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“Glory to God in the highest heaven, and on earth peace to those on whom his favor rests.”
- Luke 2:14
Research: The AI Boom Has Reshaped the American Economy
The AI boom is on track to become the largest single-industry infrastructure buildout in more than a century, according to new estimates published by the Brookings Institution.
The post Research: The AI Boom Has Reshaped the American Economy appeared first on Breitbart.
Texas Finally Vindicated as Washington Approves $7.5 Billion Border Reimbursement
Texas guarded the border for years to defend its citizens, even when the federal government refused. Now, the state is finally vindicated, and Washington, D.C., is beginning to repay its debt.
Republican Gov. Greg Abbott announced last week that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security has approved $7.5 billion from the “One Big, Beautiful Bill” to reimburse Texas for securing the border. This is one step to make up for the federal government’s failure to do that job.
After then-President Joe Biden opened the southern border after taking office in 2021, Abbott launched “Operation Lone Star,” a massive effort to crack down on illegal immigration and transnational crime. Border Czar Tom Homan, who also worked for former President Barack Obama’s administration, blamed Biden for intentionally opening the border.
“Joe Biden is the first president in my lifetime to ever come into office and intentionally unsecure the border,” Homan said. “And don’t think for a second that he didn’t do so purposefully and with total understanding of what would happen.”
The tension came to a head in a January 2024 standoff, when Texas stood down the federal government—simply to defend the border. The Texas Military Department and Department of Public Safety seized federal land in Eagle Pass, blocking illegal entry and enforcing the law. Despite the fact the Constitution tasks the federal government with ensuring the people’s security and defending against invasion, the Biden administration let hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens pour into the country—and even threatened Texas for defending its people.
“President Biden has instructed his agencies to ignore federal statutes that mandate the detention of illegal immigrants,” Abbott said. “I have already declared an invasion … to invoke Texas’ constitutional authority to defend and protect itself. That authority is the supreme law of the land.”
All in all, “Operation Lone Star” cost Texas more than $11 billion.
Rep. Beth Van Duyne, a Republican from North Texas, told the Daily Signal the state never should have needed to spend this money in the first place.
“Texas was the front line for the Biden border invasion, which flooded tens of millions of illegal immigrants and criminals into our country,” she said. “The Lone Star State fought courageously to slow this tsunami of illegal immigration.”
Van Duyne blamed Texas’ sacrifice on “Biden’s illegal actions” and “dangerous open border policies.” She said Texas Republicans in Congress worked diligently to include a federal reimbursement for the state’s border security costs.
“We are grateful to the President and the Administration for not only locking down our borders, enforcing our laws, empowering [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] and [U.S. Customs and Border Protection], but for compensating our state for these billions of dollars we should not have needed to spend in the first place,” Van Duyne said.
Abbott repeatedly demanded reimbursement, including a January 2025 request for more than $11.1 billion. Texas congressional Republicans then pushed for federal reimbursement legislation. Congress ultimately created a $13.5 billion pool for state and local border-security and immigration-enforcement expenses.
Now, DHS’ $7.5 billion reimbursement will replenish a significant portion of Texas’ resources. However, it does not erase the billions already spent or fully cover the cost.
Operation Lone Star also netted criminals that could have infiltrated the rest of the country, by apprehending more than 507,200 illegal immigrants and making more than 41,500 criminal arrests, including more than 36,900 felonies. Texas also seized more than 471 million potentially deadly doses of fentanyl.
'Latino Power': Rep. Delia Ramirez Wants to Abolish DHS, Create 'Community Safety' Immigration Agency
The elected daughter of two illegal migrants is touting "Latino Power" as she demands that $150 billion in funding for border security and enforcement be redirected to fund illegal migrants.
The post ‘Latino Power’: Rep. Delia Ramirez Wants to Abolish DHS, Create ‘Community Safety’ Immigration Agency appeared first on Breitbart.
Florida Man Pleads Guilty In $500,000,000 COVID Test Fraud Scheme
President Donald Trump and Chairman Xi Jinping Deliver Remarks During State Visit
President Trump and Chairman Xi deliver remarks during the welcome ceremony for the official Chinese delegation state visit. The remarks are in both English and Chinese as interpreted within the ceremony. Chairman Xi announced two giant pandas, Ping Ping and Fu Shuang, would arrive at Zoo Atlanta within days, continuing a tradition that began when […]
The post President Donald Trump and Chairman Xi Jinping Deliver Remarks During State Visit appeared first on The Last Refuge.
