WASHINGTON, Sept 6 (Reuters)—The Trump administration on Sunday renewed its appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court to allow a plan that could limit mail-in ballots ahead of November’s congressional elections, after a federal judge last week blocked those restrictions.

Lawyers for the Trump administration filed an emergency application to the nation’s highest court to allow the U.S. Postal Service to implement a rule restricting mail-in voting, even as some U.S. states have already started sending out postal ballots ahead of the Nov. 3 midterm elections.

On Friday, Boston-based U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani extended a ban preventing the new rule from taking effect. 

The final decision on whether the administration’s mail-in voting restrictions can proceed likely now rests with the Supreme Court.

Solicitor General John Sauer, representing the Trump administration, urged the Supreme Court to allow the rule to immediately go into effect, warning that each day the lower court’s injunction remains in place “risks sowing confusion and chaos” as more states issue mail ballots. 

Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson set a deadline of Wednesday for responses to the Trump administration’s request.

The administration had filed an earlier emergency request to the Supreme Court to overturn Talwani’s shorter-term injunction. Before the top court had ruled on that application, she extended her ban on Friday, leading to the administration’s new filing on Sunday.

The USPS issued its rule to implement an executive order that President Donald Trump signed in March.

Under the rule, states must supply the USPS with lists of mail ballot recipients, and all outbound and return ballot envelopes must bear unique barcodes. The rule allows USPS to refuse to deliver ballots that do not comply with the new standards or are associated with voters not on the lists.

All U.S. states allow for some form of mail-in voting. Twenty-nine states allow voters to ask to ​cast ballots by mail without providing ⁠a reason, and eight conduct elections entirely by mail.

North Carolina on Friday became the first state to mail ballots for the elections in November.

(Reporting by Tim Reid in Washington and Nate Raymond in Boston; Editing by Sergio Non and Paul Simao)

On Oct. 19, 1765, a crowd gathered at the corner of Broad and Church streets in Charleston, South Carolina, and built a gallows.

An effigy representing South Carolina’s stamp distributor was soon hanging from it beneath a sign that read, “Liberty and no Stamp Act.”

The Stamp Act had been passed by Parliament only months earlier. Now Charleston was showing Britain what resistance looked like. The crowd eventually took the effigy down, carried it through the streets in a procession, and burned it.

And that was only the beginning.

Over the next several days, riled up bands of Charlestonians searched buildings and homes suspected of concealing stamped paper.

Around midnight in late October, about 80 masked and blackened-faced men descended on Henry Laurens’ house on East Bay Street, chanting, “Liberty, Liberty & Stamped Paper,” and forced their way inside.

Laurens, himself an opponent of the Stamp Act, pleaded with them to leave because his wife, Eleanor, was sick and pregnant. They assured him that they “loved and respected” him—but they had come to search the house anyway.

Meanwhile, the pressure on South Carolina’s actual stamp officials was working. George Saxby and Caleb Lloyd, the colony’s stamp inspector and distributor, were pressured at Motte’s Wharf on Oct. 28 to publicly affirm that they would not execute the Stamp Act.

They renounced their commissions, and under a flag bearing the word “Liberty,” a crowd escorted them with bells, drums, music, cannon fire, and cheers to Dillon’s Tavern.

Parliament had passed a law; Charlestonians had decided it would not be enforced.

South Carolina had won its first great confrontation with Parliament without firing a shot at a British soldier.

And at the center of the resistance was a 41-year-old Charleston merchant named Christopher Gadsden.

The surviving portrait by Jeremiah Theus shows a prosperous Charleston gentleman in a blue coat and white satin waistcoat, standing with a cane in one hand and his tricorne tucked beneath the other arm. With a receding hairline, a solid frame, and a relaxed smile, Gadsden hardly looks like the kind of man who would spend the next decade making trouble for the British Empire.

Looks can be deceiving.

Gadsden was blunt, stubborn, hot-tempered, and remarkably certain of his own convictions. One observer compared him to “Harry Hotspur,” Shakespeare’s fiery warrior. Another described him as “plain, blunt, hot” but sensible.

He could irritate cautious men and attract bold ones. He had the confidence of a man who had made up his mind—and the nerve to live with the consequences.

Gadsden wasn’t a man who suddenly became radical in 1775. By then, he had been at it for ten years.

The Stamp Act crisis had convinced Gadsden that Parliament’s claims of authority over the colonies posed a much larger threat than a tax on paper. The question was no longer simply how much Americans would pay; it was whether Parliament had the right to impose its will on people who had no representatives in Parliament.

Gadsden’s answer was increasingly clear: It did not.

By early 1766, the resistance had essentially succeeded. With no stamped paper available, South Carolina’s courts closed and the customs office suspended operations. Parliament repealed the Stamp Act in March.

But Gadsden did not regard the victory as the end of the struggle. He regarded it as proof that resistance worked.

That summer, about 25 Charleston tradesmen gathered under the Liberty Tree to hear Gadsden warn that Britain would try again to restrict American liberties.

The enormous live oak stood in Alexander Mazyck’s pasture near what are now Alexander and Charlotte streets. Those tradesmen became an important core of Charleston’s Sons of Liberty over the next decade, and their Liberty Tree became a symbol of the resistance.

South Carolina had learned that popular resistance could force royal authority to retreat.

It had also learned that resistance could spread.

South Carolina had its own reasons to distrust royal authority. The colony had a long history of conflict with royal governors over taxation, appropriations, appointments, and political affairs.

Charleston, enriched by the enormous profits of rice and indigo, was one of the wealthiest cities in British North America, and its powerful political class was accustomed to exercising considerable control through the Commons House of Assembly.

After the French and Indian War, South Carolina’s political leaders increasingly saw Parliament’s new assertions of authority as an intrusion on that independence.

But beneath their prosperity was a profound contradiction.

Leading proponents of liberty, including Gadsden, were slaveholders who profited from the slave economy. By 1774, more than 90 enslaved people worked Gadsden’s two rice plantations, and enslaved laborers helped build his enormous Charleston wharf. Yet he was also a close friend and supporter of John Adams, an early critic of slavery who called it “an evil of colossal magnitude” and “a foul contagion in the human character.”

The contradiction was real, and it would follow the Revolution from Charleston to Philadelphia and beyond.

Then Parliament tried again. This time, it was tea.

When a ship carrying tea arrived in Charleston, local resistance prevented the tea from entering the market. A mass meeting on Dec. 3 created a committee to enforce a boycott. Resistance was spreading beyond the Commons House and the merchant class and into everyday life.

Parliament could impose a tax, but it couldn’t make a Charleston woman buy British cloth. Parliament could impose its laws, but it couldn’t make a South Carolinian obey them.

The deeper issue was consent. Americans increasingly believed that legitimate government required the consent of the governed.

Resistance was no longer simply something politicians debated. It was becoming something ordinary people practiced.

South Carolina had spent nearly a decade learning how to resist. Now it was learning how to govern without Britain.

When news of the Coercive Acts arrived, South Carolina was a decade into resistance. Now it was learning how to govern without Britain.

In July 1774, delegates from throughout the colony met in Charleston, elected delegates to the First Continental Congress, and created a committee of 99 that quickly became the colony’s de facto government.

South Carolina did not merely protest royal authority; it began replacing it.

And Christopher Gadsden was still there.

He had watched the colony discover that Parliament could be defied, and he had helped organize the men who defied it. He had spent a decade helping South Carolina move from protest to resistance, and from resistance toward something far more consequential.

The Revolution was still months away.

But South Carolina was already becoming revolutionary.

And by the end of 1775, that defiance would acquire a symbol:

A yellow field.

A coiled rattlesnake.

And a warning.

This article is part of a series on the American Revolution in South Carolina, North Carolina, and Georgia. 

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

The Republican National Committee is set to host its first-ever midterm national convention this week in Dallas, Texas. With less than 60 days until the midterm election, the party is using this event to celebrate nominees, fundraise, and build momentum for November.

Unlike a presidential convention, when the party selects its nominee for president, the RNC says this convention will be a “national celebration,” showcasing its candidates. The two-night event will take place in Dallas on Sept. 9-10.

“We obviously have the best showman that’s ever existed in the Republican Party in President Donald J. Trump. We can highlight all the great issues, ideas, policies, people that are fueling this Great American Comeback, and we’re going to be able to showcase all these things to the American people for two solid days,” RNC Chairman Joe Gruters said.

President Donald Trump is set to speak both nights, giving a keynote address night one and closing remarks night two. Vice President J.D. Vance is scheduled to give a keynote address night two.

The RNC has said there will be over 100 speakers and panels across the two-day event. On Day One, there will be talks on everything from fraud, healthcare, election integrity, a candidate showcase, education, and parental rights, ending with the presidential keynote.

Day Two will feature discussions on border security, honoring Charlie Kirk’s impact on American youth, a 9/11 remembrance, trade policy, and much more, plus the vice-presidential keynote, and closing remarks from Trump.

RNC confirmed speakers include members of Trump’s Cabinet including Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Attorney General Todd Blanche, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Medicare & Medicaid Administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz, Housing and Urban Development Secretary Scott Turner, and Karoline Leavitt.

Republican Congressional Leadership is also confirmed to speak including, House Speaker Mike Johnson, Senate Majority Whip John Barrasso, National Republican Senatorial Committee Chairman Tim Scott, House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, House Majority Whip Tom Emmer, House Republican Conference Chair Lisa McClain, National Republican Congressional Committee Chairman Richard Hudson, and RNC Chairman Joe Gruters.

Confirmed attendees include Senate Majority Leader John Thune, and Sens. Ted Cruz, Jon Husted, and Bernie Moreno. Some members of Congress will not be in attendance because of scheduling conflicts and campaign obligations in their districts. Johnson said he has been promoting the event, but that attendance was not mandatory.

“They’ve got to all make their own individual decision,” Johnson said. “It’s a critical time right before early voting begins nationwide.”

However, protesters will surely be there. Far-left groups from Texas and across the country have already come together. They are partnering with the Communist Party USA and are planning a march at the convention on Thursday, the day the president is set to speak.

The Daily Signal will also be in attendance, bringing you on-the-ground coverage of the event, the protests, and the president’s keynote speech.

For most people, the story of the medieval world was one of cramped cities, constant violent crime, and episodic outbreaks of deadly plagues—the dividends of unclean urban conditions, rotting food, fouled water, open sewage, and unchecked rats, fleas, and lice. Most of each day was spent simply trying to survive until the next.

Castles and walls dotted the landscape to protect kingdoms from marauding tribes and foreign invaders. City gates were usually closed at dusk to keep out nocturnal marauders. Public executions drew massive crowds. And religious schisms and conflicts often turned deadly.

In other words, it was not altogether unfamiliar to the world we are becoming today.

Yet meanwhile, science advanced quietly among true elites at universities, courts, and monasteries, producing windmills, mechanical clocks, and eyeglasses. Sophisticated crossbows were manufactured in great numbers. Large, multi-sail warships were built that could cross narrow seas.

Some of history’s greatest literature—Dante’s “Divine Comedy,” Chaucer’s “Canterbury Tales,” and St. Thomas Aquinas’ “Summa Theologiae”—was the product of the medieval mind.

