Read it.

A new California bill would prioritize illegal immigrants for taxpayer-funded disaster aid, warned California Assemblymember Carl DeMaio, R-San Diego.

AB 262, authored by Assemblymember Jessica Caloza, D-Los Angeles, would require California to “prioritize local agencies that are not eligible under [federal law] due to their inability to meet the minimum damages threshold” of $1 million to unlock federal disaster funds.

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The latest Blue Origin space mission sparked a wave of conspiracy theories on X this past week. However, one verifiable fact stands out: the all-female crew—some of whom are part of the Hollywood leftist cult—were technically not “astronauts.”

“We just completed our 11th human spaceflight and the 31st flight of the New Shepard program. The astronaut crew included Aisha Bowe, Amanda Nguy?n, Gayle King, Katy Perry, Kerianne Flynn, and Lauren Sánchez,” Blue Origin wrote on X earlier last week.

Late Friday night, U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy addressed and dismissed the misinformation and disinformation circulated by Blue Origin and leftist MSM, stating:

The U.S. commercial space industry is an inspiring project which showcases American ingenuity and exceptionalism. But the last FAA guidelines under the Commercial Space Astronaut Wings Program were clear: Crewmembers who travel into space must have “demonstrated activities during flight that were essential to public safety, or contributed to human space flight safety.”

The crew who flew to space this week on an automated flight by Blue Origin were brave and glam, but you cannot identify as an astronaut. They do not meet the FAA astronaut criteria.

But I’m sure they’ll claim that as a credential.

Read it.

The far-left groups that staffed and advised the Biden administration—a network that I call the Woketopus—are going to war against DOGE’s efforts to root out waste, fraud, and abuse in the federal government.

Activist groups like the Center for American Progress and the ACLU are working alongside unions like the AFL-CIO and the American Federation of Teachers to block DOGE through lawsuits or public campaigns.

My book, “The Woketopus: The Dark Money Cabal Manipulating the Federal Government,” exposes how these activist groups—bankrolled through the Left’s dark money network by big donors like Hungarian American billionaire George Soros and his son, Alex—used the administrative state to force their woke agendas on the American people.

The Trump administration is rooting woke ideology out of the federal government, so the Woketopus’ opposition comes as no surprise. Yet the campaign against DOGE seems particularly noteworthy, since DOGE represents an effort to tighten the government’s belt and make it more accountable to the people.

The Atlantic, a Voice of the Crust.

After Elon Musk made a public show of remedying an apparent error in DOGE’s massive cuts to foreign aid, the Trump administration has quietly doubled down on its decision to stop sending emergency food to millions of children who are starving in Bangladesh, Somalia, and other countries. Without urgent intervention, many of these children are likely to die within months, experts told me.

Paying for the support of foreign children is not the responsibility of the American taxpayer. If these hand-wringers want to spend their own money in that cause, they are free to do so–but they don’t want to spend their money, they want to spend your money, even though the national debt is now $31 trillion.

Read it.

Sen. Bernie Sanders has crisscrossed the country on his nationwide Fighting Oligarchy Tour to rail against billionaires and supposed “oligarchs” like Elon Musk—while traveling like an oligarch himself.

Campaign expenditures released Tuesday and reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon show Sanders’s main campaign committee, Friends of Bernie Sanders, spent $221,723 chartering private jets during the first quarter of 2025, with the first payment coming just days before the launch of his tour in February.

“We will not accept a rigged economy where working people struggle while billionaires become richer,” Sanders said during the tour’s latest event in California on Tuesday. “We have got to create an economy that works for working people, not just Mr. Musk and the billionaire class.” But Sanders has had no issue splurging on private jets far beyond the means of working people, even as he has ramped up his attacks on the rich.

The New York Times, a Voice of the Crust.

Two groups representing Harvard professors sued the Trump administration on Friday, saying that its threat to cut billions in federal funding for the university violates free speech and other First Amendment rights.

Apparently there is a First Amendment right to receiving a handout from the taxpayers. Who knew?

Read it.

As Vice President JD Vance warns about the suppression of Christians’ free speech rights, a new law in a Western nation makes “praying with or over a person” in some circumstances “unlawful even if that person has asked you to pray for them.” Making the wrong kind of intercession for someone in this U.S. ally could land a believer up to five years in prison.

The government of the Australian state of New South Wales explains the newly enacted Conversion Practices Ban Act 2024 allows “prayer” or expression of any “religious belief” only if it is not “directed to changing or suppressing an individual’s sexual orientation or gender identity.”

The bill—which took effect last Friday, April 4—bans any speech the government classifies as attempting to change someone’s LGBTQIA2S+ status, with a maximum penalty of “imprisonment for 5 years.”

