Read it.

Illinois Republican state Rep. Dan Ugaste is speaking out against a “nationwide literacy crisis” that counts Illinois among the more than 40 states where just one out of every three fourth grade students are now meeting reading proficiency standards.

Data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress report card shows that in Illinois, just 30% of fourth graders are hitting such standards.

In a 2024 national exam, the state’s students finished 29th in the country for the percentage of fourth graders at or above proficiency.

Look for … the Union label….

UK Daily Record.

Obviously the lion was an environmentalist.

Read it.

he internet age has allowed for the uncompromising demystification of all sorts of public archetypes. Sectors once held in high regard, or at least intense intrigue, have suffered from a dramatic drop in prestige as more comes to be known about the true nature of those who fill their ranks. Social media is awash with people from once-respected professions like academia, journalism, or law repeatedly making fools of themselves, exposing their intellectual vacuity for all to see, and being humiliatingly dunked on by random nobodies with anime profile pictures and usernames best not repeated. In doing so, they have been shorn of the high social status that they were once deferentially afforded on the assumption that most members of these professions were fundamentally interesting, capable, or at least replete with stories and opinions worth listening to. The more we see of who they truly are, the more banal and petty these figures appear.

But perhaps the archetype that has suffered the greatest collapse in perceived stature from unfiltered online exposure is the jihadi.

Read it.

This past week, The Atlantic ran an excellent, helpful, and important piece by David Zweig, excerpted from his forthcoming book An Abundance of Caution, which is, at least superficially, about the coronavirus pandemic and the school closures it prompted. Zweig denies that it is about the pandemic specifically, saying that it is, rather, about “the failure of the expert class.” Whatever the case, Zweig is unsparing in his criticism:

Without sufficient acknowledgment of the harms of school closures or adequate planning for unwinding this intervention, officials showed that their decisions to close were simply reactive rather than carefully considered. The decision makers set a radical project in motion with no plan on how to stop it. In effect, officials steered a car off the road, threw a cinder block on the accelerator, then jumped out of the vehicle with passengers still in the back. No one was in the front or even knew how to unstick the pedal.

The main point of Zweig’s case is that the so-called expert class was not particularly expert in this instance, which is to say that the damage it did was predictable and therefore preventable. Those in charge, whom we were all urged constantly to “trust,” were either ignorant of existing literature warning of the consequences of the actions they were taking or arrogant enough to think that they could produce outcomes different from those previously forecast.

The Free Press.

Picture this: your first marriage, to a billionaire, goes belly-up, and you’re in your 50s, and it’s time for your next act. You have two options. The first is to slap on those fake eyelashes and hitch a ride to space courtesy of your new, even richer fiancé, as Lauren Sánchez did this week. The second is to write a curiously petty memoir. That’s what Melinda French Gates did. The result, The Next Day: Transitions, Change, and Moving Forward, was out this week, and I read it so you don’t have to.

It’s about big life transitions—becoming a mother, dealing with death—but the only reason anyone’s picking up this clunker is to see what she says about being married to and, after 27 years, splitting up with Bill Gates. (Apparently he, as Melinda put it, “betrayed not only our marriage but my values” by which she means he hung out a bunch with Jeffrey Epstein.)

Woven through the chapters, you might find a poem Melinda is fond of, or a piece of encouragement Oprah gave her, or a poem she likes that Oprah told her about. This book screams “divorced” as loud as a new shiny red convertible, but is as un-fun as the footnotes to an alimony agreement. She drags us through her normal childhood in Dallas, and her time as a computer science major at Duke, before she gets to the goods.

“In the decade or so before my marriage fell apart, my inner voice faded. With it, I lost my center, an essential part of myself,” Melinda writes, which sounds vaguely profound (and vaguely profound is the best The Next Day ever gets). To find herself again, she does a healing ceremony in Scotland that she called “incredibly prayerful and moving,” and goes on an “unforgettable” trip to India, and spends time with her girlfriends “creating a place and space to focus on spirituality and mindfulness.” You can almost hear the glass of sauvignon blanc being placed on the patio furniture, and imagine Melinda wrapping herself in an oatmeal cashmere cardigan and looking across Puget Sound, when she writes about “carving out a quiet refuge inside myself.” Who is this book for? Her and MacKenzie Scott?

As is common in the modern world, she initiated the divorce. Now I don’t know why Bill married Melinda, but it seems to me that he could have made a better choice, and I am sure and certain that he is well rid of her.

New York Post.