We still gaze dumbfounded at the architectural genius and beauty of the colossal cathedrals of Cologne, Florence, Milan, Paris, Rome, and Seville. The Byzantine cathedral Hagia Sophia may have risen near the beginning of the medieval period and for a millennium, nothing rivaled its majesty. All these medieval architectural masterpieces were built without computers, porta-potties, overtime, or building permits.

Yet after the collapse of the classical world (circa AD 500), Western civilization still needed a millennium to recover even a modicum of its lost knowledge and technology. Centuries passed before the Renaissance saw hygienic principles of sewage systems, aqueducts, and waste disposal—not to mention the medical expertise of classically trained doctors and scientists.

Modern Medievalism

Yet our progressive-regressive modern West is now suddenly beginning to resemble the medieval age—with one important caveat: After centuries of so-called “progress,” we should know better.

Our mounting urban filth, dangerous streets, and resurgent diseases are juxtaposed with brilliant revolutions in artificial intelligence, bioengineering, robotics, satellite technology, spaceflight, and cancer research.

Unlike their counterparts in the medieval fiefdom, our officials know how to stop disease, crime, and filth but apparently choose not to. Their neglect grows out of a sick ideology that divides the world into the blameworthy “oppressors” and the blameless “oppressed.” The victim is always right and must be championed—at least from a distance or as long as he does not show up smelly on your doorstep.

We have just experienced a tribal invasion of millions of impoverished foreigners swarming across our southern border—until the belated resumption of border-wall construction, medieval-style, and the deployment of detested patrols who try bravely to stop them.

Western urban street crime seems to require the army to restore calm yet often grows unchecked when troops are barred from helping police.

It is technically illegal for people to camp out on public sidewalks or someone else’s property—unless they do so in such numbers that paralyzed city officials look the other way.

Defecation, urination, fornication, and drug injection are now routine spectacles for hurried sidewalk passersby. If Los Angeles or Berkeley allows its streets and sidewalks to become medieval, should we be surprised by outbreaks there of deadly medieval diseases like typhus and leptospirosis—or that our storm drains now double as sewage gutters?

Today’s mayors will not stop rats from breeding, while officials—most recently in Los Angeles, for example—consider proposals for taxpayer-funded “hygienic sexual-relief clinics” offering homeless people “private sexual relief through masturbation.”

In New York, some of the richest people in the world sidestep rancid piles of rat-infested trash. In San Francisco and Chicago, some of the world’s greatest cancer researchers check their shoe soles for human feces before entering their space-age labs.

Weirder still, the Western world has become both the most regulated and the most lawless civilization on the planet. Our state environmental detectives visit industries to ensure that their effluvia do not contain one part per billion of a particular toxic substance. And state and federal regulators, with dozens of letters after their names, examine daily microscopic traces of dangerous toxins in the bubbling pools of sewage at treatment plants.

Yet under cover of darkness, masked city workers decked out in hazmat suits, rubber boots, and gloves use high-pressure hoses to blast politically correct feces, urine, blood, and drug detritus into storm drains. These modern marvels carry the mess out to pollute supposedly pristine ocean waters—where a fisherman can be fined a small fortune for tossing an inert, empty soda can into the smelly water. In the modern West, one-billionth of Roundup is a threat to civilization; tons of feces on city sidewalks are not. The theory? The more the law-abiding are monitored to the nth degree, the more society can withstand exempting the lawless to do as they wish.

How strange is our postmodern medieval intersection between barbarity and civilization?

The Oppressive Oppressed

In California, a century of traffic science and public-safety research had established strict licensing rules for truck drivers navigating fully loaded 80,000-pound, double-trailer behemoths amid tiny subcompacts on our busy freeways.

Our legal system has insisted that drivers of such interstate semis must be highly skilled and certified before stepping into the potentially dangerous T. Rex of a big rig. They must be 21, possess a valid California driver’s license, pass a Department of Transportation physical, and undergo background and drug screening—all before scoring 80 percent on a required 50-question technical exam, followed by a thorough two-hour, in-person test of their driving skills. Sounds great—in theory.

But not in fact. For fear that someone, somewhere, somehow, at some time might be inconvenienced by these rules to protect the public, nearly 20,000 illegal aliens obtained commercial driver’s licenses from a compliant state of California without even proving rudimentary knowledge of English. They were free to exploit loopholes, leverage exemptions, and avoid background checks.

The result?

Our new leftist apparat empowered thousands of incompetent drivers. Many cannot distinguish a yield sign from a stop sign, and most cannot read a word of English. They drive as they please—racing, swerving, and veering, with a 40-ton trailer wagging behind them.

They now own our Wild West freeways so that our elite can feel morally superior to the mere lab-rat drivers on whom they experiment. The architects of these laws are often chauffeured in large limousines, SUVs, and motorcades or prefer to fly in private jets.

Western civilization mostly phased out public executions nearly a century ago. But before it congratulates itself on its distance from the medieval world, consider that the therapeutic Left now canonizes, rather than hangs, murderers. (Which is more medieval: to hang a murderer or to romanticize a known assassin?)

Luigi Mangione assassinated Brian Robert Thompson, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare, in a December 2024 ambush and pleaded guilty to federal charges stemming from the killing last month. He has been deified by scores of young leftist women who swoon over the trust-fund scion’s good looks and politically correct violence. Indeed, admirers even produced a musical about his supposedly heroic murder of the health care executive.

Charlie Kirk was grotesquely murdered during a livestreamed public event, after which, for months on end, some on the Left celebrated his shooting and mocked those who mourned him. When Lindsay Clancy brutally strangled her three small children with an exercise band, women on the Left did not merely cite her supposedly extenuating postpartum depression but deified her as a victimized “everywoman”—with scarcely a voice for the three young lives snuffed out before they had a chance to grow up by the person who, until recently, everyone understood was supposed to care for them most: their mother.

The new secular revolutionaries know that their city upon a hill won’t work—and will crash and burn—if conservatives likewise deify the murderer of a populist Marxist podcaster. What would they do if conservatives, in tit-for-tat fashion, were to join in to gush over the handsome killer of a popular socialist activist? What if a returning combat veteran slew all his children and then developed a cult of admirers demanding his PTSD guaranteed him an exemption from the law? What if the Secret Service, on four separate occasions, had to shoot at would-be right-wing assassins of President Barack Obama?

Modern, sophisticated, humane science now has the technology to save most premature babies at 23-24 weeks. But in pre-civilizational fashion, Massachusetts—to the cheers of “enlightened” feminists—has enacted laws to allow abortion (involving the collapse of the infant’s skull and the siphoning out of its contents) right up to the moment of birth. The media hailed this license to kill a viable infant as “strengthening abortion care.”

In this brutal juxtaposition of life and death, modern and ancient, we invest millions to save one premature infant of six months, only to allot a few dollars to kill a baby as it looks out the birth canal and almost reaches a new life.

Chic Barbarity

These contradictions and alternate universes of the modern medieval West are still quite different from their counterparts in the medieval world of 500-1400.

At least the medieval age believed that it was incrementally gaining knowledge to fight age-old terrors of the human and natural worlds. And such progress would eventually lead to the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, and the current affluence and freedom of the West.

In contrast, our retrograde contemporary world knows how to prevent ancient diseases. We have mastered the science of sewage control and treatment. We have sought to regulate away most of the dangers posed by life-giving machines. A hundred years of penal science has established that police visibility and law enforcement deter crime.

Yet reactionary Marxism, socialist-mandated equality, and authoritarian, heaven-on-earth utopianism—going beyond even the excesses of the medieval Church—war against the progress of civilization. These ideologies arise not from fear of God or of violating ancient customs and traditions, but from smug moral narcissism—with the addendum that our atheist saints must never suffer the consequences of their destructive ideology.

After all, there are no homeless people on the lawns of the humanitarian Malibu celebrities, but plenty of security for the very progressives who defunded the police in crime-ridden cities.

Martha’s Vineyard humanitarians blasted Immigration and Customs Enforcement as Gestapo thugs, even as they readied care packages for illegal aliens dropped off at their community center—but only after they had ordered buses to transfer the “Other” far away.

Redistributionist gasbag and socialist Hasan Piker—channeling medieval pogroms—warns Jews that their future is bleak in America, then whizzes off in his $200,000 EV Porsche Taycan Turbo S people’s wagon.

So again, what is this plague of modern medievalism?

It is a disease of the 21st-century West, where hundreds of millions have transcended the age-old struggle to live one more day and now enjoy the unchecked freedom and affluence of democratic market capitalism.

In a world where we deem it our birthright to die in our sleep at 90, we do not worry about who struggles to produce our food, build our homes, provide our fuel, or conquer our diseases. We care only that they do so on demand. And thus, on autopilot, we are free to get tatted and pierced, remain glued to our iPhones, and perhaps even consider transitioning as we worry about cosmic things—like the need to celebrate the murderer or torch a police precinct.

Regressive Progressives

So the progressives, socialists, and Marxists gave us universal “caring.” They birthed a puritanical holiness, a narcissistic sanctimoniousness that decrees the rape victim of an illegal alien acceptable collateral damage—allowable to ensure that the illegal alien remains free to enter the country unaudited and unquestioned.

The poor typhus-bearing rats that scurry along the public sidewalk shall not be denied their breeding grounds among the sanctified but soiled and infectious blankets of the homeless.

The modern medievalist demands that the 30-year veteran of our wars be drummed out of the military as an enemy of the people for refusing the experimental mRNA vaccine—but not the COVID-19-infected, unvaccinated illegal alien who, amid lockdowns, strolls across the Rio Grande without a word from our secular saints.

Virtue-signaling concern for the nihilist—at someone else’s expense—is the new national creed.

And the “victim” and racist killer Decarlos Brown—now deemed “too incompetent to stand trial”—readying his knife to slice open the throat of the innocent, doomed, 23-year-old Iryna Zarutska, in the seat ahead of him, is the poster child of our modern medievalism.

(C)2026 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.

In May 2025, Tom Fletcher, the United Nations under-secretary-general for humanitarian affairs, went on BBC Radio and told the audience that 14,000 babies in Gaza were going to die “in the next 48 hours unless we can reach them.”

According to UNICEF, there are around 20,000 babies in the entirety of Gaza. Which means 70% of all infants were in danger of dying in mere hours. An “utterly chilling” figure, Fletcher stressed.

The New York Times, along with numerous other establishment media outlets, relayed Fletcher’s allegation to its credulous audience without any skepticism. The usual experts were summoned to discuss this unfolding famine on cable news. And the antisemites across social media amplified the claim.

No matter how far-fetched a story is about Israel, including preposterous, evidence-free accusations that it trains dogs to rape Palestinians, papers such as The New York Times will spread it to feed the perception that the Jewish state operates as a genocidal entity. And no matter how often the claims are debunked, they keep at it.

A couple of months after Fletcher’s pronouncement, for instance, The New York Times ran a front-page story about starvation in Gaza featuring a haunting photograph of an emaciated Palestinian toddler named Mohammed Zakaria al Mutawaq. Unmentioned was that the boy suffered from cerebral palsy and other serious preexisting medical conditions, and his appearance had nothing to do with hunger.

In any event, what the U.N. report actually found was that 14,000 cases of malnutrition might occur among the 1 million children of Gaza, not babies, if aid did not reach them over the next year.

