Read it.

The Democrat-controlled cities of Boise, Idaho, and Salt Lake City adopted new city flags this week showing support for LGBTQ people in defiance of their states’ Republican-controlled legislatures.

Read it.

Frontex is supposed to protect Europe’s borders, but it has been “captured” by the Left, so does nothing of the sort.

That is the verdict of Sweden Democrats MEP Charlie Weimers, who stands at the forefront of efforts to reverse what he describes as the “coup at Frontex”—no small task, by his own admission, given the role of senior European Union officials in this takeover.

Weimers stressed that “this is not a procedural matter. It is an institutional crisis.”

Read it.

The Left Coast lives up to its name.

“What do we want?”
“DUMPSTER FIRE!”
“When do we want it?”
“NOW!”

Sounds like a Democrat plan to me….

The New York Times, a Voice of the Crust.

The National Endowment for the Arts withdrew and canceled grant offers to numerous arts organizations around the country on Friday night, sending a round of email notifications out just hours after President Trump proposed eliminating the agency in his next budget.

The move, although not unexpected, was met with disappointment and anger by arts administrators who had counted on the grants to finance ongoing projects.

I have a question: Why do we even have a ‘National Endowment for the Arts’? Especially when we are TRILLIONS OF DOLLARS IN DEBT???? This is none of the government’s business, at any level, much less at the Federal level.

Read it.

That is, apparently, the most important qualification.

Read it.

The House of Representatives voted on Thursday to repeal a Biden-era Environmental Protection Agency waiver that allowed California to ban the selling of new gasoline-powered passenger vehicles by 2035.

The vote was 246-to-164, with 35 Democrats crossing party lines to join all 211 Republicans who were present in support of the joint resolution. The measure now goes to the Senate, where under the Congressional Review Act it would only need 51 votes, rather than the usual 60-vote filibuster-proof majority, to pass.

Read it.

The Trump administration is suing both Michigan and Hawaii over the states’ plans to take oil companies to court over their alleged role in causing global warming and environmental damage.

In complaints filed late Wednesday, federal prosecutors said the two states’ planned actions against the oil and gas industry would directly counter the Trump administration’s efforts to boost domestic energy production, enforce federal emissions laws, and conduct foreign affairs. The state’s lawsuits, by blaming oil companies for weather-related damages, could decimate and bankrupt those companies, presenting an existential threat to the industry.

The unexpected complaints are a clear signal that the Trump administration is prepared to go to great lengths in defending the American oil and gas industry, even if it means intervening in state-level litigation. It also opens up the possibility of the administration intervening in similar climate litigation that has already been filed by several states and dozens of local governments nationwide.

New York Post.

Harvard University has admitted the ugly truth: The left’s long march through its faculty and administration has borne poisonous fruit in the form of blazing Jew-hatred and the overall ruin of its campus climate and curricula.

Don’t take our word for it: Just read the elite Ivy’s own report on the Tentifada that sprang up in support of Hamas after Oct. 7.

The committee tasked with looking into this antisemitic conflagration detailed how over decades what began as a tense, even rancorous zone of disagreement on campus — specifically, over Israel’s efforts to defend itself from terrorist aggression and the national aims of various Palestinian political factions — changed into an “attempt by student activists to drive Israeli students (and Jewish students who feel connected to Israel) out of student life.”

UPDATE: Harvard’s Report on Campus Antisemitism Is Damning

Read it.

Climate models have been the basis for concern about climate change for more than 35 years. The US government, the United Nations, and organizations across the world have used model projections to warn about global warming and to demand a shift to renewable energy. But Trump administration budget cuts at NASA, NOAA, and other federal agencies threaten to shut down the models, the heart of climate change alarmism.

…

There are more than 40 climate models operating across the world, with 13 of the leading models located in the US. The US models are operated by National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) in New York City, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in Princeton, New Jersey, and the Department of Energy (DOE) in Boulder, Colorado. Each of these organizations has been ordered to reduce staff as part of Trump administration budget cuts.

The White House may soon tell NASA to focus work on space programs, not climate change. In February, the administration denied NASA officials permission to travel to an international climate meeting in China. At the same time, NASA management cut off funding for a support contract for the 7^th Assessment Report of the IPCC. NASA has been a primary contributor to previous IPCC Assessment Reports. Preliminary government spending plans for fiscal year 2026 would cut NASA’s science budget by almost half, to $3.9 billion.

Freeberg nails it.

John Hawkins, writing at Culturcidal, offers five reasons.