“The Conversion Practices Ban Act 2024 does not prohibit prayer. However, praying with or over a person with the intent to change or suppress their sexuality or gender identity is unlawful. It is unlawful even if that person has asked you to pray for them to be able to change or suppress their sexuality or gender identity,” explains Anti-Discrimination NSW, the state government body that fields discrimination complaints under the law. (It also has “investigation, education, and research functions.”)

USA Today, a Voice of the Crust.

They say that like it was a bad thing.

Every piece of evidence regarding Head Start indicates that it spends money and doesn’t do any good. If sixty years of failure doesn’t justify ending a program, what would? The Brookings Institution (a Voice of the Crust) reports:

In 2005, the first report about the Head Start Impact Study found that one year of Head Start improved cognitive skills, but the size of the effects was small. While this first report affirmed Head Start’s impact on school readiness, the final HHS report published in 2010 showed that by the end of first grade, the effects mostly faded out. According to the 2012 HHS report on third grade follow-up, by the end of primary school there was no longer a discernible impact of Head Start. Due in part to these reports, some have concluded that while Head Start has some initial impact on kindergarten readiness, the fadeout in impact over early elementary school qualifies attempts to invest more in early childhood education.

Let us get away from this Deep State notion that every problem can be solved with a Federal handout administered by a Federal bureaucracy.

Read it.

Today, the U.S. Department of Education (ED) referred its Title IX investigation into the Maine Department of Education (MDOE) to the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) for further enforcement action. Simultaneously, ED will initiate an administrative proceeding to adjudicate termination of MDOE’s federal K-12 education funding, including formula and discretionary grants.

These actions are a direct result of MDOE’s continued refusal to comply with Title IX. ED issued a noncompliance finding on March 19, and sent a final warning letter to the state on March 31.

“The Department has given Maine every opportunity to come into compliance with Title IX, but the state’s leaders have stubbornly refused to do so, choosing instead to prioritize an extremist ideological agenda over their students’ safety, privacy, and dignity,” said Acting Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights Craig Trainor. “The Maine Department of Education will now have to defend its discriminatory practices before a Department administrative law judge and in a federal court against the Justice Department. Governor Mills would have done well to adhere to the wisdom embedded in the old idiom—be careful what you wish for. Now she will see the Trump Administration in court.”

Read it.

The first Earth Day was organized in 1970 in response to growing public concern for the environment. Many of these concerns were entirely justified. In 1969, for example, an oil slick along an industrialized stretch of the Cuyahoga River in Ohio caught fire, generating national awareness of the need to reduce water pollution. Similarly, in coastal cities in California, most notably in Los Angeles, the exhaust from unleaded gasoline created air pollution so dense you couldn’t see the hills a few miles away.

We’ve come a long way in 51 years. This month, as Americans celebrate Earth Day on April 22, we are challenged to differentiate between legitimate environmental priorities and those priorities chosen for us by special interests with ulterior motives for whom environmentalism is a sentiment to be manipulated.

Here are ten issues where environmentalism has been misused, with consequences that have either been of no benefit whatsoever to the environment or have even caused harm.

The Foundry.

The White House has begun to cut funding for a federal program that drives climate alarmism and bolsters the narrative that burning fossil fuels will doom the environment.

The Trump administration is cutting funding for the U.S. Global Change Research Program, which produces a National Climate Assessment. Agencies across the government use the assessment to justify directing taxpayer dollars to fighting the specter of climate change.

President George H.W. Bush signed the Global Change Research Act of 1990, which directs the administration to release the assessment every four years. The law does not require the assessment to come to biased conclusions in favor of climate alarmism, however.

The government report gives a veneer of respectability to the claims that scientists all agree that burning fossil fuels will lead to catastrophic climate change. This justifies massive boondoggles like the so-called Inflation Reduction Act.

Read it.

The US income tax system is still a progressive tax system, where those with the most income pay not only the most taxes but also the highest tax rates.

I went to the IRS website (You can Google IRS TAX STATS) and found the breakdowns for income taxes paid for several years. Let’s look at 2020, Trump’s last full year in office…

The richest Americans — those with incomes over 2 million dollars in 2020 — paid an effective tax rate of 26.68%.

The middle class — those with incomes between 75,000 and 200,000 dollars — paid an effective tax rate of 10.12%.

The poorest — those with incomes less than 25,000 dollars — paid an effective rate of 1.04%.

How does this compare to, say, Obama’s last year? Let’s look at 2016…

The poorest Americans paid an effective tax rate of 1.7%. Between 2016 & 2020, their effective tax rate went down by almost half, from 1.7% to 1%.

