THE CENTER SQUARE—State Rep. Stan Gerdes, R-Smithville, introduced the FURRIES Act, known as the Forbidden Unlawful Representation of Roleplaying in Education, on Thursday to prohibit Texas public schools from allowing furry subculture behavior in classrooms and on campuses. The furry subculture involves individuals adopting anthropomorphic animal identities who often dress in costumes and attempt to mimic animal behavior.

“I can’t believe we have to do this, but we cannot allow these types of role-playing distractions to affect our students who are trying to learn or our teachers and administrators who are trying to teach,” Gerdes said in a statement. “We just have to keep this nonsense out of our schools.”

“No distractions. No theatrics. Just education,” he said. “While school mascots, theater performances, and dress-up days remain part of school spirit, this bill ensures that students and teachers can focus on academics–not on bizarre and unhealthy disruptions. Texas schools are for educating kids, not indulging in radical trends.”

Gov. Greg Abbott expressed support for the bill at a Texas Pastor Council event on Thursday in Austin. “In some small rural sections and school districts,” public schools are dealing with furries, he said. “Kids go to school dressed up as cats with litter boxes.” It’s become such a problem that Gerdes filed a bill “saying no furries in public schools in the state of Texas.” 

“You have one expectation your child’s going to be learning the fundamentals of education: reading and writing and math and science,” Abbott continued, making his case for the need for school choice in Texas. The Texas Senate already passed its school choice bill; the House held a hearing on Tuesday and is expected to pass it, making history, Abbott said.

If children are “being distracted by furries, their parents have a right to move their child to a school of their choice,” Abbott said. “I’m not telling you anything other than what is just common sense, but common sense is very hard to deal with in this setting.”

LGBTQ Nation criticized the bill, claiming “anti-transgender Republicans” “want to punish students who act like non-human animals in schools.” The Houston Chronicle claimed Abbott “resurrected debunked rumors that public schools were putting litter boxes in classrooms for students dressed as cats.” Several news reports contradict this claim.

Gerdes says he filed the bill in response to concerns expressed by his constituents; a furry-related incident occurred at Smithville ISD, confirmed by the superintendent, he said.

“I fully expect the subculture to show up in full furry vengeance at the committee hearing,” Gerdes said. However, “they won’t be getting any litter boxes in the Texas capitol. They will have to use the regular restrooms like the humans they are.”

The bill would amend Texas education code to “prohibit any non-human behavior by a student, including presenting himself or herself, on days other than exempt days, as anything other than a human being.” Exempt days include holidays like Halloween.

Non-human behavior is defined as: “behaviors or accessories typically displayed by a member of the homeless sapiens species including using litter box for the passing of stool, urine, or other human byproducts;” an individual wearing “tails, leashes, colors, other accessories designed for pet,” including fur. “Barking, meowing, hissing or other animal noises that are not human speech and licking oneself or others for the purpose of grooming or maintenance” also would be prohibited.

The bill directs school boards to adopt student codes of conduct and penalties for violations, including removal, suspension, the disciplinary alternative education program or expulsion and specifies conditions for the penalties, according to the bill language.

It also would amend the Texas Family Code to define mental or emotional injury to a child to include “in an education setting, allowing or encouraging the child to develop a dependence on or belief that non-human behaviors are societally acceptable.” It defines mental and emotional injury, physical injury, sexual conduct harmful to a child’s mental, emotional or physical welfare, compelling or encouraging a child to engage in sexual conduct, including human trafficking, prostitution, child pornography, use of a controlled substance, child marriage and other acts.

It would allow citizens to file complaints with the Attorney General’s Office and authorize it to file a writ of mandamus requiring compliance with the law.

The criminal element was included as furry-related crimes, including with children, have been prosecuted in other states. A Sun Valley, Calif., man was convicted of three murders after becoming obsessed with a teenager involved in a furry subculture; a furry member was charged with murder and attempted murder in Portland, Ore.; a Pennsylvania man was charged with raping an 8-year-old boy dressed as an animal at furry parties.

U.K.-based Safer Schools Ecosystem has warned that online furry platforms create potential sexual exploitation of children.

Originally published by The Center Square.

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I love my children and I love my job, but I dread driving to work and school every morning and every afternoon. Why? Because the roads in Washington, D.C., are hell, and they don’t have to be this way.

D.C. driving is already bad—the district is built on two intersecting grids, so roads don’t just turn the city into blocks but also into confusing triangular pizza slices—but Mayor Muriel Bowser and the city council have instituted a series of “reforms” that make driving 100 times worse than it already was.

Furthermore, I suspect that the city council is intentionally making things worse for drivers, in an effort at social manipulation. If bureaucrats mistakenly believe that carbon emissions are dooming the planet, they might justify making life miserable in order to force people to take public transit.

Here’s just a taste of the horrible experiences I and my fellow drivers face on the streets of the city I affectionately refer to as “Mordor.”

I have seen emergency vehicles stuck in bumper-to-bumper traffic because D.C. shut down miles of roads for “Open Streets DC.” It is no exaggeration to say that people may have died because of this unnecessary bottleneck.

I have seen a major six-lane road that gets heavy traffic converted into a four-lane road, with the right lanes blocked off for buses. The speed limit on this major arterial is 25 miles per hour, and D.C. installed a speed camera to collect revenue from unsuspecting drivers in the name of “keeping people safe.” On this road, I saw one frustrated driver in the right lane cross in front of two lanes of traffic to turn left immediately when the light turned green—a dangerous maneuver but one the driver must have thought necessary because congestion was so bad.

I have waited at a light for 10 minutes because D.C. effectively made it illegal to turn right on red, creating unnecessary bottlenecks throughout the city.

This policy is particularly infuriating because the district did it in the name of “protecting pedestrians.” The problem is, when you prevent drivers from turning right on red, you force them to wait until the cycle when the light turns green. This also happens to be the time when the walk light turns green.

So, instead of allowing cars to turn right at the time when pedestrians have to wait—which is safer for both parties—you force them to go when pedestrians are most likely to be crossing the road, and you create a bottleneck so the other cars behind the car turning right get angry and honk, so the front car is less likely to take appropriate care.

I’ve sat at a red light where at least 20 cars wanted to turn right. No one was coming in the cross traffic, and there were no pedestrians, so it was 100% safe to turn right on red, yet D.C. law prevented it. During the short light cycle, the cars all rushed to turn right, using two lanes and thus making it more dangerous. The mad rush also increases drivers’ blood pressure and makes it less likely that they will stop if a pedestrian does emerge on the road.

Unfortunately, D.C. isn’t the only city actively considering banning right turns on red. According to CBS News, Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson’s transition plan called for “restricting right turns on red,” while the college town of Ann Arbor, Michigan, prevents right turns on red in the downtown area. San Francisco leaders voted to urge their transportation agency to ban right turns on red, and Los Angeles, Seattle, and Denver have considered bans, as well. New York City has long banned the practice.

Since 2023, when that CBS News article came out, it seems these cities have not taken action to crack down on red-light right turns, but that shouldn’t lull us into a false sense of security.

The anti-right turn activists who spoke to CBS News unintentionally revealed why banning right turns on red isn’t the solution—they complained that drivers don’t actually stop at the red lights when turning right. Perhaps, instead of banning the practice outright, cities should enforce the full stop, which would address the only real issue without unnecessarily making life hell for drivers.

Jay Beeber, executive director for policy at the National Motorists Association, a drivers’ advocacy group, said his team analyzed California crash data from 2011-2019 and found that drivers turning right on red accounted for only about one pedestrian death and one bicyclist death every two years.

“What’s really behind this movement is part of the agenda to make driving as miserable and as difficult as possible so people don’t drive so much,” Beeber told CBS News.

I suspect he’s 100% correct.

I can’t read the minds of the bureaucrats who did this, but I wouldn’t doubt they did it intentionally, to try to force people to give up their cars in the name of protecting the environment. Climate alarmists preach that the burning of fossil fuels is going to bring about disaster, even though their predictions of doom have failed, time and time again.

The hatred of cars isn’t just based in questionable science—it’s also impractical. The public transit system in D.C. leaves a great deal to be desired, and cars simply are the most reliable way of getting from A to B on your own timetable.

D.C.’s unnecessary anti-driver policies cost drivers a great deal of stress, and they actually make the roads more dangerous for pedestrians, because a frustrated driver is a less careful driver.

As President Donald Trump is ordering federal workers to return to the office in person, D.C. traffic is only likely to get more congested, not less.

Luckily, the American people just sent a deafening rebuke to the anti-car ideology of climate alarmism in the last election. Republicans in Congress have the ability to block D.C. laws, and they need to use it.

House Republicans have rightly raised alarms about D.C. banning right turns on red and instituting traffic cameras, and they should bring up these issues anew. Trump has also rightly called for the federal government to take the power away from the D.C. City Council.

