Watch it.

Between governments and activists, our best prospect for clean energy is being strangled in its cradle.

The only country that has actually built a couple of small modular reactors is (wait for it) Red China. (My, what a surprise.)

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The White House and its Office of Management and Budget instructed federal agencies to use a “template” for determining the cost of implementing President Joe Biden’s executive order to encourage voter participation, according to government emails obtained by The Daily Signal.

Critics use the term “Bidenbucks” to refer to the president’s controversial order from 2021, which directs federal agencies such as the U.S. Department of Agriculture to get involved in elections.

Several members of Congress contend that Biden’s order on turning out the vote for elections could violate the Antideficiency Act, a law that has three parts. It prohibits federal employees from obligating tax dollars not authorized by Congress, prohibits officials from not spending money as appropriated by Congress, and prohibits agencies from accepting voluntary service from individuals.

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According to new research, 23 percent of bachelor’s degree programs and 43 percent of master’s degree programs have a negative ROI.

The number of jobs for Grievance Studies majors is very limited.

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Eco-friendly brake cables are being eaten by foxes, after manufacturers switched from petroleum-based insulation to soy, forcing owners to wrap their cars in tarpaulins.

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Dozens of students walked out of Duke University’s commencement ceremony on Sunday as some chanted “free Palestine” to protest its guest speaker, comedian Jerry Seinfeld, for supporting Israel throughout the war in Gaza, according to videos of the event posted on social media.

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An Ohio police officer was shot and killed after being “ambushed” while answering a disturbance call over the weekend, and a suspect was being sought, authorities said Sunday.

Police in the Cleveland suburb of Euclid said officers were dispatched just before 10 p.m. Saturday to a home due to a reported disturbance.

“While police were investigating, a gunman ambushed an officer, striking him with gunfire,” police said. The officer, whose name wasn’t immediately released, was taken to a hospital but succumbed to his injuries, police said.

Euclid Ohio, as of the 2020 Census, is 30% white and 64% black.

Newsbusters.

Nine years ago this week, ABC News was roiled by a journalistic scandal: Their top political anchor had refused to disclose his big dollar contributions to the Clinton Foundation at the same time he used ABC’s airwaves in an attempt to discredit an anti-Clinton author, an obvious favor to the just-launched Hillary Clinton 2016 presidential campaign.

Yet after a few days of bad headlines, and a pair of on-air apologies, George Stephanopoulos simply resumed covering politics as if nothing had happened. ABC’s casual attitude matched the blind eye the network had turned to the anchor’s obvious bias over two decades as a pundit, correspondent and anchor.

George Stephanopoulis played the role of Michael J. Fox in the Clinton administration.

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A group of fifteen Republican Senators want the IRS to investigate whether groups involved in recent anti-Israel protests on college campuses violated their tax-exempt status by supporting Hamas, a designated terrorist group.

This ought to be a no-brainer but in these degenerate modern times it probably won’t happen.

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Scientists may have found the answer to manufacturing plastics products that actually break down without forming into microplastics, or tiny pieces of plastics that could linger for thousands of years.

Researchers at the University of California, San Diego, and materials company Algenesis said they found a way to construct plastic with polyurethane, a “bio-based” polyurethane polymer that could compost and break down in the natural environment, compared to typical petroleum-based plastic polymers, which typically are inaccessible to biological processing, according to a study published in Scientific Reports earlier this year.

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More than most technical procedures in the ancient world, drilling of hard stone such as quartz and granite has evoked awe and puzzlement. Neither wall paintings, nor textual information, nor excavated material has provided complete answers as to how drilling was done. As a conse­quence, there has been scholarly contro­versy. One such disagreement occurred between two eminent Egyptologists, A. Lucas and Sir Flinders Petrie. Their argument revolved around a difficult and important question, namely, how did the ancient Egyptians of the 3rd millennium B.C. drill granite?

