Schmidt is a syndicated columnist and editorial board member with the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
Anyone who has been pulling weeds in their gardens this spring understands that while weeding is tedious and may not be very satisfying, it is necessary for optimal growth.
Consider the following metaphor: Our constitutional republic is a garden. Our free and fair elections are the plants. Bipartisan election officials are the gardeners, working tirelessly to produce the best garden harvest as possible. Election denialism represents the insidious weeds, which began propagating before the 2016 election and have only taken off since 2020.
Weeds rob nearby plants of water and nutrients. If large enough, weeds can compete for sunlight. Weeds can be home to pests and some can even secrete chemicals into the soil that inhibit growth of nearby plants.
And so it is with election denialism.
In April, the county where I live held municipal elections. Ahead of the election, our county election authority held a phone town hall led by the director of the election authority. Residents were encouraged to call in. The director shared information about the upcoming election and then opened it up to questions.
Voters inundated the director with questions that were primed by copious amounts of disinformation. One asked if our county uses Dominion Voting Systems machines. Another asked if our county uses drop boxes and, if so, whether they are monitored 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Yet another asked what measures the county takes to prohibit illegal immigrants from voting.
The director answered all their questions, without judgment, and attempted to uproot the weeds one by one by addressing the misinformation that was behind each question.
As a concerned citizen and a self-described democratic botanist, I will call out the infectious weeds referred to above.
Invasive species No. 1 involves Dominion Voting Systems. The election technology company had alleged that it was defamed by Fox News in the wake of the 2020 election, claiming network hosts allowed lawyers affiliated with Donald Trump to falsely claim that the company had rigged the election against the former president.
Fox News and its parent company, Fox Corp., ended up striking a deal with Dominion, averting a trial in the defamation suit and paying Dominion $787.5M for the false statements made on air.
Dominion CEO John Poulos told reporters following the settlement: "Fox has admitted to telling lies about Dominion that caused enormous damage to my company, our employees and the customers that we serve. Nothing can ever make up for that. Throughout this process, we have sought accountability. Truthful reporting in the media is essential to our democracy."
Invasive species No. 2 is the vilification of ballot drop boxes. For the record. my state does not allow for drop boxes so this one is not even applicable.
There have been many conspiracy theories surrounding drop boxes, including those fueled by the completely debunked movie “2000 Mules.” Dinesh D’Souza’s film suggested that Democrat-aligned ballot “mules” were supposedly paid to illegally collect and drop off ballots in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
All of the claims made by the film have been revealed to be false. Ballots dropped in a box, mailed or hand-delivered to an election location are verified by signature and are tracked closely.
The newest variety of weed is invasive species No. 3 — voting by illegal immigrants. Trump and many other Republicans are again pushing the unsubstantiated claims that noncitizens are voting in federal elections.
It is illegal for noncitizens to vote in federal and state elections. Those who break that law are eligible for prison time and fines.
During a recent press conference, Speaker Mike Johnson repeatedly cited the immigration crisis at the southern border while talking about alleged voter fraud. When pressed for proof from reporters, Johnson became exasperated saying: "We all know intuitively that a lot of illegals are voting in federal elections," Johnson said. "But it's not something that is easily provable."
There continue to be many elected Republicans like Johnson who are proliferating noxious disinformation thistles into the fertile soil.
Weeds can be tricky and are difficult to control once they have broken ground. They can also get in the way of growing what we want or living in a desired way. The same goes for our elections.
It appears that for the short term, the plants in America’s democratic garden are going to have to live among those weeds. Those who can identify unwanted and interfering falsehoods surrounding our democratic process owe it to the rest of the citizens to yank them out as effectively as possible, roots and all. This is difficult and backbreaking work, but very necessary.
I am hopeful that American democracy will thrive again and be bountiful. It will only happen as long as we keep eradicating the distortions of election fraud.
A deep look at how "All in the Family" remains a striking mirror of American politics, class tensions, and cultural manipulation—proving its relevance decades later.
All in This American Family
There are a few shows that have aged as eerily well as All in the Family.
It’s not just that it’s still funny and has the feel not of a sit-com, but of unpretentious, working-class theatre. It’s that, decades later, it remains one of the clearest windows into the American psyche. Archie Bunker’s living room has been, as it were, a small stage on which the country has been working through the same contradictions, anxieties, and unresolved traumas that still shape our politics today. The manipulation of the working class, the pitting of neighbor against neighbor, the scapegoating of the vulnerable, the quiet cruelties baked into everyday life—all of it is still here with us. We like to reassure ourselves that we’ve progressed since the early 1970s, but watching the show now forces an unsettling recognition: The structural forces that shaped Archie’s world have barely budged. The same tactics of distraction and division deployed by elites back then are still deployed now, except more efficiently, more sleekly.
Archie himself is the perfect vessel for this continuity. He is bigoted, blustery, reactive, but he is also wounded, anxious, and constantly misled by forces above and beyond him. Norman Lear created Archie not as a monster to be hated (Lear’s genius was to make Archie lovable despite his loathsome stands), but as a man trapped by the political economy of his era: A union worker who feels his country slipping away, yet cannot see the hands that are actually moving it. His anger leaks sideways, onto immigrants, women, “hippies,” and anyone with less power than he has. The real villains—the wealthy, the connected, the manufacturers of grievance—remain safely and comfortably offscreen. That’s part of the show’s key insight: It reveals how elites thrive by making sure working people turn their frustrations against each other rather than upward.
Edith, often dismissed as naive or scatterbrained, functions as the show’s quiet moral center. Her compassion exposes the emotional void in Archie’s worldview and, in doing so, highlights the costs of the divisions that powerful interests cultivate. Meanwhile, Mike the “Meathead” represents a generation trying to break free from those divisions but often trapped in its own loud self-righteousness. Their clashes are not just family arguments but collisions between competing visions of America’s future. And those visions, tellingly, have yet to resolve themselves.
The political context of the show only sharpens its relevance. Premiering in 1971, All in the Family emerged during the Nixon years, when the “Silent Majority” strategy was weaponizing racial resentment, cultural panic, and working-class anxiety to cement power. Archie was a fictional embodiment of the very demographic Nixon sought to mobilize and manipulate. The show exposed, often bluntly, how economic insecurity was being rerouted into cultural hostility. Watching the show today, it’s impossible to miss how closely that logic mirrors the present, from right-wing media ecosystems to politicians who openly rely on stoking grievances rather than addressing root causes.
What makes the show unsettling today is that its satire feels less like a relic and more like a mirror. The demagogic impulses it spotlighted have simply found new platforms. The working-class anger it dramatized has been harvested by political operatives who, like their 1970s predecessors, depend on division to maintain power. The very cultural debates that fueled Archie’s tirades — about immigration, gender roles, race, and national identity—are still being used as tools to distract from wealth concentration and political manipulation.
If anything, the divisions are sharper now because the mechanisms of manipulation are more sophisticated, for much has been learned by The Machine. The same emotional raw material Lear mined for comedy is now algorithmically optimized for outrage. The same social fractures that played out around Archie’s kitchen table now play out on a scale he couldn’t have imagined. But the underlying dynamics haven’t changed at all.
That is why All in the Family feels so contemporary. The country Lear dissected never healed or meaningfully evolved: It simply changed wardrobe. The tensions, prejudices, and insecurities remain, not because individuals failed to grow but because the economic and political forces that thrive on division have only become more entrenched. Until we confront the political economy that kept Archie and Michael locked in an endless loop of circular bickering, the show will remain painfully relevant for another fifty years.
Ahmed Bouzid is the co-founder of The True Representation Movement.