It’s long past time for Congress to stop the anti-driver insanity. Let’s Make D.C. Driveable Again.

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Climate activists have found a new way to force us to pay more for energy.

New York and Vermont passed laws that will raise the price of oil, gas, and electricity by taxing the past.

New York’s new law demands fossil fuel companies pay $75 billion for carbon emissions dating back to the year 2000. Other Democrat-controlled states plan to follow suit.

In my new video, Travis Fisher, energy director at the Cato Institute, argues that taxing the past is wrong: “I’ve been filling up my gas tank for 25 years. Will they go after me for every time I’ve filled up my tank?”

Maybe.

A more honest way to punish burning of fossil fuel is a carbon tax. “If you want to change people’s behavior,” says Fisher, “you tell them that their behavior is going to be taxed. This is taxing behavior that’s already occurred—perfectly legal at the time. So, there’s no possible change in behavior.”

Politicians don’t push a carbon tax because they know voters won’t like it. So, they pretend oil companies will pay. They know voters don’t like oil companies.

“The deceit from these companies,” shouts California Gov. Gavin Newsom, “playing us for fools!”

He blames fossil fuel companies for his own government’s failures. “Wildfires and floods and droughts,” he says, “this climate crisis is a fossil fuel crisis!”

“That just absolves him from any responsibility for anything,” says Fisher. “Power out, wildfires, everything is climate change. Nothing is Gov. Newsom’s fault.”

But Big Oil is so rich, say activists, they can easily pay. A CNN correspondent claims, “The amount of money they are making, some will certainly see as obscene, unconscionable.”

“‘Unconscionable’ is actually in [New York’s] text,” says Fisher, adding that these new laws are an expansion of government power that “[sets] a precedent that they could tax anyone for anything going back as far as they want.”

And yet, the new tax won’t change the climate.

“If New York stopped using fossil fuels altogether,” says Fisher, “what impact would that have on the global climate? … Zero.”

That’s because the entire United States, let alone New York, emits just a fraction of the world’s carbon.

In their bill, New York politicians compare fossil fuel producers to tobacco companies, writing, “The actions of many of the biggest fossil fuel companies closely [reflect] the strategy of denial, deflection, and delay perfected by the tobacco industry.”

Politicians and greedy lawyers did get tobacco companies to pay more than $200 billion.

But was that justice? I don’t think so.

The lawyers grabbed $8 billion for themselves. But alleged Big Tobacco bad guys who misled people about cigarettes’ risk aren’t paying for the settlement. Most had left their companies long before.

Today’s smokers must pay the bill via costlier cigarettes. Likewise, we fossil fuel users will be the ones paying these new fines.

Although there are big differences between oil and cigarettes.

“If we all quit cigarettes,” says Fisher, “nothing catastrophic happens. Quit fossil fuels, the world grinds to a halt.”

Eighty percent of our energy comes from coal, oil, and natural gas, and that won’t change soon. Solar and wind power aren’t reliable enough.

So these new retroactive oil taxes are mostly a way for state politicians to grab more of your money—in my state’s case, an arbitrary $75 billion.

I ask Fisher, “Isn’t it calculated based on things fossil fuel companies did?”

“No,” He replies. “There’s sophisticated literature about the social cost of carbon. They decided to skip all of that. Skip the trial. You’re just guilty.”

So, in New York and Vermont, everyone who uses fossil fuels will be punished.

Those of you in California, New Jersey, Maryland, and Massachusetts will probably be hit by similar taxes soon.

“They’re coming after everyone’s lifestyle. That’s only made possible by fossil fuels,” says Fisher. “It’s a shame because really, when I think about what America could be, we could be so much more prosperous than we are.”

Much more prosperous. But many politicians just won’t let that happen.

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The stock market of late has been on a veritable roller coaster, Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency continues to ruffle feathers, Iran marches ever harrowingly closer to a nuclear weapon, and Russia and Ukraine get tantalizingly close to a ceasefire. But the national political conversation this week has curiously tended to focus not on any of that but instead on the uncertain fate of a lone noncitizen and former Columbia University graduate student, Mahmoud Khalil.

Talk about a misplacement of priorities. Most American media consumers care a great deal about their pocketbooks and retirement accounts. They likely also care about stability on the world stage–a subdued China, a relatively calm Middle East and a long-overdue peace deal to end the bloodshed in Eastern Europe.

By contrast, here is one thing media consumers probably don’t care a lot about: whether a Syrian national and Algerian citizen who was the face of last year’s violent pro-Hamas Columbia University campus riots gets deported. You would never know that, of course, from the media’s incessant focus on the Khalil saga. Is it any wonder that only 31% of Americans told Gallup last fall they have a “great deal” or “fair amount” of confidence in the media?

In any event, Khalil is, by any metric, a wildly unsympathetic figure. The New York Times described him as the “public face of protest against Israel” at Columbia. He was the spokesman of a pro-Hamas student group called Columbia University Apartheid Divest. CUAD has referred to the Oct. 7 slaughter of Israelis as a “moral, military, and political victory” and asserted that it is fighting for nothing less than the “total eradication of Western civilization.” Khalil personally distributed propaganda pamphlets titled “Our Narrative–Operation Al-Aqsa Flood,” borrowing Hamas’ code name for Oct. 7.

Even more relevant, Khalil is not a U.S. citizen. He is a green card holder–a legal alien. And like any alien, legal or illegal, he can only remain on our soil when the sovereign–in the U.S., that’s “We the People”–consents to it. And when we remove our consent, then the alien must go.

The power to exclude is the singular defining feature of what it means to be a sovereign. Emer de Vattel’s highly influential 1758 treatise, “The Law of Nations,” described this power as plenary: “The sovereign may forbid the entrance of his territory either to foreigners in general, or in particular cases, or to certain persons, or for certain particular purposes, according as he may think it advantageous to the state.” And as Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia noted in his 2001 dissent in Zadvydas v. Davis, quoting Justice Robert Jackson’s earlier assertion in Shaughnessy v. United States ex rel. Mezei (1953): “Due process does not invest any alien with a right to enter the United States, nor confer on those admitted the right to remain against the national will.”

It’s quite simple, really: Any alien, from someone here on a tourist visa to a green card holder, is here solely because We the People–the citizens of this nation–consented to it. When the alien violates the terms of their admission, they can be–indeed, must be–removed. That alien, moreover, can be removed summarily if so desired; there is no specific level of “due process” to which an alien is entitled.

That brings us back to Khalil–a foreign national who violated the terms of his sojourn by supporting at least one (perhaps multiple) U.S. State Department-designated foreign terrorist organizations, and by making common cause with an organization clamoring more generally for “the total eradication of Western civilization.” The day the United States loses the ability to deport noncitizens who espouse such toxic beliefs is the day the United States ceases to be a sovereign nation-state.

And therein lies the entire point.

The Khalil saga is where we see the intersection of the three menacing anti-Western ideologies I identify in my new book out this Tuesday, “Israel and Civilization: The Fate of the Jewish Nation and the Destiny of the West.” First, there is the woke angle: Khalil and his ilk believe in the neo-Marxist “oppressor”/“oppressed” dichotomy, and his view of Israel as an “oppressor” underlies his repugnant activism. Second, there is the Islamist angle: Khalil supports Sunni Islamist outfits such as Hamas. Third, there is the global neoliberal angle: Those protesting Khalil’s detention see little to no distinction between citizen and noncitizen–like John Lennon’s dystopian song “Imagine,” they envision a borderless world.

The drama over Khalil’s arrest and detention is thus not really about Khalil. It is about the fate of the United States–and the destiny of the very West of which the U.S. is the foundational cog.

On Monday, the official X account for the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee Democrats posted, alongside a corresponding photo, “Free Mahmoud Khalil.” But if those Senate Democrats and Khalil’s myriad other apologists are being honest, they seek not merely to “free” Khalil from President Donald Trump’s Immigrations and Customs Enforcement agency. Rather, they seek to “free” him–and all of us–from the shackles of Western civilization itself.

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Adapted from a speech at The Heritage Foundation’s Texas Summit on March 7, 2025. 

It is great to be living in the golden era of America. It’s hard to keep up with President Donald Trump, though, in the House of Representatives. 

We have a president who is all gas and no brakes when it comes to energy. We have a president who understands that American energy is an asset, not a liability; who understands that energy is national security; who believes that energy security is national security. We have a president who champions the energy industry because energy is actually the lifeblood of civilization.  

Look around you, everything requires energy for us to even be here today. In the last four years, the Biden administration did everything they could to stand on the neck of the energy industry. And yet, in spite of that, we are pumping more energy in America today than we ever have. But again, it’s in spite of the Biden administration, not because of the Biden administration. 