The Brooklyn woman accused of leaving a brick scrawled with a swastika and the word “Nazi” on a parked Tesla is a super-woke family therapist who was involved in criminal justice diversion programs — and blamed Elon Musk for her heinous actions as she was taken into custody.

Natasha Cohen was released on her own recognizance following her arraignment on hate-crime charges Saturday night, according to prosecutors.

Cohen, 46, has a private practice, working with children, adolescents and their families for more than two decades.

This is what passes for a ‘therapist’ in NYC. Be afraid. Be very afraid.

Power Line.

Democrats do many things that I don’t understand, but their enthusiastic embrace of El Salvadoran Abrego Garcia, a member of the brutal gang MS-13, is bizarre even for them. No one disputes that Garcia is a citizen of El Salvador. No one disputes that he was in the U.S. illegally. Therefore–it follows–he should be deported to his home country. In 2019, that deportation was temporarily held up by an immigration judge who thought that it would be too dangerous to deport Garcia to El Salvador, because he could be threatened by a rival gang. That is not, to put it politely, a persuasive rationale.

ZMan:

When getting attention is the singular goal, then everything that would prevent someone from seeking attention, such as responsibility, duty, self-awareness, and self-respect, must give way. There is no dignity in showiness because dignity prevents the carnies from doing what must be done to get a laugh, a sigh, or applause. The theater of democracy, like all theaters, selects for shamelessness.

This is how we get someone like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez barnstorming the country doing a bourgeois socialist act. She flies in on a private jet, takes a limousine to the event, perhaps stops for a meal at a fine restaurant, then performs her act. Once the show is over, it is back to the private airport and the private plane. Like many actresses, she waited tables before her big break in politics.

UK Daily Record.

Pretty sad when we need to depend on a British tabloid to inform us of what’s going on in the U.S.

A mum has been jailed after her young daughter was beaten to death when she left eight children home alone to go gambling.

Three-year-old Blessing Buckles and seven other children, aged between 11 months and 12 years, were left at a home in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, on February 12 last year. Mum Dineshia Yates and her friend Terica Scott were visiting a casino, unaware of the violence taking place.

Blessing is said to have been attacked by two boys: Scott’s 10-year-old son and 12-year-old nephew. She suffered a bleed to the brain and tragically died just two days later.

Dinesha Yates:

Blacks struggle with 72 percent unwed mothers rate (NBC News)

I guess getting married is ‘acting white’.

Read it.

It’s not as if it was ever a secret: The very core of the woke movement is fundamentally rooted in evil. The general definition of “evil” being a conscious act of deception and destruction, the deliberate victimization of others for the sake of personal power, pleasure and gain. When I try to imagine what a religion of evil might look like I consistently come back to the far-left woke movement along with its rabid mantras, agendas and self righteous narcissism.

Read it.

An American citizen identified as Akinyela Sawa Taylor hijacked a Cessna 208 Grand Caravan with 14 souls on board in Belize on Thursday.

Sure–Akinyela Sawa Taylor certainly says ‘American citizen’ to me….

According to police, the crazed American was fatally shot in the chest by a passenger carrying a licensed firearm.

That sounds more like an American citizen. (If he isn’t, he ought to be.)

Read it.

One might think that those who purport to be “defending democracy” would want to know why its advantages are not so self-evident to their children and grandchildren, who will inherit it. If preserving the social contract matters so much to them, shouldn’t they be the least bit curious as to why under-30s young professionals don’t want to bear the increasing tax burden of their NHS care and pensions? But nobody appeared like the Lorax from the stump of our civilisation to suggest felling every tree in whose shade subsequent generations should sit might be a bad idea.

It seems belief in the permanence of the welfare state has engendered an unprecedented entitlement in older generations. When their successors complain about the cost of subsidising an unsustainable system they will never benefit from, Boomers accuse them of trying to deprive them of provisions they have paid for all their lives. When they express reluctance to be conscripted and killed, they are condescended to as ignorant children who should be so lucky to receive a lesson in European history. Intergenerational noblesse oblige has been so utterly severed that the Conservative party could court Boomers as a client group at the last election by promising to tax their grandchildren to the hilt to quadruple-lock their pensions, then force them to either deliver prescriptions as an indentured servant to ‘are NHS or be conscripted to die in a ditch in Ukraine.

Read it.

Rogue climate activists in Northern California are launching balloons filled with sulfur dioxide into the upper atmosphere in an effort to manipulate the Earth’s temperature. In exchange, the climate startup behind the operation sells “cooling credits” priced at $30 for a subscription or $5 to offset 1 ton of carbon dioxide. The startup’s unregulated operations are causing a major stir and have drawn the attention of EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin.

