Midterm Mayhem
Staying Sane in the Midterm Noise
As the midterms approach, the volume on every side keeps rising. Targeted messaging, carefully framed narratives, and emotionally charged headlines fill my feeds. Some of it is pure fabrication. Most of it is not. Much of it is selective, incomplete, or spun to fit a preferred story. That distinction matters. Dismissing everything inconvenient as “fake news” is as unhelpful as accepting every claim that confirms what I already believe.
I try to hold an open enough mind to examine the claims themselves, then go looking for context that the short clips and outrage cycles rarely provide. One place I regularly turn for that longer historical and economic view is Promethean Action, particularly the work of Susan Kokinda. Their approach tends to dig into the deeper patterns—how financial systems, industrial policy, and political power have actually operated over decades—rather than stopping at the surface headlines. It doesn’t replace primary sources or my own investigative reading, but it often supplies pieces of the picture that mainstream coverage leaves out.
Free Speech
Free speech is non-negotiable for me, including speech I find wrong, ugly, or misguided. The alternative—empowering someone else to decide which ideas are too dangerous to hear—has a long and ugly track record. In Great Britain, that risk is no longer theoretical. After the 2024 Southport killings and subsequent riots, multiple people were jailed for Facebook and social-media posts treated as stirring racial hatred. Broader data show police in England and Wales making roughly 12,000 arrests a year under laws covering “grossly offensive” or menacing electronic communications—more than 30 a day. These cases do not require me to endorse the content of the posts. They do illustrate what happens when the state treats strongly worded online speech as a criminal offense rather than something to be answered, ignored, or debated. At the same time, recognizing that some ideas are destructive does not require silencing them. Communist and Marxist frameworks, with their documented history of centralization, suppression of dissent, and economic failure, remain ideas I believe we should actively resist and argue against in the open, not pretend are merely alternative approaches.
I support the current administration’s direction on a range of issues, particularly the effort to reorient economic policy toward productive capacity and national interest. That support does not require the claim that any president or administration is faultless. No one is. Oversight, criticism, and course correction are part of the job description of citizens, not a betrayal of principle. Slanderous rhetoric from either side makes that work harder, not easier.
We Want the Same Things
Most people I know, across the usual political lines, want roughly the same outcomes: stable communities, opportunity to provide for their families, basic safety, and a government that is not actively working against those things. The disagreements are largely about methods and trade-offs. Treating those disagreements as evidence that the other side is uniquely malicious rarely clarifies anything.
Voter Fraud
One practical area where those methods matter is the integrity of the vote itself. Voter fraud is not a myth or a fringe concern; documented cases exist, and the potential for larger-scale problems grows when basic safeguards are treated as optional. Requiring identification to vote is not an extreme demand. Identification is already required for boarding a plane, opening a bank account, buying a firearm, picking up a prescription, or even entering many government buildings. The systems that issue those IDs are the same ones most citizens already navigate. Secure elections protect the voice of every legitimate voter, regardless of party.
Framing a photo ID requirement as an insurmountable barrier tends to ignore how routinely people prove their identity for far less consequential transactions every day.
Immigration
Illegal immigration is another area where the human cost is too often minimized or turned into pure political theater. Large numbers of people have been drawn into dangerous journeys and then into forms of indentured labor, trafficking, and exploitation—frequently by networks within their own communities as well as by external operators. Policy has consequences, and those consequences land on real human beings.
Framing the entire situation as either “nothing to see here” or pure partisan leverage does a disservice to the people actually harmed.
Unaccountable Spending + Waste
Finally, the scale of fraud, waste, and unaccountable spending that has accumulated across administrations of both parties over the past seventy-plus years is not a partisan talking point. It is a structural problem. Addressing it will require sustained attention regardless of who occupies the White House.
Pretending it only exists under one party, or that it will vanish under the next, has not served the country well.
None of this is a call for false neutrality or for treating every claim as equally valid. It is a preference for doing the work: reading beyond the clip, distinguishing between spin and substance, and keeping the focus on what actually moves conditions for ordinary people. The midterms will come and go. The habits of attention we practice in the meantime will still be with us afterward.
