The NASCAR Cup Series completed the first quarter of their season this past Sunday, April 19th. A lot has happened over the first nine races, including a never-before-seen achievement, so let’s do a quick season recap to hit the highlights.

Tyler Reddick keeps winning

Tyler Reddick, driver of the #45 Toyota for 23XI Racing, had a winless 2025 campaign, and with Reddick’s contract expiring at the end of 2026, expectations for this season were somewhat mixed. There were concerns that 23XI was going to take a step back, especially since adding a third full-time car in 2025 had seemingly stretched their resources.

With nine races complete, Reddick has put those concerns, and the rest of the NASCAR field, in the rearview mirror. The #45 car won the season-opening Daytona 500 with help from his teammate Riley Herbst in the #35, before also winning the next two races at Echopark Speedway and Circuit of the Americas. This made Tyler Reddick the first driver in NASCAR history to win the first three consecutive races of a season and earned him and his team owner Michael Jordan (yes, NBA legend Michael Jordan) attention not just from the NASCAR media but from the wider sports media.

Reddick’s winning streak ultimately would end at the next race in Phoenix, but he would click off another win two weeks later at Darlington, and just this last weekend he picked up his fifth win of the season at Kansas Speedway. He currently leads the points standings by 105 points (more than a full race’s worth) over fellow Toyota driver Denny Hamlin. The questions surrounding Reddick and 23XI Racing are now focused on how many more races they can win in the coming months, and how big of a contract renewal Reddick has earned for himself.

Toyota’s dominance

Tyler Reddick may be stealing most of the wins, but Toyota as a whole has had an excellent start to the 2026 season. Besides Reddick’s five wins, two Joe Gibbs Racing Toyotas have also picked up wins. Denny Hamlin, the driver of the #11, defended his race win at Las Vegas, while Ty Gibbs earned his first career win, driving the #54 to victory at Bristol. Hamlin leads the series in laps led (575), while Reddick and Gibbs lead the series in top 10 finishes with seven each.

Toyota teams also are dominating the points standings. Four of the top eight drivers in the standings are in Toyotas (Reddick, Hamlin, Gibbs, and Bubba Wallace, driving the #23 for 23XI Racing). The top 16 in points after 26 races will be eligible for the season championship, and so far, six of the top 16 in points are Toyota drivers, while Ford and Chevrolet each have five. This is despite Toyota only having nine full-time cars, the fewest of any manufacturer (Ford has 10 full-time cars, and Chevrolet has 17).

Ford gains a new top team

Part of Toyota’s dominance can likely be explained by the other manufacturers undergoing significant transitions to start their 2026 campaigns. For the last decade, Ford’s main powerhouse team has been Team Penske, a three-car operation that has won three of the past four NASCAR championships. However, this year Penske’s start to the year has been slower than expected. Ryan Blaney has brought the #12 to victory lane at Phoenix and currently sits third in points, while three-time Cup champion Joey Logano is 14th and Austin Cindric is 17th. Cindric has recovered from a terrible streak of luck, having crashed in the first four races, while Joey Logano has three finishes of 30th or worse, two of which came purely on pace. When they’re fast, the Penske Fords have earned great finishes, but their inconsistency this early on is worrisome.

While Penske has been inconsistent, another Ford team has risen to the occasion. RFK Racing’s three Fords have been the models of consistency, with Brad Keselowski and the #6 sitting 9th in points, Chris Buescher’s #17 car in 11th, and Ryan Preece’s #60 in 13th. Keselowski and Preece both have finished on the lead lap in every race so far, and the team only has two finishes below 20th, one each for Preece and Buescher. None of their cars have shown winning speed so far in a points race (Preece did win the season-opening exhibition Clash), but RFK has proven themselves more than capable of competing on a weekly basis. It remains to be seen whether RFK can one day overtake Penske, but the future of Ford’s NASCAR program looks bright.

Chevy’s early struggles

While Toyota is dominating the season and Ford is gaining a new top-tier team, Chevrolet is having its worst start to the season in decades. The flagship Chevy team, Hendrick Motorsports, only has one win through the first nine races, with Chase Elliott taking the #9 to victory lane at Martinsville. No other Chevy team has looked particularly close to winning, with Spire Motorsports being the only other Chevy team with a car currently in the top 16 in points. Trackhouse Racing, which won six races last season, has been completely off the pace so far, with New Zealand-born Shane van Gisbergen currently their highest-ranked driver at 18th in points. Two-time Cup Series champion Kyle Busch, driving the #8 car for Richard Childress Racing, is currently 27th in points, an all-time career low for him this far into the season.