“Make Sunsets is a startup that is geoengineering by injecting sulfur dioxide into the sky and then selling “cooling credits.” This company is polluting the air we breathe. I’ve instructed my team that we need to quickly get to the bottom of this and take immediate action,” Zeldin wrote on X.

Tyler Cowen.

With a Trump-induced decline of American alliances n the works, is Chinese global ascendancy going to result? It would seem so. Matt Yglesias tweeted that “America may be cooked and it’s gonna be the Chinese century.” Thomas Friedman recently wrote a column suggesting that the future is to be found in China, not America.

Thomas Friedman has never met a Communist regime he didn’t prefer to that of the U.S. Makes you wonder why he hasn’t left yet.

In the realm of technology, China’s advances are impressive. BYD has the best and cheapest electric vehicles, the CCP is pulling out all stops to attain high-quality chips and lithography capabilities. Chinese AI, in the form of DeepSeek and Manus, has shocked many Westerners with its inventiveness.

Being able to exploit technology stolen from other countries doesn’t constitute ‘impressive advances’.

Read it.

Following the release of his new book, The Dark Sides of Migration, Swiss forensic psychiatrist Frank Urbaniok has called for European asylum policy to finally take migrant crime statistics into account, claiming that certain migrant groups are “disproportionately criminal” due to cultural factors.

Much like black people in the U.S.

Urbaniok, one of Switzerland’s most prominent forensic experts with over three decades of experience analyzing violent offenders, suggests that cultural influences from countries such as Afghanistan, Morocco, and Tunisia contribute significantly to higher crime rates among migrants from these regions.

“Afghans are reported more than five times, Moroccans more than eight times, and Tunisians more than nine times more often than Swiss nationals for serious violent crimes,” Urbaniok stated in an interview with Swiss newspaper Neue Zürcher Zeitung, citing his analysis of crime data from Germany, Austria, and Switzerland.

“The disproportionate crime rate has a lot to do with cultural influences. It is about how violence is dealt with, the image of women, or the role of the rule of law in these countries. I have been dealing with criminals for 33 years and have seen thousands of cases at close range. That’s why I know how strong and relevant these imprints can be. Sometimes, they persist for generations,” he said.

The American Mind.

Professor James Hankins has written a sincere but largely misguided piece advocating for what amounts to a national guest worker program with a delayed pathway to citizenship. He proposes, with appropriate modesty, that “The advantages of this [immigration] proposal may not seem obvious at first sight to Republicans.” Let me, with all due humility, suggest that the alleged advantages are not obvious because they are not there. While Hankins’s program has a slightly different taste, it is basically the same old amnesty wine in a new bottle.

His core problem is viewing immigration policy as one issue among many in which any proposed solution should ultimately be subject to a popularity contest. In reality, immigration is an existential issue, and the way we approach it defines what kind of community we will be.

The first question to add in re immigration is: What sort of people add value to the country and the people already here?

Rich people add value by spending and investing.

Successful businesspeople add value by starting and running successful business, providing jobs and tax revenue.

Intelligent people add value by solving problems and making lives better for everybody.

Criminals don’t add value (and every illegal immigrant is ipso facto a criminal)–they subtract value by increasing the natural proglodyte propensity for ignoring laws they don’t like and diluting the common shared culture that makes a society work.

Read it.

Unfortunately, we have a problem with the military. They don’t seem to think they answer to civilian leadership anymore.

The most recent example of that problem is Space Force Colonel Susan Meyers, who was just relieved of her command of the 821st Space Base Group at Pituffik Space Base in Greenland. Why was she relieved? Because she, in her official capacity as commander of this unit, disavowed the words of the Vice President of the United States.

Vice President JD Vance made remarks regarding Greenland getting the shaft from Denmark and leaving it vulnerable, and Meyers decided that she just had to counter those comments.

Now, she’s been relieved of command.

Vice Admiral Shoshana Chatfield was also removed from her position as the US representative to NATO’s military committee, which followed a series of actions, including her refusal to put up photos of President Donald Trump or Vance in the chain of command. It might not be the worst act of insubordination ever, but it’s still insubordination.

Let’s also not forget good old General Milley, who famously and publicly said, following Trump’s first term, that if he’d been ordered to attack China, he’d have given the Chinese a phone call to let them know what was coming, first.

Read it.

President Trump, Treasury secretary Bessent, and Commerce secretary Lutnick are effectively teaching a course right now on the fundamentals of international trade.

