Read it.

Homeland Security’s border agency says it has fixed a loophole from the Biden era that let immigrants enter the United States illegally and claim asylum despite using fraudulent identification documents, according to a newly released audit.

The Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general said in a report that agents at the border caught migrants using fake papers but failed to record the attempted fraud in the migrants’ official immigration files, known as A-files, reports The Washington Times.

As a result, authorities reviewing asylum applications had no idea the individuals had tried to deceive border officers, which could have disqualified them.

Read it.

On the eve of an emergency crisis summit with the steel industry, Germany’s ruling Social Democrats (SPD) have unveiled their “crisis roadmap.” If subsidies and protectionism fail, the sector will be nationalized. Just like that.

Germany’s steel sector has become the perfect parable for the pitiful state of the country’s broader industrial base. Its decline over the past eight years is almost without precedent in modern economic history. Output has plunged by more than 30% since 2018, with the first half of this year alone showing a brutal 12% year-on-year drop — a collapse accelerating at high speed.

In absolute numbers: crude steel production fell from its 2018 peak of 42.4 million tons to what will likely be only 29 million tons this year. It’s simple: producing in Germany no longer pays. So capital is fleeing to more profitable locations. China — and now increasingly the U.S. — is where business gets done.

Read it.

Play stupid games, win stupid prizes. (Well, it is Milwaukee….)

Read it.

A federal judge has lifted travel restrictions for Mahmoud Khalil, allowing the Palestinian activist to speak at rallies and other events across the U.S. as he fights his deportation case brought by the Trump administration.

Khalil, who was freed from a Louisiana immigration jail in June, had asked a federal magistrate judge to lift the restrictions that limited his travel to New York, New Jersey, Washington, D.C., Louisiana and Michigan.

“He wants to travel for the very significant First Amendment reasons that are at the bottom of this case,” his lawyer, Alina Das, said during a virtual hearing Thursday. “He wants to speak to issues of public concern.”

Let him do it back where he came from.

Read it.

Conservatives are nowhere to be seen in a Harvard University course focused on black women in politics, according to a copy of the syllabus obtained by The College Fix.

‘History 167: Race, Gender, and the Law Through the Archive’ praises First Lady Michelle Obama, failed Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams, and Vice President Kamala Harris for having “left their mark on 21st-century politics and grassroots organizing.”

The course says it will examine black women in the 20th century who “shap[ed] politics, grassroots organizing, the legal profession, and higher education during Jim (Jane) Crow and beyond.” Topics include “reproductive rights,” “non-binary people,” and “Black Feminism,” according to the syllabus.

But the course leaves out prominent conservative black women, including one who even made history at Harvard.

After all, they’re not REALLY black….

Read it.

Fueled by the explosive rise of artificial intelligence and the data centers that power it, America’s demand for electricity has surged to record highs. Meeting that demand will require unprecedented investment in reliable, affordable energy. Yet just as the need for dependable power grows more urgent, radical climate activists are working to choke off the very projects that promise to supply it and are threatening the integrity of the American judicial system in the process.

The clearest example of this troubling trend came earlier this year, when Greenpeace International filed a lawsuit in the Netherlands against the American company Energy Transfer, an extraordinary attempt to overturn a verdict issued by an American court. In the case, a North Dakota jury ordered Greenpeace to pay roughly $660 million in damages for its role in the disruptive 2016 and 2017 protests targeting Energy Transfer’s Dakota Access Pipeline.

During the North Dakota trial, jurors heard how the organization engaged in a campaign of defamation, disruption, and property damage that led to costly delays in the pipeline’s construction. One of Greenpeace’s central falsehoods was that the pipeline would cut through sacred tribal lands. In reality, Energy Transfer worked directly with tribal leaders and routed the pipeline to avoid such areas, a fact Greenpeace chose to ignore.

Greenpeace was also found to have dispatched paid protesters to the construction site who were carrying tools that were later used to lock agitators to equipment. These “hired guns” trained protesters who assaulted law enforcement officers, set fires, and caused untold environmental damage by leaving behind 48 million pounds of garbage.

Read it.