We live in a world where economic development is largely equal to energy. Increased availability of all forms of energy means there will be improved lives and improved national security across our world, the Western world, as Winston Churchill called it, the Christian civilization.  

As chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Europe, I can tell you that Europe really made some serious mistakes over the last 20 to 25 years. Germany led the way in dependence on Russian energy. And they almost paid the price about two winters ago. And yet, American energy saved them from that, along with a very mild winter.

[Artificial intelligence] and data centers are here to stay because we must have more energy because of that. Because of our growth, because of AI, because of data centers, we require more energy, and now is the time to do it. 

I have probably had 15 or 20 delegations from Europe through my office since I was named chairman this term, and I tell them all, if you continue to use Russian energy to any great degree, you are liable to blackmail. It’s a simple fact of life. 

It’s also rich that Europeans expect us to keep funding the Ukraine war when their nations have basically been funding both sides of it by buying Russian energy. EU imports of Russian [liquefied natural gas] grew by almost 20% last year, and that cannot continue. 

A little further afield, let’s look at China, which imports 11 million barrels a day every day. We produce about 13.5 today, and Russia is the No. 1 supporter of China. 

We have sanctions on Russian oil that we are not enforcing. If we would simply enforce our sanctions on Russian oil as well as Iranian oil, the world would be a whole lot safer place today. And how are we going to replace that if we enforce the sanctions on Russia and Iran? With American energy.

We can do it. We need to be dominant. This is a national security issue. I will tell you, everyone that works in the industry does vital work, as President Trump would say, “Beautiful work.” 

I cannot leave the stage today without, of course, saying, “Drill, baby, drill.”

We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal.

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Trans woman activist Dylan Mulvaney did a happy-go-lucky softball interview tour to promote the book “Paper Doll: Notes from a Late Bloomer.” The “mainstream” media are out of the mainstream on trans issues, and their extreme fawning and flattery only underlines it.

On “CBS Mornings,” correspondent Natalie Morales sounded like a supporter: “What do you want people to see and know about you?”

“I would ask them to please not make it harder for us,” Mulvaney said. “I am now realizing that this is life or death, you know, for a lot of people.”

They routinely play the suicide card. When the Bud Light ad campaign with Mulvaney tanked their sales, Mulvaney said, “It resulted in a lot of suicidal ideation.”

Dissent equals death. It’s not subtle. Extreme fragility is their superpower.

When the softball bucket was empty, CBS co-host Gayle King put on her Oprah pose: “We live in a society today where there are things that are different, and we need to at least make an effort to understand and embrace that.” Embrace the libertine Left. That’s their command.

On ABC’s “The View,” it was the same game. The Bud Light fiasco–“Beergate”–displayed dangerous conservative backlash. Co-host Sara Haines summarized: “There were angry protests, denouncing the brand. The company got bomb threats. You were the lead topic on conservative media for months. It became known as one of the biggest boycotts in American history. Now, what people didn’t see with all this backlash, it caused you to have suicidal ideations.”

Mulvaney responded: “What brings me the most joy is my gender euphoria, and to have that used against me was such a mind game,” but it was “the trans women in my life that supported me during that time and took my hand and said, ‘This is our reality. Welcome.’”

Perhaps the gushiest interview of them all came on taxpayer-funded National Public Radio, under the online headline “For Dylan Mulvaney, ‘sweet earnestness’ is what feels right.”

NPR’s Juana Summers was swooning: “You write to the reader in the opening of this book that–I need you to believe that sweet earnestness still exists. And Dylan, that is just something that–from everything I’ve seen and everything I’ve heard–that you seem to embody. How is it that you manage to hold on to that?”

This eight-minute lovefest aired on a show called ‘All Things Considered.” Here’s how Mulvaney’s opposition was considered by Summers: “You were also the subject of some ugly vitriol online, some violent threats. You’ve talked about this in the book. I know that you’ve spoken out about this before, but I just want to know, what is it that you want people to understand about what that time in your life was like for you–how you experienced it?”

Follow-up questions included: “I wonder, having gone through that experience and now being at a very different point in your life, what did it teach you about yourself? What did you learn about yourself?” And: “What’s your relationship with your faith today?” Then finally, “Dylan, what do you hope comes next for you? What are you looking for in your next chapter?”

NPR’s show could be titled “You Had Me at Hello,” not “All Things Considered.”

Whenever a leftist lectures us on Democracy, it’s easy to bring up transgender issues because there can be no dissent, no opposition, no debate–it’s just “hate.” In our democracy, conservatives are not only maligned, they are taxed so they can be maligned on radio and TV from coast to coast.

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The Trump administration is finally doing what President Joe Biden refused: revoking visas and deporting violent Hamas-supporting foreign “students” once and for all. These agitators should count their blessings. They could have been and should have been criminally prosecuted by the Biden administration.

These foreign actors staged violent protests at American colleges, cheering the vicious massacre, rapes, assaults, and kidnappings on Oct. 7, 2023. Masquerading as students, these antisemitic, hate-filled agitators assaulted, intimidated, and threatened other students. They blocked access to classes and damaged property and buildings.

Yet the Justice Department never criminally prosecuted them, even though their conspiratorial actions were designed to support Hamas, which the State Department Bureau of Counterterrorism has designated a terrorist organization since 1997.

Engaging in such physical altercations and clashes is not free speech or protected by the First Amendment.

A federal statute is designed to stop such virulent, malicious misbehavior. To no one’s surprise, the anti-Israel Biden Justice Department refused to use it.

The statute dates to May 1870, when Congress approved the Enforcement Act, also known as the Ku Klux Klan Act, to give federal prosecutors the authority to go after the Klan and its masked members, who were assaulting, intimidating, and killing black Americans.

Today, this act is codified at 18 U.S.C. § 241, and it’s particularly applicable to these Hamas supporters because of their routine practice of hiding behind masks.

Section 241 is enforced, or it’s supposed to be, by the Criminal Section of the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department, where I served as counsel to the assistant attorney general for civil rights.

The law makes it a felony for “two or more persons” to “conspire to injure, oppress, threaten, or intimidate any person … in the free exercise or enjoyment of any right or privilege secured to him by the Constitution or laws of the United States.” Under federal civil rights law, college students have the right to peaceful, unimpeded access to the educational process, meaning anyone who deprives them of that right is violating Section 241.

This statute prohibits going “in disguise on the highway, or on the premises of another, with intent to prevent or hinder his free exercise or enjoyment of any right or privilege so secured.”

All the masked terrorism supporters infesting Columbia and our college campuses were “in disguise” and, therefore, could be prosecuted, at least to the extent any of them had the “intent to prevent or hinder” other students from receiving their rightful education.

Punishment under Section 241 is severe: heavy fines and up to 10 years in prison. Video footage at schools could have provided extensive evidence for prosecutors to review.

Did the Biden administration file a single criminal prosecution under Section 241 against any of these criminals? Not to my knowledge.

Instead, the Biden administration used Section 241 to justify special counsel Jack Smith’s indictment of Donald Trump.

No, really. Biden used a law designed to halt the KKK to criminally prosecute Trump for contesting the results of the 2020 presidential election. Using that same law to criminally prosecute masked Hamas supporters threatening, intimidating, and assaulting other students on college campuses in direct parallel to the tactics used by the KKK during the 1960s? Not interested.

That contrast is another example of the Biden Justice Department’s politicization and the direct threat it posed to the American public.

The Trump administration is now acting where Biden failed by moving to identify these people, probably by obtaining information from local law enforcement and campus security officers. The administration has already revoked one former student’s visa, suggesting some success in tracking culpable people.

The Trump administration is right to act. All foreign students involved in such behavior should have their visas revoked. They should also be criminally prosecuted for threatening, dangerous behavior.

After all that, we should consider dropping a note instructing the Department of Homeland Security to bar them from ever entering the United States again.

Originally published by The Washington Times

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Despite a smattering of preliminary injunctions and administrative stay orders from rogue federal judges, President Donald Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency is well on its way to accomplishing its worthy goals. And despite what some out-of-control judges are saying, it is acting well within the boundaries of the law. 

Already, DOGE has exposed wasteful, potentially fraudulent, and truly bizarre spending of taxpayer funds to the tune of $105 billion. For comparison, that’s equivalent to about half the gross domestic product of Kansas and more than twice that of Vermont.

Unsurprisingly, DOGE’s work has elicited vehement howls from the parasites of government largess, particularly so-called nongovernmental organizations that have received billions of dollars. They have flooded the courts—engaging in very selective venue shopping to find “their” judges—with multiple lawsuits all alleging that Elon Musk and his team are acting outside of the law. 