…

Or asked another way: How “free” can international trade be if its proponents depend upon a labyrinthine system of rules that requires thousand-page treaties and guidance from the United Nations, the World Trade Organization, the Export-Import Bank of the United States, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, central banks galore, the Bank for International Settlements, international standards organizations, law firms specializing in commercial and maritime law, more law firms specializing in the administrative law of specific nations, even more law firms specializing in the labor and environmental laws of each nation, and an ever-increasing number of national and international regulatory bodies to tell producers what they can and cannot produce, how and when to produce what they are permitted to produce, and whom to pay for the “privilege” of producing it — all while restricting which domestic consumers around the world are permitted to purchase what the aforementioned producers end up producing?

That long question only scratches the surface of the sheer complexity of international trade, yet even in its oversimplification, it smacks of coercion, extortion, overbearing micromanagement, government corruption, and blatant racketeering.  It oozes the “command and control” odor we associate with a Soviet-type, socialist, or similarly centrally planned economy.  Nothing about “free trade” in practice sounds remotely free.

The Sunday Times.

Scotland was once a great recruiting ground for the UK’s armed forces. Not any more.

In 2014, the year of the independence referendum, the British Army reported an official intake of 630 untrained soldiers from Scotland.

By 2023 that number had dropped to 330, less than one a day. In the past financial year, it was 370. That is a decline of 41 per cent in a decade. It is the same story for the Royal Navy and the RAF, where Scottish recruitment has plunged 37 per cent and 53 per recent respectively since Scotland voted on its constitutional future.

The British Army has been shrinking since the Cold War, winding up entire historic Scottish regiments, severing multigenerational links with communities as it does so. Recruitment has fallen in England too, but by nothing like the scale seen in Scotland. For the army, it is down 13 per cent across the UK.

Read it.

West Yorkshire Police (WYP) is currently blocking white British applicants from its police constable entry programmes, according to reports. Aiming to ‘boost diversity,’ black and Asian candidates are being advised to apply early before the vacancies are made open to other potential recruits.

WYP’s goal is to address the problem of “under-represented” groups in the workforce. This is despite it already spending a police record minimum of £1m (€1.17m) a year employing 19 diversity, equality and inclusion (DEI) staff. Its website admits that it accepts

applications all year round from these under-represented [ethnic] groups [while white British candidates must wait until] our recruitment process is open.

Employed in police human resources, a WYP whistleblower claimed that a candidate rating system is in force. While black and East Asian candidates were ranked “gold”—and south-east Asians “silver”—“white others”, such as candidates from Irish and eastern European backgrounds—were tiered “bronze.” This means the recruitment process is being distorted at the insistence of senior officers. Separately, vacancies were not made directly available to the public but emailed out to selected applicants using a ‘Positive Action’ mailing list.

UK Daily Record.

The UK and various European countries have recently advised citizens to prepare emergency kits with at least 72 hours’ worth of essential supplies.

Fresh advice issued to UK residents by the government suggests they should keep a 72-hour emergency kit ready at home, sparking confusion about what should be included and how to store the additional supplies like cans of baked beans and water bottles. The recent encouragement from both UK authorities and European countries reminds everyone to prepare emergency kits packed with at least three days’ worth of supplies.

A handgun, of course, is not included–nor is any kind of knife, axe, or wrecking bar.

The Foundry.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was arrested on Feb. 12, 1974, for speaking out about the evils of Soviet communism. The next day, he was exiled to the West and would not touch Russian soil again for more than 15 years.

On the day of his arrest, Solzhenitsyn published an essay titled “Live Not by Lies.” The four-page essay was a call for civic courage: The end of Soviet totalitarianism would begin only when the Russian people refused to accept the regime’s lies.

Solzhenitsyn’s essay inspired the title of Rod Dreher’s 2020 book “Live Not by Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents.” Almost five years later, Angel Studios has turned Dreher’s book into a four-part documentary series focusing on the stories of the brave souls that stood up to communist regimes. Dreher joined “The Signal Sitdown” to give a behind-the-scenes look at the Angel Studios project.

Dreher started working on “Live Not by Lies” when he received a shocking phone call.

“I got a call from a doctor in the Midwest who had reached out to me through a mutual friend. He said, ‘I have to tell somebody what’s going on,’” Dreher recalled. “What he said was his elderly mother, who lived with him and his wife, had been a political prisoner in Communist Czechoslovakia in the 1950s. They imprisoned her—the communists did—because she was a spy for the Vatican, meaning she wouldn’t stop going to church when they told her to.”

“But in 2015, she told her son, ‘The things I see happening in this country, the United States, remind me of what it was like when the communists first came to power in Czechoslovakia,’” Dreher said.