The middle class paid an effective rate of 11.69% in 2016. Their taxes also went down, but not nearly by almost half. They went from an effective tax rate of 11.69% in 2016 to 10.01% in 2020.

And the richest? They got a break too. But a tiny one. Their effective tax rate went from a rate of 27.0% to 26.67%.

It is a fact (whether you like it or not) that those who pay most of the taxes will benefit most from tax relief.

If I am paid $1,000,000 a year and pay tax at a 20% rate, I will owe $2oo,00 in tax. If my tax rate is changed to 19%, I’ll get to keep $10,000 more of my own money.

If you are paid $50,000 and pay tax at a 10% rate, you will owe $5,000 in tax. If your tax rate is changed to 9%, you will get to keep $500 more of your own money.

This is the hard truth of plain mathematics that proglodytes can’t stand.

Read it.

After spending years pouring billions into left-wing progressive activism and demonizing conservatives for wanting financial transparency, the European Commission just received a giant blow from the inside.

In a bombshell report, the EU Court of Auditors (ECA) confirmed what right-wing groups have been saying all this time: there is no transparency, no oversight, and no clue where most of the money sent to non-governmental organizations (NGOs) will end up.

“Transparency is key to ensuring credible participation by NGOs in EU policymaking,” Laima Andrikien?, the ECA member in charge of the report, said.

However, despite some progress since our last audit, the picture of EU funding for NGOs remains hazy, as information on EU funding—including lobbying—is neither reliable nor transparent.

The key findings listed in the damning report speak for themselves. Most importantly, the EU seems to be intentionally violating its own transparency standards with its “opaque” system. Data is fragmented across incompatible online platforms, with key information mislabeled, buried, or outright missing—making reliable information “practically impossible” to find.

Read it.

The Soros-funded Civil Society Europe, an organisation that connects left-wing groups from across Europe, released a statement on Monday, April 7th, decrying the “attack” on NGOs by right-wing groups in the European Parliament.

“This attack resorts to misleading arguments to fabricate a scandal,” the statement reads. It claims that civil society organisations are a “crucial tool” for ensuring that “the rights of citizens” are “collectively heard for building an inclusive society and a shared European future.”

The statement comes after recent revelations that billions of euros in EU taxpayer funds have been spent on progressive political activism across the bloc.

Members of the national conservative Patriots for Europe (PfE)—the third largest group in the European Parliament and the main opposition bloc in Brussels—recently launched a campaign to force the Commission to disclose all contracts with EU-funded NGOs. In a report on Monday, the European Court of Auditors (ECA) also labelled EU funding of NGOs “too opaque.” The ECA criticised the European Commission for failing to clearly disclose information about advocacy activities carried out by NGOs using EU funds.

Read it.

A conservative Christian law firm is gearing up to countersue the Southern Poverty Law Center after the left-leaning firm attempted to bankrupt it with a “frivolous lawsuit” that demanded $200 billion in damages.

The SPLC represented a woman who dragged Liberty Counsel through nine years of legal purgatory, all based on a lie. The SPLC did not originally represent the woman, but joined the case after she sued Liberty Counsel, a conservative Christian law firm the SPLC has branded an “anti-LGBTQ hate group.”

“The Southern Poverty Law Center saw Liberty Counsel’s name and that’s when they started salivating, thinking they could come after Liberty Counsel and bankrupt us,” Mat Staver, the Christian firm’s founder and chairman, told The Daily Signal in an interview Friday.

Yet the entire case fell apart when the Vermont woman who sued Liberty Counsel, Janet Jenkins, admitted under oath that the very basis for including the law firm in the suit was a lie, Staver said.

Judge William K. Sessions III, a Bill Clinton appointee, granted Liberty Counsel’s motion on March 31. Sessions ruled that Jenkins’ case against Liberty Counsel had no merit. This came, however, after 9 years of legal proceedings involving 186,000 documents, over 500 pages of legal writing, over 5,000 exhibits, and 25 depositions, Staver said.

Read it.

The Colorado House of Representatives passed a bill Sunday that would remove kids from parents’ custody for behaviors like “misgendering” and “deadnaming” after Democrats cited the Southern Poverty Law Center to justify excluding parental rights groups from discussion on the bill.

The bill, HB 1312, passed with 36 votes in favor, 20 against, and nine absent in a largely party-line vote. One Democrat, Bob Marshall, voted against the bill.

The Colorado House of Representatives has 43 Democrats and 22 Republicans.

Rep. Jarvis Caldwell, a Republican, accused the House Democrats of silencing debate on the issue because they knew their position is unpopular.