“NGO” is really a misnomer when you consider that these organizations who call themselves “nongovernmental” are sucking so much money out of the federal government—like Planned Parenthood, which received over half a billion taxpayer dollars in just one year.  No way are they “nongovernmental.”

But contrary to what it might seem if you read the headlines of The New York Times or watch hysterical outbursts at MSNBC, so far the Trump administration has been relatively successful in defeating those trying to prevent DOGE from finding and stopping the waste of federal funds. 

To date, about 23 lawsuits have been filed to halt DOGE’s work. Only three have obtained orders adverse to DOGE—and none has successfully stopped DOGE from doing its much-needed work.

For instance, 19 states led by New York asked U.S. District Court Judge Jeannette Vargas to stop DOGE from changing how the Treasury Department performs its work, which included actually recording who payments were going to and what specific congressional appropriation authorized the payment.  

Gosh, what a radical concept—applying standard business accounting standards to the government! 

What did Vargas say to this wild request from New York? A resounding “no” to such “broad and sweeping” restraints on the executive branch. 

Instead, she issued a much narrower injunction limiting who could access personally identifiable information. 

A Maryland judge also entered a temporary restraining order barring “unauthorized” government employees—i.e., DOGE—from accessing personally identifiable information possessed by the Treasury Department on similar grounds. 

Those injunctions presume that Congress can limit the president from reviewing information held by executive branch agencies or authorizing someone to do it for him. That’s a dubious idea when it comes to the president’s inherent executive authority under the Constitution to oversee federal agencies and make sure they are following the law—if necessary, by checking in on their day-to-day operations.   

And then on March 10, District of Columbia Judge Christopher Cooper ruled that DOGE must respond to a Freedom of Information Act request. In his view, DOGE’s actual structure and work didn’t matter as much as rhetoric around DOGE for determining whether DOGE is an agency that is subject to FOIA.  

Otherwise, however, DOGE’s challengers are striking out. 

When unions sued to block DOGE’s access to data at the Labor Department and two other agencies, Judge John Bates, a George W. Bush appointee, denied their request for a temporary restraining order. 

Judge Randolph Moss, an Obama appointee, also refused to issue a temporary restraining order in another lawsuit challenging DOGE’s access to student loan data.

And when the Electronic Privacy Information Center broadly challenged DOGE’s access to agency-held information, Judge Rossie Alston, a Trump appointee, also denied an injunction. 

Even Judge Tanya Chutkan, who presided over special counsel Jack Smith’s criminal prosecution of Trump and demonstrated on numerous occasions that she is no friend of Trump’s, could not find sufficient legal grounds to issue an injunction when 14 states claimed that Musk’s position and role were unconstitutional. As she explained, the states were only speculating that they would be harmed. But as a consolation prize, she did expedite the discovery process in their lawsuit. 

That’s not to say that the judges hearing these challenges are not sympathetic to claims that DOGE’s structure or operations somehow raise constitutional flaws. 

Chutkan, for instance, speculated that Musk might need to be Senate-confirmed and pontificated that DOGE represents an unconstitutional power grab by the president. 

At the end of the day, however, such speculation—which lies at the heart of many of these lawsuits—is just wrong. Speculations by a judge are totally inappropriate unless the issue has been raised and briefed by the parties, and the judge has examined all the facts, thoroughly researched the law, and come to a conclusion on the merits—or lack thereof—of the claims being made.

Keep in mind that it was President Barack Obama who launched the U.S. Digital Service, DOGE’s predecessor, in 2014 and appointed a tech engineer who formerly worked for Google to head the team. Even Obama had an Elon Musk—and no one cried foul then. 

Trump’s executive order simply renamed the U.S. Digital Service as DOGE and reorganized it within the Executive Office of the President—and a president has complete control over the structure, organization, and staff of his Executive Office. Neither Congress nor any court can tell him what to do within that office.

Aside from that realpolitik observation, Musk isn’t an officer requiring Senate confirmation. Obfuscating rhetoric aside, Musk has no actual power to change or cancel contracts, terminate or halt spending, or create any regulation. He is simply an unofficial adviser to the president with no executive authority of any kind. All he can do is make recommendations—which, as Trump reminded his Cabinet during their first meeting, agency officials can reject. 

It is Trump who is vested with the authority under Article II of the Constitution to carry out Congress’ legislative mandates. Thus, he has a constitutional obligation to ensure that bureaucrats inside the executive branch are complying with statutory requirements and that taxpayers are getting the most bang for their buck.

On top of that, the president has inherent constitutional authority to instruct executive officials to gather whatever information is needed to carry out those duties, unless there is a specific statute that limits the president’s authority, is within the constitutional bounds of congressional authority, and does not violate the president’s constitutional position as the head of the executive branch.  

The notion that federal agencies should police themselves and that the president has no authority to do that (or to receive advice on how to do that from anyone he wants) is nonsense. It is fundamentally contrary to the constitutional mandate that the buck stops with the president. 

That’s why Trump doesn’t need Congress to pass a law authorizing DOGE to do its work. He has inherent constitutional authority as the chief executive to ensure that federal agencies are following the law. 

At bottom, Trump can authorize Musk and DOGE to do what he simply cannot because of time and resource constraints on him. To argue otherwise is to suggest either that the president can be barred from ensuring that the laws be faithfully executed or that the chief executive must be omniscient. Neither is tenable—and the former is unconstitutional. 

Opponents of reform have retreated to the citadel of judicial activism in a last-ditch attempt to cripple the now-underway restoration of America’s political institutions. But contrary to their claims, DOGE is bringing much-needed sunlight to the swamp of bureaucracy that is the federal government today. And it is doing so well within the legal boundaries set by the Constitution. 

We can only hope that more unelected judges recognize that fact and stop acting like an imperial judiciary that can override the elected leader of the country. 

The post The Swamp Can Scream But DOGE Is on a Lawful Path to Success appeared first on The Daily Signal.

President Donald Trump thanked Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., for getting Democrats on board with the Republican spending package to keep the federal government open.

The Senate voted late Friday afternoon to advance the continuing resolution, a short-term spending bill. That cleared the way for a final vote to avert a government shutdown.

“I mean, I was told that that was what was going to happen,” Trump told The Daily Signal on the tarmac of Joint Base Andrews in the Maryland suburbs of Washington. “And I appreciate Sen. Schumer, and I think he did the right thing, really. I’m very impressed by that.”

After initially staunchly opposing the bill, Schumer agreed to vote for the continuing resolution because “a shutdown would be a gift” for Trump and Republicans. All told, nine Democrat senators and one nominal independent who caucuses with them sided with all but one Republican to advance the CR on a vote of 62-38, two more than the minimum of 60 needed.

If Democrats had refused to advance the CR, they would have been seen as responsible for the shutdown, which would have likely caused grief for Democrat members of Congress in swing districts in the midterms.

The post ‘Very Impressed’: Trump Thanks Schumer for Whipping Dems’ Support of Spending Bill appeared first on The Daily Signal.

When Erin Brewer was 6 years old, she and her older brother were accosted by two grown men. She was raped. Her brother was not.  

Brewer called herself a boy for the next several years because, she said, she felt vulnerable as a girl. She wore her brother’s hand-me-downs, used the boys bathroom at school, and asked her friends to call her “Timothy.” At home, her mother told her she could pretend to be a boy. Only when her school counselor stepped in did she start to feel strong as a girl and accept her body. 

“She did her best to help me accept myself as a girl, and I am so thankful that I lived in a time when that was the normal way that a transgender identity was treated,” the 58-year-old mother of three told The Daily Signal.  

A current case before the U.S. Supreme Court could decide whether counselors like the one who helped Brewer can do the same for others and advise minors in therapy against “transitioning” genders.  

The court granted review Monday for Chiles v. Salazar, a case in which Kaley Chiles, a licensed professional counselor in Colorado, sued Patty Salazar in her official capacity as executive director of the Colorado Department of Regulatory Agencies. Chiles said she wants to help her clients talk through problems like gender identity without being forced to promote transgender ideology.  

Colorado law prevents counselors from advising their young clients against gender transition by banning what it calls “conversion therapy” for minors. The law defines conversion therapy as any practice or treatment that attempts to “change behaviors or gender expressions or to eliminate or reduce sexual or romantic attraction … toward individuals of the same sex.” The same law, however, protects “assistance to a person undergoing gender transition.” 

Chiles challenged the constitutionality of the law in federal court, saying it violated her First Amendment right to free speech. After the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit upheld Colorado’s law, attorneys from Alliance Defending Freedom, a Christian law firm, filed a petition with the Supreme Court in November.  

“What’s at stake here are the free speech rights of counselors,” Cody Barnett, legal counsel for Alliance Defending Freedom, told The Daily Signal. “They want to be able to offer the counseling that many parents and children across the country desperately need and want. But that’s the exact type of counseling that Colorado says is illegal, and instead, Colorado says the only counseling that can be offered is one that … aligns with Colorado’s view of gender and sexuality and forces counselors to parrot that for the state.”  

