The Briefing with Albert Mohler - Thursday, August 13, 2026

Episode Date: August 13, 2026

This is The Briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview.On today’s edition of The Briefing, Dr. Mohler discusses David Crowley’s narrow defeat of Francesca Hong in Wisconsin, Peggy Flanagan’s landslide victory in Minnesota, the parable of Lindsay Graham, and the continuation of the Sophie Cunningham saga as the WNBA and other women’s sports league confuse creation order.Part I (00:14 – 10:41)David Crowley Defeats Francesca Hong in Wisconsin: But the Democratic Socialist Insurgency Lost By Less Than One Percentage Point and Will Press OnCrowley scores Hail Mary win over Hong: Takeaways from Aug. 11 primary by USA Today (Susan Page)Part II (10:41 – 13:34)The Minnesota Senate Primary Results: Progressivist Gains Again in Minnesota as Peggy Flanagan Wins in a LandslidePart III (13:34 – 18:25)There is More to This Race Than Most See: The Parable of Lindsay Graham and the Runoff Between Darline Graham and Ralph NormanWTA mandates genetic testing for all future competitions by USA Today (Danielle Lerner)Part IV (18:25 – 28:13)The Parable of Sophie Cunningham Continues, Even as the WNBA and Other Women’s Sports Leagues Confuse Creation OrderSign up to receive The Briefing in your inbox every weekday morning.Follow Dr. Mohler:X | Instagram | Facebook | YouTubeFor more information on The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, go to sbts.edu.For more information on Boyce College, just go to BoyceCollege.com.To write Dr. Mohler or submit a question for The Mailbox, go here.

It's Thursday, August 13, 2006. I'm Albert Moller, and this is the briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview. On the political screen these days, the big story is, of course, the rise of the Democratic Socialists of America and the resurgence. Vast political energy going into the left of the Democratic Party, often described as the progressive left. Some of those candidates openly identify as DSA, the Democratic Socialists of America. Others receive their support while claiming that they're not themselves members of the DSA and they don't identify as Democratic Socialists. Others are long-term progressives who make the DSA happy but have not identified formally with them. And this gets back to the fact that there's been a progressivist wing in the Democratic Party for a long time. As a matter of fact, that long time comes very much into our view when we consider the primary votes in the Democratic Party, most especially, that took place Tuesday.

So we now have those numbers in. We can talk about them clearly. And the big story is what didn't happen in Wisconsin, but was very close. What didn't happen in Wisconsin was that Wisconsin Democrats did not choose Francesca Hong as their candidate to run against who will be the Republican candidate, Tom Tiffany. That means the Democrats in the state of Wisconsin said no to the Democratic Socialists, but you need to look at the numbers. Here's what's really, really interesting. And when the results are coming in on two, day night at one point, even though the major media were saying it's still too close to call and all the rest, I pretty much figured that it was going to be a loss for Francesca Hong, precisely because most of the votes were in from Madison, Wisconsin. And so you're really looking at the university town there. And there were some areas where you had that deep blue just to point out the difference. If you look at Milwaukee versus Madison, Wisconsin, you're talking about little Democratic voters who are in the same universe. They're in the same state, but they are in counties that often go very differently in terms of some of these Democratic primaries.

But nonetheless, the vote was so close it came down to 3,783 votes. But for those votes. Now, that reminds us, by the way, that if less than 2,000 votes in all of the votes had shifted, we'd be talking about Francesca Hong as the Democratic nominee. Now, David Crowley, who defeated Francesca Hong, again by 3,783 votes, He is someone well known in Democratic politics, more of an establishment candidate. And here's the big thing. The polls were showing that Hong was going to run away with it.

She had a double-digit lead in most of the polling, especially that that was a week or more away from primary days. So what happened? Well, here's what's really interesting. The one thing to note is that the worldview held by Francesca Hong was really not repudiated. Now, remember, David Carly had withdrawn from the race until another third candidate withdrew, when he got back in precisely to give an establishment alternative to Francesca Hong, the thing to note is that Francesca Hong was really way ahead on the issue.