Critically Wounded Butler Shooting Victim Jim Copenhaver Has Died
What A Noob! This So-Called 'Pastor' Didn't Even Make Each Sermon Point Start With The Same Letter
OWASSO, OK — It was total amateur hour at First Baptist Church of Owasso as so-called "Pastor" Darren Parsons didn't even make each of his sermon points start with the same letter.
CNN's Meltdown Didn't Stop While the Trump White House Wouldn't Let Them in
CNN's Meltdown Didn't Stop While the Trump White House Wouldn't Let Them in
Trump Allies Target Anthropic CEO Over AI 'Doomerism'
Nolte: Former Disney Animation Chief Jeffrey Katzenberg Champions AI
Reaching all the way back to the 1980s, Jeffrey Katzenberg was a giant in the world of feature animation movies for more than 30 years. His biography is like no one other than Walt Disney and includes such timeless classics as Who Framed Roger Rabbit, The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, The Nightmare Before Christmas, The Lion King, and the Shrek and Kung Fu Panda franchises.
The post Nolte: Former Disney Animation Chief Jeffrey Katzenberg Champions AI appeared first on Breitbart.
What Claremont Is For
Conservative blogger Erick Erickson published an essay last week on Substack, “The Midwestern Führerbunker Driving the Right Off a Cliff,” maligning the Claremont Institute, one of our donors, and a few of our fellows and alumni.
Claremont Institute Senior Fellow Steve Hayward published the first in a promised series (“Is Conservatism In Crisis?”) on his Political Questions Substack, criticizing the tone, rhetorical tactics, and substance of Erickson’s essay. As Hayward shows, Erickson relies on guilt-by-association smears and innuendo that let the juxtaposition do the arguing. Many of his citations come from untrustworthy and hostile sources, like The Guardian, which has published numerous hit pieces against Claremont. Erickson’s essay is a mile-wide, inch-deep bit of motivated reasoning.
At the top of his essay, a headnote by Erickson explains that he “worked on this for weeks.” We could have cleared up a lot of Erickson’s errors during those weeks had he followed the standard journalistic practice of reaching out to any of the parties or organizations he named for comment. He did not. By his own account, Erickson let AI find the sources for his claims: “I wrote the piece and Claude found the links relevant to my claims. When Claude thought I was making weak claims or arguments, it challenged me to improve and clarify my writing and claims to match information in provided linked [sic].” That may explain why so many of his sources come from hostile outlets.
As a result, some friends of Claremont who are not close students of the internecine social media wars on the Right are confused. I write to offer some clarity. The short version: Claremont’s mission remains, as it was when we were founded in 1979, “to restore the principles of the American founding to their rightful, preeminent place in our national life.” The core of that work remains what Harry Jaffa called “the scholarship of the politics of freedom.” Many of our critics mistake the application of that scholarship to present circumstances for abandoning our principles.
Answering every insinuation in Erickson’s essay would be tedious; correcting the most serious is not. Consider four of his claims: about a donor, about a fraternal organization, about an essay in The American Mind, and about Nick Fuentes.
Erickson’s first target is Charles Haywood, a retired industrialist and philanthropist who runs The Worthy House website, where he routinely reviews, in spirited fashion, books on all manner of topics. Readers of Haywood know that he has a dim view of the prospects for the medium-term survival of the current American regime. He has constructed his city in speech, what he hopes will be a successor regime, in his “Foundationalist Manifesto.”
Erickson regards Haywood’s Manifesto as too statist. He wants us to gasp with him at Haywood’s deprecation of democracy. What Haywood favors, however, would not have been foreign to thinkers and statesmen from the American Founding up through the turn of the 20th century: a republicanism with aristocratic elements, like elections and representatives rather than direct popular involvement in decision-making. Erickson objects that Haywood assigns to the central government “unlimited means,” but fails to include the rest of the sentence, which reads in full, “In pursuit of its limited ends, it will have unlimited means.” Claremont has always thought that the political philosophy of the founding, properly understood, should guide our constitutional analysis and reform. Haywood’s assessment is not the same as Claremont’s position, and reasonable people can dispute it. But it’s clear that Erickson wants merely to cherry-pick the document to stoke outrage with his readers.