Aid did reach them. Lots and lots of aid. The U.S.-Israeli Gaza Humanitarian Foundation delivered around 187 million meal equivalents, plus produce, and over 1 million packs of supplementary food for children to Palestinians before the ceasefire.

And a year after U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres claimed that “famine” in Gaza was a “failure of humanity itself,” a UNICEF-led “Nutrition SMART Survey Result” found that not only was there no widespread acute malnutrition in Gaza, but at 0.5%, the strip had one of the lowest rates in the region.

By the time “clarifications” run, the stories have coagulated in the imaginations of Israel haters.

No credible person argues that Palestinians in Gaza do not suffer because of Hamas’ endless nihilistic wars against Israel. But there was no genocide. Not one popularly understood. And not legally. The exculpatory evidence against genocide is overwhelming.

The most significant thing to remember about the genocide charge is that international organizations had to change the way they apply the legal definition that has been in place since the 1948 Genocide Convention to smear Israel.

In the popular understanding, the term “genocide” is something akin to the mass murder of people. As a legal matter, it is defined as acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group.

The legal case against Israel relies on intent.

If Israel harbors genocidal intentions, why would it deliver more humanitarian aid to the Gaza Strip than any army has probably ever delivered to an enemy population during wartime in history? Israel, which gave Gaza autonomy in 2005, not only provided food but also clean water, electricity, and medical aid for decades.

If Israel has genocidal intentions, why does it warn civilians with flyers, roof knocking, phone calls, and other mitigation techniques? Israel remains the only nation in the history of Earth that is allegedly intent on genocide to put its own troops in more danger to spare civilians.

Why does Israel move the populations of entire cities out of the way when trying to confront Hamas? Israel could, of course, annihilate all of Gaza within minutes if it felt like it.

If Israel has genocidal intentions, why does the Gaza war have one of the lowest combat-to-civilian death ratios in the history of modern warfare? This, despite the fact that Hamas urges its own people to become cannon fodder as a means of appealing to friendly Western journalists and intellectuals. Hamas leaders build tunnels under hospitals, schools, and mosques. They fire rockets from civilian areas. They prevent their own people from evacuating combat zones.

If Israel had genocidal intentions, there would be a lot more than 70,000 total casualties during the war. That total, it needs to be stressed, includes deaths from illness, old age, executions, murders, natural causes, and preexisting conditions. Most importantly, it includes Hamas and Islamic Jihad fighters—though that fact is barely ever mentioned by the mass media.

Of course, Israel itself is home to over 2 million Arab citizens, a fifth of the country, with full legal and voting rights, who serve in the Knesset, practice law and medicine, and attend universities. Arab Israelis have higher living standards, longer life expectancies, and greater political freedom than Arabs in most neighboring countries.

If Israel’s goal was ethnic cleansing, the nation is the most spectacularly incompetent operation in human history.

There is no genocide. And there was no famine. There was a war. And the bad guys lost.

COPYRIGHT 2026 CREATORS.COM

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

Just like the networks spent months helpfully skipping over the Nazi tattoo on the chest of Maine Democrat Graham Platner, they have largely ignored radical leftist influencer Hasan Piker, who has campaigned with Michigan Democrat Abdul El-Sayed. ABC and NBC haven’t found him, while CBS broke the mold with two stories.

The “PBS NewsHour” hasn’t mentioned Piker, although there was a mention on the PBS show “Washington Week with The Atlantic” on Aug. 14. The show’s host, Atlantic Editor Jeffrey Goldberg, volunteered: “The party has developed something of a Hasan Piker problem. This is a popular hard-left Twitch streamer who has said that America deserved 9/11, that Jews are inbred. He’s praised Mao. He’s praised Houthi terrorists and so on. Democrats are extremely worried about the presence of people like this who are no longer at the margin, who are creating, let’s say, loads of new ads, if nothing else, for Republicans.”

National Public Radio offered more coverage, but none of it dipped to the level of loopy detail that Goldberg did. “America deserved 9/11” never came up, or the Houthis, or praising Chinese communist dictator Mao Zedong as a great leader. On the June 15 “All Things Considered,” Elena Moore, who covers young voters for NPR, tamely described Piker as “a leftist streamer who’s been stumping for progressive candidates. He’s got an audience of millions across social media, but he’s also, Ailsa, divisive because of his strong anti-Israel beliefs.”

Moore at least noted that he said he “would vote for Hamas over Israel” every single time. After running a sound bite from her Piker interview about why he’s endorsing candidates, Moore added: “And Piker’s followers are left-leaning, but he does have a politically valuable audience, which he describes as majority young, white, and male, a group that Democrats lost ground with in 2024.”

The next day, Moore then took this topic to “The NPR Politics Podcast.” She repeated the same basics, including the pro-Hamas quote. But he was just a “leftist” or “left-leaning.” NPR White House reporter Danielle Kurtzleben brought up Nick Fuentes as kind of an opposing figure, but then she regretted it. “Hasan Piker, he is a leftist. To be clear, I am not saying that’s the mirror of white nationalists.”

Fuentes loves Hitler, Piker loves Mao. So aren’t they similar in an obvious way?

The imbalance continued as NPR reporter Miles Parks added, “The late right-wing activist Charlie Kirk, someone who for a long time was seen as fringe. And then, of course, as [President Donald] Trump became less and less fringe, as did he in the Republican Party.” Leftists can never find a “fringe” on their side.

There were two other brief mentions of Piker on “Morning Edition” (July 27 and Aug. 11) where Piker was mentioned in passing as a “leftist Twitch streamer” in one story and a “left-wing streamer” in the other.

On the Aug. 6 “Morning Edition,” NPR host Michel Martin interviewed former Obama campaign manager David Axelrod, who lamented that Republican Mike Rogers has been “able to create a distraction by using the [Democratic Socialists of America] and Hasan Piker and some of the more radical elements of your coalition to change the subject.” At least the word “radical” was uttered.

But Martin just wanted Axelrod’s advice on how El-Sayed can get around the GOP, to avoid “allowing his ethnicity, his heritage to sort of be used against him?” Does he have the “political skill to navigate these traps?”

This betrays some of the real objectives of “public broadcasting.” They help their allies on the left “navigate traps” set by those objectionable Republicans who are trying to “create a distraction.”

COPYRIGHT 2026 CREATORS.COM

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

Mother Teresa (feast day of Sept. 5) is synonymous with love and service.

No matter what one’s religious affiliation—or lack thereof—she is known as a sort of blueprint for the human person. She gave everything to serve the most vulnerable. And yet, her smile and joy reverberated around the world.

So many people recognize the blue and white habits that her congregation wears. She was a woman of intense sacrifice for God and for others. She had a way of looking at people that made them feel like they were the only person who mattered in the entire world.

If you are like me, you might ask: How can anyone ever be like that? How can you live so radically for God and for others as Mother Teresa did? What did she know about life that gave her the recipe to live in such a radically beautiful way?

While I am not even close to being a Mother Teresa, I do believe that the secret to living in a similar fashion to hers is found in the depths of her prayer life. Mother Teresa spent her entire day serving the poorest of the poor and those who were dying in Calcutta. The rest of her time was given to prayer and a few hours of sleep. Many great works have shown that it was the intimacy of Mother Teresa’s prayer that fueled her life.

Most notably, it was my encounter with a letter that she wrote to her community toward the end of her life that changed my view on prayer and holiness. It is called the Varanasi Letter, and it was written on March 25, 1993.

The entire letter is worth reading (I recite a portion of it each morning), but a constant theme is her pleading with her sisters that they must “meet Jesus as a real living person, not just an idea.”

In the beginning lines of her letter, she states that she is worried that her sisters “have never really met Jesus, one to one, you and him alone … we may spend time in chapel but have you seen with the eyes of your soul how he looks at you with love,” she wrote. In so many words, Mother Teresa was challenging her sisters to reflect on what they do when they pray. Now, these sisters had given up families and money and so many liberties to serve the poor–but, had they fallen in love with Jesus Christ? This was the concern of her letter.

Honestly, these words are tough for me to hear each day. If it is true that these sisters might not really know Jesus intimately, and they spend hours a day in prayer and service to the poor—then what does that mean for me?

These words truly personify the personality and wisdom of Mother Teresa. She was always willing to “go there” when talking with others and she was always consumed with preaching the personal love of Jesus. She had experienced the depths of Jesus’ love for her, and she knew that he desperately desires to share this with others. It was divine intimacy that was calling her sisters to experience, and it all begins with acknowledging Christ as a Person present with us in prayer.

Divine intimacy is not just for the saints. It is the bare minimum necessary in our relationship with Christ. If personal and intimate union with Jesus as a real living person is not a common experience for us, then we cannot settle for that. With more exclusivity comes more intimacy. Therefore, we must strive to be alone with the One who assures us that we are never alone.

To honor Mother Teresa and to accept her invitation to know Jesus “as a real living person,” make the commitment to pray differently this week. Place yourself at the feet of the God who simply wants you “to hear him speaking in the silence of your heart.” The God who desires for you to have, “a daily intimate contact with him.”

Accept the challenge to pray like Mother Teresa and focus on the personal aspect of prayer. Then await your marching orders for how to change the world like she did, one small action at a time.

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

The Environmental Protection Agency under President Donald Trump has launched a quiet revolution in the approach the EPA takes toward some forms of plastic waste, removing regulatory barriers by treating some plastic recycling as a form of manufacturing rather than waste disposal.

The EPA’s new approach aims to incentivize advanced recycling of plastic, contributing to the economy while addressing the spread of plastic waste into oceans and other ecosystems.

The EPA under Trump and Administrator Lee Zeldin “has taken several concrete steps to reinvigorate recycling in the United States, including actions that directly support the advanced recycling industry,” the agency told the Daily Signal in a statement.

Applying different regulations for the same technology can incentivize innovation and growth. The distinction can affect permitting costs, investment decisions, and whether a technology scales commercially.

The agency highlighted six different moves to remove regulatory barriers and incentivize more advanced recycling.

We Can Recycle Plastic?

America’s Plastic Makers, a specialized group under the industry-aligned nonprofit the American Chemistry Council, explained the process of pyrolysis, the advanced recycling of certain plastics.

“By using heat in no or low-oxygen environments, pyrolysis can convert used plastics that are difficult to recycle back into their molecular building blocks to make new products,” Ross Eisenberg, president of America’s Plastic Makers, said in a statement praising the EPA’s new approaches.

Advanced Recycling Regulations

In March, the EPA announced it would consider revising the definition of “municipal waste combustion unit” under Other Solid Waste Incinerators under the Clean Air Act of 1970 to remove the reference to “pyrolysis/combustion units.” The new definition would clarify that the rule for other solid waste incinerators will not apply to pyrolysis units.

The EPA accepted public comments on the rule until May 4, and is currently reviewing them, the agency told the Daily Signal.

Eisenberg praised the move as “a key step toward improving recycling and spurring innovation in the United States while retaining high environmental standards.”

Pyrolysis technologies “convert used plastic into valuable feedstocks to make new products, rather than combusting the plastic for energy purposes or landfilling it,” he explained.

Zeldin’s EPA told the Daily Signal it has also made site-specific determinations for advanced recycling facilities.