“After preventing us from the ability to debate, Colorado House Democrats rammed through HB 1312,” Caldwell told The Daily Signal in a statement Monday. “It’s codifying into law that if their ideology confuses your child, and you don’t affirm that delusion, you’re committing child abuse and can lose custody of your child.”

Read it.

One of the great ironies of our age is the double standard of Big Environmentalism toward wind and solar, which commit numerous eco-sins that would not be tolerated otherwise. Dilute, intermittent, and thus inefficient? Yes. Energy sprawl requiring service roads and transmission lines in the wild? Yes. A threat to wildlife on land and in the water? Yes. And mining issues, even using child labor? Yes.

But it is “anti-CO2 or bust” for the foes of modern, prosperous living in a free society. They want a state of nature, a Garden of Eden, as if humankind did not matter. Deep Ecology is a religious cult—that is, in the area of energy, an enemy of Global Greening.

There comes a time in every ‘movement’ where people who started off full of idealism eventually descend to the point where it’s All About the Money.

Read it.

Our media elites love to tout themselves as “independent” and “fact-based.” But on almost any story on President Donald Trump, they can’t help but put those words in the shredder.

The Kennedy Center illustrates one major difference between the two Trump terms. In the first term, the president deferred to the leftists who gave all the Kennedy Center Honors in 2017 to Democrats and Trump haters. He chose not to attend the ceremony so no honoree would refuse to attend and then hail themselves as “brave.” It was atypically polite and deferential, and Trump received zero credit.

In the second term, Trump quickly proclaimed himself Kennedy Center chairman and kicked out the management. While the Kennedy Center hasn’t been a blazing hot spot of woke culture, the media’s intense reaction to this action demonstrated this space is not for all Americans.

Read it.

If you don’t know who Michael Mann is, you’re luckier than some. Read on.

A year ago, I was a witness in the Mann v Steyn-Simberg libel trial. It was an extremely frustrating experience. Mann’s lawyers tried to block McKitrick and I from giving evidence against Mann. The judge ruled against them, saying that our evidence was relevant to the defense. However, the judge then prevented either of us from presenting evidence on Mann’s concealment of failed verification statistics or even on the verification failure of Mann’s statistical model. The judge didn’t even allow the presentation of a table published in Geophysical Research Letters. In mid-trial, the judge also reduced the time available for the defense by about 40% from the original allocation; the time available for McKitrick and myself was almost chewed up by defense objections.

The Crust takes care of their own.

Because Steyn was so weak, nearly all of the defense was taken up by Simberg’s lawyers. They were highly professional, but their strategy was focused almost entirely on the lack of damages to Mann, and, in particular, to Mann’s claims about lost grants. In my opinion, the issues about, for example, Mann’s concealment of adverse verification statistics were issues that ought to have been raised in cross-examination of Mann (rather than late in the day in direct examination of McKitrick or me), but none of this took place. Instead, the cross-examination went on and on about Mann’s grants – an issue which seemed far less important to me than putting Mann on the spot about his concealment of adverse verification statistics,

Read it.

“This was an illegal act,” said U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis of Maryland, an Obama appointee. She gave the administration until 11:59 p.m. Monday to free Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a citizen of El Salvador, from the El Salvadoran prison where he is being held, and return him to the United States where he is not a citizen.

Abrego Garcia, 29, was among the hundreds of illegal immigrants—a large percentage of them MS-13 and Venezuela’s Tren de Aragua gang members —expelled from the U.S. to El Salvador last month.

Although the Trump administration acknowledged in court records earlier this week it made an “administrative error” when it deported Garcia without an interview, the fact remains that he has no legal status in the United States.

Garcia crossed the border illegally in 2012 by his own admission, and claimed he had to flee El Salvador as a teenager to escape gang violence when he was detained in 2019. Both the original immigration judge and the Board of Immigration Appeals found there was sufficient evidence that Garcia was a member of MS-13 and, as such, a danger to the public.

Read it.

The progressive left has spent years sermonizing about the virtues of “buy local”—fewer carbon-spewing cargo ships, more jobs for American workers, a lighter footprint on Mother Earth. It was their climate gospel, right up there with electric vehicles (EVs) and organic kale. But now, with Donald Trump’s latest tariff push hitting foreign goods hard, the same crowd that once fetishized localism is clutching their imported lattes and crying foul. First, they turned on Tesla’s EVs, now they’re ditching “buy local”—and the irony is thicker than a smog cloud over Beijing.

Quillette weekly podcast.

I’m your host this week, Iona Italia. My guest is William Costello. William is a PhD student in Individual Differences and Evolutionary Psychology at the University of Texas at Austin, where he is part of a lab run by the eminent evolutionary psychologist David Buss. His research focuses on incels—involuntary celibates—and the community of men who identify in that way. I wouldn’t always turn to someone at such an earlier stage in his research career to provide expert opinion for Quillette, but William is exceptional, as I think you will quickly notice.