As you’d expect from the people who invented the concept of “microaggressions” and “safe zones,” liberals have a tendency to wildly overreact to things most people would barely notice. They also tend to spend their lives terrified of imagined dooms that never happen…Really, it’s no surprise so many liberals mentally break when they spend their days endlessly being spoon-fed imaginary apocalyptic scenarios…

I have noticed, in my dealings with dedicated liberals outside of politics, there’s often this tension arising where I’m waiting on them to make a delivery of some kind. And rather than the product or service, what I see them bringing is drama. It gets to the point where I start wondering what the drama is going to be, and stop wondering if I’m going to get what I contracted to have delivered. The initiative is lacking, and they seem to be drawn to distractions like a moth to a flame.

Read it.

On Tuesday, April 29^th, the EU Court of Justice declared Malta’s “golden passport” scheme unlawful, siding with the European Commission in a long-standing legal battle over whether citizenship can be sold to the highest bidder. The European Commission welcomed the ruling. “It’s now for Malta to implement the court’s judgement,” said EU spokesperson Markus Lammert.

“The acquisition of Union citizenship cannot result from a commercial transaction,” the EU’s highest court ruled, concluding that Malta had violated EU law by offering its citizenship to non-Europeans in exchange for pre-defined payments or investments. The binding decision now requires Malta to shut down the program or face significant penalties.

“A member state cannot grant its nationality—and indeed European citizenship—in exchange for predetermined payments or investments, as this essentially amounts to rendering the acquisition of nationality a mere commercial transaction,” the court wrote. It also noted that Malta’s actions “infringe the principle of sincere cooperation and jeopardise the mutual trust between member states concerning the grant of their nationality.”

The legal action, initiated in 2020 and escalated in 2022 when the Commission brought the case to the Court of Justice, has now reached a decisive conclusion. The island nation’s controversial program allowed wealthy individuals—many of them Russians and Chinese—to buy their way into EU citizenship and thereby access all the rights and privileges of the bloc.

Malta had previously defended the scheme, pointing out that “Significant investments were made in key sectors to improve the quality of life for the Maltese and Gozitan people,” the government noted, stating that the program had brought in 1.4 billion euros since its launch in 2015.

NPR, a Voice of the Deep State.

Because, as we all know, it’s the responsibility of the Federal government–and the Federal taxpayer–to make sure that deaf students get a science career.

Read it.

The Iberian nations of Spain and Portugal were thrust into chaos yesterday as a massive power outage swept across the entirety of their territories, leaving tens of millions without electricity.

Major cities, among them tourist destinations of international repute—Madrid, Lisbon, Barcelona, Seville, and Valencia—all ground to a halt. Airports shut down, trains stalled, traffic lights failed, and hospitals scrambled to maintain critical operations on backup generators. The Madrid Open tennis tournament was suspended. Supermarkets had to close to prevent panic buying. Ordinary people were left stranded in elevators and metro tunnels, navigating pitch-black stations with phone torches. Passengers had to leave stranded trains on foot. Authorities reportedly had prior warnings, yet failed to act decisively.

By evening, partial power was finally restored—Spain’s grid operator Red Eléctrica reported meeting 43% of demand—but full recovery could nevertheless take hours, if not days. Meanwhile, Portugal’s operator warned of potential disruptions that might last for up to a week. On Monday evening, Lisbon’s mayor, Carlos Moedas, asked people to stay at home the following day, fearing the city would still be unprepared to return to normal.

This spectacular, wholly unprecedented blackout, described as a “50-year, if not 100-year incident,” exposed a deeper flaw: the catastrophic consequences of left-wing energy policies that have recklessly prioritised renewable energies while dismantling reliable alternatives like coal and nuclear power.

UPDATE: Grid Overload: How Solar Sparked a Continental Power Crisis

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The establishment media this week is awash in stories about the Trump Administrations “frightening” deportations of at least three young children from the US, even though they are considered “American citizens”. The narrative follows a typical strategy of generating outrage using omission of the facts. The goal is to anger the public by pumping out hysterical headlines, knowing many people won’t investigate further.

The news reports insinuate that Trump has hijacked three American children and shipped them across the border, but they gloss over the fact that the parents of all of the children involved are illegal immigrants. The children’s parents were deported, and of course, the children went with the parents.

“Three U.S. citizens ages four, seven and two were not deported,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio said. “Their mothers, who were illegally in this country, were deported. The children went with their mothers.”

“If those children are U.S. citizens, they can come back into the United States if their father or someone here wants to assume them,” he added.

Quillette.

On 19 March, it was announced that the ten-campus University of California (UC) system would no longer require academic job applicants to supply so-called “diversity statements”—documents testifying to one’s embrace of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) as guiding professional values. The move made national news, both because of the size of the UC system, and because UC’s original adoption of diversity statements in the late 2010s had been instrumental in establishing a wider trend throughout academia.