“If a salable product is being made, EPA has generally determined that the ‘advanced recycling’ unit is not processing a solid waste,” the agency told the Daily Signal. The agency pointed to a 2011 EPA rule on “Identification of Non-Hazardous Secondary Materials that are Solid Waste” as providing the authority to determine whether non-hazardous materials count as waste or fuels under the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act of 1972.

This change aligns with the recommendation of the American Chemistry Council that “facilities that convert used plastics into new raw materials should be regulated as manufacturing operations rather than as solid waste disposal facilities.”

The advanced-recycling changes form part of a broader EPA effort to boost resource recovery.

The agency also highlighted a proposed rule to speed cleanup of the nation’s roughly 48 million abandoned scrap tires by making it easier to use recovered tires as fuel; work on a federally required battery recycling framework; ongoing grants supporting recycling infrastructure; and research into removing impurities from recycled materials so they can be used more consistently in industrial processes.

The Administration’s Philosophy on Trash

When asked about the large amount of trash Americans produce, the EPA acknowledged that local governments struggle to adequately handle this “significant activity.”

Yet the EPA highlighted that “the challenge presents an opportunity: by prioritizing resource recovery, we can transform waste into valuable materials, reduce environmental impacts, and support a more circular economy.”

The EPA said it is committed to supporting states, tribes, local governments, and industry “to modernize recycling infrastructure, remove regulatory barriers, and advance technologies to support safe recovery of materials (including critical minerals), economic growth, national security, and environmental protection.”

As pyrolysis improves, more and more plastic that might otherwise be destined for landfills or to get stuck in the gills of a fish can become a renewable resource to improve the lives of consumers and add value to the economy.

The Trump EPA is betting that the best way to reduce waste is not merely to regulate it, but to make it worth something. That’s a transformation both Republicans and Democrats should be able to get behind.

In one of his Truth Social bombs, President Donald Trump insisted we should rename Lake Ontario to Lake America after Canada refused to accept his trade negotiation terms. It obviously echoes his renaming of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America.

It’s easy to find these whole geographic kerfuffles unnecessary. But the media hated the first one so much that The Associated Press found itself restricted from the White House press pool for refusing to accept the new gulf terminology. What they hate is anything Trump does to add a patriotic pro-America tinge to something that they associate more with his ego than with patriotism. They see red—as in a red MAGA cap.

On the Lake Ontario battle, HBO host Bill Maher joked: “The liberals are very pissed at this. They say you can’t just go around changing things to fit your political agenda. Just ask any Latinx birthing person.”

As anyone who watches the “evolution” of what terms are acceptable, the Left regularly changes the terminology and expects everyone to follow its changes. Try to keep up with The Associated Press Stylebook, which calls the tune for the press.

These term tyrants routinely genuflect to ethnic and LGBTQ+ pressure groups and their demands to remake the language we’re all supposed to use. They tried to force “Latinx” on people, but the Latinos seemed to hate it the most. Illegal immigrants are “undocumented,” homeless people are “unhoused,” and gender is “assigned at birth.”

Describing a woman as a “birthing person”—to include “men” with a uterus—strikes most people as waging war on biological truth. The use of “pregnant person” instead of “pregnant woman” has caused some pushback from feminists.

But those aren’t on the map, the Left might suggest. OK, well, it wants to cancel and rename all kinds of landmarks to satisfy its urge for wokeness. Just in this decade, the Left has pulled down all kinds of statues. Last week, it removed three statues in Richmond to clean that Old South house: Confederate Gens. Stonewall Jackson and “Extra Billy” Smith, as well as Confederate Dr. Hunter Holmes McGuire.

President Joe Biden renamed nine major U.S. Army bases that honor Confederate leaders, including Fort Bragg, Fort Benning, Fort Pickett, Fort Hood, and Fort Rucker. He also renamed nearly 650 geographic features across this country.

Under Native American (or is that “Indigenous”?) Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, they created a “Derogatory Geographic Names Task Force” and changed the names of things with offensive terms like “Squaw.” None of this was considered controversial by our media elites because everything a Democrat renames in the cause of wokeness is good news. Or not news.

The woke police forced name changes for the Washington Redskins and the Cleveland Indians, and many college and high school athletic teams with “derogatory” mascots. But now they also seem to find the use of “America” on the map to be offensive.

Conservatives are usually the ones who like to stick with traditions and not rename things based on the newest ideological fads. Liberals can’t seriously object to renaming things. They just want to be the only people who get to rename things.

COPYRIGHT 2026 CREATORS.COM

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

Pew Research reports what any precinct captain could have told you for the price of a beer: affordability, not abstraction, is what voters carry into the ballot box this fall.

Gas, groceries, rent—the three horsemen of kitchen-table economics—are top of mind for voters this midterm season.

The Trump administration, to its credit, has noticed. It has struck an oil arrangement with Venezuela, announced a drug-pricing initiative, lifted tariffs on beef imports, and taken up other such measures besides. Reasonable people can debate their merits. What is less reasonable is the question put to this writer, with wearying regularity, by television hosts and reporters alike: When will we see results?

The question is understandable. It is also a category error, one that reveals more about the assumptions of those asking it than about the policies in question. It presumes that an economy is a machine with a dial, that a lever pulled in Washington in September produces an outcome in November, calibrated and on schedule, the way a thermostat produces heat.

An economy is not a machine. It’s more like an ecosystem: vast, adaptive, and complex. No official, however well-briefed, can specify in advance precisely when a policy will bite, whether it will bite as intended, or what else, unbidden, will be biting at the same time.

There are limits to what any mind, or any committee of minds, however intelligent, can know about a system built from the choices of hundreds of millions of people.

Consider how much lies outside anyone’s control. The Iran conflict could escalate or subside, and either would move oil markets before any economist in D.C. could issue a statement about it. Shipping lanes reroute, or get struck again, depending on decisions made by people whose names appear in no American briefing book. Cattle herds do not grow in a fiscal quarter; they rebuild over years, one calf at a time, and the rebuilding can be undone overnight by a screwworm outbreak that no analyst saw coming and no policy could have prevented.

Time lags stretch on, indifferent to election calendars. And effects surface in the last place anyone looked: e.g., ranchers, mid-rebuild, upset about cheaper beef imports.

The political trouble here is real, and worth stating plainly. A president can order a border closed. A governor can order the National Guard into a city. Neither can order prices down, and if either somehow could, the ordering could produce shortages, black markets, and other miseries considerably worse than the prices being complained about.

An economy of our size and intricacy cannot be tuned to a November deadline. What it can be given, however, is room: barriers removed, rules simplified, supply allowed to do what supply does when it is not obstructed. That is a policy of patience, which is precisely the kind of policy a two-year election cycle punishes.

What can honestly be said is this: look back.

Whatever discomfort households feel now, measure it against 2022, when annual inflation ran at roughly 8% and hit 9.1% (year over year) that June—the worst reading in four decades—while the national average for a gallon of gas that same month touched $5.01.

Today’s national average sits closer to $4.10.

The distance between those two figures is not nothing. You might say that it’s the distance between a genuine emergency and a genuine grievance, and that conflating the two serves no one but those who benefit from public panic.

That distance would narrow considerably, and the pain would deepen, if policymakers were to embrace wage, price, and rent controls as remedies for high costs. These proposals rest on a familiar premise: that government can improve economic outcomes by determining what workers, landlords, and businesses may charge. The history of such interventions suggests otherwise.

Among the clearest historical examples is Venezuela, once the wealthiest nation in Latin America. Its experience offers a cautionary illustration of what can happen when government attempts to substitute administrative judgments for the information conveyed by prices and markets.

Which returns us to the trouble: Beneath “when will it work” predictions lies a deeper and more flattering assumption: that somewhere in Washington sits a mind, or a model, capable of holding the whole of a $28 trillion economy in view and adjusting it like a recipe.

No such mind exists, and pretending otherwise is the beginning of every policy failure worth remembering. The honest posture toward an economy this large is not mastery but humility, a recognition that the most any government can do is clear away what it has needlessly piled in the road and then wait, as the rest of us must, to see what an unmanaged multitude of free people choose to build.

The U.S. Department of State is unambiguously stating that the Chinese Communist Party is committing genocide.

On Aug. 27, this writer sent some questions to the State Department Office of Press Operations through its online portal for media inquiries. One of these questions was: “Has the State Department concluded that China is continuing to engage in genocide in 2026?”

On Sept. 1, a State Department spokesperson provided a written answer via email: “The United States determined the CCP is committing genocide and crimes against humanity against Uyghurs and members of other ethnic and religious groups in Xinjiang.”

On Jan. 19, 2021, the last full day of President Donald Trump’s first term, then-Secretary of State Michael Pompeo, as this column has noted before, issued a written statement that was headlined “Determination of the Secretary of State on Atrocities in Xinjiang.”

“The United States of America has led the world in holding the perpetrators of the most heinous human rights abuses accountable,” Pompeo said in this statement.

“We do so because it is right,” he said.

“[A]fter careful examination of the available facts,” said Pompeo, “I have determined that the PRC [People’s Republic of China], under the direction and control of the CCP, has committed genocide against the predominantly Muslim Uyghurs and other ethnic and religious minority groups in Xinjiang. I believe this genocide is ongoing, and that we are witnessing the systematic attempt to destroy Uyghurs by the Chinese party-state.”

In this statement—issued more than five years ago—Pompeo called for this to stop.

“The United States,” he said, “calls upon the PRC immediately to release all arbitrarily detained persons and abolish its system of internment, detention camps, house arrest and forced labor; cease coercive population control measures, including forced sterilizations, forced abortion, forced birth control, and the removal of children from their families; end all torture and abuse in places of detention; end the persecution of Uyghurs and other members of religious and ethnic minority groups in Xinjiang and elsewhere in China, and afford Uyghurs and other persecuted minorities the freedom to travel and emigrate.”

Since Pompeo made this statement, each of the State Department’s five annual reports on human rights practices in China (covering calendar years 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, and 2024) has stated that China is committing genocide.

“Genocide and crimes against humanity occurred during the year in China against predominantly Muslim Uyghurs and members of other ethnic and religious minority groups in Xinjiang,” said the first sentence of the 2024 report.

The State Department has not yet released its human rights report on China that will cover calendar year 2025. “The Department is actively working on the Human Rights Report covering global conditions in 2025 and expects to publish it later this year,” a State Department spokesperson informed this writer.

The department’s report covering 2024 described the CCP’s actions in Xinjiang.

“Government targeting of ethnic and religious minorities in Xinjiang with intensified coercive population control measures resulted in plummeting birth rates in Xinjiang after 2018 when authorities increased coercive population control measures, including forced abortions, forced sterilizations, involuntary intrauterine device insertions, and pregnancy checks occurring at detention centers in the region and targeting minority groups, primarily Uyghurs and ethnic Kazakhs,” said the report.

The report also said that “[s]ignificant human rights issues” in China included “credible reports of: arbitrary or unlawful killings; disappearances; torture or cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment; involuntary or coercive medical or psychological practices; arbitrary arrest and detention by the government including, since 2017, of more than one million Uyghurs and members of other predominantly Muslim minority groups in extrajudicial internment camps [and] prisons.”

Former President Joe Biden, as this column has noted before, met with CCP General Secretary Xi Jinping three times during his four-year term. But there is no evidence that Biden ever confronted Xi on the genocide that Xi’s regime has been perpetrating—and that Biden’s State Department cited in its annual human rights reports.