This outrage is a setup to suggest that because Haywood donates low six figures annually to Claremont and has an honorific “advisory” title common in the think tank philanthropic world, Claremont’s mission is now being subverted in favor of Haywood’s Foundationalism. No donor sets our agenda, and Haywood has never tried. He supports institutions on the Right for the work they’re doing, in line with their own missions, to recover constitutionalism and defend the American way of life.
Erickson’s second target is closer to home: me. He indicts my involvement in the founding of a Christian fraternal organization, the Society for American Civic Renewal (SACR), and in so doing makes a serious charge that demands correction. One of SACR’s founding documents, writes Erickson, “describes the members as ‘un-hyphenated Americans’…. The hyphen is there to screen for lineage, and it tells you the racial mindset of the organization.” This is false. The membership requirement for “unhyphenated Americans” is a reference to Theodore Roosevelt’s 1915 call for immigrants to assimilate and embrace American citizenship without qualification. SACR welcomes trinitarian Christian men of any race or ethnicity.
Fittingly, Roosevelt gave that speech to the Knights of Columbus, itself a Christian fraternal order. Few things are more American than Christian fraternal organizations, which have been around since our country’s founding. The founding board of SACR in 2020 agreed with the theme of Yuval Levin’s book, A Time to Build. We thought a decentralized fraternal organization for values-aligned men would be a useful institution in an ideologically divided and institutionally corrupt America. It has been gratifying to see lodges founded in several states, centered on friendship, shared love of country, and the many benefits such networks provide for local collaboration and mutual aid.
Erickson’s charge against The American Mind is more serious still. He claims that “Claremont’s American Mind has published the argument that conservatives must now be willing to commit violence of their own.” The essay in question, Hillsdale College Professor Kevin Slack’s 2023 article, “The Constitution, Citizenship, and the New Right,” does no such thing. The passage Erickson appears to be describing reads:
Many conservatives have now become convinced that, unless they are willing to allow their churches to be desecrated, their sacred services cancelled, their property and liberty taken away, and their children indoctrinated or chemically castrated, they must be willing to engage in violence of their own.
Slack ends with a warning, not a call to arms:
Finally, the use of actual violence, which underlies the enforcement of all laws, including the natural law, has quickly become part of our machinations. And while I sympathize with any defense of natural right, I also fear it. Our first civil war was between states, but this new terrible war would be city against country, neighbor against neighbor, in the aisles of grocery stores, restaurants, and churches. I would not choose to live in this world, but America is fast becoming no country for old men. I still hope that we can appeal to genuine nationalism, celebrating America’s principles and its remarkable achievements, rejecting a false patriotism and tribalism.
In other words, Slack is describing what many conservatives have come to believe, not arguing that they are right. Erickson turns a description into a prescription.
Erickson throws Nick Fuentes and his “groypers” into the mix for good measure in the final third of the piece. He is careful to state that he doesn’t think anyone named so far is “coordinating with Fuentes.” (Quite right! I suspect Fuentes would object to any coordination with Claremont, as he has said publicly that we are untrustworthy because our chairman is Jewish.) But Erickson’s presentation is meant to leave the reader with the impression that this constellation of projects, writings, tweets, and people represents different flanks of a movement to overthrow the American Constitution.
While Erickson’s essay was making the rounds, I was on my way to Mount Vernon with Claremont colleagues to celebrate Constitution Day and honor Charles Kesler with the Salvatori Prize in the American Founding. The evening featured short speeches from our Washington Fellow Matthew Peterson, praising George Washington’s magnanimity and prudence; from our Salvatori Research Fellow in the American Founding, Glenn Ellmers, on the meaning of the Declaration at 250 after a century of progressivism; and from me, on the significant scholarly, editorial, and teaching achievements across Kesler’s five decades (and counting) of work.
It was an evening celebrating the work of the Claremont Institute and its scholars, surrounded by the Claremont family of alumni, supporters, and friends. That work, not the caricature in Erickson’s essay, is what Claremont is about. We look forward to a good-faith debate with serious and honest interlocutors—let iron sharpen iron. The stakes are nothing less than the fate of America and the West.
The post What Claremont Is For appeared first on The American Mind.
