewalling. Justice delayed is not justice at all.
Rob Maness is a contributor to the Daily Caller News Foundation, a decorated combat veteran, and dynamic leader with over 40 years of experience steering complex organizations through high-stakes challenges. During his military service, Maness received eighteen major awards and decorations, including the Legion of Merit twice and a Bronze Star for combat leadership. Through Iron Liberty Group (2013-present), Maness consults, hosts “The Rob Maness Show” on the WorldViewTube Network, and drives digital initiatives, showcasing entrepreneurial adaptability. His leadership — forged in combat, proven in turnarounds and fueled by a knack for inspiring teams — marks him as a force for action and impact in any arena and is showcased in his book: “What You Can Do About It — Taking Real Action Against Corruption, Radicalism, and Moral Decay to Save America.”
Something is missing from the Democratic Party’s 2026 message, and its absence speaks louder than any speech. Climate change, the issue party leaders once called an existential emergency, has gone quiet. Journalists even have a name for it: climate hushing.
An analysis of congressional press releases by Inside Climate News found that Democratic mentions of climate change have plummeted since 2025, while talk of energy affordability has surged. Democratic New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, once a green energy champion, now sells herself as a fighter against high utility bills, and her pivot is being called a blueprint for the party.
Behind closed doors, the shift is even starker. At a recent Senate Democratic strategy retreat, the polling presentation did not ask a single question about climate change. One attendee, Democratic Rhode Island Sen. Whitehouse, called it a massive blind spot.
Give the strategists credit. They read the same election returns everyone else did. The party’s own review of the 2024 loss reportedly found that green transition messaging frightened workers in traditional industries who feared for their jobs. Voters punished Democrats for the high cost of living, and nothing raised that cost more visibly than energy.
But notice what the party retreated toward. They did not change the subject to something safe and unrelated. They ran straight at affordability, the exact ground where their climate record is weakest. You do not flee toward your own weakness. You flee toward it only when you have no choice, because the voters are already holding their ever-increasing electric bills.
And those bills tell the story. The average American residential electricity rate has climbed about 25% in four years, from just over 15 cents per kilowatt hour in 2022 to nearly 19 cents this spring. In the last year alone, rates jumped more than 7%.
Federal forecasters expect another increase in 2026, with the sharpest pain along the East Coast, where climate mandates are most aggressive. These are not acts of nature. They are the predictable result of policies that shut down reliable power plants and force expensive, weather-dependent replacements onto the grid. Like adding an undependable car to your family’s budget. It just increases your costs if you want reliability.
The price tag reaches well beyond the monthly bill. When Congress passed the ill-named Inflation Reduction Act, budget scorekeepers pegged its energy subsidies at around 370 billion dollars over ten years. The real number keeps climbing.
The Congressional Budget Office now estimates the clean energy tax credits alone will add 825 billion dollars to the deficit, and the Cato Institute puts the full range as high as nearly 2 trillion dollars over the same window. That is a wealth transfer from ordinary ratepayers and taxpayers to well-connected developers, and it buys higher prices, not lower ones.
Here is the admission hiding inside the silence. If the green transition were actually making energy cheaper, climate and affordability would be the same message, and there would be nothing to hush. The party could brag about both in the same breath. The fact that its own strategists had to choose between them, and chose to bury climate, is a confession that the two pull in opposite directions.
Some Democrats insist this is a recast, not a retreat. They argue that cheap solar and wind are the affordability answer, and that voters can be won by promising climate policy will lower bills.
But that claim collapses on contact with its own logic. If renewables were truly the cheapest power, they would not need mandates, subsidies, and regulatory waivers to force utilities to buy them. You do not have to compel people to choose the cheaper option. The mandates exist precisely because the market, left alone, would choose otherwise.
The honest lesson is one conservatives have argued for years. Reliable, affordable energy and heavy-handed climate central planning cannot coexist. Americans want to keep the lights on and the bills low, and they have figured out which policies deliver that and which do not.