Trump, thus far, has had seven meetings with Xi. The latest was in May, when he traveled to Beijing accompanied by a number of major American business leaders, as this column has noted before. These included, among others, then-Apple CEO Tim Cook, BlackRock CEO Larry Fink, Boeing CEO Kelly Ortberg, Citi CEO Jane Fraser, Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon, Meta President Dina Powell McCormick, and Tesla CEO Elon Musk.

The genocide being perpetrated by Xi’s regime was not an issue at this summit. In a Truth Social posting made as the group departed for Beijing, Trump said, “I will be asking President Xi, a Leader of extraordinary distinction, to ‘open up’ China so that these brilliant people can work their magic, and help bring the People’s Republic to an even higher level! In fact, I promise, that when we are together, which will be in a matter of hours, I will make that my very first request.”

Xi is now scheduled to meet with Trump at the White House on Sept. 24. The first thing Trump should tell Xi at that meeting is that if China does not immediately cease engaging in genocide, the United States will cease engaging in trade with China.

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

In 2022, politicians in Minneapolis and St. Paul voted for rent control.

I said that would lead to bigger problems.

Was I right?

My update video reveals what happened.

St. Paul politicians pushed rent control, saying rent caps would stop “unfair profiteering.”

But what the heck is “profiteering,” and how is it different from “profit”? Who decides what is “unfair”?

The opportunity for profit is what persuades people to invest in things. And build things. If enough people invest in new housing, rents will stop shooting up.

That’s just how markets work.

It’s why studies show that rent control reduces the supply of housing and gradually raises prices.

But activists don’t pay attention to those.

“We don’t need more studies,” says one in my video. “We need action.”

St. Paul’s actions were strict—its rent control law made no allowance for inflation.

“It’s just going to shut down construction,” said Mercatus Center economist Salim Furth. “Why would you enter a market where it seems like the government is actively trying to hurt you?”

At least St. Paul has a “Twin City,” Minneapolis, so frustrated builders could move just a few blocks and build something there. They did just that. Construction increased there.

Minneapolis politicians had also voted for rent control, but they were wary about imposing it. That was smart, since new housing collapsed in St. Paul.

But Minneapolis City Council member Aisha Chughtai was unconvinced. She wants more rent control, telling me, “You don’t have a city” if people “can’t afford to live there.”

I pushed back: “The way you have a city is if people build apartments and houses. That’s what eventually brings the price down … Builders still build in Minneapolis—building permits were up … But in St. Paul, they’re down 60% because of rent control. You’re not going to get more apartments by pushing this.”

Her response was something new for me after 50 years of interviewing people: 17 seconds of silence. Finally, she said: “Guaranteeing housing for people and making sure that they can stay in their homes matters more than anything else.”

Chughtai calls herself a socialist. I ask her, where has that ever worked?

After another long, awkward pause, she says, “I’m doing a fine job of representing my community.”

I wish socialists would just spend a little time reading economics—or history.

Rent control once destroyed much of New York City.

Because they made it hard for landlords to profit, many landlords just stopped doing maintenance.

“They don’t take care of their properties,” says Furth. “They don’t send a plumber promptly when water starts leaking.”

Or worse: The documentaries “The Bronx Is Burning” and “Decade of Fire” document how landlords, unable to profit, set fire to their own buildings.

So what’s happening now in St. Paul, four years after its clueless politicians imposed strict rent control?

There was so little new construction that the politicians rolled most rent control back.

In sister city Minneapolis, socialist Chughtai has been promoted to majority leader. But the Minneapolis council never imposed rent control, and the mayor pledges never to impose it.

I’d think politicians would learn from St. Paul’s failures. But no, not my new socialist mayor, Zohran Mamdani, who just froze rent on a million New York City apartments.

Give me a break.

Already, 57,000 New York City apartments sit vacant because existing rent stabilization laws make it unprofitable for landlords to repair them.

The late economist Walter Williams was right to say: “Short of aerial bombardment, the best way to destroy a city is through rent controls.”

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

In less than two years, federal prosecutors in the Trump administration charged about four times as many noncitizens with election fraud crimes as the Biden administration’s Justice Department in the entirety of the four-year term.

Since President Donald Trump took office for his second term, charges have been brought against 50 noncitizen defendants for alleged offenses such as illegally voting or illegally registering to vote, according to the Justice Department.

Also, during this Trump term, 17 noncitizens were convicted of voting-related offenses. One defendant was found not guilty, while the remaining defendants’ cases are pending, according to Justice Department figures.

During the four years of the Biden administration under Attorney General Merrick Garland, the Justice Department brought charges against 13 noncitizens for illegal voting-related offenses. Of those, nine defendants were found guilty, including two whose voter fraud charges were dismissed as part of plea agreements.

“The contrast with the prior administration could not be clearer — this department is enforcing the law against noncitizen voting in ways the last administration simply refused to,” a Justice Department spokesperson told the Daily Signal. “Protecting the integrity of our elections is a top priority for this Department.”

Trump has advocated for Congress to pass the SAVE America Act, which requires photo ID to vote and proof of citizenship to register to vote. Though prospects for the bill’s passage look dim before Election Day, its supporters point to the prosecutions as evidence of the need for additional safeguards.

If annualized over four years, Trump’s second-term Justice Department has brought almost 10 times as many charges as the Biden Justice Department. That means, at the current pace, it amounts to about 31 defendants per year under Trump, compared with 3.25 per year under Biden.

“These are illegal votes that are cast and counted, and once they’re counted, they can’t be uncounted,” Cleta Mitchell, the co-founder of the Only Citizens Vote Coalition, told the Daily Signal.

“First the Left says this never happens, noncitizens never vote. Then you say, ‘Look at this,’” Mitchell added. “Then they come back to say, well, it’s not widespread. How many illegal votes are OK with you? We want to make sure there are no illegal votes cast.”

To demonstrate the impact a single vote—or a single illegal vote—could have on an election, the Public Interest Legal Foundation established a database showing 1,376 tied elections and 531 contests decided by a single vote since 1982.

A majority of the Justice Department charges and convictions in this area came since October, or the start of fiscal year 2026, with 29 defendants. In that time, there were 11 convictions.

In most cases, defendants in both administrations were charged with multiple crimes.

For example, in December 2021, during the Biden era, the Eastern District of North Carolina announced an indictment against a Bahamian citizen on 10 counts, including voting in elections from 2018 through 2020; falsely claiming U.S. citizenship to register to vote; passport fraud; and false statements.

In September 2024, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Alabama charged an illegal immigrant from Guatemala with using a U.S. citizen’s identity, registering to vote, and voting in Alabama in the 2016 and 2020 primary and general elections. She pleaded guilty on Jan. 15, 2025, days before Trump’s inauguration.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Florida garnered guilty pleas from a Cuban national in September 2025, a Haitian national convicted in April of this year, and a Brazilian national in May for illegal voting.

In May 2026, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of New Jersey announced four separate noncitizen voting prosecutions. In June, the office announced that a French citizen pleaded guilty to voting in the 2022 election.

The Justice Department has received assistance in several cases from Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Homeland Security Investigations, the law enforcement wing of the Department of Homeland Security.

“Our message to aliens who vote in American elections is clear: We will find you, arrest you, and you will face the consequences—including criminal charges and deportation,” the Department of Homeland Security spokesman told the Daily Signal in an email.

Homeland Security Investigations began focusing this week on California, Connecticut, Georgia, Missouri, Nevada, New York, Pennsylvania, Washington state, and Wisconsin, CNN reported.

“Since April 2025, more than 24,000 cases have been identified by SAVE as potential non-U.S. citizens who were on voter rolls, and those cases have been referred to ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations for further investigation,” the Department of Homeland Security spokesman said.

“Over the past year, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services has overhauled the SAVE program, making it fully operational and providing states with an easy-to-use tool that has resulted in over 60 million voter verification queries processed since April 2025,” the Department of Homeland Security spokesman added.

A new election advertisement criticizing Sen. Jon Ossoff’s exorbitant spending on hair and makeup was released on Friday, as the senator spoke with reporters in a virtual news conference to take jabs at his Georgia U.S. Senate race opponent, Rep. Mike Collins.

The ad, released by the Senate Leadership Fund and posted to multiple social media platforms, says, “Sen. Jon Ossoff spends more money than any Washington politician on hair and makeup. I know what you’re thinking. Yes, even more than the ladies.”

“The dude voted to raise taxes by two grand, and to tax overtime too. Ossoff needs to put down the mascara and join the real world,” the ad continued, making use of AI renderings to depict the senator getting pampered hair and facial treatments out at the salon.

Ossoff has taken heat for spending more campaign money on makeup services this year than any other federal candidate, including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib.

During his virtual news conference, when asked about the use of AI in the media, particularly in the recent ad, Ossoff responded, “It’s a slippery slope toward the destruction of truth in political debate.”

He continued, “Congressman Collins of course, himself, has deceptively used deepfake videos to try to lie to voters.”

However, this comes after The Washington Free Beacon revealed that the senator paid Atlanta-based makeup artist Stephanie Ponder $2,887 since February for “makeup services.” While the senator continued to accuse Collins of misusing tax dollars, the senator himself has used campaign funds on a seemingly unnecessary service.

The Out-of-Context Ad

As Ossoff continues to accuse Collins of lying, fact checkers say the senator has released two ads with comments from his opponent that are out of context.

In a 2025 radio interview, Collins promoted President Donald Trump’s tax cuts from the “One Big, Beautiful Bill” Act, stating that tax cuts would encourage economic prosperity and help people to “get off of Medicaid, get off of Social Security, [and] get back into the workforce.”

Upon closer look, the ads fail to give the full context of the congressman’s actual words. The Ossoff ads state that Collins “wants to push you off Social Security,” instead of Collins’ intention, making the system more advantageous for people to work.

Ossoff’s Out of State Donors

While Ossoff has outdone Collins when it comes to fundraising, the sources for his funds have raised eyebrows. The Federal Election Commission reports that while the senator has raised over $98 million since 2021, the majority of his funds come from California, not the Peach State, The Center Square reported.

Most notably are his donors from California and New York, with funds from California amounting to $7.3 million since 2021, and funds from New York amounting to $3.6 million.

Ossoff’s Q-and-A

During the virtual news conference on C-SPAN, Ossoff seemingly kept repeating himself when asked various questions by attendees at the meeting.

For example, one of the attendees asked Ossoff if he would be “OK with outside Democratic groups moving the money that they would have otherwise invested in this [Senate] race and using it in other races that Democrats are trying to flip seats in, like Ohio or Alaska.”

Instead of directly addressing the question, Ossoff referenced Collins, name-calling and accusing him of misusing tax dollars. Throughout the course of the news conference, he seemed to keep reiterating his attacks against Collins through stating his name more than 10 times.

The senator was asked a variety of questions on topics ranging from affordability to complacent voters. He seemed to evade answering them, however, consistently reiterating the same point about Collins.

Ossoff on Trump’s Monuments

While Ossoff has continued to smear Collins’ name, he has also recently referenced President Donald Trump, saying earlier in the year that the president is “building his own monuments because he knows nobody else will do it for him,” People reports.

In an interview with New York Magazine about his continued renovations at the White House, Trump, when asked about Ossoff’s comment about monuments, said, “That’s true.”