Transgender swimmer Lia Thomas is being celebrated in Los Angeles Thursday with a “Voice of Inspiration” award — but not everyone’s applauding.

Thomas, who was born a male and identifies as female, will receive the award at the Violet Visionary Awards, a move that sparked fierce backlash from Riley Gaines.

While Thomas, 26, won the NCAA Division 1 500-yard freestyle in 2022, Gaines, 25, finished fifth in the same race.

The Times (UK).

Pro-Palestinian campaigners have vowed to continue protesting, claiming the ceasefire agreement did not amount to a peace deal and branding “ceasefire” an “oppressor’s term”.

Perhaps they’d prefer the term “hudna“.

Several groups said the peace agreement brokered by President Trump last week was “not enough” and had done “little to change their demands”.

Nothing will ever change their demands, because those demands will change hour by hour.

The Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC) has encouraged students to walk out of classes on Thursday, boycott Barclays on Saturday and has planned a march on November 2. University societies described the agreement as a “so-called peace deal” and encouraged students to demand the sanctioning and boycott of “the Zionist state of Israel”.

Read it.

The president of Boston’s Police Patrolmen’s Association has responded after a violent mob of over 100 people unleashed chaos in Boston’s streets, torching a police cruiser and pelting officers with fireworks, cones, and poles in what witnesses called a “riot-like” assault on law enforcement.

The wild attack, which unfolded in the early hours of October 5, was described as a deliberate and “hell-bent” targeting of police, according to Larry Calderone, president of the Boston Police Patrolmen’s Association, in an interview with Fox News.

Read it.

Democrats and their radical leftist allies need an urgent wake-up call after betting the entire political strategy on transgender ideology, which most notably is the effort to queer America’s youth into “gender-fluid” left-wing activists operating in schoolyards and on city streets. That strategy appears to be collapsing, if it hasn’t already, as a new study reveals a sharp decline in youngsters identifying as something they’re not. In short, youngsters appear to be rejecting the multi-decade social engineering experiment by leftist public school bureaucrats, Hollywood, progressive doctors, left-wing NGOs, and other ideological operatives aligned with the globalist agenda.

Read it.

A few years back, I kept tripping across one of the many “disinformation experts” who popped up during the COVID pandemic like mushrooms on a rotten log after a hard night’s rain. I had no clue who Imran Ahmed was, nor his Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), but the Biden White House plucked him from obscurity to anoint him an expert on COVID vaccines and to censor their critics.

…

Intrigued, I began digging into the Center for Countering Digital Hate. In a 3,300-word investigation for Tablet, I exposed CCDH—not for being a trusted source on vaccines—but as a fraudulent political operation formed by two staffers working for the British Labour Party: Morgan McSweeney and Imran Ahmed. These two characters created CCDH and several other dark money nonprofits to install Keir Starmer as the head of Labour. Starmer is now the Prime Minister of England and Morgan McSweeney is his chief of staff. After its success in the UK, CCDH then began operating in DC and coordinating with Democrats to attack critics of the Biden administration.

Read it.

Students and parents staged a walkout at a high school in Oregon last week to protest a state policy that allows boys to be in the girls’ locker room and restrooms, The News-Review reported.

The walkout from Roseburg High School in Roseburg, Oregon, on Wednesday was sparked after several girls reported feeling uncomfortable with a boy using their private facilities, according to the report.

“Some of my daughter’s friends let me know about all of this going on. As a mom, I don’t stand for boys in my daughter’s locker room. That’s a private area for her,” RHS parent Shannon Miller said, The News-Review reported.

Read it.

After years of waging a subversive war against the western world, radical leftists think they can polish their image overnight and pretend as if they were always an amicable movement of civil rights advocates. Much like the “fiery but mostly peaceful” BLM, Antifa is facing a political optics crisis and they are desperate for some spin. With the help of the establishment media and Democrat politicians, they think they have found the solution.

Like any other well organized network, Antifa activists in the Portland epicenter have changed tactics almost overnight. They are pulling back from their typical black-bloc outfits, physical assaults and intimidation and donning inflatable cartoon animal costumes instead.

The Financial Times. a Voice of the Crust

(The FT is the British analog of the Wall Street Journal–if the Wall Street Journal were published by the staff of Mother Jones.)