Democratic strategists have figured it out too. That is why they have stopped talking. The quiet is not a change of heart. It is a change of subject, and it amounts to an admission that the policies were too expensive and too restrictive to defend out loud. The rest of us should say plainly that we do not want less reliable and more expensive electricity.
The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine just released a major report on extreme event attribution science, the increasingly trendy climate alarmism field that tries to pin specific hurricanes, heat waves, or floods on human-caused climate change and, more importantly, on the oil and gas companies activists love to sue.
The headlines from the usual media suspects will predictably claim the science has “advanced.” What they won’t emphasize is the report’s own admission that the field still faces “significant challenges,” or the roster of climate litigation partisans who helped shape it.
President Donald Trump immediately questioned the report’s legitimacy, and the reason why is pretty simple: The report was heavily influenced by academics and activists with apparent conflicts of interest.
One example is Michael Burger of Columbia’s Sabin Center, who also serves as of counsel to the Sher Edling firm in Honolulu’s climate lawfare effort targeting the oil and gas industry. In that role, Burger could benefit if courts start accepting these studies as proof of liability. The report’s acknowledgments thank him anyway while making no meaningful disclosure of his conflicts.
Oh.
But wait, there are more! Delta Merner of the Union of Concerned Scientists, who runs their Climate Accountability Campaign and Science Hub for — guess what? — Climate Litigation, served on the committee itself into early 2025.
Jessica Wentz, another Sabin Center figure previously tied to a now-rescinded Federal Judicial Center climate chapter written by litigation advocates, shows up in the acknowledgments.
So does Michael Wehner, linked to the Environmental Law Institute’s Climate Judiciary Project, which trains judges on these very issues. One of the report’s own authors, Joyce Kimutai, has publicly argued that the “bar is too high” for using attribution in court and that the burden of proof should flip to the defendants. That’s not science talking. That’s advocacy.
The National Academies’ own conflict-of-interest policy demands advice “free from undue influence” from interested parties. This lineup makes a mockery of that standard.
Yet even with all that help from the climate lawfare complex, the NAS could not bring itself to declare victory for attribution science. Committee chair James Hurrell noted that the field “still faces challenges, and addressing them is necessary to fully realize the value of attribution science.”
Confidence in results “varies significantly across different types of extremes.” In other words, the science remains uneven, incomplete, and not ready to play the primetime role in the courtroom sought by activists for years.
That quest dates back at least to the 2012 Rockefeller-funded La Jolla conference, where participants openly discussed using attribution to link emissions to specific harms for litigation purposes.
Even then, they admitted “many challenges” in getting the science right. By 2021, researchers including Friederike Otto were conceding that plaintiffs were failing to overcome causation hurdles in court because the evidence simply didn’t connect individual emitters to specific losses. Five years later, after relentless pressure and Biden-era institutional capture, the NAS is still saying the same thing: significant challenges remain.
Attribution science was never pure science-based inquiry. It was purpose-built to support a coordinated campaign of lawsuits aimed at extracting settlements, driving up energy costs, and ultimately bankrupting or nationalizing parts of the fossil fuel industry.
Courts have mostly resisted so far because judges still require actual evidence of causation, not probabilistic storytelling disguised as settled science. The NAS report unintentionally underscores why those lawsuits keep stumbling.
Americans should pay attention. When activists capture scientific bodies, the product is not better science.
Instead, what we get for our taxpayer dollars are better press releases and stronger talking points for trial lawyers. The real-world energy system still runs on oil, natural gas, and coal because those fuels deliver affordable, reliable power.
Efforts to litigate them out of existence based on incomplete attribution models will inevitably produce the results that are impacting our pocketbooks in real time: higher energy costs, weakened reliability, all with zero impact on global temperatures.
The NAS had a chance to produce a clear-eyed assessment. Instead, it produced a document that both acknowledges the science’s limits and carries the fingerprints of the very people hoping to use it as a legal weapon.
That’s not how independent science works. It’s how lawfare works.
David Blackmon is a contributor to The Daily Caller News Foundation, an energy writer, and consultant based in Texas. He spent 40 years in the oil and gas business, where he specialized in public policy and communications.