“Nobody will do it once I’m gone. When I leave here, nobody will,” the president said.

ATLANTA—The Joint Election Equipment Specifications and Standards Committee on Thursday held its second meeting at the Georgia Statehouse, and lawmakers heard testimony about ballot-on-demand technology, cybersecurity, and ensuring the state’s new voting system considers the needs of Latinos and individuals with disabilities.

The meeting featured Sens. Max Burns, Rick Williams, and Bo Hatchett and Reps. Victor Anderson, Tim Fleming, and Scott Holcomb.

After going through the agenda of the meeting, Anderson said, “I want everybody who is signing up [to offer public comment] to remember this committee’s task is to determine a recommendation for specifications and standards for the next uniform voting system in the state of Georgia.”

Three state election officials were on hand to testify before the committee: Rebecca Anglin, elections director for the Greene County Board of Elections and Registration; Chris Channell, director of the Glynn County Board of Elections and Voter Registration; and Kelvin Williams, acting elections supervisor for the Gwinnett County Board of Registrations and Elections.

Anglin spoke first, saying that “A successful election system is not simply about the equipment itself; it’s about the entire process, from voter check-in, to ballot production, to casting your ballot, tabulation, reconciliation, reporting, maintenance, training, and ultimately, the ability of 159 counties to successfully administer our system.”

“Based on the feedback we received, it is our belief that a ballot-on-demand system, and or a full-faced ballot-marking device, are a viable path forward for consideration,” she added.

Williams, who spoke next, discussed whether current systems can be upgraded, as opposed to switching to an entirely new voting system. “Understanding recommendations must fully meet the legislative requirements for a change in our current voting system, we recommend careful evaluation of whether existing hardware and components can be upgraded and retained rather than discarded for a complete replacement,” he said.

Channell, the last of the local election officials to speak, stated that cybersecurity should remain a focus. “Cybersecurity was ranked as the top concern for members of the association that responded to our survey,” he said.

He also emphasized the importance of “physical security and protections,” saying, “The Halderman Report proved, given unlimited time, unrestricted access, and keys and passwords to a voting system, potential weaknesses can be identified.”

Recommendations by Elections Experts

Paul Lux, supervisor of elections in Okaloosa County, Fla., spoke next, highlighting the efficiency of ballot-on-demand voting.

“We were already using what we call direct print, directly from the poll book to a laser printer. In other words, when they [voters] check in, they just pause briefly. It takes the ballot about 30 seconds to print out, and then you hand them their ballot.”

Next up was John Cronin, elections services manager for the Virginia Department of Elections, who said that his state uses paper ballots as well as counting machines “to determine the results of the scanned paper ballots.”

He noted that the “vast majority of these ballots are hand marked,” and that, in 2022, “the law changed the definition of a voting system to include ballot-on-demand devices.”

Accessibility Considered

In the afternoon session, the focus of the meeting shifted to disability advocacy and ensuring that everyone has access to voting, regardless of disability.

Various organizations and individuals testified, including Lanona Jones of the Rev Up Georgia Coalition leadership team. The coalition also included Jessica Mathis, who spoke on the prevalence of voters with disabilities, and how “Georgia’s electronic ballot-marking devices work well for voters with disabilities.”

Dr. Anar Parikh, policy manager for Asian Americans Advancing Justice-Atlanta, urged lawmakers to consider expanding “language access,” which “has been a cornerstone of our voting rights.”

AJ Link and Shun Tucker-Allen, director of community engagement for New Disabled South also weighed in on the new voting system, calling for curbside voting.

Latino Justice

Nicolas Bernal, election protection consultant for the Latino Justice PRLDEF, a New York-based civil rights organization, urged lawmakers to expand language access for Hispanic and Latino voters, stating that “any new election equipment specifications should require the complete voter-facing ballot interface to be available in multiple languages.”

Speaking to reporters outside of the hearing, Burns said that, when it comes to accessibility for voters with disabilities, lawmakers will want to “make sure it’s an integral part of the specification requirements.”

Anderson, also speaking about the voting system’s accessibility, added, “We have a system that was, for the most part, considered to be fairly successful at addressing a lot of the needs now.”

“As we develop plans for whatever this next system looks like, we’ll just have to make sure that those same principles are brought forward to it, and that we continue to provide services,” he said.

The Justice Department announced on Friday that Mount Sinai Health System, one of New York’s largest hospital systems, agreed to stop providing puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and gender surgeries to minors. It now must pay a monetary penalty and dedicate $2 million in free medical care to those suffering harmful consequences from those interventions.

“The Department of Justice is committed to holding accountable medical providers that violate federal law and endanger children through so-called gender-affirming care,” Attorney General Todd Blanche said in a press release on the settlement. “This agreement puts an end to these practices at Mount Sinai and provides meaningful relief for individuals who have already suffered harm.”

While the Justice Department did not reveal the size of the monetary penalty, it emphasized Mount Sinai’s “multimillion-dollar commitment to detransition care.” More Americans who underwent pediatric gender interventions have publicly rejected transgender identities and are speaking out about the harm they suffered.

The announcement follows similar settlements involving Texas Children’s Hospital, the Cleveland Clinic Foundation, and Connecticut Children’s Hospital. The Justice Department credited Mount Sinai with remaining “cooperative, proactive, and solution-driven.”

The settlement marks one of the highest-profile victories in the Trump administration’s campaign against pediatric gender interventions and the first publicly announced settlement involving a major New York hospital system.

Pediatric gender interventions have faced setbacks recently. At least one detransitioner won a $2 million judgment in a medical malpractice suit. A Department of Health and Human Services study found little evidence of positive impacts from sex-rejecting procedures, while other studies show they can cause harm, from increased cancer risks to a higher risk of suicidal thoughts.

“A growing number of hospitals, like Mount Sinai, have recognized the medical scandal of sex-rejecting procedures,” Assistant Attorney General Brett Shumate, who heads the Justice Department’s Civil Division, said about the news. “While we are grateful when we secure resolutions to end this discredited practice and protect children, we must not and will not rest in our pursuit of justice for the victims it has left behind.”

Ryan Raybould, U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Texas, pledged that the Justice Department will “continue to use all of our civil and criminal tools to hold these actors and entities accountable when they violate federal law when providing this so-called care.” Raybould’s office assisted with the investigation.

The Justice Department opened a nationwide investigation into the child gender-transition industry in response to President Donald Trump’s order “Protecting Children from Chemical and Surgical Mutilation.” The investigation examines potential violations of the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act, the False Claims Act, and other federal health care laws, including fraudulent billing practices such as the use of false diagnosis codes to obtain payment from federal health care programs and private insurers.

A teenage Christian may not go to church with her mother unless her father permits it, according to a Sept. 1 ruling by the Maine Supreme Judicial Court. The 13-year-old girl has not been allowed to gather with any church since December 2024, when Cumberland County Judge Jennifer Nofsinger, a lesbian, gave her father “final authority” over his daughter’s religious activity.

David Closson, director of Family Research Council’s Center for Biblical Worldview, described the ruling as “a serious threat to religious liberty,” in addition to threatening parental rights.

“This opinion rejects the First Amendment right of a fit parent to raise her child consistent with her Christian faith,” argued Liberty Counsel Founder and Chairman Mat Staver. “This opinion goes against other state court decisions involving custody in the context of religious free exercise rights and ignores precedent from the U.S. Supreme Court. We will ask the High Court to take this case and overrule the decision.”

In a unanimous ruling, Maine’s highest court upheld Nofsinger’s decision, arguing that “allocating authority between two parents does not ‘intru[de]’ on the parents’ shared right to direct the upbringing of their child,” but that “allocation of religious authority” to the father alone “was in the child’s best interest” in this case. Furthermore, the court ruled that a lower court had “erred by applying strict scrutiny” to the question of parental rights.

Family Context

It may be helpful, at this point, to back up for context. Emily Bickford and Matthew Bradeen had a child together in January 2013, even though they were never married. Before the year was out, the child’s mother and father had split, and a family law magistrate had already entered an order, agreed to by both parties, that set out “shared parental rights and responsibilities,” including a commitment to “reach jointly, whenever possible,” any “major decision concerning their child.”

Sometime after this, Bickford professed faith in Christ, and she began attending Calvary Chapel Greater Portland in May 2021. The Maine Supreme Court noted with alarm that Bickford brought the child “to multiple services per week”—as American Christians customarily do.

“Bickford did not inform Bradeen about the child’s attendance at the church,” the court noted reprovingly. “After Bradeen learned about the child’s participation in a church event, he asked Bickford for more information about the church and its teachings. Bickford told Bradeen that she and the child were attending Calvary Chapel, but she did not provide any other information.”

This last clause shows either great ignorance or great bias, as if Bickford needed to provide “any other information” about a Calvary Chapel’s teaching. “Calvary Chapel is mainstream, we believe in the Old and New Testament,” protested Travis Carey, pastor of Calvary Chapel Greater Portland, in an interview with The Washington Stand.

Every Calvary Chapel teaches the same things, and their shared Statement of Faith can be found online in a minute or less. Among other things, every Calvary Chapel believes:

• “The Word of God is the foundation upon which the church operates and is the basis for which the church is governed. We believe that the Word of God supersedes any earthly law that is contrary to the Holy Scriptures.”
• “That the Lord, Jesus Christ instituted two ordinances for the church: the full-immersion water baptism of believers and the Lord’s Supper.”
• “In a literal Heaven and a literal Hell and that all those who place their faith, hope and trust in Jesus Christ will spend eternity in Heaven with the Lord. Those who reject Jesus’ free gift of salvation will spend eternity separated from the Lord.”
• “In the Second Coming of Jesus Christ, which is His personal, visible return to Earth and the establishment of His millennial kingdom, in the resurrection of the body, the final judgment and eternal blessing of the righteous and endless separation of the wicked.”
• “In the Pre-Tribulation Rapture of the Church where all believers will meet the Lord in the air and be taken out of this world prior to the Tribulation that will come upon the earth.”

These points are selected for their relevance to what follows.

Months later, in September 2021, Bradeen “asked the court to allocate to him sole responsibility for the child’s religious upbringing,” according to the state supreme court. For the next three years, Bickford and Bradeen “participated in a series of mediation sessions, and they eventually resolved all their disagreements except for those pertaining to religion and healthcare.” (Bickford also objected to her daughter receiving COVID-19 and flu shots and the HPV vaccine.)

Mistaken Baptism

The court record then erred by mistaking believers’ baptism for infant baptism. “Bickford made other unilateral decisions about the child’s participation in church activities,” its opinion stated. “For example, Bradeen learned that the child was scheduled to be baptized only when he was informed by a third party. Bradeen then called Bickford to ask about the baptism, and she placed him on speakerphone in front of the child.”

As noted above, Calvary Chapel practices believers’ baptism, which is only performed on individuals who believe the Christian gospel. The court omits the conversation that ensued after Bickford placed Bradeen on speakerphone, but the purpose was probably so that her daughter could describe her conversion to her father in her own words.

The girl “made an outward profession of faith,” Carey told The Washington Stand, and she “wanted to invite her dad to the baptism.” This is the most normal thing in the world, and it happens in churches across America every week. Somehow, the Maine Supreme Court twisted this into something sinister.