Even Dreher was skeptical. “I thought it was a little extreme at first, but the more I started talking to people—when I would go to conferences or travel—people who had come to America to escape Soviet communism, I would just ask them, ‘Do you see parallels to what you left behind?’”

“Every single one of them said yes, and if you talked to them long enough, they would get really angry that Americans didn’t take them seriously,” Dreher said.

Read it.

A significant portion of unemployed people in Germany have a migrant background. According to the federal employment office, 1.5 million out of the 2.8 million unemployed are migrants—they represent 54% of the total.

Among the migrants, 1,1 million people, 39% of all unemployed people, are foreigners—people without German citizenship. This means that they are hugely overrepresented in the unemployment figures, as foreigners make up 16% of the total population.

There is a similar trend among the long-term unemployed—defined as those who have been out of work for two years or more. Of the 881,000 long-term unemployed in Germany, 52% have a migrant background.

Differences between Germans and non-Germans also run through the levels of education. While 51% of unemployed Germans have not completed vocational training, the figure is almost 82% for non-Germans.

Read it.

Northwestern University’s Students for Justice in Palestine chapter held an anarchist training session for its members at which it cited propaganda from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine terror group urging U.S. students to “build an Intifada” and “destroy amerika.”

Northwestern’s Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) chapter featured two radical pamphlets as part of its materials for the Thursday training, titled “Organizing Safety 101.” One of those, an anarchist pamphlet, quoted a PFLP leader and called on students to “build an Intifada” so they could “destroy amerika.” The other, crafted by the SJP chapter, featured a PFLP cartoon on the cover and encouraged students to “channel [their] anger” so they could “aid in the fight” against Israel.

The event coincides with the Trump administration’s intensifying efforts to address anti-Semitism on college campuses across the nation, slashing more than $430 million in federal funds at Columbia University and threatening to cut another $9 billion in grants and contracts at Harvard University. And on Tuesday, the Trump administration froze $790 million at Northwestern amid a civil rights investigation, the New York Times reported.

Read it.

Democrats don’t hate Trump… they want to be him, mimicking his style but failing to connect with voters, exposing their desperation and lack of authenticity.

By now, everyone and his brother is familiar with Trump Derangement Syndrome, that particular pathology that drives liberals and even many conservatives absolutely batty. Not only does Trump drive his opponents and detractors to fits of apoplexy, but he also compels them to make foolish statements and to embrace positions they would otherwise never even consider. During Trump’s first presidency, at the height of the COVID panic, the left openly and ardently dismissed a vaccine as partisan quackery. Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, then running against Trump, openly warned that “his” vaccine was not to be trusted, that they would be hesitant to take it, and that they were sure the experts would not recommend it. As soon as they hit 270 electoral votes, however, that vaccine was suddenly the greatest thing in the history of ever, and you better take it…or else! And while there are good and just reasons to support Ukraine in its war with Russia, it is almost inarguable that the American Left’s obsession with the war, with Ukraine, and with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is a byproduct of its belief that Donald Trump is on Putin’s side and, therefore, they must do precisely the opposite. Whatever he likes, they hate. Whatever he supports, they oppose. Whatever he says, they say the opposite. And so it has been for roughly a decade now.

Lately, however, a new Trump-related syndrome has begun to manifest among his opponents, one that is equally potent, equally idiocy-inducing, and equally self-defeating. This new syndrome has been prevalent among Democrats for the last several months at least, but only recently has it clearly distinguished itself from all the Democrats’ other pathologies. The key moment in the diagnosis of this syndrome came just the other night, when Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett (D, TX) spoke at a banquet in Los Angeles and referred to her state’s Governor Greg Abbott as “Governor Hot Wheels.” Abbott, of course, is wheelchair-bound after a freak accident 41 years ago left him paralyzed. Crockett insisted that she meant no offense and adamantly refused to apologize.

Read it.

It’s no secret that American colleges and universities, once revered as pillars of intellectual integrity, have devolved into hotbeds of anti-American ideologies and radical left-wing activism. Rather than fostering critical thinking, they are actively pushing toxic agendas and even championing dangerous extremism.

But now, we have a chance to change all that.

President Donald Trump’s administration’s decisive action to strip federal funding from universities that have allowed extremist ideologies to thrive has opened a critical opportunity for alumni and donors to step in and make a meaningful difference.

Read it.