Barnett noted that the state law applies in only one direction. 

“What could happen here is that you have someone who is born a boy, decides they want to transition into being a girl, and then they regret that choice,” Barnett said. “This law forbids a counselor from helping them go back to getting comfortable with their natural body.” 

Court documents from the lawyers for the state argue that so-called conversion therapy harms minors and that professional health care is fundamentally different from an average person’s speech under the First Amendment. 

“Unlike laypersons, those who choose to practice as health professionals are required … to provide treatment to their patients consistent with their field’s standard of care,” the brief said. “Petitioner’s claim would undercut states’ long-standing ability to protect patients and clients from harmful professional conduct.” 

According to Barnett, the conversion therapy tactics referenced by the state in this case do not reflect Chiles’ work as a therapist. The therapy Chiles offers is speech protected under the First Amendment, Barnett said, not conduct. Judge Harris Hartz of the 10th Circuit affirmed this assessment in his dissenting opinion in the court’s ruling. 

“[T]he First Amendment never cares whether ‘professionals [are] speaking,’” Hartz said in his dissent. “Otherwise, government bureaucrats could alchemize almost any professional’s speech into conduct that can be silenced.” 

The Colorado Department of Regulatory Agencies declined The Daily Signal’s request for comment and cited the ongoing litigation. 

More than 20 other states have similar laws prohibiting so-called conversion therapy. A favorable decision for Chiles could remove such restrictions on counselors across the nation who want to help children like Brewer. 

Brewer said she supports Alliance Defending Freedom’s effort to protect the work of counselors like the one who helped her growing up. 

“I often wish I could get in touch with her,” Brewer said of her school counselor. “She may not even be alive anymore. I wish there was some way to tell her how much I appreciate what she did.” 

The post Supreme Court to Decide if Counselors Can Advise Minors Against ‘Gender Transition’ appeared first on The Daily Signal.

In less than two months, President Donald Trump has signed more than 80 executive orders, reshaping federal government policy and administration of the executive branch on a range of issues including immigration, national security and defense, gender, education, and government efficiency.

Predictably, the Left is trying to use the courts to fight this political battle, seeking out judges who they believe will step in and block Trump’s executive orders, in some cases almost before the ink of his signature is even dry.   

If it needs to be said, the legislative and executive branches must comply with the Constitution when they exercise their powers, and judges are sometimes asked to decide whether they have.

But the judiciary is subject to the same Constitution, which limits judicial power to deciding “cases” and “controversies,” that is, to settling legal disputes between specific parties. These legal challenges to Trump’s executive orders are trying to go far beyond those limits.

Specifically, these lawsuits not only ask judges for injunctions to put Trump’s orders on hold before their legality has even been decided, but to use so-called universal injunctions to do so for the entire country rather than simply the parties bringing the lawsuits.

During Trump’s first term, our colleagues Hans von Spakovsky, Paul Larkin, and GianCarlo Canaparo addressed problems with these controversial moves.

The Left is at it again. The challenge to Executive Order 14160, titled “Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship,” is a good example. The Fourteenth Amendment provides that “[a]ll persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”

In this executive order, Trump declared that, even though born in the United States, a child is not subject to its jurisdiction if his or her parents are neither citizens nor lawful permanent residents. This would end the practice of so-called “birthright citizenship.”

Left-wing advocacy groups challenged the constitutionality of this executive order in the U.S. District Court in Maryland, asking for a universal injunction to put the order on hold nationally.

Within days, Judge Deborah Boardman granted the injunction, attacking what she called a “flagrantly unconstitutional” executive order that would inflict “immediate and irreparable harm on newborns and their families across the United States.”

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit denied the Trump administration’s request to limit Boardman’s injunction to Boardman’s actual jurisdiction. Boardman is just one of the 662 district judges in active service across the country’s 94 judicial districts, but she alone was able to prevent Trump’s order from taking effect anywhere in the nation.

Tactics like these are an attempt to use the judiciary for explicitly political purposes, a radical departure from how the judiciary was designed and how it operated for most of American history. The Supreme Court has called injunctions a form of “extraordinary” relief because they block a law or policy before it is actually found to be unlawful. Universal injunctions were even more rare; only six of President George W. Bush’s executive actions were enjoined nationwide.

That was then, this is Trump. Scholars have documented how universal injunctions “dramatically spik[ed]” during Trump’s first term. In fact, more than half of all universal injunctions since 1963 were issued against Trump’s first-term policies. But the pattern is also becoming much more partisan, with 92 percent of those anti-Trump injunctions issued by Democrat-appointed judges.  

Needless to say, the possibility of blocking a policy for the entire country makes forum-shopping, finding districts and judges most likely to deliver the desired political result, almost inevitable. It’s no coincidence that a majority of universal injunctions against Trump’s first-term executive orders came from U.S. District Court judges in California, Maryland, and the District of Columbia.

The challenge to Trump’s executive order on birthright citizenship is an example of how this gambit works.

Remember that an injunction is supposed to be an “extraordinary” step because the judicial process isn’t yet underway. Judges may issue injunctions only if four conditions are met, including that the plaintiffs will likely win in the end and would suffer “irreparable harm” if the judge doesn’t step in now. The latter requirement, however, is in the eye of the judicial beholder and a judge may well claim the label “irreparable harm” for what, in fact, are simply her own policy objections.

Boardman’s opinion, for example, asserted that eliminating birthright citizenship would throw “families’ lives into chaos and distress,” “rip away the promise of citizenship for countless babies,” and constitute “a form of punishment more primitive than torture.”

Whether individuals being in the United States illegally are the cause of familial chaos and distress, or whether citizenship should be made available to illegal aliens, are obviously policy issues for Congress or the executive branch. They are not legal considerations that a judge should be able to use to block policies she does not like. Her wild rhetoric about a policy being “more primitive than torture” only makes the point more strongly.

But it gets worse. In Mahmoud v. McKnight, parents of various faiths challenged the Montgomery County, Maryland, school board’s policy of mandating participation by all school children in classes that use storybooks with “LGBTQ characters” and refusing to inform parents when those materials will be used. The policy even covers pre-kindergarten classes. The parents claimed this policy violated their right to direct the religious upbringing of their children and sought an injunction. Boardman not only denied the request, but said that the policy imposed no “cognizable” injury to the parents’ rights at all. None whatsoever.

Finally, all the forum-shopping and political injunction-wielding will likely result in competing, and possibly conflicting, universal injunctions against the same policy.

In this case, for example, Fourth Circuit Judge Paul Niemeyer observed that “at least four cases in other United States District Courts are addressing similar challenges to Executive Order 14160.” Talk about chaos and distress.

Universal injunctions, especially when used in these political campaigns, will only increase the 65% of Americans who lack confidence in the nation’s judicial system or already believe that judges decide cases based on politics rather than law. The Supreme Court or Congress should consider limiting the reach of district court injunctions to the parties seeking them.

The post Universal Injunctions: The Left’s Go-To Political Weapon Against the Trump Agenda appeared first on The Daily Signal.

Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s video from Daily Signal Senior Contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to see more of his videos.

Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for The Daily Signal. There’s been a lot of frenzy in the news about the detention of Mahmoud Khalil. He’s a former Columbia University student who was here on a student visa and then has married an American citizen and has recalibrated his visa to a green card.

He’s an Algerian citizen who grew up in Syria and Palestine. And he’s the spokesman for something at Columbia University called the Columbia University Apartheid Divest, in which it suggests that no university should allow any investments with the so-called criminal state, apartheid state, as they call it, of Israel.

Now, he was deported because his activity is in contrast to what the State Department guidelines suggest. And that is, simply, that they do not want to issue visas—whether green cards or student visas or other sort of visas—to people whose activity is in contrast or against the interest of the United States foreign policy.

As I’m speaking, Hamas, who engineered the Oct. 7, 2023, massacre, still holds five American citizens as hostages. They will not release them, apparently. They’re on record, for the last 25 years, as a State Department-designated terrorist organization.

So, the question is, is it fair for Mr. Khalil to go back to his home and lose his green card?

The Left and many on the libertarian right said, “This is a free speech issue. He can say whatever he wants. Yes, he was the spokesman for the Columbia University Apartheid Divest group. So what? He can say that he doesn’t like Israel, that Oct. 7 was a glorious occasion.”

And if you look at the literature of his organization, it’s very clear that, A, they have called Oct. 7 a wonderful event, and B, in the past they’ve called for the eradication and destruction of Western civilization. Now, he may deny that, but that’s what his organization has done.