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“If you’re not with me, then you are my enemy,” proclaims the young, rebellious Jedi Knight Anakin Skywalker during the emotional climax of Star Wars Episode 3: Revenge of the Sith. To this, his disappointed master, Obi-Wan Kenobi, replies, “Only a Sith deals in absolutes. I will do what I must,” as he switches on his lightsabre. Even though the lightsabre duel that follows is universally praised as a piece of cinematic brilliance, the dialogue has left many Star Wars fans annoyed and disillusioned.

The problem is this: To claim that 1) “Only a Sith” 2) “deals in absolutes” is in itself an absolutist statement; we have here an internal contradiction. If this is really the case, then Obi-Wan has just proven himself to be a Sith. It is safe to say that this is not what George Lucas had in mind. So, theoretically, the whole philosophy of the Star Wars franchise falls flat as a result of this claim.

There is a stark parallel between the frustration that Star Wars fans express about this piece of half-baked Jedi philosophy and that of the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor about the theory underpinning liberalism.

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Concerned by the increasing number of attacks on elected leaders, the German government is working on a plan to provide more protection for politicians, while ordinary citizens will be left to their own devices.

Europeans have always been more statist than Americans.

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The terms “fascist” and “fascism” are continuously bandied about today. But those who use these words most seem to understand them least, such that many of today’s self-styled anti-fascists paradoxically take on the central features of fascism to an extraordinary degree.

We can see contemporary fascist tendencies manifesting on both ends of the political spectrum — not only among white supremacists but also in the character types described by Eugene Rivers as “trust fund Becky with the good hair revolutionary communist” or “white boy Carl the anarchist from the Upper East Side who is a junior at Sarah Lawrence.”

Fascism is obviously worth opposing, but to be truly anti-fascist requires an understanding of how this ideology manifests in history and what the word actually designates. Already by the end of World War II, George Orwell noted that the term “fascist” was used so indiscriminately that it had become degraded to the level of a swearword synonymous with “bully.”

Eugene Meyer, whom I knew at Yale and who went on to help found the Federalist Society, was fond of saying that ‘fascist’ merely means ‘something I don’t like’, while ‘equitable’ merely means ‘something I like’.

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Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson recently traveled to Springfield with a big wish list of stuff he wants from state lawmakers. Among them, $1 billion in extra funding for Chicago Public Schools.

We have a host of reasons why his demand should be categorically rejected. Among them, CPS already spends $29,000 per student, Chicago teachers are already among the nation’s highest paid in big cities and the Chicago Teachers Union refuses to close the many empty, failing schools across the district. Not to mention that both CPS and CTU refuse to hold themselves accountable to students. Just 20% of minority CPS children can read at grade level and in math it’s even worse.

Now add to that the growing rate of teachers simply not showing up to school. The U.S. Department of Education’s definition of chronic teacher absenteeism is 10 or more absences in a school year.

I think we will see, within my lifetime, public schools reduced to being the last resort of people who can’t afford private or home schooling.

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When people gripe about paying taxes and the government being a poor the absolute worst possible capital allocation, this is what they are talking about: $7.5 billion in investments for electric vehicles has – in two years – produced just 7 charging stations across four states.

The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, signed by Biden in November 2021, allocated $7.5 billion for EV charging, the Washington Post writes. Of this amount, $5 billion went to states as “formula funding” for the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure program to establish a network of fast chargers along major highways.

Today, there’s seven chargers with a total of just 38 parking spots. And, come on: when the Post is calling it out, you know the results have been horrible.

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The machine has been built and put into action over nearly a decade but largely in secret. Its way of doing business has been via surreptitious contacts with media and tech companies, intelligence carve-outs in “fact-checking” organizations, payoffs, and various other clever strategies, all directed toward boosting some sources of information and suppressing others. The goal has always been to advance regime narratives and curate the public mind.