Many have suspected that Dr. Jill Biden played a key role in saving the country by facilitating Donald Trump’s long-awaited return to the White House. Many have assumed the former first lady (and acting president of the United States) was possessed of an insatiable lust for power, which drove her to insist that her enfeebled octogenarian husband, Joe Biden, run for reelection. The ill-advised decision nearly destroyed the Democratic Party when Biden’s cognitive impairment became impossible to ignore. It forced the party to rally around Kamala Harris, the most incompetent presidential candidate since Hillary Clinton, all but ensuring that Trump would win a second term and usher in the Golden Age of America.

The revelations unearthed in several new books by political journalists—conveniently published after the election—confirm that these suspicions and assumptions were correct.

“[L]et’s be honest, Jill was a thousand percent behind this,” a Biden ally told journalists Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes, authors of Fight: Inside the Wildest Battle for the White House. “So, she was pushing it. The staff was all pushing it. At the end of the day, I don’t think anyone in that inner circle was presenting the president any contrary advice that this thing is not going to be easy or maybe this is not the best thing for the Democratic Party.”

The Times.

London is no longer one of the top five wealthiest cities in the world after losing a higher proportion of millionaires than anywhere other than Moscow.

An annual report on global wealth says the UK’s capital has lost 11,300 dollar millionaires over the past year, including 18 centimillionaires and two billionaires. A centimillionaire is someone who has at least $100 million, while a billionaire has more than $1,000 million.

The study, conducted for the advisory firm Henley & Partners by New World Wealth, defines wealth as “liquid investable” assets, which means cash, bonds and shares but excludes property wealth.

The assessment was conducted before the recent stock market falls that followed the announcement of Donald Trump’s tariffs.

Read it.

A Canadian government task force responsible for monitoring foreign interference in elections has disclosed that Chinese state-affiliated social media posts were amplifying messages in support of unelected leftist Prime Minister Mark Carney.

The messages appeared on a WeChat news account called “Youli-Youmian,” which the Security and Intelligence Threats to Elections (SITE) Task Force has linked to the Chinese Communist Party.

“The SITE Task Force observed large spikes of coordinated inauthentic behavior preceding the election campaign, on March 10, and again during the writ period on March 25, 2025,” the agency stated.

Read it.

The White House announced that a Honduran national in the U.S. illegally has been indicted for allegedly stealing over 40 firearms from a Tennessee gun store, according to Breitbart and a DOJ press release. The guns, still bearing price tags, were found in his car.

“Under President Trump, criminals like this are being hunted down and taken off our streets,” the White House said on X.

The DOJ wrote in a press release: “Carlos Alberto Diaz-Chavez, 21, a citizen of Honduras without legal status in the United States, has been charged by criminal complaint with being an Alien in possession of a firearm, possession of a machinegun, possession with intent to distribute methamphetamine, and possession of a firearm in furtherance of a drug trafficking crime, announced Acting United States Attorney Robert E. McGuire for the Middle District of Tennessee.”

Read it.

A host of teachers in Vienna have come forward to express their frustration about the difficulties of trying to teach migrant children—who evidently don’t want to be taught.

According to the publication Exxpress, Austria’s capital city, Vienna spends €2.2 million per year on free German, English, and mathematics courses for 12,000 children, most of them migrants, to help them integrate into society.

But it seems that the well-intentioned programme is utterly useless: many of the children don’t show up to classes at all, and when they do, they refuse to pay attention. Alarmingly, their parents don’t seem to care about their children’ s education either.

“Some children scream loudly in Arabic, eat crisps, throw worksheets on the floor, or run around the room,” one teacher complained. The children show absolutely no respect towards their teachers, some of whom are close to tears by the time their classes come to an end.

Most of the kids barely speak German, and can hardly put a complete sentence together, even though they attend German-language schools in Vienna.

Read it.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has accused Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky of repeatedly deceiving the Trump administration about the proposed critical minerals agreement with the United States.

In a candid interview with conservative journalist Tucker Carlson, Bessent alleged that Zelensky “lied to our faces three times” about signing the deal, which would provide U.S. companies with access to Ukraine’s vital strategic minerals.”

Bessent explain that Carlson that he flew to Kyiv to sign the agreement with Zelensky—but the Ukrainian leader refused. Instead, Zelensky agreed to sign the deal during a meeting with Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio in Munich, Germany, which never occurred.

Politico, a Voice of the Crust.

Exactly right.

Bondi pointed to the administration’s difficulty in standing up its planned ban on transgender troops serving in the military. A second federal judge in late March blocked the effort, calling it blatantly discriminatory.

“It’s basically a game of whack-a-mole with these District Court judges around the country who have a tremendous amount of power, they believe they do,” she said. “But that’s why we’re appealing all of these cases of course up to the Supreme Court.”