The president of Barnard College, the sister campus of Columbia University, about a week ago wrote an op-ed blasting Mr. Khalil’s organization and said that they were responsible—that is, again, the Columbia University Apartheid Divest, of which he is their, I guess, official spokesman and negotiator—had caused over $30,000 of damage, vandalism to the Columbia/Barnard campus.

They have, on two occasions, forcibly entered halls on the university campus and refused to leave. They have illegally encamped on campus grounds, refused to leave. And he was the negotiator.

So, the question is this, it’s very simple: Does he have a right, as a resident, to speak and do whatever he wants as long as it’s not criminal? He does. Does the State Department have a right to consider whether to issue a visa or a renewal of this visa or cancel a visa, depending on whether the recipient is doing things in the interest of the United States, or I shouldn’t say, is doing things contrary to the United States? And the answer is absolutely. Both sides are right.

In other words, Marco Rubio and his State Department are just saying this: “We issue thousands of visas to all sorts of people who say all sorts of things, and that’s perfectly fine. Obnoxious, obscene, whatever they want to say under the First Amendment because our courts have ruled that those who are residing in the United States have the same rights of free speech. However, we don’t have to let people in the United States automatically. We make that decision on whether we feel they’re in the interest of the United States or they pose a danger to the United States.”

So, both sides are right.

And all Mr. Rubio is saying is, Mr. Khalil, as the spokesman for Columbia University Apartheid Divest, has on numerous occasions supported groups that committed vandalism, that harassed Jews, and, most importantly, have called for the destruction of Western civilization and glorified a group that is designated by the U.S. State Department as a terrorist group. Now, he may deny that, but it’s on record.

Marco Rubio and the State Department put it in a pretty good way. They said something along the following lines, and I’m paraphrasing:

If in 2022, when this Algerian citizen wanted to come to the United States as a guest and use our educational facilities to get a degree and he had just said the following, ‘I plan, while I am at Columbia, to be part of the Columbia University Apartheid Divest group. And I will condone or participate in takeovers of particular halls and facilities on the campus to prove my point or to advocate my position, which is to alienate, ostracize Israel. And if it comes up that there is another war in the Middle East, I will side with Hamas, a known terrorist organization, as the State Department has defined it.’ Do you really think that we would allow that visa to be issued?

And the answer is no.

So, yes, he can say everything he wants. But his activity has consequences.

It wasn’t what he said, but it was what he did. And he now gets his wish. He can go back to the Middle East and be a strong advocate for Hamas, in closer proximity to it.

We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal.

The post Yes, Mr. Khalil, Your Actions Have Consequences appeared first on The Daily Signal.

The Senate on Friday voted 62-38 to end debate on a continuing resolution to fund the government through September, all but guaranteeing final passage of a GOP-crafted bill that would avoid a partial federal shutdown.

The continuing resolution bill arose out of political necessity after Congress was unable to pass individual spending bills for the current year.

President Donald Trump had called on Congress to vote on the stopgap spending bill.

“The budget from last YEAR is still not done. We are working very hard with the House and Senate to pass a clean, temporary government funding Bill (‘CR’) to the end of September. Let’s get it done!” he wrote on Truth Social on Feb. 27.

Trump’s call for a stopgap measure to provide funding to the government came as the narrow Republican majorities in Congress faced the difficult task of agreeing on a budget resolution.

The effort to pass a CR through Sept. 30, the end of fiscal 2025, was complicated by Democrat demands that Republicans promise Trump would cease his cost-cutting actions.

Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., the ranking member on the Senate Appropriations Committee, said that she and her fellow Democrats would support the CR if guarantees were provided that Trump would not impound funding and would back off of Elon Musk’s anti-bureaucracy efforts.

Ultimately, the bill passed in the House along mostly partisan lines, with only one Democrat, Rep. Jared Golden, D-Maine, voting for it.

From the outset, the situation in the Senate appeared to be much the same.

Sen. John Hickenlooper, D-Colo., who was once thought to be open to the CR, took to X and said he wouldn’t vote for it because of Trump’s frontal attack on the bureaucracy.

“This bill would wipe out congressional oversight, letting Trump cut and redirect funding however he wants,” said Hickenlooper.

But some Democrats, facing the harsh reality of the fact that their opposition could trigger a government shutdown, decided to support the CR.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., who had previously said he would urge his members to vote against it, said in a speech Thursday that he would not block the CR.

“While the CR bill is very bad, the potential for a shutdown has consequences for America that are much, much worse,” said Schumer.

Sen. Tommy Tuberville, R-Ala., asked shortly before the cloture vote why Schumer backed down, said, “It would be to commit suicide” if the Democrats triggered a shutdown.

Sen. John Fetterman, D-Penn., went a step further than Schumer, deciding to support the bill to avoid a shutdown, writing on X, “I disagree with many points in the CR, but I will never vote to shut our government down.”

Sen. Cynthia Lummis, R-Wyo., told The Daily Signal shortly before the cloture vote that she was confident Democrats would moderate their opposition to Trump in the future.

“I actually have great optimism the Democrats will get their land legs back under them. They always have. Right at the moment, they’re flailing a bit. But that won’t last,” said Lummis.

“They’ll pull it together, and they’ll either find ways to work with Republicans to get some of their policy priorities included, and if they don’t, this flailing with opposition instead of legislating will hurt them in the 2026 election cycle.“

The post Senate Dems Cave, Help GOP Advance Bill to Fund Government, Avoid Shutdown  appeared first on The Daily Signal.

Acquiring Greenland remains a priority for the Trump administration, and there are signs that a deal may be inching closer to happening.

You may have missed it, but President Donald Trump referred to Greenland in his joint address to Congress in early March. Trump said to the people of Greenland, “We strongly support your right to determine your own future, and if you choose, we welcome you into the United States of America.”

That short line, “and if you choose,” is significant because it undermines the silly conjecture that Trump is going to take the United States to war with Greenland and NATO or some such nonsense. Sumantra Maitra at The American Conservative wrote that the U.S. purchasing and integrating lands peacefully is very much in line with the country’s traditions.

“The idea that the U.S. would just simply annex Greenland, even by force if needed, is unappealing to a lot of Americans and worse for Europeans,” Maitra wrote. “Peaceful integration and mutually beneficial trade with foreign lands, on the other hand, is as American as, well, apfelstrudel” (the German phrase for apple pie).

Gentle, but forceful coaxing is the way to go here to entice the people of Greenland without provoking anti-American backlash.

Trump affirmed his commitment to this path on Thursday, too, saying how important he thinks Greenland is for security around the Arctic, through which Russian and Chinese ships frequently pass.

The message is that America wants Greenland, but that Greenland will ultimately need the U.S. It will be a mutually beneficial relationship for all.

Greenland’s recent elections were a mixed bag but they showed that the potential for a long-term deal is increasing.

The victorious Demokraatit party is considered center right. It’s generally pro-Europe and not currently in favor of U.S. acquisition but leans toward long-term independence.

Notably, the second-highest vote-getting Naleraq party—that only trailed Demokraatit by a few points—is the one most strongly amenable to independence (from Denmark) and partnership with the U.S. They will almost certainly be part of the ruling coalition of the country, since the two parties’ combined vote percentage was over 50%.

And most importantly of all, the left-wing parties hostile to Trump and the U.S. were soundly defeated.

Nick Solheim at American Moment had a nice, quick breakdown of the results on X.

Even NBC News admitted in an analysis of the election that while the pro-U.S. party didn’t win outright, the results are likely good for the White House.

It should be noted that Greenland’s voters are typically very much to the Left of Americans. The rightward shift after Trump’s overtures is significant.

Greenland is almost certainly willing to “play ball,” so to speak. And for a good reason. The United States offers huge investment possibilities far beyond the capacity of any European country or collection of countries, and certainly of Greenland alone.

Right now, both Denmark and Greenland are trapped in a suboptimal economic situation. Denmark can’t quite invest in Greenland to the degree necessary to make the partnership really pay off and it remains an underdeveloped financial burden as a result.

Greenland is rich in natural resources, but the island has a tiny number of people and only a few marginal industries. A great power like the United States could step in and make things happen like never before.

The key phrase here is “great power.” Greenland is of more importance now than it has been in decades because there’s been an unmistakable return to international great power competition.

A look at any map of the globe from the top should explain why Greenland is important. It’s straddled by Russia on one side, and China is highly interested in the region, especially its resources.

Starting the long-term process of acquiring Greenland signals that the U.S. is not going to let another great power encroach on the territory. It will help build upon the U.S. presence and influence over the Arctic. And it will provide significant investment and job opportunities to Americans and Greenland residents.

Trump said to the people of Greenland in his address, “We will keep you safe. We will make you rich. And together we will take Greenland to heights like you have never thought possible before.”