And yet, based on its operations and insofar as we can tell, it had every intention of remaining secret. This is for a reason. A systematic effort by government to bully private sector companies into a particular narrative while suppressing dissent contradicts American law and tradition. It also violates human rights as understood since the Enlightenment. It was a consensus, until very recently, that free speech was essential to the functioning of the good society.

Four years ago, many of us suspected censorship was going on, that the throttling and banning was not merely a mistake or the result of zealous employees stepping out of line. Three years ago, the proof started to arrive. Two years ago, it became a flood. With the Twitter files from a year ago, we had all the proof we needed that the censorship was systematic, directed, and highly effective. But even then, we only knew a fraction of it.

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One of Chevy’s longest running vehicle models has now fallen at the hands of the company’s transition to EVs. The Chevy Malibu will be no longer, according to a new report from Car and Driver.

The Chevy Malibu, one of the longest-running and most successful vehicles in history, is being discontinued again. Chevrolet informed Car and Driver that production will end in November 2024 as the automaker invests $390 million in its Fairfax Assembly Plant in Kansas.

Car and Driver reports that GM will also pause production of the Cadillac XT4 in January to retool for the Ultium-based Bolt EV. Production will resume in late 2025, with the XT4 and Bolt EV sharing an assembly line.

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New reporting from Forbes published last week outlines a host of college campuses employers are turning to instead of Ivy League institutions — including two in Texas.

The University of Texas at Austin and Rice University joined the rankings of new public and private school elites which are “attracting the smartest students and plaudits from employers.”

Forbes’ researchers said the evaluation came as the traditional Ivy League institutions have “faced a barrage of complaints in recent years” related to admissions policies, grade inflations at several elite schools and university officials’ responses to on-campus protests regarding the Israel-Hamas War.

For Forbes’ methodology, researchers removed the eight classic Ivy League institutions (Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Brown, Penn, Columbia, Dartmouth and Cornell) as well as the “Ivy-plus yardstick”: Stanford University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Duke University and the University of Chicago.

I’d include UCLA in that latter category. However, the point of the Ivy League is that they are private institutions; UT Austin is a public school, and so wouldn’t qualify, nor is it really of the same quality as the Ivies, although Rice certainly is. If one is looking for value for money, Rice would be hard to beat.

NBC.

The woman had flooring, a computer, a desk, a printer, a Keurig and a pantry of food in the space, which was 10 to 15 feet long, five feet wide and approximately 8 feet tall at its highest point, according to the Midland Police Department.

Thank you, Joe Biden.

Read it.

Your Religion of Peace at work.

Newsbusters.

On Friday night’s Real Time with Bill Maher on HBO, the host complained about how the Democrats from Merrick Garland on down “blew it at every turn” on creating legal problems for Trump, so now before the election, “it’s Stormy or bust.” Even there, Maher argued porn star Stormy Daniels is a “bad witness” because she has changed her story in front of this jury, from empowered porn actress to victim.

Vox.

Maybe you know the routine. Every so often, I go through my refrigerator, check labels on the items, and throw out anything that’s a month, or a week, or maybe a few days past the date on the label. I might stop to sniff, but for my whole adult life, I’ve figured that the problem was obvious — my jam or almond milk or package of shredded Italian cheese blend had “expired” — and the fix was simple: Into the garbage it goes.

This habit is so ingrained that when I think about eating food that’s gone past its date, I get a little queasy. I’ve only had food poisoning once or twice in my life, always from restaurants, but the idea is still there in my head: past the date, food will make me sick. You’ll probably never catch me dumpster-diving.

I know, on some intellectual level, that throwing away food is probably wrong. The statistics are damning. Forty percent of food produced in America heads to the landfill or is otherwise wasted. That adds up. Every year, the average American family throws out somewhere between $1,365 and $2,275, according to a landmark 2013 study co-authored by the Harvard Food Law and Policy Clinic and the Natural Resources Defense Council. It’s a huge economic loss for food growers and retailers, who often have to ditch weirdly shaped produce or overstocked food that didn’t sell.