We focus on the recent Netflix mini-series, Adolescence, which first aired less than three weeks ago and which is already on track to be their most-watched series ever. The series depicts the story of a thirteen-year-old boy who views himself as an incel (i.e., someone who will never have success with women) and murders a classmate after she rejects his attentions. It has attracted widespread media and political coverage and UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer—who has repeatedly mistakenly referred to this fictional story as a “documentary”—has suggested that it should be shown in all British schools, to combat a supposed epidemic of misogyny. We discuss what the show gets both right and wrong about incels and William helps counter some of the overheated responses to this emotive, exquisitely filmed fiction with facts and statistics that provide a much more accurate picture of the situation. I hope you enjoy my conversation with William Costello.

ALSO: What Netflix’s “Adolescence” Got Wrong – William Costello  Interviewed by Chris Williamson.

The most dishonest show every made? At least a good candidate.

Read it.

Democrats in Colorado have introduced legislation that would recognise ‘misgendering’ and ‘deadnaming’ as forms of abuse of children who have decided to identify as transgender.

Colorado Newsline reports that the bill, called “The Kelly Loving Act” after a transgender-identifying individual killed in a 2022 club shooting in Colorado Springs, would ensure such ‘abuse’ be considered in child custody disputes.

The legislation defines ‘deadnaming’ as “to purposefully, and with the intent to disregard the individual’s gender identity or gender expression, refer to an individual by their birth name rather than their chosen name.”

Read it.

The Left, for all its protestations about the travails of the working class, is a movement of radical intellectuals, effete upper-class dilettantes and professional activists who are detached from the ‘plight’ of the ‘proletariat’ whose rights they claim to be campaigning for. Its academic theories, from Marxism on down, are not grounded in anything except abstract sophistry marshaled on behalf of the perpetually oppressed who are to benefit from the totalitarian rule of the Left.

The inauthenticity of the Left, its power and privilege, its detachment from what it considers to be ordinary life, leaves it forever searching for authentic victims, whose lives follow the patterns of socialist theories, rather than being the ones who stand apart and make those theories.

The mimicry of working-class attire by leftists had been mocked as far back as Orwell. Radicals who didn’t work loved adopting the costumes and accents of the working class as if they were ideological method actors who could discover the authenticity they lacked by playing a part. (It is no coincidence that acting is a profession rife with leftist politics and that so many of those who play the embodiment of the ordinary man or woman on screen proved to be nothing of the sort. To paraphrase Shakespeare, all the Left’s a stage and its activists mere players.)

Read it.

Far-left Maryland lawmakers, sitting high in their Annapolis castle, are completely detached from reality. They masquerade as public servants but are merely progressive activists who cannot govern properly. Instead of addressing the state’s incoming financial crisis and worsening power crisis, these woke lawmakers have focused on condoms for kids and other disastrous left-wing policies. It’s as if these politicians are sabotaging the state…

Democrats in the state have been spending taxpayer monies like drunken sailors, driving the state to the brink of a financial crisis marked by a $3.2 billion deficit, heightened credit downgrade risk, and a worsening power crisis. Compounding the situation, DOGE-related cuts to the bloated federal bureaucracy threaten to trigger a devastating recession in the state, whose economy is mainly dependent on the federal government and produces little value in the private economy.

On Wednesday, instead of addressing the mounting problems, Democratic lawmakers passed a bill in a 101–36 vote to establish a commission tasked with studying and recommending potential reparations for slavery and the lasting effects of racial discrimination in the state.

I think Democrats ought to be the ones to pay reparations, since they were the ones who owned the slaves.

Read it.

Gov. Gavin Newsom stands behind his claim that “Big Oil” is responsible for California’s higher gas prices and vowed on April 1 to continue his fight against the industry. The pledge comes after new research put the blame on state regulations and policies for the high prices at the pump.

,,,’

A new study published March 16 by Michael Mische from the Marshall School of Business at the University of Southern California says the evidence contradicts Newsom. Mische’s research indicated California’s high gas prices were caused by the state’s regulations and policies.

“There is no economic data to support the allegation of price gouging,” Mische told The Epoch Times. “It just doesn’t exist.”

Read it.

Imagine that.

Read it.

The Nation’s justice correspondent Elie Mystal told “The View” co-hosts on Tuesday that all laws passed before the 1965 Voting Rights Act should be deemed “presumptively unconstitutional.”

Mystal claimed that the U.S. was “functionally an apartheid country” before the passage of the Voting Rights Act, a Civil Rights-era law that prohibited racial discrimination at the ballot boxes. The Supreme Court ruled in June 2013 that a part of the law allowing for federal review of proposed election-related changes before they took effect is unconstitutional.