So in other words, the DSA part, the very progressive left part, really does continue. The big thing for the Democrats is understanding trajectory momentum. And there's no doubt that that is with the progressive left. But it's also true that in a state like Wisconsin, you did have an establishment candidate who did somehow find a way to eke out of win. But here's the big thing to note. Why did Francesca Hong lose? A couple things to note. Candidate quality really does matter. The ability of a candidate. And in this case, this was the progressivist leftist candidate. The ability to do certain things politically turns out to be really important.

And Francesca Hong failed in those things in the, say, seven to ten days before the election. Number one, you have to be able to answer questions as if you're glad to get the question and you have an answer. she appeared to be dumbfounded by some questions, including questions about whether she truly held to such liberal, progressivist kind of really left-wing ideas like canceling Thanksgiving. Let's just say her answer to that was not exactly no. And voters pick up on this kind of thing. Furthermore, she appeared to be flustered. She was not a natural communicator. You look at Zoran Mamdami, the mayor of New York.

Again, another Democratic socialist. That is someone who understands the media. and he's also someone who understands how a candidate has to respond. He has a smile in his face, even when he's answering a hostile question, and even when he's absolutely politically just offering bluster. The fact is, he looks very confident. Francesca Hong did not look confident. The other thing is that you have candidates, especially on the left,

who have some of these positions they've taken on social media, Twitter or ex posts and other things like that. And the reality is that in the digital age, those things can be brought right back. up, just abolish the police. Well, you know, even though there are many voters, it comes very clear, many Democratic voters in Wisconsin who are ready to elect a Democratic socialist-identified candidate, even for governor, they're not willing to abolish the police, they're not willing to abolish Thanksgiving. So it is a good reminder to us, and I think it was very interesting that media

sources like CNN, which is make just an industry out of election coverage, and they have the map and you've got the red and the blue or in the Democratic sense. You have deep blue and lighter blue as you saw the electoral map in states like Wisconsin in this big governor's nomination race. The other thing to note is that they are the ones who've been telling us insistently, the major newspapers, the major media sources on the on the internet, the major television networks, they've been saying, look, Francesca Hong is going to run away with this. She has a double digit lead. No one else is going to get close. It turned out it was very close. It was even closer than the vote that took place just days before in terms of the Senate nomination in Michigan.

So when it comes down to the bottom line in the Democratic Party, you still have all of this energy on the far, far left. And furthermore, it's generationally and demographically concentrated on what's coming rather than what's going in the Democratic Party, in its political base. And one of the things you see here is that one of the reasons that Democratic socialism is taking such hold is because the Democratic Party that a matter of generations ago was the party of the working class, labor union support, and all the rest, it has really shifted its base enormously such that you're looking at the energy in the Democratic base now coming from college-educated professionals. And by the way, more wealthy and more economically advantaged people in terms of

voting. And so it is really interesting. They're more ideologically committed. There's just no doubt about it. And the Democrats are going to have to watch this. Okay, so one of the big issues is worldviews in conflict. We're going to have to watch. There are multiple worldview conflicts here. Number one, on the Democratic side, you've got the more traditional Democrats versus the Democratic Socialists. That is a distinction in worldview. Now, when you talk about the traditional Democrats, let's just say associated with Roosevelt, Truman, you know, Kennedy, you just go down the list, much more liberal than the Republicans, certainly over the course of the last. I say five to six decades, but still within something of an American consensus.