The US has moved to cancel what would have been the largest solar project in North America, as the Trump administration expands its attack on the embattled renewable energy industry.

Late on Thursday the Bureau of Land Management scrapped approval for Esmeralda 7, a 6.2 gigawatt project that could have powered nearly 2mn homes. It had begun the permitting process under the Biden administration.

The high-profile Nevada solar project backed by NextEra Energy, the largest renewable energy company in the US, is the latest to become a casualty of the Trump administration. The American president has called renewable energy projects a “scam”.

Read it.

30 years too late, but its a start.

The Times (UK).

A council refused to grant a legal order shielding a feminist organisation from antisocial behaviour hours after trans activists smashed up its conference venue.

Rather amusing to see ‘feminists’ suffering the same indignities that they like to inflict on other people. What goes around comes around.

More than 2,000 people are due to attend the three-day conference hosted by Filia, which started on Friday. Organisers say the twice-yearly event is aimed at defending women’s rights and challenging sex-based injustices.

I’m sure that ‘trans activists’ use similar rhetoric.

On Thursday night, under the cover of darkness, masked transgender rights campaigners attacked the venue in Brighton.

The activists, who call themselves “Bash Back”, later released video on social media of them smashing the glass frontage of the Brighton Centre, which they said was hosting a conference that would be attended by “hate groups”.

Pass the popcorn.

Read it.

A Chicago woman who was shot multiple times by federal immigration agents was indicted by a federal grand jury on charges of impeding a federal officer with a deadly weapon.

Prosecutors alleged Marimar Martinez, 30, rammed the vehicle of federal agents with her own vehicle before they shot her, which they said was an act of self-defense and that she was armed.

Martinez’s attorney, Christopher Parente, said footage from one of the agent’s bodycams contradicted that account, and Martinez will plead not guilty at an arraignment scheduled for next week.

Read it.

President Trump’s latest roundtable on ANTIFA wasn’t just a political statement — it was a long-overdue reckoning against rising far-left political violence. For years, journalists and citizens alike have watched America’s streets burn, our cities vandalized, and our law enforcement vilified under banners of “resistance.” But as the President’s meeting revealed, ANTIFA is only one mask worn by a much larger monster — a transnational network of NGOs, foreign financiers, and ideological operatives quietly fueling what Seamus Bruner of the Government Accountability Institute called “Riot Inc.”

Read it.

“Activism is a way for useless people to feel important, even if the consequences of their activism are counterproductive for those they claim to be helping and damaging to the fabric of society as a whole.” — Thomas Sowell

Read it.

Hey, virtue-signaling isn’t cheap.

reta Thunberg’s Gaza-bound flotilla belched more pollution than 200 airplane trips between Israel and the U.K., according to a new analysis.

The Swedish climate-turned-anti-Israel activist’s Sumud Flotilla burned through more than 14,000 gallons of diesel during its five-week voyage from Spain to Gaza, according to a study by Volta Solar, a solar energy company based in Israel.

That fuel use, the study said, translated into 165 tons of air pollution — equal to the CO? emissions from 206 commercial flights between Tel Aviv and London.

Read it.

Told you it wouldn’t go to Trump. Pigs are amazing creatures but they cannot, in fact, fly.

I’m curious how the activities of a ‘political opposition leader’ in a totalitarian country promote peace. Surely they promote further conflict?

Read it.

Leonardo DiCaprio’s new movie, “One Battle After Another,” which has been blasted by conservatives as “an apologia for radical left-wing terrorism,” is reportedly struggling to recoup its budget at the box office.

Gee, I wonder why that could be….

Mother Jones, a Voice of the Deranged Woke.

Thank you, Barak Hussain Obama (uh, uh, uh….)

The GOP’s backdoor plan to gut Obamacare: Kill the tax credits.

The Woke backdoor plan to government-provided health care: Mandated coverage so expensive that it needs “tax credits’ to be “affordable”, thus putting recipients squarely in the Dependent Class.

ATQUE: Meyers Demands Republicans Cave On Obamacare Subsidies

Read it.