The justice correspondent accused President Donald Trump’s administration of citing so-called racial laws passed before the Civil Rights Movement to justify the arrest of non-citizens who may pose a threat to the U.S.

Daily Mail (UK).
A toddler has been kicked out of nursery after being accused of transphobia, new figures reveal.

The child, aged either three or four, was suspended for ‘abuse against sexual orientation and gender identity’, data from the Department for Education shows.

The offences took place in the 2022-23 academic year at a state school, according to The Telegraph.

Statistics indicate 94 pupils at similar primary institutions were suspended or permanently excluded for transphobia or homophobia in the same year.

This included ten pupils from Year 1 and three from Year 2, where the maximum age was seven, and one child was of nursery age.

Aren’t you glad you don live in Britain?

Read it.

Who didn’t know that such things would happen? Where is the FBI when you really need them?

Read it.

On the campaign trail, Donald Trump used contentiousness around transgender people’s access to sports and bathrooms to fire up conservative voters and sway undecideds.

One of the Left’s primary objectives is to make the exception into the rule and the rule into the exception.

Read it.

Wokeism, the ideology that infiltrated the permanent bureaucracy and increasingly gave it ideological ballast, is, if anything, an insurrection against the West. Woke, a term borrowed from black American slang, means being acutely awake to what its supporters believe to be the systemic oppression of the marginalized by society’s winners.

That is why Musk, whom President Donald Trump appointed to lead the Department of Government Efficiency, posts about how he also sees his role as saving Western civilization. DOGE is not a department but an effort outside of the government itself, and it’s charged with slashing this bureaucracy.

The oppressor versus the oppressed paradigm is a way of looking at all human experience directly from Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto

Read it.

Democrats unleashed their coordinated, NGO-driven color revolution—dubbed the ‘Tesla Takedown’—nationwide on Saturday, though it unfolded in a notably unimpressive fashion.

The days of million-man (or woman) marches, usually bankrolled with taxpayer dollars funneled through now-defunct USAID, appear to be over, as their ability to sway national sentiment has diminished significantly. Still, these dark and corrupt NGOs receive monies from leftist billionaires, as we’ve previously reported.

Read it.

Democrats have been wallowing in the despair of last November’s elections for months, unable—or maybe unwilling—to crawl out of the pit of public opinion they find themselves in. “It’s hard to win if you don’t know why you lost,” Axios’ Alex Thompson observed. But it’s even harder, some would say, if you know and do nothing about it.

To most people, the solution to the party’s problems is simple. After a year of losing ground with virtually every demographic—men, black Americans, Hispanic Americans, Asian Americans, young people, Independents, suburban moms—the polling all points to Democrats being completely out of step with everyday voters. So why not just abandon the extremism Americans rejected? For the party of Barack Obama and Joe Biden, the answer is much more complicated.

The crisis facing Democrats isn’t about their identity; they have one. The crisis is that they can’t moderate their ideology—or embrace it—without severe consequences. As National Review’s Rich Lowry put it, “The reason Joe Biden won in 2020 is he didn’t seem like a progressive, and one reason that his party lost in 2024 is that he governed like one.” For Democrats, ideological extremism is their kryptonite and their lifeblood. It’s what excites the base and repels the populace. In other words, it’s a recipe for long-term political disaster.

Read it.

Air travel will soon be the preserve of the privileged, an airline boss has admitted, as Net Zero makes low-cost air travel a thing of the past. The truth the Net Zero is making us poorer is slowly leaking out, says Matthew Lynn in the Telegraph.

Read it.

A California policy that prevents schools from requiring staff to disclose a child’s gender identity or sexual orientation to his or her parents may be in violation of a federal law, the U.S. Department of Education announced Thursday.

The federal agency’s Student Privacy Policy Office, which oversees the Family Educational Rights Privacy Act (FERPA), is investigating instances in California where school personnel in various districts allegedly hid information from parents and assisted students with their gender “transition,” a March 27 news release notes.

The Department of Education alleged that AB 1955, which took effect on Jan. 1, conflicts with FERPA, which gives parents the right to review students’ records. The department’s news release said federal law supersedes any state law in this case.

Newsbusters.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom hosts a podcast. Why not? He has plenty of free time.

In the last few years, California experienced a net population loss of nearly 1 million people. The average price of a home in the state is twice that of the national average. Its K-12 test scores in reading and math place California 37th of 50 states. The state’s January 2025 unemployment rate, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, was the second highest in the nation.