The DSA and the Democratic Socialists, the left wing of the Democratic Party, want to move the Democratic Party. And as we've said, they want to use the Democratic Party as the vehicle for their progressivist agenda. They want to move the Democratic Party far from that traditional Democratic base. Okay. So there's a worldview collision inside the Democratic Party. And then there is a worldview collision of the Democrats versus the Republicans, because in

increasingly, that implies un moral issues, even ontological issues, creation order issues, male-female issues. You've got enormous distinction. Here's something to watch. On the Democratic side, that internal democratic worldview collision, you don't have really a collision over those moral issues. Abortion, LGBTQ? No. In order to be a Democrat, the purchase price, the entrance price to just getting in the Democratic tent these days, is that you've got to be absolutely across the board avidly pro-abortion, pro-abortion rights, pro-LGBQ, all the way, etc. And so inside the party, there is this dynamic because the Democratic Socialists really do have a very different agenda. I mean, after all, some of them are saying abolish not only the police, abolish not only

borders. They're saying abolish the presidency, abolish the Senate, of course, the electoral college. Now, here's another interesting point. You hear many in the media, and let's just say, let's just give them a pass, at least to some extent, that maybe they're just trying to get a parallel. I just want to point out it's a false parallel. You will hear people say, well, this is on the Democratic side, something like what happened in the tumult and the Republican Party that produced Donald Trump. For instance, the development of the Tea Party, as it was known, of fiscal conservatives. Well, get this. The reason that's a false identification is that the Tea Party was all for the Constitution of the United States.

They wanted a much more conservative economic set of policies, but they did not want to eliminate the Senate, the presidency, the electoral college. They did not want to abolish the police, let's just say. In other words, it's a false equivalence, but you hear this in the press, and quite frankly, it falls apart and needs to be called out when that parallel is drawn. Okay, Susan Page, front page of USA Today, dims, that means Democrats divide only gets deeper. Well, you know, some people are coming in the mainstream media and saying, you know, the very fact that Francesca Hong didn't win that nomination shows the Democratic Party is still pretty solid. You know, again, 39.81 percent to 39.33 percent, it's not looking like they're in one position at all. As a matter of fact, the interesting thing to watch, and this happens on both sides of the political spectrum, when you have a close vote like this, it is not that the center pulls the left in.

It's going to be the left is going to pull the center out. Now, the same dynamic has taken place to some degree in the Republican Party, where it's not so much that the center has pulled the right back as the right has pulled the center in a more conservative way. So that just tells you how political arguments are made. The stronger argument qualifies the weaker argument on both sides, especially when there are numbers behind it. And you're looking at this separation of less than a percentage point. Yeah, that poll is going to take place. We need to watch it.

All right, a couple of other primary elections. One of the other ones following the same kind of dynamic was the Democratic race for the U.S. Senate primary. And in this case, the important thing to recognize is that Democratic Senator Tina Smith, who is on the left. So in other words, she was already identified with the progressive wing of the Democratic Party. She decided not to run for renomination and re-election. And so you had a race between Representative Angie Craig, who was recognized as kind of the center-left candidate. And Lieutenant Governor Peggy Flanagan, who was identified as a progressive. Again, identifying with the left wing of the Democratic Party.

In this case, it wasn't close. And it was so not close that we're talking about Flanagan getting about 59 percent, of the vote and Craig getting about 39.4% of the vote, less than 40% of the vote, that's massive. When you're talking about, say, a landslide in politics, that often comes down to anything that's double digits. And so even in a presidential election, if you have 55, 45, 45, that's really, really big. That's a huge victory. In this case, you're talking about 20 points of division. So that tells us that in the adjoining state of Minnesota here, you're looking at that in Great Lakes region, Michigan, Minnesota, Wisconsin, we'll come back to this just very quickly. You're looking at the fact that in Minnesota, you've got a very progressivist wing.

The point I want to make is that that's not new. And I want us to think about American history and understand that when you look at that upper Mississippi area, you go all the way up, you look at the Great Lakes area, you take Wisconsin, Michigan, and Minnesota, the three states we've just been talking about, interest. interestingly enough. And you look at movements early in the 20th century. It was present, at least, in some sense late in the 19th century, but it was really early in the 20th century that you had this massive energy in an agrarian and populist direction. And that's just something that marks the Democratic Party's politics. So for instance, you have a farm labor party there in Minnesota that is identified with the Democratic Party, but it was even more populist. And it was on the economic left, the populist economic left, going all the way back to the early 20th century.