The ‘Cult’ Smear

In fact, Bradeen undertook legal proceedings to prove just that. At a two-day hearing in August 2024, he produced an expert witness on cults, Janja Lalich, who flew in from California for the purpose. She described cults as “closed social systems” and suggested that Calvary Chapel Greater Portland had some identifying marks.

The Maine Supreme Court denied “Bickford’s claim that the court evinced hostility toward her religion by describing her church in offensive terms, including referring to it as a ‘cult,’” arguing that “cult” was merely the word chosen by the expert witness. However, the very fact that such an expert witness was allowed to testify implies the judge deemed her testimony relevant to the proceedings.

Jesus warned his followers to expect no better treatment. “It is enough for the disciple to be like his teacher, and the servant like his master. If they have called the master of the house Beelzebul, how much more will they malign those of his household” (Matthew 10:25).

Hell and Fear

The state Supreme Court further maligned Calvary Chapel Greater Portland for faithful, expositional preaching. “As described by the pastor, Travis Carey, Calvary Chapel teaches the Bible ‘verse by verse, chapter by chapter,’” it recorded, with scare quotes. “This entails sermons that include, in Carey’s words, ‘quite vivid description[s]’ of Hell.” How vivid? It sounds like Carey simply quotes Jesus: “There’s wailing and gnashing of teeth. There is burning and torment. The worm dieth not. Shame, eternal perpetual pain, and regret.”

The court was not finished. “Carey also testified that he preaches about the ‘Second Coming of Christ,’ which will involve ‘seven years of … pure hell on earth under the persecution of … the Antichrist’ for those who have not ‘accept[ed] the terms of God.’”

If any member of the Maine Supreme Court even bothered to check the Calvary Chapel statement of faith, this simple recitation of pre-tribulation dispensationalism would not come as a surprise. Yet the court found it appropriate to put all these teachings in scare quotes as something foreign and strange. It acts as if some sabretooth cat had just jumped out of a paleontology textbook and was roaming through the courtroom.

These documents become relevant for the case because the court claimed, “The child has experienced fear and anxiety associated with these teachings.”

However, the evidence does not fully match that characterization. “The child has asked Bradeen a lot of questions about Heaven and Hell and about why Bradeen and his other child would not be in Heaven with her,” the court recited. “The child has left notes around Bradeen’s house because she fears that the Second Coming is approaching and that Bradeen will be left behind.”

“It is harmful for a child to hear negative and frightening messages about one parent from the other parent or the other parent’s authority figures,” the court declared.

On the contrary, the evidence suggests that, rather than fearing hell for herself, the child feared what her father might face and sought to bring him to repentance. This is what Paul writes to the church in Corinth: “For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ. … Therefore, knowing the fear of the Lord, we persuade others” (2 Corinthians 5:10-11). If anything, her embrace of evangelism is evidence that the girl genuinely believes the word of God.

Religious Discrimination

In relegating parental rights to the sidelines, the Maine Supreme Court had to choose its ground carefully to avoid the appearance of discriminating against Bickford’s religion. “The Constitution does not require the displacement of the best-interest standard and imposition of strict scrutiny any time a parental rights order implicates a parent’s religion,” the court stated. “It does, however, ‘mandate governmental neutrality between religion and religion, and between religion and nonreligion.’”

The court claimed that the resulting situation—where final authority for all religious decision-making rests with Bradeen—avoids religious discrimination, when in fact it does no such thing. “The court’s allocation of religious decision-making to Bradeen ultimately rested on no more than its findings that the parties are unable to coparent on matters of religion, such that it was therefore necessary to allocate decision-making to one or the other, and that Bradeen is better suited to determine whether certain religious activities are in the child’s best interest,” it alleged.

Why is Bradeen the better parent? The opinion emits the unspoken reason with a deafening roar of silence: because he doesn’t go to a kooky church where folks actually, like, believe stuff. “Bickford believes that the child’s relationship with God is more important than anything on earth, including the child’s relationship with Bradeen,” the court sneered.

To it, this was evidence that “Bickford has essentially abdicated her independent decision-making to the church. Bradeen, meanwhile, has taken a ‘measured approach’ and ‘acted in a manner designed to protect [the child] from additional anxiety.’”

This gets the facts more twisted than a Twizzler. According to the court’s logic, if one parent wants to take a child to church and the other one doesn’t, courts should err on the side of less religious education—a bizarre conclusion incongruous with American history.

What About the Child?

The court never mentions the 13-year-old child’s own preferences. According to Carey, the pastor, she wanted to keep attending his church, where she came to believe the gospel and was baptized.

Without asking her opinion, the court projects onto the child its own judgment that her anxiety is due to hearing messages about hell, so preventing her from hearing about hell would ease her anxiety. Thus, the court paints itself into the role of Felix, the Roman governor in Acts 24:25; as Paul “reasoned about righteousness and self-control and the coming judgment, Felix was alarmed and said, ‘Go away for the present. When I get an opportunity I will summon you.’”

But messages about hell are not easy to unhear, nor can Christian faith be easily quenched by suppressing it. Had she been consulted, the girl would likely have told the court that she was anxious for the salvation of her father. By banning the girl from attending church without the permission of her father, who does not want to go, the court has only ensured that her anxiety will likely continue.

In fact, Bradeen has forbidden his daughter to attend church—not just Calvary Chapel, but any church—since he won final authority in 2024.

Ironically, the court admitted that “the child has enjoyed a strong, loving relationship with each of the parties.” Despite this, it declared that “Bickford’s decisions regarding religion have endangered the child’s relationship with Bradeen” by exposing her “to messaging ‘that her father is going to burn and suffer for eternity, that he is persecuting her, that he seeks to “dismantle” her faith.’”

The court never confronts the incongruence between these claims. If such Christian teachings have not ruined the relationship between the girl and her father, one likely conclusion is that Christian teachings about hell do not necessarily ruin family relationships.

Christian belief can lead to family tensions, but only because of the persecution of the unconverted family members who hate the Christians for their beliefs. “Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I have not come to bring peace, but a sword,” Jesus warned. “For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law. And a person’s enemies will be those of his own household. Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me, and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me” (Matthew 10:34-37).

One hears of stories where Christian converts from Muslim families overseas risk their family relationships to publicly identify with Christ. But one rarely considers that a girl in Maine may have as much to risk.

Christian Perspective

The tragic circumstances of this case show the difficulties that can arise when Christians are “unequally yoked” with unbelievers in marriage and childrearing (2 Corinthians 6:14). This is a matter of increasing relevance as American culture becomes post-Christian. In Bickford’s case, she was not converted until after she bore a child, and after her relationship with Bradeen appeared to have come to an end. But for Christians who find themselves in this unenviable situation, Paul offers wise counsel in 1 Corinthians 7:12-16, with a particular focus on what it means for children.

“From a Christian perspective, parents have a God-given responsibility to raise their children in the faith, to teach them Scripture, and to bring them into the life of the church,” Closson told The Washington Stand. Paul exhorts fathers, “Do not provoke your children to anger, but bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord” (Ephesians 6:4).

“Unmarried parents obviously complicate how those responsibilities are exercised, and courts sometimes have to resolve genuine disputes between two parents who possess equal legal rights,” Closson allowed. “But that does not give judges a blank check to treat historic Christian doctrines as evidence of psychological harm or to rely on an expert’s characterization of an otherwise mainstream evangelical congregation as a ‘cult’ or ‘closed social system.’”

“The state certainly has a legitimate interest in protecting children from actual abuse or neglect,” Closson continued. But “exposure to traditional Christian teaching is not evidence of parental unfitness. Religious liberty means very little if it protects only beliefs that judges, experts, or cultural elites consider benign or fashionable. … The government should not be in the business of deciding that the ordinary beliefs and practices of a theologically conservative Christian church are somehow so dangerous that a fit parent may be prohibited from taking her child there.”

Next Steps

“This is why I think the U.S. Supreme Court should take a close look at this case,” Closson added. “The principle at stake is much larger than one custody dispute: whether the government may effectively penalize a fit parent because her religious convictions are deemed too conservative or too unsettling by the court.”

“As tragic as this case is,” Carey lamented, “it should be eye-opening for not just Christians, but for every U.S. citizen, that this type of constitutional violation is happening.”

“Teachings about heaven and hell, spiritual warfare, biblical sexual ethics, or the authority of Scripture are not fringe beliefs invented by Calvary Chapel,” Closson said. “They are part of historic Christianity. Once courts begin treating orthodox Christian doctrine itself as a basis for restricting a parent’s relationship with her child, the First Amendment concerns become unavoidable.”

Originally published by The Washington Stand

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

Department of Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin on Friday appeared for a roundtable in Cincinnati, Ohio, where he met with local officials and addressed partnerships in Warren County under the 287g program.

Mullin touted the Trump administration’s commitment and success on the issue of crime and illegal immigration, comparing that to “just four years ago” under the Biden administration.

“The truth is, for too long we ignored a problem that was taking place, and the previous administration decided not to do anything about it. When you have open borders, you have you have criminals that are going to take advantage of that,” Mullin shared.

The secretary also said illegal immigrant crime is “preventable.”

“It’s frustrating to me because every single death that happens at the hand of an illegal is 100% preventable, because that person shouldn’t be here. It’s just that simple. They shouldn’t be on our streets,” he said.

Mullin also addressed how fighting crime shouldn’t be political.

“Fighting crime shouldn’t be a blue issue or a red issue,” he said, lamenting how “radical politicians” will “talk about defunding ICE and preventing our local law enforcement from being able to work and partner through the 287g program.”

The secretary also responded to claims that those who come to the country illegally have not actually broken a law or are not criminals.

“They chose to break the law when they decided to come across our border illegally. That means they broke the law; that means they are criminals. That doesn’t mean they all have criminal records. They chose to break our laws, and it is our job to hunt down every single one of them and send them back to where they came from,” Mullin said.

Warren County Sheriff Barry Riley, who has served since January 2025, explained that his county has been part of the 287g program since October 2025.

“If you are in this country illegally, I feel you should be sought out, detained, treated humanely, and processed according to the law,” he said, adding that he views working with federal partners as “a responsibility and a duty” according to the U.S. Constitution.

Republican Rep. Warren Davidson, who represents Ohio’s 8th Congressional District, noted that the secretary’s remarks were not “divisive” or “partisan” in Warren County, but that nearby Hamilton County has more liberal policies.

The secretary said sanctuary policies by counties matter because crime “doesn’t stay in that county” and “bleeds” elsewhere where “they have to deal with that issue.”

“Just because you’re a sanctuary city or sanctuary county doesn’t mean you’re doing any justice. You’re actually causing harm, and … you’re harboring and abating the criminals that are going just outside your area, too, and they’re flooding our streets,” Mullin said.

Matt Putra, removal operations director for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, noted various ways local law enforcement can partner through the 287g program, including the “task force model,” in which officers are “conducting their normal police activities and have immigration authority to identify and apprehend anybody in violation of immigration law.”

Riley shared that Warren County uses that model, adding that he doesn’t want ICE to have to be there, since they “are needed elsewhere.”

Mullin added he would “love ICE to be a transport agency where we have a partnership with our local law enforcement, like we do with the sheriff in Warren County, and we come pick them up after they after they apprehend them.”

The DHS secretary criticized jurisdictions that have banned law enforcement from working with the 287g program. “When they do that, they are actually aiding and abetting the criminals at that point, because we can just expand and get after it faster when we’re participating all together,” he said, adding that “this isn’t a political issue at all.”