‘No Child Should Be Exposed’: DOJ Settles With 6 Hospitals to End Gender Surgeries on Minors
Opponents of “gender transition” surgeries on minors applauded a Justice Department settlement with at least six major hospitals to stop the practice.
The Department of Justice has announced settlements with six hospitals, the New York Times reported, to stop doing the surgeries and hormone treatments for minors.
“The Department of Justice has done incredible work in driving healthcare providers to end experimental transgender treatments on minors,” Dr. Kurt Miceli, chief medical officer of Do No Harm said in a statement Wednesday. “Nearly two dozen systematic reviews have found no credible evidence supporting these interventions. Meanwhile, the known or expected harms are significant, including infertility, cardiovascular disease, and surgical complications, among others.”
Texas Children’s Hospital, Cleveland Clinic, Connecticut Children’s Medical Center, Mount Sinai Health System, and most recently, New York University Langone Hospital, and the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center Children’s Hospital reached separate agreements with the DOJ, the Times reported.
As part of the individual agreements, several of the hospitals will even provide free medical care to former patients who wish to detransition. Although the hospitals agreed to stop the procedures and pay certain federal fines, they admitted to no wrongdoing.
“No child should be exposed to so-called ‘gender-affirming’ care and the irreversible effects that many of these interventions can have,” Miceli added.
The group Consumers’ Research has been critical of federal and state tax dollars going to nonprofit hospitals that push gender ideology.
“Nonprofit hospitals that embrace a radical political agenda over their core mission of patient care must be held accountable,” Will Hild, executive director of Consumers’ Research, said in a statement Wednesday.
He praised the Justice Department’s investigation of the hospitals and added, “These woke hospitals need to be held responsible for putting politics over patients.”
However, Eliel Cruz, co-founder of the Gender Liberation Movement, told The Associated Press, “It’s a really dangerous precedent when the federal government is allowed to politicize any one group of people’s care and end it.”
Rep Calls for DHS to Deport Gaza Journalist Who Admitted to Protecting Hamas Through Propaganda
An outspoken member of the House Freedom Caucus has called on President Donald Trump’s administration to remove a photojournalist from the United States after he publicly admitted in an online video interview that the conditions of his work were dictated by Hamas officials in the Gaza Strip.
The journalist, Motaz Azaiza, who has been championed by Rep. Rashida Tlaib and New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, also admitted to witnessing the Israeli hostages of the Oct. 7 massacre being beaten and paraded in the streets of Gaza, but refused to take photos of the incident.
“People got out, watched, beat them, hit them, and I followed them and filmed,” Azaiza told the “Taqarrab” podcast over the weekend. “But I did not publish those videos.”
“Why? Because I did not want to ruin the lives of the people who were filmed,” the photographer continued. “I understood that Israel would use those videos to identify every person who was there and eliminate them.”
In an exclusive interview with the Daily Signal, Rep. Randy Fine, R-Fla., said that Azaiza “needs to be deported.”
Fine added that Azaiza needs to be detained by the Department of Homeland Security and have his visa revoked by the secretary of state.
The DHS and the State Department did not respond to the Daily Signal’s request for comment.
Fine, during the phone interview, said it’s unfortunate that the American people will never see a retraction from the mainstream media outlets or politicians who have previously championed Azaiza because of their newfound support of Islam.
“They fetishize Islam, the Left has fetishized Islam,” Fine said about the legacy media that championed the photojournalist for his work pushing Hamas propaganda. “They have adopted the view of mainstream Islam that you cannot engage in blasphemy, you cannot criticize Islam. They have adopted Sharia, [and] they are operating as Sharia-compliant entities.”
One example Fine highlighted was the shooting that took place in Arizona earlier this month, where two “Gays for Gaza” activists were killed by an Islamic radical outside of a gay nightclub. The perpetrator, 44-year-old Gambian-born Ousman Ceesay, had a list of other gay bars and nightclubs that he planned to attack.
“I know the media lost their mind over this,” Fine said, adding that they failed to cover the incident because it did not fit their narrative.
CNN and The New York Times did not respond to the Daily Signal’s request for comment.
Previously, Fine told the Daily Signal that he “feels bad” for the LGBTQ+ community because they have “been replaced by Islam” in the list of groups the Left chooses to fetishize.
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