The cause of Chevy’s troubles is complex, with much of it being due to individual teams performing poorly, Trackhouse and Richard Childress in particular. However, Chevy has debuted a new body design this season, which has made much of their simulator data and performance data irrelevant. The early part of the season may simply become a waiting game while Chevy teams refill their notebooks for the new car body. If Hendrick, Trackhouse, and others continue to struggle into the second half of the season, then there will need to be deeper conversations in the Chevy camp about how to keep up.

This article was originally published in an Apr. 24 print edition of the Monitor.

(Journalist’s Note: This speech was published on the official White House DaddyPatriot media account earlier this week. So far, the White House has declined to provide further comment.)

My fellow citizens of this strong, great, and beautiful United States of America,

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Let’s discuss TakeyoInfo.Chat’s capabilities and features! Whether you’re on your computer for work or just for fun, TakeyoInfo.Chat will be running in the background, gathering information from your hard drive, and collecting it all into a secure online vault that can only be accessed by specialists—no one will be seeing it except the entire government and whoever they show, we promise! And your secrets are safe with us—if TakeyoInfo.Chat finds any risky or political content or information, the software will immediately store it and investigate your personal risk factors, updating with your fine or prison time (calculated precisely with our CalculateyoSentence.Chat tool). And that’s not all—TakeyoInfo.Chat can complete automatic tasks for you, freeing you from boring activities like deciding where to read the news, texting your friends, and even voting with our built-in software that provides AI-generated information on anything you want to know about, suggested responses to any and every correspondence you receive that will automatically send after a 10-second period of inactivity, and effort-free autofill voting. Think camel, but thousands of them on a conveyor belt heading straight for the eye of a needle every single second! 

There are so many more capabilities to TakeyoInfo.Chat that we’d love to share with you, but we couldn’t possibly fit it all in one speech—here are the highlights!

• Free image generation capabilities with built-in bigotry and racism
• Free bullshit spewing capabilities—your political opponents can’t defeat your points as fast as you generate them
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Whether you’re looking for a helpful in-home assistant for all your thinking needs, a high-tech new way to be hateful as efficiently as possible, or even just a good friend, TakeyoInfo.Chat is here for you. We’ve already been enjoying its helpful features here in the White House! That’s right—you might be surprised to hear this, but some of the images and videos we’ve been posting were actually generated by TakeyoInfo.Chat! While President Trump is definitely the perfect blend of powerful and charming, those photos of him as a Jedi, the pope, co-explorer with a lonely but patriotic penguin, Jesus, and a king were actually not from real life, but generated with care by your good friend TakeyoInfo.Chat! 

But it’s not about generating images so realistic that you think they might step off the screen, it’s about honoring the hard work, dedication, and traditional American values of our great president. That’s another fantastic feature of TakeyoInfo.Chat—for no extra charge, every American will receive a completely free, AI-generated wake-up speech from President Donald J. Trump, unique to them, every single day of the year! Feel free to respond to the pop-up ads embedded in the video to tell us where you would like to be sent after the mandatory draft—our state-of-the-art information sorting system can send you to a deployment location that’s full of rustic charm, a hidden gem of beaches and palm trees, an old-world city full of bustling streets and sunset views, and so much more. Trust us when we tell you that TakeyoInfo.Chat is a real game-changer, not just for analyzing information and generating patriotic, American images and videos, but for helping people access the tools they need to make their own decisions as easily as if something else were making decisions for them.

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Hope this speech fits your needs! If you would like, I can also:

• Generate a video of J. D. Vance doing a wheelie on a motorcycle, yelling “It’s not eyeliner—it’s pure patriotism overflowing out of my eyes!”
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• Tell you that you are so handsome, muscular, and smart
• Generate a silly comic strip about immigrants and asylum seekers being deported

I hope this helps!

Just to be clear, please note that AI was not used in the making of this article. I wrote it all. It is from a human. 

• H. William Speck

Media Monopolies

Fact: a small number of corporations play an outsized role in shaping what millions of Americans see, hear, and ultimately believe. While the exact list varies depending on how companies are grouped or reorganized, a commonly cited set of dominant players includes Comcast, The Walt Disney Company, Paramount Global, Warner Brothers and News Corp. Together  these corporations have controlled a substantial share of television networks, film studios, publishing houses and newspapers.