On Sunday, the Green Party in the United Kingdom voted to “abolish” private landlords in a move that reaffirms the party as a largely socialist movement.

For some environmentalists, it is a sad hijacking of a cause by far-left elements that moves it away from its original environmental priorities.

Who didn’t expect that to happen?

Read it.

Without access to Uncle Sam’s deep pockets, these groups could not exist, and certainly couldn’t cause as much agita as they do.

Read it.

The United Nations will cut a quarter of peacekeepers in 11 operations around the world in the coming months due to a lack of money, senior U.N. officials said on Wednesday, and as future funding from the United States remains uncertain.

“Overall, we will have to repatriate … around 25% of our total peacekeeping troops and police, as well as their equipment, and a large number of civilian staff in missions will also be affected,” said a senior U.N. official, speaking on condition of anonymity.

That would amount to between 13,000 and 14,000 troops and police, the official said.

Choking off funds to the U.N. and its actively-anti-American operations is one of Trump’s chief wins.

Read it.

On Sunday’s PBS News Weekend, anchor John Yang introduced a self-satisfied segment on a new documentary from the literary leftists at PEN America, based on the misnomer that books are being “banned” from schools and public libraries, as opposed to being removed due to concerns over age appropriateness regarding explicit sexual content.

PBS is picking up the baton from their public radio cohorts at NPR, which has made a cottage industry conducting performative preening over so-called “book bans,” often when the American Library Association’s “Banned Books Week” rolls around.

Censorship is a histrionic description of removing or limiting access to books in public schools. The books selected by librarians should not be “challenged” for any reason. It’s not a “banned book” when librarians refuse to stock a book.

Nowhere in this seven-minute promotional (and unanimous) segment does Yang disclose that this documentary is funded by the Independent Television Service, financed like PBS stations through the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. It’s slated to air on the PBS show Independent Lens next February.

Read it.

A professor at the University of Chicago was arrested Friday and charged following riots at an Immigration and Customs Enforcement center, authorities said.

Not a Republian, I suspect.

UPDATE: Far-left professor Eman Abdelhadi charged with violent felonies after Chicago ICE facility riots (Anthony Blair/New York Post)

Read it.

Only two jurisdictions have changed their policies under the Trump administration to allow police and sheriffs to assist U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers in making arrests.

Louisville and Nevada took steps to avoid the increase in federal immigration raids that had been taking place in Los Angeles, The Washington Post reported Tuesday.

Mayor Craig Greenberg, a Democrat, announced Louisville would reinstate a 48-hour hold on immigrant inmates at local jails to allow the Department of Homeland Security to take custody of them.

Read it.

Monday’s Morning Joe brought MSNBC viewers a confounding explanation for the ongoing government shutdown by creating a political paradox: Republicans were completely at fault, but Democrats were preventing the shutdown from ending.

Read it.

Take Illinois Governor JB Pritzker’s recent denunciation of “White House senior aides” for “sowing fear, intimidation and division” by, among other things, calling Democrats “fascists.” Given not just his party’s but his own frequent use of such rhetoric – comparing ICE agents to Nazis who disappear immigrants and vowing that Republicans “cannot know a moment of peace” – the jaw-dropping irony of his complaint was lost on no one, except, apparently, Pritzker and his allies. It raises the question: How did he think he could get away with this?

He is not alone. In recent weeks, progressives have been assailing President Trump’s very real attacks on free speech, without wrestling with the fact that they have long been the driving force behind cancel culture, hate speech codes, and broad-based censorship efforts.

They have been attacking Trump for weaponizing the justice system against his political enemies without coming to grips with the fact that they did exactly that during the Biden administration.

Read it.

Disorderly conduct charges have been dropped against a conservative journalist who was arrested for defending himself from an attack by members of an Antifa mob in Portland, Oregon Thursday.

“VICTORY: Following our demand for discovery related to the @PortlandPolice ’s coordination with Antifa, the Multnomah County DA has announced they will DECLINE to prosecute me,” Journalist Nick Sortor declared on social media Monday.

“After a careful review of the investigation, including reports and video, we do not believe the crime of Disorderly Conduct can be proven against Mr. Sortor beyond a reasonable doubt,” Sortor quoted from a statement by the Multnomah County District Attorney’s Office he embedded in his post.