The Trump administration’s focus on Greenland demonstrates that the U.S. is not content to be a fading power or an economic zone in a global, woke empire. Instead, it will act as a great nation, willing to defend its interests at home and abroad and unwilling to allow other powers to force their way into the Western Hemisphere.

The post Trump’s Overtures Toward Greenland Are Paying Off appeared first on The Daily Signal.

FIRST ON THE DAILY SIGNAL—The Department of Defense’s school system touted the video game Minecraft as a tool for teaching social-emotional learning, a Trojan horse for diversity, equity, and inclusion.

A Department of Defense Education Activity middle-school teacher sent an email to staff encouraging them to use Minecraft to teach kids to “develop important [social-emotional learning] skills like collaboration, communication, empathy, mindfulness, social management, coping skills, self-awareness, and problem-solving.”

While claiming to equip children with the ability to manage emotions, feel empathy for others, and maintain positive relationships, social-emotional learning integrates critical race theory throughout the education system. 

During his first two weeks in office, Trump issued executive orders prohibiting radical gender ideology, critical race theory, and diversity, equity, and inclusion instruction from federally funded American education. 

That includes schools on military bases run by the U.S. Department of Defense Education Activity, which operates 161 schools across 11 foreign countries and in seven U.S. states and two territories, and serves more than 67,000 military-connected students. 

The teacher said Minecraft teaches collaboration and teamwork, self-management, empathy, problem solving and critical thinking, and safe social interactions.

“Role-playing and storytelling in Minecraft allow students to experience different viewpoints, improving emotional awareness,” he wrote to employees.  

The Department of Defense Education Activity agency renamed social-emotional learning programs as “resilience,” according to a Jan. 6 meeting recording obtained and previously reported by The Daily Signal.

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth made it clear that he would enforce the president’s ban on DEI at the Department of Defense.  

“The Pentagon will comply, immediately,” Hegseth said. “No exceptions, name-changes, or delays.”

Prior to Trump’s executive orders banning gender ideology and critical race theory, Pentagon schools were under fire for pornographic LGBTQ+ library books and age-inappropriate Pride Month celebrations. 

School libraries in the Department of Defense Education Activity offered widely banned books with sexually graphic content such as “All Boys Aren’t Blue,” “Sex: A Book for Teens,” and “This Book is Gay,” Fox News Digital reported. 

The post Pentagon Schools Instruct Use of Minecraft to Promote DEI Trojan Horse appeared first on The Daily Signal.

In a speech Friday at Vantage Plastics, a plastics manufacturing plant in Bangor Township, Michigan, Vice President JD Vance touted American workers and the progress the Trump administration has been making to make American manufacturing great again.

“We are an administration that is going to do things for the American people and for American workers,” he said.

Vance warned that the administration would be paying close attention to U.S. interests.

“So, if you’ve gotten rich the last few decades by ripping off U.S. companies and preying on American workers, well, the president is simply telling you the jig is up,” he said.

The vice president criticized the neglect of previous administrations when it came to offshoring, rather than preserving, American manufacturing jobs.

“For 40 years, the people of this country, the businesses, the workers, everybody, have been neglected, they have been ignored, and they have had a leadership that refuses to stand up for them,” Vance contended. 

The former Ohio senator said that the era of apathy for the plight of American workers is over and that the new administration would be guided by the America First principle.

“We are going to be guided by a very simple principle: Build in this country, we cut your taxes, we reduce your regulation, we reduce your energy costs,” Vance explained.

The vice president was introduced by Kelly Loeffler, the administrator of the Small Business Administration. The SBA recently announced that it would be launching a manufacturing initiative that would cut $100 billion in regulations. 

The vice president didn‘t hesitate to promise that there would be significant consequences for American businesses that continued to strengthen the U.S.’s foremost foreign policy adversary, the Chinese Communist Party, by offshoring manufacturing jobs to the communist nation.

“If you want to manufacture in China, which has the worst and most punitive economic policies towards us anywhere in the world, then you are going to have to pay the consequences,” Vance explained.

The vice president highlighted the importance of being able to produce domestically, because it reduced reliance on potentially hostile powers, such as China, by cultivating self-reliance. 

“Being able to make things is good, because it creates self-sufficiency as a nation, and it creates self-sufficiency in our people,” Vance noted.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the U.S. saw firsthand the problems of outsourcing supply chains to China when the Chinese government began hoarding the masks that country had made.  

Vance also detailed the many accomplishments of American workers over the past several decades. 

“American workers famously won the Second World War. American industry took us to the moon. It enabled the silicon revolution that created the most precise and sophisticated jobs imaginable in any field, demanding mechanical expertise on the scale of nanometers, which is so small you can’t even see it,” the vice president told the Michigan crowd. 

Vance assailed the Biden administration for its failures to deliver affordable prices for necessities, such as food and housing, while simultaneously ballooning the national debt at an unprecedented rate.

“They left us with sky-high prices. They left us with home values that had doubled in just four short years; meaning, a lot of American families couldn’t afford to buy or to rent a home. They left us with a historic debt crisis,” Vance said.

Under the Biden administration, federal spending reached 100% of gross domestic product, a number not reached since the immediate aftermath of World War II. 

“What did all that spending, what did all that waste and fraud get us? It got us an economy where Americans couldn’t afford to buy a home, our families couldn’t afford to buy groceries, and our people felt like the American dream was slipping away,” the former Ohio senator concluded. 

In the first two years of the Biden administration with Democratic majorities in both chambers, Congress spent more than the last two years of the Trump administration than occurred during the height of the pandemic. 

Still, the vice president ended on a hopeful note.

“And I feel invigorated that we finally have a president who is turning his back on 40 years of failed policy in Washington, D.C., and is getting back to investing in, and fighting for, the American worker. God bless you guys,” Vance said.

The post Vance Vows Accountability for Offshoring of Jobs appeared first on The Daily Signal.

President Donald Trump said the Justice Department is “turning the page on four long years of corruption and weaponization.” 

Trump spoke Friday when delivering remarks at the Justice Department for an event focused on fighting fentanyl, a highly lethal drug that has become an escalating problem in the United States. 

Trump said during the Biden administration, the DOJ was weaponized against political opponents, and “set loose violent criminals and went after patriotic parents.”

After being targeted by a string of Justice Department investigations during the Biden administration, Trump vowed to make the department less political and focus on fighting violent crime, including fighting illegal drug cartels. 

Trump said the Biden Justice Department “broke the law on a colossal scale.” 

“In the end, truth won and freedom won,” Trump said. 

However, Trump’s Democrats in Congress have insisted that Trump is likely to weaponize the Justice Department to retaliate against political foes.

This is a breaking news article and it will be updated

The post What Trump Said in Justice Department Speech appeared first on The Daily Signal.

West Virginia Gov. Patrick Morrisey signed a bill Wednesday to define sex-based terms in state law and prohibit biological males from entering female-only spaces in public schools, colleges, and correctional facilities in the state. 

“Today, we sent a strong message that West Virginia stands with women,” Morrisey said in a press release. “West Virginia will not bow down to radical gender ideology—we are going to lead with common sense, and the Riley Gaines Act does exactly that.”  

The act (SB 456), named for the former college swimmer-turned female sports advocate, adds a new article to state code to define “male” and “female” based on biological sex.

The bill also effectively brings uniformity to state law regarding sex discrimination and ensures the protection of sex-segregated spaces such as locker rooms, changing rooms, rape shelters, and correctional facilities. Sponsored by West Virginia Senate President Randy Smith, a Republican, the bill received bipartisan support in the Legislature. 

Gaines was present at the signing of the bill and affirmed her support of the legislation. 

“Under Gov. Morrisey’s leadership, the West Virginia Legislature has executed his priority of defining sex-based words and protecting women’s spaces. … I look forward to celebrating this win along with West Virginian women and girls,” Gaines said. 

West Virginia is now the 12th state to sign such legislation banning males who identify as females from women’s and girls’ female-only spaces, which follows a legislative model outlined by Independent Women’s Voice, a nonprofit policy advocacy group. 

Adaleia Cross, a West Virginia high school athlete, said she was grateful that Morrisey and the legislature prioritized common-sense protections for girls in the state.  

Cross is being represented by attorneys from Alliance Defending Freedom in an ongoing legal challenge to the Biden administration’s re-interpretation of Title IX, which was an attempt to force women’s sports to accept males who identify as female.

Title IX prohibits sex-based discrimination in any school or educational program that receives federal funding. The re-interpretation defined “sex” in Title IX to include “gender identity” and has since been reversed by President Donald Trump’s executive order “Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports.” 

“Because of a policy that allowed a male athlete to use the girls’ locker rooms and restrooms at my school, I was exposed to sexual comments and had no choice but to change in a bathroom stall out of fear of being exposed to males in the locker room,” Cross said. “Men and women are biologically different, and men don’t belong in girls’ spaces. Denying this truth only harms women and girls.” 