And that's one of the reasons why. Let's just take, for example, the fact that you talk about you have to add the Dakotas to that list when you think about something like George McGovern, a senator, who was the Democratic standard bearer for the presidential race in 1972 against Richard Nixon. You know, you're talking about one of the most liberal figures on the political spectrum. And again, he came from that region. He didn't stand out so much at the president. that time there in that upper north-central region. The fact is that Minnesota is one of the most important of those states, just in terms of setting trends. This trend, again, points in a decidedly progressivist direction. But now let's just switch regions. Let's go to the south.

Let's go to South Carolina. Let's look at the Republican primary there. Not so much a worldview clash, but a political reality we need to look at. Darling Graham, who was appointed to the position by the governor of South Carolina after her brother, Senator Lindsey Graham, unexpectedly died, she decided she would run for the seat. It was going to come open this year anyway. Senator Graham, that is Senator Lindsey Graham, was the odds-on favorite, obviously for the Republican nomination, wouldn't even really have been a race. And then when you look at the general election, there's no doubt that given the Republican dominance in South Carolina, Lindsay Graham was likely to be re-elected to the U.S. Senate. When he died unexpectedly, his sister was appointed,

Darlene is politically pretty much an unpainted picture. In other words, we really don't know her political conviction. She doesn't, she hasn't really been clear about all of this. She obviously had great affection for her brother. And it made perfect sense that she was appointed to the end of his term just to finish that out. It's a different thing entirely for her to be the Republican nominee for the six-year term in the U.S. Senate. And it's going to be competitive. And that's simply a fact of life.

it's competitive now in that she didn't win the nomination outright. There's going to be a runoff with U.S. Representative Ralph Norman. She got 32.7% of the vote. He got 24.6% of the vote. Okay, now you look at that and you say, well, she got a lot more votes than he did. Yeah, but let's look at something else. And that is that if you look at the total number of candidates and the total number of votes cast in the Republican primary,

that means that 32.7 indicates, that, you know, over 65% of the voters did not vote for Darling Graham. Now, when they're presented with a choice of two, they're going to have to choose between Ralph Norman or Darling Graham. It's going to be interesting to see which way they go. And it is also just pointing to something we often don't think about, and that is that in the Senate, you do have some amazing longevity. Now, you have some in the House, but in the Senate more so. You have figures like Senator Chuck Grassley, who's been in the Senate for decades. Lindsay Graham was in the Senate for. decades. And when you have that kind of political position, in one political sense, you really don't

have much of a challenger. And that means that people who in your party and in the other party who would like to be in the Senate, but particularly in your own party, they're shut out. And so when there is an opening in one of these longstanding seats, there's a lot of party interest in people who have wanted to run for the Senate. And thus, that's a part of the dynamic here. There are those who have thought, you know, it's not exactly fair for the sister of the late senator, just to have the advantage here. It's going to be interesting to see how the Republicans in South Carolina vote, and that's just a matter of days away. Before the end of the month, there will have to be a runoff, and then look at how short that election cycle is going to be. The winner of that primary

is going to have to be in the race in a hurry. This raises, by the way, when you look at Senator Lindsey Graham, the late Senator, it does look at. at the longevity issue in politics. And we need to understand that that argument can go both ways. One argument is we need fresh faces. You've been in this seat too long. And of course, when you look at someone like the late Democratic Senator Diane Feinstein, it was very clear she wasn't really operational towards the end of her term,

when she was very aged. And, of course, there are a lot of people now pointing to Republicans in the same predicament. The point is the argument for longevity is that the Senate, has a lot of power centered in seniority. And so it takes time to build up that seniority. And thus, by the time you have a senator in the position to take a lot of leadership in the Senate, it's going to have to be multiple terms in most cases. And at the same time, that also means that senator is getting older.