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Sometimes places ban or restrict animals. For example, an apartment building might not allow dogs. Or an airline might charge you money to transport your cat. But the law requires them to allow service animals, for example guide dogs for the blind. A newer law also requires some of these places to allow emotional support animals, ie animals that help people with mental health problems like depression or anxiety. So for example, if you’re depressed, but having your dog nearby makes you feel better, then a landlord has to let you keep your dog in the apartment. Or if you’re anxious, but petting your cat calms you down, then an airline has to take your cat free of charge.

Clinically and scientifically, this is great. Many studies show that pets help people with mental health problems. Depressed people really do benefit from a dog who loves them. Anxious people really do feel calmer when they hold a cute kitten.

Legally, it’s a racket. In order to benefit from these rules, you need for a psychiatrist to write you an “emotional support animal letter”, saying that your pet is actually an emotional support animal. In theory, the psychiatrist should evaluate you carefully, using their vast expertise to distinguish between an emotional support animal and a normal pet. In practice, nobody has a rubric for this evaluation that makes sense. I’m not saying there aren’t long, scholarly-sounding papers with twenty-seven authors from the psychiatry departments of top medical schools called things like A Rubric For The Emotional Support Animal Evaluation That Makes Sense. I’m saying that when you take out all the legalese, the executive summary is “think really hard about whether this animal really helps this person, then think really hard about whether it will cause trouble, and if it helps the person and won’t cause trouble, sign the letter”.

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U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officials in the El Paso region seized more than 124 pounds of fentanyl and cocaine last week in four separate incidents, amid criticism of lax border policies.

On April 30, officers working at the Bridge of the Americas seized cocaine totaling 42.5 pounds, according to a May 3 press release from the CBP. The drugs were found to be concealed inside a Hyundai Elantra vehicle allegedly driven by a 48-year-old American citizen. “The seizure was made when CBP officers monitoring the Low Energy Portal inspection system spotted anomalies in the appearance of the vehicle and advised primary CBP officers,” the release noted.

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Time to leave.

ZMan rips off the bandage.

called Human Bio-Diversity. We tend to live around people who look like us and think like us. It is why after more than half a century of trying, the United States is as segregated as it was before civil rights. Humans naturally self-segregate and that is both natural and based in natural properties.

The term Human Bio-Diversity is credited to Steve Sailer, who years ago hosted an email list using that label to discuss advances in the human sciences. For a time, the HBD subculture functioned as a sort of counterculture, reacting to the dominant blank slate culture, while refuting their claims about the human condition. It has remained a gateway drug for many who end up in the dissident camp.

Thirty years ago when The Bell Curve was released, what would become the HBD world was primarily focused on intelligence. After close to a century of systematically measuring human intelligence and comparing the results to various social outcomes, science seemed to prove what people have always suspected. Intelligence is heritable and genetically determined.

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At this week’s Milken Institute Global Conference in Beverly Hills, while the financial elite discussed artificial intelligence and Elon Musk’s latest ventures, a crucial and fiery debate on diversity unfolded behind closed doors. About 40 attendees, including influential Wall Street figures and senior executives of color, engaged in a heated discussion with hedge fund manager Bill Ackman over his controversial stance on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI).

In a private, invitation-only panel, Ackman – who’s come under intense fire from the woke-industrial-complex, faced criticism for his public denunciation of DEI initiatives, which he has labeled as “inherently racist and illegal.” The dialogue, which lasted about an hour, saw attendees harangue Ackman’s over his views, accusing him of attacking women’s rights (as opposed to the trans movement?) and people of color in the U.S., Bloomberg reports. The panel included notable figures such as Jarvis V. Hollingsworth of the $200 billion Teacher Retirement System of Texas, and Dina DiLorenzo of Guggenheim Investments – which manages over $300 billion, among others.

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Some years ago in the U.K. a 15-year-old ninny decided to run to Syria to become a “Bride of ISIS.” When the reality of that life sank in, of course she demanded to be let BACK IN to the U.K. She even claimed she would be a force to fight terrorism if allowed to come home. By some miracle, her appeal was denied.