That trend has been in decline since 2023, a policy reversal that is now accelerating thanks to the Trump administration’s strenuous opposition to DEI. In a parallel development, numerous corporations have been abandoning the DEI campaigns that they ramped up with much fanfare following the murder of George Floyd and the heyday of the Black Lives Matter movement in late 2020 and 2021.

Read it.

Russian as well as independent regional media sources have revealed that a high-ranking CIA official’s son was killed while fighting alongside Russian forces in Ukraine last year.

The news and story of the young man’s death is highly unusual, given his mother is a US intelligence information warfare and ‘disinfo’ expert: the CIA’s Deputy Director for Digital Innovation Juliane Gallina Gloss.

The New York Post among other US media outlets described the CIA official’s son, a longtime global traveler and activist, as having been ‘radicalized’ against the US and its foreign policy.

Michael Alexander Gloss, 21, died on April 4, 2024 – based on a family obituary posted by a funeral home in Fairfax, Virginia – but on Friday investigative outlet IStories reported that Russian authorities only informed his family of his death in October. His official obituary only related that he was “tragically killed in Eastern Europe.”

IStories apparently had access to his phone records, given that it published a live recording of Gloss informing his parents that he traveled to Russia, along with many photos including showing life in a Russian barracks with fellow soldier friends who appear to be foreign fighters.

Juliane Gallina Gloss has been the CIA’s deputy director for digital innovation since being appointed in February 2024, and is a career CIA and US Naval intelligence officer.

Read it.

The scandal over the alleged corruption of the founder of the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos would be just an anecdote were it not another example of what has happened recently with many international institutions. The Financial Times reveals that the WEF founder faces accusations of manipulating the organization’s analysis to gain favour with governments.

For years, many of us have watched with sadness as an important forum like Davos shifted from being a centre for debate and confrontation of ideas in defence of free enterprise to becoming a loudspeaker for the most interventionist ideas, the most damaging statism, and a whitewasher of authoritarian governments, spreading the destructive ideas of inflationism, socialism, and wokeism— which, in reality, are all the same.

Davos went from being a forum for debate to a congregation for repeating interventionist dogmas and whitewashing a single, extractive mindset; those who defended economic freedom, attractive taxes, and control over public spending were gradually ostracised. We have heard enthusiastic applause for those demanding more taxes and greater assaults on job creators, and one-sided debates in which all participants repeated clichés and words like “resilience” and “sustainability” as Trojan horses for predatory statism, where the idea of creating value and wealth was repudiated.

Read it.

Postmodern feminism has reached a dead end. Since Judith Butler led feminists to their demise, diluting what it means to be a woman and making it so even any man can be one, feminism has been mired in constant contradiction. This has all unfolded in an era of singular thought and cancellation, where the few feminists who remained loyal to late-20th-century ideas and critiqued queer theories have been excluded from the debate or even branded as misogynists. Thus, traditional feminism, possessed by the demons of the woke Left, has been left with only one outlet—hatred of men.

The first step in this process began years ago with the relentless propaganda pushing the construction of so-called new masculinities. Wokism is a theory entirely detached from reality and human nature, so the only way to enforce it is by constructing a new reality. In terms of masculinity, this construction has been a persistent effort—a steadily tended ideological seed now bearing its poisoned fruit.

To build this new masculine reality, they pitted new ‘masculinities’ against traditional masculinity, labelling the latter as patriarchal, violent, misogynistic, and backward. But their aim wasn’t to critique potential inequalities between men and women; it was to attack the very core of what defines a man and his most intimate traits. By making the exception the rule, wokists conclude that all men are potential rapists; that the traditional family is little more than a nest of violent vipers; and that the white, middle-class man is behind all the world’s ills. It’s as if they’ve forgotten Henry Kissinger’s quip: “Nobody will ever win the battle of the sexes. There is too much fraternising with the enemy.”

Read it.

One of the unintended—but providential—side effects of America’s anti-woke wave isn’t just that companies are walking away from LGBT extremism, but that entertainment is. In a market pivot that’s gone somewhat under the radar, key Hollywood players seem to be quietly turning away from the wokeism that’s financially punished the industry for years. Families in this country want more wholesome options—and, in a surprising twist, producers seem much more willing to provide them.

The sex, violence, profanity, gay and trans themes, and other vices that have characterized modern entertainment have started to give way to more decent and uncontroversial fare. And audiences are eating it up. While other movies continue to tank at the box office, PG-rated films made up a whopping third of ticket sales in the U.S. in 2024, the highest percentage, Axios points out, since 1995. A quarter of those profits went to animated films, four of which topped the charts as last year’s highest-grossing movies.