And so it is a real interesting predicament for voters. You want seniority in the Senate, certainly if the senators in your party, you want that senator to gain in seniority. that can bring, by the way, manifest benefits to your state all across the board. But it's also true that at some point there's going to be a desire for change. And that change can come in pretty radical forms. One final issue on this, we'll have to be watching this. When it comes to the shift to the left and the Democratic Party, over the course of the next several weeks,

you're going to have every Democrat imaginable trying to say it doesn't really mean much. It's not that radical. And you're going to hear Republicans who say, not that radical. my goodness, just look at these candidates. That's going to be a very interesting dynamic in the media and public discussion just over the course of the next few weeks. All right, now I want to shift gears entirely, and we're going to take another look at the gender issue, transgender issue, and the WNBA. Because it turns out in the case of what we talked about even last week in the case, really the catalyst was Sophie Cunningham player for the Indiana fever. It is really interesting that over the course

the last several days, that issue does not now look smaller in the review mirror. It looks larger. It looms larger. And I think it becomes larger every day. Okay, let's just remind ourselves what was going on here. You had fever player Sophie Cunningham, who primarily has received media attention connected with Caitlin Clark, her teammate, and the fact that both of them have been kind of isolated by other players. And that's another part of the story going on here. But Sophie Cunningham made the statement that we've already discussed in which she said she's not anti-trans, but she does believe that women should be in women's sports, and she spoke particularly of the difficulty if you had biological males in girls' sports. And almost immediately there was the politically correct

backlash on her. And you had people on her own team, and you had people in the WNBA, and you had owners and others, and she faced protesters at basketball games and a lot of media attention. She's actually come out again in ways that are kind of frustrating to some people when she says, I really haven't taken a position on the transgender issue. She just thinks that biological males should not be in female sports. And in particular, she even says girls' sports. But all of this has led to what's now a crisis for the WNBA. And that crisis, again, comes down to whether or not they have a clue what W means.

And in this case, it just gets more interesting. So, for example, on the eighth of this month, Sophie Cunningham was fact. It was a flagrant two foul by Dijunet Carrington. She often goes by DJ. And this really is incontrovertible. I mean, you can see the video. And a flagrant two foul is a very serious intentional physical foul. And this gets really interesting because Stephanie White, who is the coach of the Indiana

fever, made the statement that she didn't even think it was that intentional of foul until she saw the video and it was incontrovertible. Then the coach said, I think this is rather amazing for a basketball coach. maybe I just don't get it. She said she didn't see the foul. That raises the question as to why she would speak about it if she didn't see it. When she did see it, she said, yes, it was a flagrant foul, but then she held a press conference, and it was a colorful press conference. I can't quote a lot of it. But on August 11th, she held a press conference in which she basically justified her own leadership. Quote, I thought the plague got called right. Thankfully, Sophie's okay. Was it egregious? Absolutely. When you have a chance to watch that over and over and over on replay, you can see that.

I didn't have that in real time. Okay, so I'll just take her word for not having it in real time. She shouldn't have said anything. And this is really an embarrassment to the team and to the coach. And then in the most amazing conflict between attitude and wording in the most frustrating way. And let's just say she wasn't acting gracefully. She said, the reality is with me. I'll always lead with love.

I'll always lead with grace. I'll always lead with humility and I'll always lead with integrity. I've rarely seen anyone use those words in such an angry way. All right. So let's go back. There's even more to the story of what took place on the 8th when there was this flagrant two foul by DJ Carrington against Sophie Cunningham. Now, the interesting thing is that also,

once she was ejected from the game, DJ Carrington posted white privilege and then tagged the fever. Everybody knew what she was talking about, although later she said it really didn't have anything to do with that. There's no question. It had everything to do with that. It is really, really interesting. Okay, so it gets even more interesting because we're talking about a league.

We're talking about a league that's very interesting. The WNBA. And, you know, these issues have swirled around the WNBA for some time. Sexuality issues, politically correct issues, moral issues, all these things have been swirling around. You have a leaked memo from the chief executive of the WNBA. WNBA, and this is about the WNBA chief's plans to have kind of a study on this issue and to come up with a position. The memo was leaked to the media. The commissioner is Kathy Engelbert, and she affirms that her goal was, quote, preserving the integrity of our game and ensuring fair competition.