“And trust me, this is ONLY the beginning,” Sortor promised, possibly alluding to plans to file a lawsuit or investigate whether or not the police had engaged in any “coordination with Antifa.”

Newsbusters.

Another domino fell Friday in the collapse of collusion by financial institutions seeking to impose net-zero ideology on the American marketplace, as the Net-Zero Banking Alliance (NZBA) closed its doors.

“Net-zero,” which envisions achieving zero-sum emissions of so-called “greenhouse” gases, particularly carbon dioxide, is one element of the radical-left’s ESG (Environment, Social, Governance) ideology. Financial institutions belonging to groups such as NZBA agree to discriminate against, or in favor of, companies based on whether or not they adhere to net-zero mandates.

“On paper, the NZBA, which was convened by the UN Environment Programme finance initiative but led by banks, encouraged members to slash the carbon footprint of their investments and help drive the transition to net zero emissions by 2050,” The Guardian noted Friday.

Over the past two years, such collusive efforts have come under scrutiny for being potential anti-trust violations.

The Telegraph (UK).

Israel has accused a Gaza flotilla activist of biting a member of prison staff in response to allegations of mistreatment during their detention.

Israel’s foreign ministry said on Monday: “The only violent incident came from a Hamas-Sumud provocateur who bit a female medical staff member of Ketziot prison.”

The Global Sumud Flotilla has not responded to the allegation, but its activists had claimed Israeli soldiers mistreated, beat and set dogs upon them in detention after their flotilla was intercepted last week.

Fellow detainees said Greta Thunberg was shoved and forced to wear an Israeli flag before the Swedish activist was deported on Monday.

Read it.

Funny how that works….

Read it.

The Veterans Affairs Department is facing a lawsuit after failing to disclose information related to the department’s alleged improper use of medical resources during the Biden administration to benefit illegal immigrants.

Following a Daily Signal report in August 2024, a policy organization in Washington asked the VA for more information related to its reputed use of employees to process cases of illegal aliens at the Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Health Service Corps.

The Center to Advance Security in America, or CASA, received none of the information it requested from the VA.

My, what a surprise.

The Foundry.

“The issue is never the issue. The issue is the revolution,” said the late David Horowitz, quoting a 1960s rebel. The Palestinian conflict, the climate, transgenderism, immigration, and abortion are all proximate causes for protests and now terrorism. But they are all also part of an amalgamated “omnicause” whose real purpose is to bring down the United States and the West.

Following the assassination of Charlie Kirk and other recent tragedies that are rightly garnering worldwide attention, our leaders have finally woken up and are looking into who the perpetrators are and who organizes and finances them.

After Kirk’s death, a liberal fired three bullets into an ABC News office in Sacramento, supposedly to protest the suspension of left-wing commentator Jimmy Kimmel. Last week, another radical shot inside a Dallas Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility, killing two people.

Read it.

About 60 students walked out of morning classes on Oct. 1 to protest their high school’s policy allowing male students who identify as transgender to use girls’ bathrooms, in Anaheim, California.

Read it.

A newly released report by ChargerHelp! shows that while 64% of Americans now live within two miles of an electric vehicle charging station, nearly one-third of charging attempts fail. Despite charging infrastructure showing 98.7% to 99% uptime rates, only 71% of charging attempts actually succeed, according to the 2025 EV Charging Reliability Report.

The report analyzed more than 100,000 sessions across 2,400 chargers. The report argues that instead of focusing on site uptime statistics, the first-time charge success rate (FTCSR) provides a more accurate measure of the driver experience.

“Uptime tells us if a charger is available, but it doesn’t tell us if a driver can actually plug in and get a charge on the first attempt,” said Kameale Terry, CEO of ChargerHelp!, in an interview with FreightWaves. “First-time charge success captures the real driver experience, and by centering on this metric, the industry can close the gap between availability and usability and build the trust needed for mass adoption.”

The complexity of EV charging stems from multiple software systems that must work in harmony, explained Terry, who has nearly a decade of experience in the space.