Even industry titans like Disney—who, not so long ago, bragged about intentionally “queering” content to indoctrinate kids—have taken some modest steps back from their personal pride parades, reining in recent projects and internal goals. Although the signs of impending doom were all around them (the Mouse House lost a jaw-dropping 700,000 streaming subscribers in the last three months of 2024), very little about CEO Bob Iger’s social agenda changed. After Donald Trump’s landslide election in November, however, alarm bells finally went off.

The New Neo.

Our British visitor “David Clayton” is highly offended and downright outraged by Judge Dugan’s arrest:

The FBI arresting a judge.

I am not surprised but probably not for the same reasons as you Neo. Your country and its constitution is being dragged into the mire by a liar who frightens his supporters into tolerating anything.

And you cheer him on. Doesn’t any of this excessive executive power worry you? The endless EO’s, the thoroughly cowed Congress and the imperilled judiciary.

Your entire constitution was written to prevent one man rule but one man is ruling.

Is there anything Trump will do that you won’t tolerate?

And here I thought that, to the David Claytons of the world (because he is hardly alone in his sentiments), no one is above the law. Apparently, however, judges are above the law, and can make up their own law and/or defy the actual law in order to assist a criminal illegal alien if they happen to feel so disposed.

Good to know.

Read it.

A new study by researchers at the University of California at Berkeley School of Public Health and other major universities has put a damper on the claim that obstetrician-gynecologists (OB-GYNs) are systematically fleeing pro-life states or ones with more liberal abortion laws.

To the contrary, the cohort study measured data collected from Jan. 1, 2018, to Sept. 30, 2024. It concluded that the number of OB-GYNs in pro-life states actually increased at a faster rate than in pro-abortion states in the wake of the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization (2022) decision by the U.S. Supreme Court. That case overturned 1973’s Roe v. Wade and returned the issue of abortion regulation to the purview of individual states and to Congress.

Based on data from more than 60,000 OB-GYNs, the report, released Monday, determined that the number of the women’s heath doctors actually increased by 8.3% in states where abortion was banned compared with 7.7% in states where abortion was protected after the Dobbs decision.

Overall, the study held that as of 2024, “the number of OB-GYNs did not significantly change across policy environments [states with varying abortion laws].”

Read it.

Columbia University warned student radicals that they could face disciplinary actions—and possibly arrest—if they move forward with their plans to launch anti-Israel encampments.

“We have been made aware of possible plans to establish encampments on Columbia’s campuses. We want to clearly communicate that camping and encampments on Columbia’s campuses are prohibited by University Policy,” Columbia’s public safety department announced in a university-wide email Wednesday evening.

“Participants will be instructed to disperse,” the email continued. “Individuals who refuse to disperse will be identified and sanctions, including potential removal from campus and possible arrest, may be applied.”

The Foundry.

Recent votes to continue secret gender “transitions” in schools and to remove public access to the Fairfax County, Virginia, sex education committee cap years of deceit by Fairfax elected officials. For a decade now they have inserted themselves between parents and children where they should most defer: in sensitive areas of mental health and sexuality.

Associated Press, a Voice of the Crust.

The U.S. Army has suspended a Wisconsin training base’s first female commander after discovering portraits of President Donald Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had been flipped around to face a wall.

The Army has posted an undated statement on Fort McCoy’s website saying Col. Sheyla Baez Ramirez has been suspended as the base’s garrison commander. The statement said the suspension isn’t related to any misconduct but provided no other details, saying the matter was under review.

The Department of Defense on April 14 posted photos on X showing portraits of Trump and Hegseth on the base’s chain of command wall had been turned to face the wall, along with photos showing that they had been flipped back to face the corridor.

Read it.

Making the rounds this past week were comments by a Mexican archeologist regarding the discovery of a Mayan altar at which child sacrifices were performed.

As reported by CBS News, the altar, found in Tikal National Park, showed “the remains of three children not older than 4 years,” according to the scholar who led the discovery team.

The savagery of how such sacrifices were performed, however, is not brought up. Instead, we merely read how Tikal was “a cosmopolitan center,” a “center of cultural convergence,” and how the altar had a “figure representing the Storm Goddess.”

CBS also managed to get a comment from an archeologist not affiliated with the findings at Tikal. How come? Probably because María Belén Méndez of the National Autonomous University of Mexico said the child sacrifices were merely “a practice.”

I’ve Got a Little List (W.S. Gilbert)

…
Then the idiot who praises, with enthusiastic tone
All centuries but this, and every country but his own;
And the lady from the provinces, who dresses like a guy….

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.

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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.

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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.”

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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.

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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.

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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,

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“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.

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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.

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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.”