And what you see in this leaked memo is reported in the press is the same double argument that we've seen in the past. We just need to track this because it's going to come up again and again and again. and it's a big part of our worldview consideration right now. You have people in the WNBA and in other areas of sports as well. What they want to say is we're absolutely for the transgender movement. A. B, we believe biological males should not be on female teams. Okay, so again, you can say one of those things enthusiastically.

You can't say both of those with integrity or consistency. And that's exactly what they're trying to get away with. The big issue here is that they're not going to get away with it. And so here you have the commissioner of the WNBA who's trying to say all of this, quote, I know many of you have received questions in recent weeks regarding transgender athlete participation in women's basketball. And I expect this topic will continue to receive significant attention. And she went on and on. But the most interesting thing is that she doesn't resolve the issue at all.

And I predict that this report is going to be a studious effort to avoid answering the question and acknowledging the contradiction. But it's not going to work long term. It just can't work. because you are going to have to decide who can be on these WNBA teams and who can't. And now you have two male former NBA players who say they want to be a part of the draft of the WNBA and they'll identify as women. Now, another response from the commissioner of the WNBA is that the eligibility rules are a part of collective bargaining. In other words, the players get to have a very determined to say in the eligibility rules. And it says only women may be in the WNBA.

but it doesn't define who is a woman and who is not. And guess what? In 2006 America, if you are a WNBA team or a WNBA league, you better be ready to define women because you're going to have to. Now, one of the interesting things here is that yesterday's edition of USA Today. USA Today is not an authoritative newspaper in the same sense that the Wall Street Journal and the Times of London, the New York Times are. It's very indicative, however, of trends in the culture.

That's the strength of USA Today. It kind of tells you, it was sometimes called McNews, McNeuspaper. It kind of tells you what a lot of Americans are interested in. And so you had one full page at the top. It's about the women's tennis association adopting gene testing in order to make certain that in professional tennis, they know who a woman is. And as a matter of fact, British tennis has now already moved. The Law and Tennis Association has banned transgender women from all competitive female matches, even if those matches are only part of internal club competitions.

And you also have now this headline about the Women's Tennis Association here in the United States. And it comes down to the fact that they're trying to say both those things. Again, number one, we're all pro trans. We're absolutely pro trans. But number two, the WTA is going to include only biological females as women. They're going to try to get away with both of those things. And it really shows up in this article. But this is a change.

Here's what's really interesting. Under the previous WTA policy, I'm reading here from USA Today, quote, transgender and non-binary women were allowed to compete against other women as long as they maintained blood testosterone levels below 2.5 nanomoles per leader for a specified period, end quote. So the new position adopted by the Women's Tennis Association is actually more conservative and clearer than was the case before. So you have the WNBA being put in a position where it's going to have to clarify and you have the women. Tennis Association, kind of ahead of the game, saying, well, we're going to go ahead and clarify. And they're trying to get away with the same thing, saying we're absolutely pro-trans. It's just, you know, we're only going to allow biological women, biological females, to be in the WTA and its

events. Once again, there's objective reality here. Here's what Christians need to point to. The worldview issue here is ontology. It's creation order. Male and female are absolutely real categories. They're biologically real. They're physically real. And it turns out they're genetically real, and the use by the WTA and other international tennis authorities and sporting authorities of gene testing is just an affirmation of the fact that the real world is real. You're going to have to deal with it. One final thought on this. One of the ways you see people try to confuse the issue is just to use a lot of language that appears to say something and says nothing. The WNBA Commissioner Kathy Engelbert said in her memo to the teams that the approach

would be, quote, to approach this topic thoughtfully, respectfully, and in alignment with the longstanding values of our league, end quote. Well, I guess that's the kind of thing you would think a commissioner might say, but in this process, she's going to have to tell us what those longstanding values of the league actually are. We're about to find out one way or the other. Thanks for listening to the briefing. For more information, go to my website at Albertmuller.com. You can follow me on X or Twitter by going to X.com forward slash Albert Moller. For information on the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, go to sbts.edu. For information on Boyce College, just go to Boycecollege.com. I'll meet you again tomorrow for the briefing.