As for California’s poverty rate, CalMatters, a respected, California-based nonprofit news organization, wrote: “The Public Policy Institute of California, using a methodology similar to that of the Census Bureau, calculated that in 2023, 31.1% of Californians were either at or near poverty. Deep poverty, defined as ‘families with less than half of the resources to meet basic needs,’ was at 3.4%.” (California’s homeless population, at an estimated 187,000, is the nation’s largest.)

In a separate report, CalMatters wrote, “Nearly a quarter of all unhoused Americans live in California — as well as 28% of all homeless veterans and 44% of all ‘chronically homeless’ Americans (people who have a disability and have been homeless for a significant period of time.)”

Read it.

Remember in 2006 when Al Gore released An Inconvenient Truth and made lots of frightening claims about climate change, none of which came true?

Read it.

In the end, we are left with a strange theological message: the road to environmental heaven is paved with good intentions, reinforced stitching, and a sturdy sense of self-righteousness. And if you can’t save the Earth, at least make sure your bag says you tried.

The New Neo.

This article caught my eye. It describes what you might call the Rosie O’Donnell phenomenon of people leaving the country because of their hatred of Trump and fear of what he has in store for them. Ordinarily the latter bears zero relation to reality. But that seems to be the echo chamber in which they live, and they’re willing to act on it.

These proglodytes are afraid that Trump might do to them what they’d love to do to us.

I can’t even figure out what rhetoric of Trump they might be relying on to think that those rights would be threatened by Trump during his term. He did nothing about it during his first term, either. And a policy of blocking medical transition for youths actually supports gay people, because a great number of de-transitioners finally settle into accepting that they are gay rather than trans.

But logic has little to nothing to do with fear of Trump.

Good riddance, I say.

Jonathan Turley.

Yesterday, there was a curious aspect to the coverage of the video of a woman attacking a young man for wearing a MAGA hat. Ignored by many mainstream outlets, conservative news sites described the woman as a “Karen” who got “karma.”

The video below was viewed as a funny payback as the woman fell while chasing the man from the New York subway car. However, the incident is not karma but a crime. This is political violence perpetrated on the New York subway, and yet no one in New York seems to be calling for the arrest of this person.

If you watch the video, the woman starts by harassing the young man in the subway car. She is shown yelling, “If you f—-ing voted for Trump, you’re a racist!… He’s a racist!”

One can dismiss the verbal attacks as an exercise of free speech. However, she then repeatedly grabs and strikes the young man as she chases him from the car:

Of course, if he defended himself, he’d be the one in jail for ‘hitting a girl’.

Read it.

Pamphlets outlining how to “build a culture of resistance against” Immigration and Customs Enforcement were available in Columbia’s main library Monday night, the Washington Free Beacon has learned. A second stack of handouts detailed how radical activists can protect themselves while participating in various protests, including encampments and while occupying administrative buildings.

The first pamphlet, titled “8 THINGS YOU CAN DO TO STOP ICE,” was attributed to the anarchist group CrimethInc. and calls on activists to “Abolish ICE” and “Shut Out The Police.” The second set, adorned with the anti-Israel National Lawyers Guild’s logo and titled “KNOW YOUR RIGHTS FOR CAMPUS PROTESTS,” warned that corporations may use lawsuits “to target protected speech” and suggested finding allies among faculty and school administrators.

Both sets of flyers, obtained by the Free Beacon, filled a bin sporting two labels: one that read “Know Your Rights Educational Resources,” and another that read “Property of library staff—do not remove.”

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As they do.

Publicly, Columbia University interim president Katrina Armstrong says she’s committed to implementing the reforms the Trump administration is demanding. Behind closed doors, she is telling colleagues not much is going to change.

In a weekend meeting with roughly 75 disgruntled faculty members, Armstrong told colleagues that, despite national news headlines indicating the school had genuflected before the administration, there would be “no change to masking” and that the university’s disciplinary process “remains independent” and “has not been moved to my office.”

Armstrong said something different days earlier when announcing several changes to the school’s operating procedures. In a memo presented to the Trump administration on Friday, she indicated that “face masks or face coverings are not allowed for the purpose of concealing one’s identity” and that anyone wearing a face covering during a protest is subject to a mandatory ID check.

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Our think-tank MCC Brussels has been investigating the use of Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) by the European Union. Our published reports expose the laundering of billions of euros to institutions charged with promoting the European Commission’s propaganda throughout Europe.

This misuse of taxpayer’s money is an outrage. But what is of even greater concern is how this corruption of civil society undermines democratic decision making in the EU’s member states. In particular, the EU-NGO propaganda complex has sought to use pliant NGOs to promote regime change in Hungary and Poland.