He also addressed check-ins at schools, as he insisted the focus was to locate the children lost during the Biden administration and rescue those being trafficked, which has been a priority for the Trump administration.

“We’re going to schools to find out are these kids there because that’s where they were last reported. If they’re there and they’re safe, great. Are we there to make arrests? Absolutely not. We’re there to find these kids,” though he lamented that there are states that are directing schools not to work with officers.

“We have 180,000 that are still under 18, and we’re hoping and praying they’re in schools. …If we can get cooperation from [schools], it’d be wonderful, because that’s 100% what we’re trying to do,” Mullin continued, as he also spoke of using contractors rather than ICE officers.

Nick Shirley announced today on X that he is suing the state of California over the controversial bill signed by Gov. Gavin Newsom that critics have dubbed the “Stop Nick Shirley Act.”

AB 2624 restricts the publication of certain identifying information about workers at organizations that provide immigration-related services when a worker submits a written request that the information not be published.

Critics of the law, including Shirley, argue the restrictions could interfere with journalists and others investigating those organizations.

“Now in a world where we all want more transparency and not less, it is more critical than ever that we do not just sit back and do nothing. That is why I’m filing this lawsuit against the state of California,” Shirley said in his post.

In making his case against the law, Shirley went on to describe who authored it, why he believes it was created, how he says it affects journalists, and the timeline that he argues shows the law was targeted at him.

That timeline began on Jan. 31, when Shirley announced he was in California investigating alleged fraud. Days later, Newsom said the San Diego Somali community felt “under siege” amid the arrival of what he described as “right-wing provocateurs,” a comment Shirley suggested was directed at him.

Shirley then pointed to a Feb. 5 news conference held by California Attorney General Rob Bonta, who pushed back against allegations of widespread fraud in the state, describing the claims as “reckless, false, outrageous, and ridiculous.”

Over two weeks later, on Feb. 20, Assemblywoman Mia Bonta, who is married to the attorney general, introduced AB 2624, known among critics as the “Stop Nick Shirley Act.”

Shirley argues the timing was no coincidence.

“They needed the Stop Nick Shirley Act, AB 2624, to protect the fraud and stop people from exposing these locations inside of immigration support providers.”

Shirley is now taking that argument to federal court, claiming the statute violates the First Amendment. The journalist also stressed that he is not seeking monetary damages from the lawsuit, but instead is challenging the law to protect what he says are his and others’ First Amendment rights.

“It’s time for We the People to do something. This law never had anything to do with the Right or Left. It had to do with your dollars being defrauded, and now they want to prevent people like me from going out and searching for the truth about where our tax dollars are going,” Shirley said.

The Daily Signal reached out to the offices of Newsom and Bonta for comment but did not receive a response by publication time.

A Texas congressional candidate is drawing attention in McKinney after posting a series of criticisms targeting U.S. Rep. Keith Self, a Sharia survivor, and supporters of a local recall petition. 

Evan Hunt, the Democrat candidate running against Republican U.S. Rep. Keith Self in Texas’ 3rd Congressional District, has caused a stir online after responding to supporters of the McKinney City Council recall using his campaign’s X account.

On Hunt’s X account, he posted a video featuring a video of Self signing the petition. Hunt responded to the video, calling Self an “out-of-touch congressman” and accusing him of attempting to intimidate council members “into denying a mosque building plan.” 

“This isn’t left versus right. It’s about right versus wrong,” Hunt said in his video. “As a proud resident of McKinney and a proud neighbor of Muslims, here’s my message to this desperate Nazi quoter: Stay out of our local politics. You will not tread on us.” 

Self told The Daily Signal that he believes residents have a right to participate in local government “without fear of harassment, intimidation, or retaliation.”

“Regardless of someone’s position on the proposed mosque, the recall effort, or any other local issue, no American should be targeted for exercising their constitutional rights,” Self said.

He also told the Daily Signal that he’s aware that the Department of Justice has been notified about alleged intimidation measures and said he will continue standing by residents.

“These bullying tactics by the radical left are similar to those that I experience in Washington on a regular basis, but now they have come home to roost in McKinney,” Self said. “I continue to stand with the residents who are speaking up boldly and refusing to cower.”

What Sparked the Recall 

On Aug. 4, McKinney City Council members unanimously voted to approve a mosque relocation proposal, which would be operated by the McKinney Islamic Association.

The proposed site is a 5-acre tract along Virginia Parkway near two residential neighborhoods and a high school. It would include a 37,000-square-foot facility with a mosque, educational spaces, a gymnasium, and meeting rooms. It will also be designed to accommodate 3,000 people.

Residents at the meeting expressed concerns about the proposed site. Some said Sharia law is incompatible with American traditions and values, and one Iranian survivor spoke to the council and urged members to reject the proposal.

Self also spoke to the council, telling members to “honor your oath that starts with the U.S. Constitution.”

Other attendees at the meeting supported the proposal, saying the mosque and its members have been part of the community for years, and that the relocation would give a new generation the opportunity to foster community and mutual understanding.

More than a week after the meeting, a group of residents filed a petition to recall McKinney Mayor Bill Cox and Council Members Justin Beller, Geré Feltus, and Ernest Lynch.

Another Jab at Self

In another post directed at Self, Hunt addressed comments made by Self at the council meeting, where he spoke against the mosque proposal.

“The only time I’ve seen Congressman Keith Self show up at a McKinney City Council meeting was to spread fear and divide our community,” Hunt wrote. “Instead of addressing the issue before the council, Keith Self invoked stories about rapes in the UK and rumors about Dearborn, Michigan, inflaming the crowd with vague warnings and culture war talking points.”

“McKinney deserves representatives who bring people together, not politicians who show up to divide us,” Hunt added.

Hunt told the Daily Signal that Self “hasn’t offered facts to substantiate these broader fears.”

“If he has evidence of criminal activity or an actual threat to our community, he should present it to the appropriate authorities and to the public,” Hunt said. “What he should not do is use the actions of extremists elsewhere to cast suspicion on Muslim Americans here at home.”

Hunt Comments on Campaign

Hunt also said that instead of inserting himself in a municipal recall and “fueling division among his own constituents,” Self should focus on problems he “was elected to address.” 

“That is where my campaign is focused,” Hunt said. “Health care and housing are too expensive, our public schools are underfunded, and our infrastructure has not kept pace with North Texas growth. Our national debt is unsustainable. Artificial intelligence is transforming the workforce faster than government is preparing for it, while massive data centers raise legitimate concerns about electricity, water, privacy, and their impact on surrounding communities.” 

“We need sensible rules that address those problems without strangling innovation,” he added. 

Hunt Responds to Sharia Survivor

Hunt also responded to supporters of the recall. In multiple posts, Hunt took aim at local resident Eddie Isa, who says he survived living under Sharia in Iran. 

Isa spoke to council members at the Aug. 4 meeting, warning of the dangers of mosques and Sharia. 
 
“Every country that is Islamic now used to be a Christian country,” said Eddie Isa, who described himself as a survivor of Sharia from Iran. “We were soft Christians, and we allowed these people to come in, bring their Sharia law into their countries, and slowly kill us off left and right.” 

“These people will use ‘Takia’ to lie to you, to manipulate you, because whenever Islam is little, they will lie to you and tell you they come in peace. This is Level One. Level Two is what’s happening in the U.K. right now,” he added. 

Isa has been outspoken about Sharia law in the United States, speaking to Wylie ISD, the Frisco City Council, and the McKinney City Council about what he describes as the dangers Sharia law and Islam pose to the U.S. 

Isa told the Daily Signal that inside the mosques they are committed to Sharia. 

“There’s a reason why they don’t want to allow people to go in there and listen to what they have to teach,” Isa said. “They will lie to you, manipulate the truth, and not tell you the truth about Sharia law, which is … religion and state. That means for blasphemy there’s punishment. For apostasy, there’s punishment.” 

Hunt responded to Isa in multiple posts, questioning Isa’s description of himself as a Sharia survivor.

“Ah yes, it’s wannabe influencer Eddie. And no, I don’t platform bullies and bigots who claim to be ‘survivors’ of religions they willfully converted to, and then willfully converted away from,” Hunt wrote in response to Isa telling him to attend the Sept. 1 meeting. “Did I get that right? You don’t speak for people in McKinney.”

In another response to Isa, who told Hunt to stop smearing residents concerned about Islam, Hunt said Isa was attempting to “try to get famous.”

“No thanks—I’ll keep standing up for the regular people of McKinney and for the constitutional freedom of religion, not to mention innocence before proven guilt,” Hunt said. “I guess you’ll keep doing whatever you’re doing—which sure seems like demonizing billions of people to try and get famous.”

Hunt told the Daily Signal that Isa has every right to discuss his experiences, but that it does not give him the right to “assign collective guilt.”

“Mr. Isa describes himself as a “Sharia law survivor” who left Iran as a child. His experiences are his own and he has every right to discuss them. They do not give him the right to assign collective guilt to American Muslims who had nothing to do with what happened to him,” Hunt said. “I will stand against prejudice and bigotry just as firmly as I will stand against religious extremism in any form.”

Isa told the Daily Signal that Hunt is “clueless as to what Islam is,” and noted his own experience as someone who studied the religion for 12 years and “lived under Islamic theocracy.”

“When he’s trying to tell me, who lived under Islamic theocracy, is that I don’t have the right to tell what’s going on, when I see exactly what’s been happening for the 1,400 years, about the conquest and how the crusades started. …But nobody wants to talk about that,” Isa added.

Hunt said his primary concern with Isa is that he said he would “ruin my career,” told him to “get the f— out of Texas,” and made a vulgar sexual comment about his wife

“If you make a public practice of judging and criticizing others, you should be prepared to have your own rhetoric challenged,” Hunt said. “I will not be intimidated out of defending the constitutional rights of people in my community.”

Isa moved from California to Texas and said he fears that it will turn into another New York or Dearborn, Michigan.

“People like that [Hunt] are the biggest virus in Texas. I left California because of people like him,” Isa said. “I’m not going to let people like him turn Texas into another hellhole.”

Isa then challenged Hunt to live in an Islamic country.

“If he thinks he has the good version of Islam, why doesn’t he go and preach to the Muslims over there? If he had the guts to actually go and run for anything over there,” Isa told The Daily Signal.

Hunt Defends His Position 

Hunt emphasized to the Daily Signal that he has “no problem with McKinney residents supporting a recall, questioning what expansion is best for their community, challenging religious extremism, criticizing me, or exercising their First Amendment rights.”

He did, however, say that he takes issue with people who go from one City Council meeting to another “stirring up fear and conflict in communities where they do not live.”

Hunt added that he fought in the U.S. military alongside Muslim Americans.

“Muslim Americans are our neighbors, coworkers, business owners, parents, veterans, and members of our communities,” Hunt said. “They are entitled to exactly the same constitutional protections as every other American.”

Isa told The Daily Signal that the people who live next door to Muslims are afraid because of Sharia.

“Those next door neighbors are fearing apostasy, because they know the minute they become apostates, their life is in danger,” Isa said.

Petitioners have until Sept. 26 to collect 5,805 signatures, which is equivalent to 30% of the turnout in the last general election.