Looking at the Campus Islamofascists shrieking and threatening Jewish students, one is struck dumb that even after the savagery of 10/7, a large majority are women. At least the ones the brave jihadist creeps put out front as a barrier between themselves and possible trouble. They are used to that because, back in Gaza, they put weapons of war and Hamas soldiers under mosques, schools, and hospitals, the better to use women and children as human shields.

But why would American women fall for their propaganda and sign up to be a Hamas Handmaiden?

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The battle started a decade ago with conservative parents in the eastern areas of Baton Rouge, Louisiana seeking the right to send their children to better public schools. Their requests for a redistricting to build a new school in their area was denied by the city. Year after year Louisiana public schools have been rated some of the worst performing schools in the US, not just in education but also in safety.

Then there was the ongoing threat of rising crime combined with persistent Democrat controlled leadership; the policies of progressives directly contributed to repeat offenders being released onto the streets. Conservative residents, feeling that Baton Rouge leaders had no intention of representing their interests or listening to their concerns, decided they had to take drastic measures to make a change.

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… which will inevitably become another hotbed and headquarters for anti-Israeli terrorism. That’s how Gaza got started.

In a grand procession last week, Sinai militia leader Ibrahim al-Organi arrived at a ceremony to inaugurate the Arab Tribes Union, a new paramilitary entity that brings together five tribal groups from across Egypt. The celebration named President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi as the union’s “honorary president”, while also announcing plans to build Sisi City on the site of al-Arjaa, a village in Rafah near the Egypt-Israel border.

The formation of this alliance comes at a critical time and place, as Israel this week launched a long-threatened ground offensive against the Palestinian city of Rafah, just a short distance from where the Egyptian ceremony was held. Around 1.4 million displaced Palestinians have been sheltering in Rafah since Israel launched its war on Gaza last October.

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Think globally, self-harm locally.

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If you are in the hospital emergency room, and that’s where most people without insurance go, then you get treated. Otherwise, many hospitals are turning to pay in advance for services.

…

It’s interesting to note that hospitals want payment in advance for births. Most illegals just walk in and never pay for anything.

Nonpayment is one of the reasons costs are soaring for everyone who does pay. Medicare for all is not the answer. When consumers have no skin in the game, no one is interested in reducing costs.

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Guess wrong, get stuck.

Ride the fashion, get a mashin’.

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Roxanne Mathai, a lieutenant with the Bexar County Sheriff’s Office (BCSO) at the time she traveled to Washington, will receive $395,000 in a settlement reached after she sued her former employer, the parties in the case told The Epoch Times.

Newsbusters.

In a May 9 blog post, YouTube detailed its plans to target and censor certain election-related content ahead of the European Union (EU) elections this June. This includes removing content and terminating channels that YouTube considers to be spreading “disinformation” online. “Our global team of reviewers combine with machine learning technology to apply these policies at scale, 24/7,” the platform boasted. YouTube’s blog came soon after the Meta Oversight Board urged all tech companies to engage in election censorship.

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Here’s the 7,325,793,257th reason I plan to homeschool my children.

Rebecca Joynes, a math teacher in Manchester, UK, just had a baby with a teenager she slept with. She did so while out on bail for sex with a different one of her students.

I guess raping one kid just wasn’t enough for Miss Joynes.

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I quit buying from Target when they started allowing biological males into their women’s bathrooms.

UPDATE: Heritage Economist on Target Pride: DOJ Should be ‘Suing Them Into Oblivion’

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If “The Peter Principle” were published today, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre would be a case study in the phenomenon, now called “failing upward.” In Jean-Pierre’s case, that’s reflected in her work for the short-lived Democratic presidential campaigns of John Edwards in 2004 and Martin O’Malley in 2016, and now as the chief spokeswoman for the Biden administration. On Monday, she will mark her second anniversary in that role.