The nice thing about a hybrid is that you carry your charger with you.

The Foundry.

Amid its ongoing fight with President Donald Trump over whether Harvard University violated the civil rights of students and even deserves to receive millions of dollars from the American taxpayer, the school decided that it was a smart idea to hire a literal drag queen to teach courses.

“Harvard University hired a drag performer as a new professor—who is expected to teach a class on TV show ‘RuPaul’s Drag Race’ in the spring semester, the Ivy League school announced over the summer,” New York Post reported.

Harvard hired Kareem Khubchandani in July. He is a visiting professor from Tufts University and will teach in the Studies of Gender and Sexuality program.

Read it.

On Saturday morning, October 4th, a serious incident overshadowed the opening mass of the March for Life in Vienna’s St. Charles Church.

Worshippers first noticed a bag in the nave emitting a ticking noise, and shortly thereafter, another suspicious object was discovered behind a pillar. The church was immediately evacuated, and the Cobra special unit, along with explosives experts, secured and examined the objects, determining they were fake bombs.

Authorities believe the devices were deliberately placed to incite panic and disrupt the demonstration advocating for life. The timing and location suggest a coordinated attempt to intimidate Christians.

Just hours before the march, a left-wing radical channel circulated a graphic titled “CALL TO ACTION!” glorifying violence against Christians, showing the church in flames with the slogan “Give the fundamentalists hell!” A chalked threat referencing recently assassinated U.S. conservative activist Charlie Kirk was also found nearby.

Chicago Sun-times.

A woman was shot by U.S. Border Patrol agents Saturday morning on Chicago’s South Side, marking the second shooting since President Donald Trump’s administration launched an aggressive immigration enforcement operation in the area last month.

Tricia McLaughlin, a spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security, said the shooting erupted after patrolling agents were “rammed by 10 cars” and “boxed in.” Agents then fired “defensive shots” when they discovered the woman “was armed with a semi-automatic weapon” while driving one of the cars.

The time and location of the shooting weren’t immediately known. No law enforcement officials were hurt.

Read it.

Poor and developing nations need to band together, finance their own energy infrastructure, development, health and prosperity – and tell the carbon colonialists to take a hike.

The New Neo.

The left loves to distort language in order to mislead the public. You might say it’s one of their favorite tactics, and it’s very effective.

One good example is the morphing of the term “illegal aliens” to “illegal immigrants” to “undocumented workers” and then to “migrants. And have you heard of the word “unhoused” to refer to homeless street people?

Another example has to do with “book bans.” The phrase conjures up Nazi book burnings and dystopic films like Fahrenheit 451, and it’s meant to do so.

But the current “bans” aren’t actual bans at all. They are about school libraries as well as what books to teach in classrooms. Students are completely free to read whatever books they wish (or whatever books their parents let them read, if parents still have control).

Removing a book from a school library or failing to put it there in the first place, or deciding it will not be part of the curriculum, amounts to not recommending it, and/or not facilitating exposure to it. This is a very different thing from banning something. But the left would like you to confuse the two. The linked article does mention schools, but the word “ban” nearly overrides it and is not only misleading but is almost certainly intended to cause an emotional reaction and a connection with Nazis and the like.

Read it.

X user DataRepublican, also known as Jennica Pounds, who leads DOGE-adjacent efforts in an open-source capacity, has delved deeper into the dark-money-funded NGO world. Her latest target: George Soros and one of the largest soft-power projects of the 1990s, called the Muskie Fellowship program.

But the focus here is not the Muskie Fellowship program, but rather her question: “This is straight off the Federal Register. Now ask yourself why Wikipedia doesn’t mention the Soros Foundation.”

She added, “And fun fact — Soros had further grants for these graduates of the Muskie fellowship program. Hard to interpret this as something other than using our taxpayer funds to educate his minions.” 

ATQUE: Rabid Climate Group Goes to War with Trump to Protect Its ‘Major’ Financier: George Soros

Read it.

Harvard, apparently, can never learn.

It has made itself the poster-child for all the failures of contemporary education, including the racketeering around endowments, government grant grifts, race and gender hustles, and intellectual surrender to ideas that would make medieval astrologasters burst out laughing.