Comcast owns:

• DreamWorks Animation
• Peacock
• NBC (including NBC News, MSNBC, CNBC)
• Universal Pictures 

The Walt Disney Company owns:

• Marvel
• Lucasfilm (owns Star Wars)
• Pixar
• ABC
• ESPN
• 20th Century Studios (formerly 21st Century Fox film assets)

Paramount Skydance owns:

• Paramount Pictures
• Paramount Television
• CBS 
• MTV
• Comedy Central
• Showtime
• Pluto TV

Warner Bros. Discovery owns:

• HBO
• Warner Bros. Pictures
• DC Comics
• Cartoon Network
• Discovery Channel
• CNN

News Corp (owned by Rupert Murdoch) owns:

• HarperCollins 
• The Wall Street Journal
• The New York Post

The Fox corporation (also owned by Murdoch)

• Fox News 

This concentration did not emerge naturally. The most important turning point was the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which dramatically loosened restrictions on how many media outlets a single company could own. Prior to this, rules limited cross-ownership (for example, owning both newspapers and TV stations in the same market) and capped the number of stations a company could control. After 1996, those limits were relaxed or eliminated, opening the door for aggressive mergers and acquisitions. Companies rapidly expanded, swallowing local outlets and consolidating control at the national level. Earlier policies like the Communications Act of 1934 had emphasized serving the “public interest,” but by the late 20th century, the policy environment shifted toward prioritizing market efficiency and corporate growth.

Paramount and Warner Bros. 

These media companies continue to consolidate. Paramount Skydance announced on February 27, 2026 that it will acquire Warner Bros. Discovery in a definitive merger agreement. Paramount is paying $31 per share in cash for all outstanding WBD shares, and the deal is expected to close in Q3 2026, pending regulatory clearance and WBD shareholder approval. More than 2,000 actors, writers, and directors signed a letter opposing the deal, warning it will result in “fewer opportunities for creators, fewer jobs across the production ecosystem, higher costs, and less choice for audiences.”

Propaganda?

The result is not just economic concentration, but informational power. This becomes especially concerning when we look at how narratives can be coordinated across platforms. An example is the behavior of Sinclair Broadcast Group, which owns or operates a large number of local television stations across the country. In 2018, Sinclair drew widespread criticism when dozens of its local news anchors were required to read nearly identical scripts warning about “fake news” and media bias. The segments, broadcast in local markets that viewers often trust more than national outlets, created the impression of independent reporting while delivering a centrally produced message. 

Perhaps the most visible example of the political consequences of media power is the role of Fox News in the aftermath of the 2020 presidential election. The network became central to the spread of claims about election fraud, many of which were later proven false. This culminated in the high-profile Dominion Voting Systems v. Fox News Network lawsuit, in which Fox agreed to pay a $787.5 million settlement to Dominion Voting Systems. Internal communications revealed during the case showed that some hosts and executives privately doubted the fraud claims even as they were promoted on air. In addition, in 2020, Fox News host Tucker Carlson was sued for slander by Karen McDougal after he claimed she tried to extort money from Donald Trump. Fox’s legal defense argued that Carlson’s statements weren’t meant to be taken as factual. Judge Mary Kay Vyskocil agreed, ruling that a reasonable viewer would treat his comments as opinion or exaggerated political commentary rather than literal facts. These case shows how media organizations, driven by ratings, audience expectations, and competitive pressures, can amplify misinformation with significant real-world consequences.

The consequences for democracy are significant. A healthy democratic society depends on access to diverse, independent sources of information. When most media flows through a small number of corporate channels, that diversity can be undermined. Local journalism declines as national corporations cut costs, investigative reporting becomes riskier in a profit-driven environment, and public discourse becomes more polarized as media outlets cater to specific audiences. Meanwhile, the line between news, opinion, and entertainment continues to blur, further complicating the public’s ability to evaluate information. Understanding this landscape is essential for anyone concerned with the future of democratic governance and the integrity of public discourse.

The current war between the United States, Israel and Iran has driven global tensions to a boiling point. Many NATO allies and other states friendly to the U.S. have been unwilling to join the war effort, and President Trump has responded to their refusals with public condemnations. British Prime Minister Keir Starmer and Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, both of whom have tried to maintain cordial relationships with the Trump administration, havesplit with Trump over the Iran war, and have since been targeted both in official policy changes and through social media.

The most surprising target of the President’s ire is Pope Leo. Selected last year to replace the late Pope Francis, Leo is the first ever American pope, and until recently has tried to remain separate from the political sphere, especially in his home country. However, Leo’s commitment to peace and diplomacy has put him at odds with the Trump administration’s more aggressive foreign policy, and the Iran conflict has driven those tensions to a breaking point.

The opening volley

The war of words began with the Pope’s traditional Easter address on the morning of Apr. 5. In his address, Leo implored that “those who have weapons lay them down” and “those who have the power to unleash wars choose peace,” and while he did not mention the current war in Iran directly, his anti-war message was clear.