In recent weeks, however, with the 2024 election campaign shifting into high gear, there have been well-sourced reports that high-ranking figures in the Biden administration are not-so-subtly seeking to push Jean-Pierre out of the role—for which she was never qualified to begin with. Many of the same administration figures reportedly behind those efforts to oust her are, not surprisingly, denying the accuracy of the reports.

The New York Post quoted a source as saying the high-ranking administration figures “‘were trying to find Karine a graceful exit’ because of the ugly optics of removing her against her will,” especially because she thinks she’s doing a good job. (One face-saving exit strategy was to offer her the presidency of EMILY’s List, an abortion rights group.)

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Scan news accounts of anti-Israel campus and street protesters. Read their demands and manifestos. Collate the confusion from the Biden administration after Hamas’ Oct. 7 terrorism in Israel.

Here are 10 of their most common untruths about Oct. 7 and the Israel-Hamas war that followed.

Newsbusters.

On Thursday, UnHerd released an interview featuring the three men, who discussed the complex web of NGOs and state agencies that make up the “Censorship Industrial Complex,” the origins of the industry and the techniques it uses, as well as the underlying ideology driving the players behind it.

Shellenberger did not hold back in his criticism of these entities, describing their mission as driven primarily by a sense of bigotry and religious zeal.

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U.S. Border Patrol agents arrested nearly 500 migrants in one sector along the Canadian border, a one-week total that eclipsed all of Fiscal Year 2021.

Reuters.

The hippies of the sixties are going gray.

UPDATE: What was the point of the JustStopOil Magna Carta stunt?

The Foundry.

She was there to smear Trump as much as possible in an attempt to turn people away from supporting him in November. That’s all this trial is about.

The Foundry.

Apart from the taxpayer-funded lawfare being waged against former President Donald Trump by leftist prosecutors in New York, Atlanta, and Washington, there is no clearer proof that the Left has embraced “by any means necessary” as its credo than the politicization of Secret Service protection of President Joe Biden’s presidential rivals.

Not only has Biden’s Department of Homeland Security denied five requests for Secret Service protection from independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on the flimsiest of grounds, but now the Democratic congressman from Mississippi who chaired the kangaroo court Jan. 6 committee is proposing to strip Trump of his Secret Service detail if he were convicted in any of the politically motivated trials he’s facing.

Never mind that this brazen legislation, championed by Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., has no chance of being enacted by Congress or that the courts would surely enjoin it as unconstitutional if it were. Its sheer cold-bloodedness is appalling.

The Foundry.

Why does the Biden administration want open borders so badly? For three very big reasons. One is ideology, which I covered in last week’s BorderLine column. Another is extortion, which I will cover in next week’s column. But this week, I look at how the Left uses illegal immigration to give itself an unfair electoral advantage.

First, illegal immigration affects congressional representation because the apportionment of members of Congress by state is based on U.S. census data. As Heritage Foundation Border Security and Immigration Center Director Lora Ries writes, the census currently counts all noncitizens—from green card holders to illegal aliens—in addition to U.S. citizens for the purposes of apportioning congressional districts among the states. The more citizens in a state, the more congressional districts—i.e., seats in Congress—a state gets. In turn, the number of congressional districts in a state determines how many Electoral College votes that state receives. (Heritage founded The Daily Signal in 2014.)

While president, Donald Trump tried to restore the U.S. citizenship question on the 2020 census and exclude all noncitizens from apportionment calculations. Yet court challenges prevented him from doing so prior to the deadline for getting a new census form printed and distributed. Joe Biden then immediately terminated the effort when he took office. That should tell you which states and party benefit most from the population overcount.

Newsbusters.

The Times spent some 3,500 words and used Artificial Intelligence and four staffers (Karen Yourish, Danielle Ivory, Jennifer Valentino-DeVries, and Alex Lemonides) to try to paint the GOP as the true anti-semitic party.