The basic question is, Who runs the Executive branch? The President, as it says in the Constitution? Or the Deep State, as has been developing since Nixon’s day?

Read it.

The Left has a long, storied tradition of staring reality squarely in the face and refusing to believe their lying eyes. And nowhere is this more evident than the Left’s defence of multiculturalism—a project so disastrous that even its architects have admitted it to be dead. Yet here we are, in 2025, watching senior Labour politicians prancing around the corpse of cultural diversity, insisting it’s still got a pulse.

While the fabled benefits of multiculturalism are yet to materialise, its ill effects are now undeniable. In Britain, despite an impressive majority of 174 seats in last year’s general election, the Labour Party’s diversity chickens have finally come home to roost. First we were treated to the shameful spectacle of Angela Rayner, begging male Muslim voters (naturally, there were no women in sight) not to oust her from her Ashton-under-Lyne seat; promising that if Labour got into power it would ‘recognise Palestine.’

The Other McCain.

Matt Walsh’s Daily Wire article is “members only,” so in case you’ve been hiding under a rock — or getting your news from the mainstream media — I’ll summarize what happened in Frisco, Texas, this week: A high school junior, Austin Metcalf, was stabbed to death Wednesday morning at a track meet by a senior from another high school, Karmelo Anthony.

Read it.

One in 10 people say they have been harmed by the NHS, according to a study published in the BMJ Quality & Safety Journal.

Researchers surveyed over 10,000 people across England, Wales, and Scotland between 2021 and 2022 and found that 988 of them (9.7 percent) had reported experiencing physical or emotional harm caused by the health service in the previous three years.

According to researchers at the University of Oxford’s Population Health and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM), 6.2 percent said they experienced harm owing to care they had received.

The remaining 3.5 percent blamed the harm on having a lack of access to treatment.

How about that great government-provided health care? Don’t you wish we had a system like that in the U.S.?

Well, it’s coming….

The Foundry.

Civil disobedience practiced by the likes of Henry David Thoreau and Martin Luther King Jr. is one thing. Crimes against people or property for political ends are quite another. The latter risks return to the law of the jungle, a cure worse than the disease.

That provides the framework to assess the proliferation of criminal attacks on Tesla vehicles to express opposition to Elon Musk’s politics, including his virtual duumvirate with President Donald Trump and affinity for Nazi-like memes, gestures, and ideas. For starters, there are multiple peaceful avenues to protest Musk. Boycott Tesla or sell Tesla vehicles. Criticize Musk and urge others to boycott his enterprises. Organize politically to oppose Musk, such as in the recent Wisconsin Supreme Court election.

Musk’s nemeses are disingenuous in their professed opposition to Nazis. BMW, Mercedes-Benz, and Volkswagen have escaped their wrath. But all three profited from Jewish slave labor during the Third Reich. BMW’s Herbert Quandt was allied with the Nazi regime and benefited from the slave labor of at least 57,000 Jews. Gunther Quandt, Herbert’s father, acquired numerous Jewish-owned companies at forced, fire-sale prices. Quandt heirs are majority owners of BMW. An independent study from 2011 found that “the Quandts were linked inseparably with the crimes of the Nazis.” The specific value of BMW’s reparations to Israel is unknown.

The Times.

The exodus of wealth from Britain has accelerated since the turn of the year, fuelling fears that the abolition of the non-domiciled tax regime will wipe billions of pounds from the economy.

Inquiries about moving overseas were nearly three times higher in the first three months of this year compared with the same period last year, claims Henley & Partners, which offers global relocation services.

The company said the exodus was being led by non-doms before their privileged tax status ends this weekend. But wealthy entrepreneurs were also heading for the exit.

Read it.

Half of all women murdered in Spain so far in 2025 were killed by foreigners, even though foreigners make up just 13.4% of the country’s population. This figure is alarming, especially given that the proportion of foreign-born perpetrators has tripled since data started being recorded in 2003.

This trend raises serious questions about the effectiveness of the migration and integration policies of successive governments over the past few decades. Of particular concern is the high rate of femicides committed by individuals from Morocco, who are statistically almost six times more likely to commit such crimes than Spaniards. The Romanian community also shows a troubling pattern, with a rate 3.4 times higher than the national average relative to its population size..

Moreover, the high concentration of these crimes in specific regions is also worrying. Andalusia and Catalonia stand out in particular, regions with a significant increase in their foreign population in recent years. Andalusia has had the highest absolute number of murders of women since 2003, closely followed by Catalonia and the Valencia region. A particularly alarming fact is that foreign perpetrators in the Madrid region now outnumber Spaniards.