Alliance Defending Freedom legal counsel Sara Beth Nolan commended the governor and legislators for their leadership. 

“States have a duty to protect the privacy, safety, and dignity of women and girls,” Nolan said. “Letting men intrude into girls’ spaces where they are most vulnerable … is an invasion of privacy, a threat to their safety, and a denial of the real biological differences between the two sexes.” 

The post West Virginia Governor Signs Bill Protecting Female-Only Spaces appeared first on The Daily Signal.

Over the last three decades, elite American universities have engaged in economic, political, social, and cultural practices that were often unethical, illegal—and suicidal.

They did so with impunity.

Apparently, confident administrators assumed that the brand of Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, and other elite universities was so precious to the nation’s elite movers and shakers that they could always do almost anything they wished.

By the 1970s, nonprofit universities had dropped pretenses that they were apolitical and nonpartisan.

Instead, they customarily violated the corpus of iconic civil rights legislation by weighing race, gender, and sexual orientation in biased admissions, hiring, and promotions.

Graduation ceremonies became overtly racially and ethnically segregated. The same was true for dorms and “theme houses.”

So-called “safe spaces,” in the spirit of the Jim Crow South, reserved areas of campus solely for particular races.

Affluent foreign students often openly protested on behalf of designated terrorist groups like Hamas.

First-Amendment-protected free speech all but vanished on elite campuses. Any guest speaker who dared to critique abortion on demand, Middle East orthodoxy, biological males dominating women’s sports, or diversity, equity, and inclusion dogmas was likely to be shouted down, or on occasion roughed up.

University administrators either ignored the violence done to the Bill of Rights or quietly approved when their rowdy students were turned loose on supposed conservatives.

But in their hubris, the universities began a series of blunders that may now end them as they once were.

They began gouging government agencies such as the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation by grabbing anywhere from 30% to 60% of individual campus grants as “overhead.”

Yet they usually charged most private foundation grants a far more modest 15% surcharge—as if a lax government did not object to overcharging.

They pushed for a vast expansion of the student loan program, whose portfolio of federally guaranteed loans reached $1.7 trillion. But once the federal government guaranteed student loans against default, universities began jacking up their fees and tuition well above the annual rate of inflation.

Elite universities did not grasp that the more they began warping their curricula with DEI gut courses, radical green agendas, and postmodern race and gender theories, the less time they had to offer students their once gold-standard general education curricula of Western Civ, history, literature, philosophy, math, and science.

Soon employers started to notice that the new therapeutic courses were also married to race and sex-based admissions.

The SAT and ACT were, for a time, dropped. So were comparative rankings of high school grade point averages.

Soon, once iconic degrees were no longer any guarantee of the ability to write and speak well, think analytically, or compute competently.

Employers often began to prefer graduates from those state schools where DEI was muted, admissions were competitive, and teaching remained rigorous and non-ideological.

Finally, after Oct. 7, 2023, growing antisemitism on campuses became unapologetic, overt, and violent.

Thousands of Middle Eastern guest students brazenly cheered on Hamas terrorists.

The campus Marxist orthodoxy that Jews and Israel were “victimizing white people” and Palestinians were noble “non-white victims” ensured that Jewish students were chased and physically attacked on campuses.

A disgusted public watched invertebrate administrators either greenlight the antisemitic violence or ludicrously deny it.

So, there was bound to be a public reckoning. And now it has arrived.

Congress will soon pass legislation that will tax the annual multimillion-dollar income from multibillion-dollar endowments at somewhere between 15% and 20%.

There will be no more “overhead” or “surcharges” on government campus grants allowed larger than 15%.

Those two reforms alone could cost some of the richest campuses nearly a half billion dollars a year in lost income.

Racially offensive DEI programs will disqualify schools from federal support.

Foreign student guests who break U.S. laws or violate university rules will have their visas yanked and be shown the door to go home.

Campuses will have to abide by the First, Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Amendments of the Bill of Rights or forgo federal funds.

All these remedies enjoy broad public support.

For the first time in memory, a majority of Americans disapprove of current higher education. Only 10% of Americans believe an Ivy League degree translates into becoming a better American worker.

In a nation of declining fertility, smaller numbers of youths choosing college, and a federal government $36 trillion in debt, universities have very little leverage.

They can return to the original mission of offering rigorous, meritocratic, and disinterested education, guarantee constitutional protections for all on campus, and slash their vast administrative bloat.

Or if not, they are free to continue as they are, ensuring only further mediocrity, public dislike —and eventual irrelevancy.

(C)2025 Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal.

The post Is the Jig Up for Elite Higher Education? appeared first on The Daily Signal.

America has many adversaries: China, Iran, North Korea, to name a few. But perhaps America’s biggest enemy is fentanyl, a highly addictive and highly lethal synthetic opioid. In this war on fentanyl, the Senate is preparing to launch its next attack with a Friday vote on the HALT Fentanyl Act.

The Daily Signal spoke with Sens. James Lankford, R-Okla., Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, and Bill Cassidy, R-La., before the Senate’s vote on the HALT Fentanyl Act.

“There is no silver bullet,” to end the fentanyl epidemic, Cassidy, the lead sponsor of the bill, told reporters, “but there is silver buckshot.” He presented the Halt Fentanyl Act as one of those pellets.

If signed into law, the legislation would permanently classify fentanyl-related substances as Schedule I under the Controlled Substances Act. While fentanyl is already a controlled substance, drug traffickers—including cartels—have sought to circumvent the law by making slight chemical alterations to the lethal drug. 

Cassidy said this bill “recognizes that some of those attempting to bring in fentanyl will try and circumvent the law by changing the fentanyl just enough so that it becomes what is called an analog.”

“‘Oh, it’s got fentanyl, [but] you can’t bust me because it’s not actually fentanyl,’” Cassidy said, acting out a theoretical exchange between drug traffickers and law enforcement. “No, it still addicts like fentanyl, it still kills like fentanyl, and it is substantially fentanyl. So, therefore, it shall be treated by law enforcement as if it is fentanyl.”

By closing the fentanyl-analog loophole, “this gives law enforcement the legal justification to say, ‘You’re right. You’ve changed it ever so slightly. You’re still busted, because it still addicts and it still kills,’” Cassidy explained.

More than a quarter of a million Americans have died from fentanyl overdose since 2018. In fiscal year 2024 alone, U.S. Customs and Border Protection seized 21,889 pounds of fentanyl; with a lethal dose of just two milligrams, the seized drugs were enough to kill nearly 5 billion people, more than half of the global population.

Lankford recounted a conversation he had with a first responder in his home state of Oklahoma to illustrate just how rapidly fentanyl is evolving and how lethal it has become.

Lankford recalled the first responder telling him that “it used to be that when they went to a site, and they saw someone had overdosed on fentanyl, they could get one shot of Narcan and be able to bring them back. Now, the potency is so high on it, sometimes they’ll do six or eight shots of Narcan just to be able to try to revive someone because of the potency that they’re dealing with.”

“Things are changing rapidly on the street,” Lankford added. “Congress should respond on this and be able to support law enforcement, first responders … as well as protecting our citizens when they do get caught up in this kind of addiction, as well.”

The HALT Fentanyl Act, however, is just one of many points of attack because “there’s a lot of elements” to the war on fentanyl, Lankford said.

The goal remains, Cassidy said, “to save lives by telling law enforcement you can confiscate that shipment, even if it’s an analog, not just if it is fentanyl.”

During President Donald Trump’s first term, the government temporarily put similar restrictions on all fentanyl-related substances. This legislation would make those restrictions permanent.

Grassley highlighted the “dozens or hundreds of organizations of parents that have lost loved ones because of … fentanyl.”

“If there’s any reason for passing this bill, it’s their urging of it, and I thank them and the law enforcement organizations for their support,” Grassley added.

Grassley said he is encouraged by “the bipartisan group that Senator Cassidy put together to get the bill introduced and the overwhelming votes we had on the floor of the United States Senate.” Previous procedural votes on the HALT Fentanyl Act received more than 80 votes in favor.  

Even this common sense piece of legislation, however, “had threats of amendments at the last minute,” Grassley told reporters. “But I think everybody working on this legislation, including Senator Cassidy, but others as well, including Republican leadership, were able to mute the efforts to hurt this bill by amendment.”

With those threats defeated, Grassley said he “feel[s] very good about the wide margin that this bill has had through two or three roll calls so far and hope it leads to a new day of more bipartisanship.”

“I think probably naive in saying that, but I still have that hope,” Grassley mused.

The post With HALT Fentanyl Act, Senate Poised to Strike Another Blow to Drug Traffickers appeared first on The Daily Signal.