The EU has channelled funds to NGOs in countries such as Poland (€38 million) and Hungary (€41 million) through the CERV program, aimed at promoting ‘EU values’ and, in some cases, undermining the elected government. For example, the Ökotárs Foundation in Hungary, which received a €3.3 million grant from the EU, has been involved in disputes with the Orbán government and stands accused of being a “local distribution centre” for foreign influence.

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CBS loves to pose as the opponents of propaganda and misinformation, but when it comes to their own long history of making propaganda, they can only glorify themselves. On Sunday’s 60 Minutes, they aired a 13-minute puff piece on Democrat activist and actor George Clooney, now making a Broadway play out of his CBS-mythologizing movie Good Night and Good Luck.

CBS interviewer Jon Wertheim made a disclosure early in this puff piece about his work with Clooney and his partner Grant Heslov: “Full disclosure, the three of us collaborated on an unrelated sports documentary out later this year.”

The truth gets mangled early on in this segment. Wertheim explained about Sen. Joseph McCarthy: “At the height of the Red Scare, the Wisconsin senator led a crusade to weed out supposed communist infiltration of the U.S. government.”

Supposed? We’re not in the 1950s any more. Anyone who’s read the Venona papers knows the Soviet Union infiltrated the U.S. government, including Alger Hiss, who the Clooney types pretended was innocent for decades. This is the myth that CBS and Clooney are still promoting, that they were on the “right side of history” as they were gaslighting and getting it wrong about Soviet espionage.

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By the way, as I see it, the people being removed are being removed because they entered the country illegally. That they supposedly have violent criminal backgrounds or are members of violent gangs is the reason for prioritizing their removal, but not the sole reason for their removal. Some of the “due process” concerns I have read or heard pertain to whether or not these people are actually gang members. But I don’t see that distinction as relevant to the question of whether they can be removed because they entered the country illegally.

And I understand that the reason these people were removed to El Salvador rather than to their home country of Venezuela is that Venezuela refused to allow them back in.

I can kinda understand having a little more process when revoking previously granted permission to enter the country (i.e., revoking a “green card” or a visa) because the person violated the terms of the permission. But I still don’t see that those processes need to be as stringent as the full criminal due process requirements. Being sent back to your home country is categorically different from being sentenced to prison or to death.

Proglodytes chant ‘DUE PROCESS! DUE PROCESS! DUE PROCESS!’ as if it were an magical spell that will act as a Get-Out-Of-Jail-Free card (which is actually Habeas Corpus, but that’s law school talking).

What everybody is ignoring is the fundamental question of: What ‘process’ is ‘due’?

If you accuse someone of Not Following The Rules, then the immediate concern is, what version of The Rules are you talking about? Because the legal system has many different sets of The Rules depending on the circumstances, and nobody seems willing to do the heavy lifting of talking about which set of The Rules applies.

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This all sounds reasonable, but where is the “first, check your premises” caveat? Greater speed to the wrong destination is not a virtue, as the late founder of the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), Fred Smith, stated. Path dependency and “the tyranny of the status quo” in climate research and understanding can ruin a student’s time and subsequent career path.

Lisa Sachs repeated refusal to address intellectual diversity and the need for balanced debate on open climate questions speak for themselves. It is climate propaganda at Columbia U.

The Antiplanner.

On her first day in office, Oregon Governor Tina Kotek signed an executive order calling for the construction of 36,000 new homes per year. She was especially hoping for lots of new apartments because, as everyone knows, driving is evil and people who live in apartments drive less than people who live in single-family homes.

It should come as no surprise to anyone who understands how well central planning works that apartment construction in Portland, where close to half of Oregonians live, is now at its lowest level in more than a decade. There are several reasons for this, but among them are several idiotic government policies that have discouraged more construction.

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Francesca Padilla was awakened by the sound of screaming people and breaking glass. Soon she could hear the tortured howls of her neighbor’s dog Togo as the bungalow right next to her Venice home was engulfed in flames.

“It was yelping so loud—the sound isn’t the usual dog sound—it was suffering,” another neighbor told a local newspaper. “It was suffering.”

The homeowner, Dr. Courtney Gillenwater, a pediatrician, was at work when the fire started around 3 a.m. Her neighbors tried and failed to break into her bungalow to rescue Togo. But the Husky-mix ultimately died, and Gillenwater’s home in this Los Angeles neighborhood was destroyed.

Gillenwater suspected that drug addicts from the growing homeless encampment nearby started the April 2021 fire because she had asked city officials to remove a dumpster behind her house where they would congregate.

Her neighbor, Padilla, also believes the homeless were the culprits. “Anyone can see the correlation between homeless encampments and the rise of fires,” she said. “We have people cooking drugs out in the open right across the street. Is that not a recipe for disaster?”