Off-Guardian.

We’re mere inches away from actual legislation based almost entirely on the made-up events of a fictional TV show.

People are rightly pointing this out as ludicrous – and it is – but that’s seeing it backwards. We’re not getting laws passed because of TV shows, we’re getting TV shows made so they can pass laws.

The studio behind Adolescence gets government funding, as does Tender, the charity that was also invited to that absurd meeting.

Netflix’s finances have been a source of speculation for years, but its political associations, alongside a track record of producing content that perfectly fits a mainstream agenda, really speaks for itself.

Government, charities, corporate media. It’s all one organism.

Does that mean the show itself was cynically produced to fill a need and sell an agenda?

Absolutely certainly yes.

Read it.

Roger Severino sued then-President Joe Biden in 2021 for dismissing him before the end of his term on an independent agency called the Administrative Conference of the United States.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit’s decision against Severino laid the groundwork for the court’s decision on Friday that President Donald Trump can fire holdover Biden appointees at “independent agencies.”

The appeals court paused a U.S. District Court’s orders restoring fired members of the National Labor Relations Board and Merit Systems Protection Board to their jobs.

Quod abiit circum venit circum.

Jonathan Turley.

… which tells us who the real Nazis are.

Read it.

Stern Magazine is calling for mass conscription of German youths to join the army, including to ensure the defense of “freedom and diversity.” The reaction to the article has been harsh to say the least, with hundreds of negative comments directed at Stern.

Read it.

The Sentencing Council of England And Wales, a non-departmental public body (faceless bureaucracy) which determines the guidelines for court punishments of convicted offenders, has recently made controversial changes and ignited a firestorm among the native British populace.

The council has announced that special exceptions in sentencing will be made for ethnic minority offenders (the majority of violent crime in Britain) and religious minority offenders, as well as female offenders. In other words, everyone except white males will enjoy reduced sentencing, creating a two tier justice system that targets white men for harsher treatment.

Victor Davis Hanson.

We’re talking about the fact that in 2020, 158 million people voted. Four years later, only 155 million. That’s only happened, I think, two or three times in American history, where four years later, fewer people voted. But the country grew by 11 million people. So, that was kind of odd that we went from an 11 million increase in population but we decreased by 3 million voters.

The other thing that was very odd was that traditionally we only had about 40% of people voting before Election Day, either through mail-in balloting or early balloting. And that was very apparent in 2018, when a traditional 35% to 40%, depending on the state, did not vote on Election Day. But given the changes that were democratically inspired, on Election Day, in 2020, 70% of the people had already voted. And about 55% to 60% of those, even higher in some states, were Democrats.

…

So, just what am I getting at? There were a lot of very strange things. You remember the Hunter Biden laptop? Antony Blinken, Mike Morell—the former CIA director, interim director—they got 51 people, right before the Oct. 23 debate, to lie—and they knew it was a lie because the FBI had authenticated the laptop—to say that the laptop had all the hallmarks of Russian disinformation. And we know from a, albeit conservative, poll, TechnoMetrica, that that affected 8 out of 10 people who were polls votes.

That was a stunning thing to do.

And then, in addition to that, the FBI was inserting agents into the social media network at Facebook and Twitter and their job was to censor the news. What Molly Ball in her Time essay said was to suppress disinformation and misinformation.

Read it.

And judges … don’t forget the judges….

Judge James Ho of the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals recently charged that the nation’s major law firms are infested with the woke ideology of the Left, infusing them with “institutional bias” and leading them to provide pro bono and other assistance on only one side of the political divide.

After more than two decades in the heart of darkness—Washington, D.C.—my own observations of the legal community match those of Ho.

Pro bono work for liberal causes gets you praised and rewarded. But seek to do pro bono work for conservative causes, and you will be criticized, denied permission to engage, and possibly thrown out of your law firm.

Read it.

Not that it would matter if he were.

Venezuelan illegal immigrant Leonel Moreno, known as the “migrant influencer,” who amassed a half million followers on TikTok, was deported to Caracas early Friday morning following his 2024 arrest by ICE in Ohio.

In a series of short videos on TikTok, Moreno bragged about receiving ‘stacks of cash’ from American taxpayers and urged other illegal aliens to take advantage of all the free money progressives were handing out. He has thanked “Papa Biden” for the free cash.

Thank you, Joe Biden.

Read it.

BLUF: Pissing contest between Trump and the ICC. Whose dick is longer, only time will tell.