Case in point: the university lately announced the hiring of a Boston-area drag-queen to teach a course in the spring semester of 2026 about the TV show known as Ru Paul’s Drag Race. The show features contestants vying for prizes and crowns based on “Charisma, Uniqueness, Nerve, and Talent” (C.U.N.T.). Get the picture? Reach into your Jungian psychology tool-bag.

This backwater of the arts was identified some years ago by the literary pop-star Susan Sontag as “camp” derived from the French se camper “to pose in an exaggerated fashion” depicting “unnatural artifice.” Camp is the theatrical cousin of kitsch, which is the celebration of bad taste, with histrionic overtones of exaggerated sentimentality

The Telegraph (UK).

The Church of England, like the American Protestant Episcopal Church before it, has severed any last tie to the Apostolic Christian tradition, and is now officially the Church of the Woke.

Read it.

What should the goal of economic policy be? Ideally, a political party would have a clear answer to that question, one it could convey to voters and translate into specific proposals. Yet the Democrats currently lack any sort of unified economic vision. In its absence, the intellectual wings of the various factions that make up the party have been left to battle with one another in the hopes that their competing visions will set the party’s economic agenda for the next election cycle.

One of the factions that is best situated to fill the current policy void, at least partially, is the New Antitrust Movement, which won converts and gained influence during the Biden presidency.1 Over the last 15 years, this movement has gradually built out an impressive political apparatus, including foundation-funded political organizations like the Open Markets Institute, American Economic Liberties Project, and More Perfect Union, media footholds at places like The American Prospect, a stable of elected officials like Sen. Elizabeth Warren, and a set of semi-celebrity bureaucrats including Jonathan Kanter, Tim Wu, and Lina Khan.

For most modern political factions, it is hard to pinpoint their exact origins. They seem to emerge from a variety of disparate sources and cultural shifts that can only be described impressionistically. But this is not so for the New Antitrust Movement. Unlike other Democratic factions, it has an identifiable individual founder: Barry Lynn. It also has what is essentially a founding document: Lynn’s 2009 book Cornered: The New Monopoly Capitalism and the Economics of Destruction.

Sixteen long years later, Cornered’s diagnosis of what ails the American economy remains quite influential even though many of the illustrative industries Lynn diagnosed as unacceptably concentrated have since been disrupted by new entrants. More importantly, despite its big flaws, the idea that the proliferation and protection of small business owners is itself an important goal that supersedes more conventional goals like efficiency, growth, and labor protection has taken hold of a large portion of the policy-focused left, with no retreat on the horizon.

The Wall Street Journal.

Around the country, the fathers’ rights movement was gaining momentum. Dividing time and decision-making equally between parents, advocates argued, reduced children’s feelings of abandonment, promoted gender equality and lowered tensions between feuding couples.

“There is no law that affects more people other than taxes or traffic,” said Matt Hale, vice chair of the National Parents Organization, an advocacy group formerly known as Fathers and Families. “Giving kids equal access to both their parents is just common sense.” Dads like Hale and Holdsworth found a sympathetic ear in lawmakers including Jason Nemes, a Kentucky state representative whose own father was his primary guardian after his parents divorced.

In 2018, Kentucky became the first state to pass a law making equally shared custody the default arrangement in divorces and separations. Four other states—Arkansas, West Virginia, Florida and Missouri—have since passed their own versions of Kentucky’s custody bill. Around 20 more are considering or close to passing similar laws, according to an analysis by the National Parents Organization.

The law has become a model for other states, not least because Kentucky’s divorce rate has plummeted. Between 2016 and 2023 it fell 25%, compared with a nationwide decline of 18%, according to an analysis by the National Center for Family & Marriage Research at Bowling Green State University.

Hale calls the drop in the divorce rate an unintended bonus of the custody law. He suggested that parents are increasingly likely to stay together because they realize they’ll be in regular touch regardless, so “they might as well work it out.” He added that he’s heard stories of couples who decided not to break up because of the presumption of shared custody, and years later are glad they stayed together.

Plus women realized that they could no longer divorce a husband and take both the kids and (accordingly) generous “child support”.