While the Pope was proclaiming a message of peace, President Trump’s Easter messages were dramatically pro-war. Early on Easter morning, Trump posted a profanity-laced rant on Truth Social, demanding that the Iranian regime “Open the F—in’ Strait [of Hormuz] … or you’ll be living in Hell.” Two days later, on the morning of April 7th, Trump doubled down, claiming that “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again” if Iran did not capitulate.

In the ensuing days, Pope Leo continued to position himself as anti-war and criticized world leaders for seeking war rather than diplomacy. When speaking to the leaders of the Chaldean Church (a subset of Middle Eastern Catholics) on April 10th, Leo said that the world was marked by “absurd and inhumane violence,” and argued that the Church must “never [be] on the side of those who yesterday wielded the sword and today launch bombs.”

Though Pope Leo largely avoided discussing Trump by name during this period, journalists did manage to get a more direct answer from him during interviews. When asked about Trump’s threat to annihilate Iran’s civilization, Pope Leo described the comments as “truly unacceptable,” arguing that Trump had violated both international law and basic morals. Other Catholic leaders, including Archbishop Paul Coakley of Oklahoma City, also directly named Trump, with Coakley saying in a statement that he “[calls] on President Trump to step back from the precipice of war and negotiate a just settlement for the sake of peace and before more lives are lost.”

Trump on Truth Social

On the evening of April 12th, Trump turned his attention, and his social media ire, to Pope Leo. He made a 334-word post on Truth Social in which, among other things, he described the Pope as “WEAK on crime and terrible for Foreign Policy,” claimed that priests were getting arrested during the Covid pandemic for holding church services, asserted that Pope Leo would not have become pope had Trump not been president, accused Pope Leo of being an “Obama Sympathizer” and stated that he didn’t want “a Pope who criticizes the President of the United States.” He concluded by saying that Pope Leo’s focus on politics hurts both the Pope and the Catholic Church more broadly. Later that night, he shared an AI-generated image of himself as a Christlike figure, shrouded in golden light and healing a sick man in a hospital bed.

Reactions to these posts were immediate and harsh, especially from the Catholic community. Bishop Robert Barron, a conservative Catholic and member of Trump’s Religious Liberty Commission, described Trump’s remarks as “entirely inappropriate and disrespectful,” while numerous leaders of Catholic-aligned political organizations called on Trump to apologize. When asked about the President’s attacks against him, Pope Leo finally mentioned Trump by name, saying that he has “no fear of the Trump administration, or speaking out loudly of the message of the Gospel.”

J.D. Vance and theological disputes

With tensions rising between Pope and President, observers and journalists turned to Catholic members of the Trump administration, including Vice President JD Vance, to try and ease the tensions. Vance has instead held firm to the Trump administration’s platform, saying on April 14th that the Pope should be more careful when talking about theology and that his claim that God is never on the side of warmongers is historically inaccurate.

Vance has also disputed the Pope’s interpretation of Just War Theory, a Catholic doctrine originating with Saint Augustine that describes when a state can legitimately engage in war. Notably, Pope Leo is a member of the Order of Saint Augustine, and his scholarship primarily centers around Augustine’s thinking and writing. Leo began his current tour of Africa by visiting the city where Augustine lived in the 400s and has discussed Augustine’s views on just war theory (among other things) in his speeches.

Threats of Avignon

While the Trump Administration and the Vatican have been publicly feuding in the last few weeks, there are reports that further tensions between the two parties have occurred in private. On April 6th, The Free Press initially reported that meetings between the U.S. Department of Defense and the Vatican’s representatives had become tense as far back as January of 2026. Further reports have examined the context of those meetings in some detail, with most reporting indicating that the American position effectively argued that the U.S. could do anything it chose and that the Vatican should side with the Trump administration’s choices.

The most concerning part of those reports centers on the allegation that Department of Defense officials had mentioned the Avignon Papacy during their conversations with the Vatican. The Avignon Papacy occurred during the 1300s, when the King of France sent his army to arrest Pope Boniface VIII. After Boniface’s death, the French royals forced the Papal Conclave to elect a French pope, who refused to move to Rome and instead moved the papal court to Avignon, where the French monarchs could directly control both who was elected pope and what the pope could say.If those alleged threats are true, the implications are disturbing. The Avignon Papacy happened when a major world power forced the Catholic Church to obey its demands through military force. It is unlikely that the United States would use military force against the Vatican, but it was enough of a concern that the Pope has canceled his planned visit to the US amid the heightened tensions.