FIRST ON THE DAILY SIGNAL—As the Department of Health and Human Services continues to commemorate Men’s Health Month, the department’s assistant secretary for health told the Daily Signal that President Donald Trump’s administration is focused on revitalizing fatherhood for the benefit of the nation.

“We want to make a positive impact on men’s health during this administration,” Adm. Brian Christine told the Daily Signal. “In this administration, men matter.”

Christine’s remarks come as the United States is witnessing a historic decline in men’s suicide rates, obesity, hypertension, and depression, while also seeing a rise in fertility and testosterone levels.

Christine noted that 80% of suicides in this country are committed by men, and that men “have higher levels of substance abuse, depression, and mental health challenges—and use health care and mental-health resources at a far lower rate—than women do.”

“Every day, 100 men take their life in the United States,” he added. “So, it is appropriate to talk about overall men’s health, but it is also appropriate to talk about men’s mental health.”

During President Joe Biden’s administration, suicides among men in 2023 alone reached a record of 39,045, while substance abuse increased and average testosterone levels for men reached a historic low.

The Trump administration has focused on reversing the crisis through things like loosening restrictions on testosterone replacement therapy and other resources for men’s health. The administration has also focused on promoting strong manhood, cleaner diets, removing drugs from American streets, and the nuclear family.

“We’re committed to making America healthy again here at HHS because that’s all part of getting our country healthy again, and getting America great again,” the admiral continued. “I believe we have to have strong men for strong families to make the country strong again. I think it’s all linked together.”

Christine hopes that by raising awareness about men’s struggles and the positive impact men have in society, a rebound will continue.

“We believe that engaging the public, talking about these things, raising awareness for these things, is important,” he said. “But also, part of our message is not simply to raise awareness.

“It’s that, but also to say, listen, men … if you are having mental health challenges, do reach out to a practitioner. Do seek care. Don’t isolate yourself, because men tend to do that.”

Christine added that the administration also wants to explore why rates of obesity, hypertension, substance abuse, cardiovascular disease, and fertility issues are higher among men.

“We have to talk about it,” he said. “We see higher suicide rates in men … who have been our war fighters. So, it’s a real tragedy.”

Christine concluded by wishing America’s fathers a happy Father’s Day.

“We want to wish a really happy Father’s Day to all the fathers out there. Fathers have such an incredible impact on making the country great and strong again,” he said. “A strong, loving, committed, engaged father can do so much for their children, for their wives.”

The sudden death of the historian Gordon Wood, just weeks before the celebration of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, is one more mark of the closure of a golden age of the historiography of the revolutionary era.

It’s an occasion to reflect on the uniqueness, indeed the idiosyncrasy, of the emergence of the primacy of this United States among the nations of the world.

As the historian Walter McDougall has pointed out, a catalog of world civilizations in the year 1600 looks, with one exception, much like the world today. There is a prosperous and populous China at one end of Eurasia and a prosperous and populous Europe at the other. There is a bustling Indian subcontinent and a vast and little-visited Africa, and large Euro-indigenous cultures in Mexico and South America.

The great difference is the emergence, from what was a sparsely populated and isolated realm, of the great world power of the United States of America.

How this nation emerged, and how it was formed and unified in the pivotal final years of the 18th century, has come to be understood anew thanks to a generation of historians who began their work in the postwar decades more than 50 years ago and continued it into their 90s. Among the pioneers were Gordon Wood, who died this week at 92, and his thesis adviser Bernard Bailyn, who died in 2020 at 97.

Before their generation, American historiography often was more about the presumptions of the writers than the makers of history. Early 19th-century historians glorified, even mythologized, the Founding Fathers. The tragic losses of the Civil War prompted Northerners to lament antebellum statesmen’s failure to compromise and Southerners to canonize the champions of the Lost Cause.

Early 20th-century progressives, influenced by Marxist assumptions about economic class warfare, tried to prove that colonists led a revolution against Britain and then wrote a constitution all to protect their wealth against redistribution. Then, in what I have called the “Midcentury Moment” during and after World War II, some historians abjured class warfare and argued that Americans shared a consensus all along.

Bailyn and Wood did something else. They read the patriots’ words more carefully and took their arguments seriously. They studied the numerous pamphlets from the revolutionary 1760s and 1770s, as well as the debates over the new republic in the 1780s and 1790s.

They understood that Americans, imbued with British ideas of freedom but blessedly distant from British authorities, could write with more frankness than past political theorists under the close supervision of monarch and church, and with no motive to conceal motivation from the then nonexistent Marxian or Freudian theorists. They did the real work of history: understanding a society familiar in some respects but strange in so many others.

“The approach of many historians to the American Revolution, it seemed, had too often been deeply ahistorical; there had been too little sense of the irretrievability and differentness of the eighteenth-century world,” Wood wrote in 1969 in his preface to “The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787.” “When I began to compare the debates surrounding the Revolutionary constitution-making of 1776 with those surrounding the formation of the Constitution of 1787, I realized that a fundamental transformation of political culture had taken place.”

This is a history of unanticipated events changing minds. As Bailyn wrote in 1967 in “The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution,” “The details of this new world were not as yet clearly depicted; but faith ran high that a better world than any that had ever been known could be built where authority was distrusted and held in constant scrutiny; where the status of men flowed from their achievements and from their personal qualities, not from distinctions ascribed to them at birth; and where the use of power over the lives of men was jealously guarded and severely restricted.”

Wood’s central thesis in his 1992 Pulitzer Prize-winning “The Radicalism of the American Revolution” was that the revolution declared in 1776 had transformed the character of the American people. They realized that what held them together “could not be the traditional ethnic, religious, and tribal loyalties of the Old World” and instead “found new democratic adhesives in the actual behavior of plain ordinary people—in the everyday desire to make money and pursue happiness in the here and now.”

Writing in National Review last January, Wood celebrated “five significant words that came to define American culture—‘all men are created equal.’” This prompted them to create “numerous learned academies and historical societies,” including “mechanic societies, humane societies, societies for the prevention of pauperism, orphans’ asylums, missionary societies, marine societies, tract societies, Bible societies, temperance associations, Sabbatarian groups, peace societies, societies for the suppression of vice and immorality, societies for the relief of poor widows, societies for the promotion of industry.”

Wood was among the multiple leading historians who criticized The New York Times’s Nikole Hannah-Jones’s argument that 1619, the importation of the first slave in the colonies, was the real founding of America. Instead, he argued it was the revolution that led to the unraveling of slavery.

“Although many modern historians have called the Revolution’s inability to free all the slaves its greatest failure, they have committed the great sin of anachronism by assuming that everyone in the past must have known that slavery was an evil,” he wrote in January. “These historians have not fully appreciated that the Revolution defied a world that for the millennia had taken slavery for granted. It was the Revolution that for the first time in history made slavery a problem, and it led to the first instance of states’ abolishing the practice.”

Wood has been critical as well of the notion, recently mentioned without disapproval by Vice President JD Vance, that those with American ancestors in the Civil War era are somehow more American than those whose ancestors arrived later. Contrary to Europe, “There is no American ethnicity to back up the state,” he said in his November 2025 Irving Kristol lecture at the American Enterprise Institute. “To be an American is not to be someone, but to believe in something.” Such as “the powerful sense of equality” that “is what makes us one people.”

We are unlikely to hear much more from the last survivors of the two generations of academic and popular historians who made the final third of the 20th century a golden age for the history of the founding. In the universities, most have been replaced by academics with different interests and a more adversarial approach to the nation whose bounty and freedoms make their work possible.

But on the 251st Fourth of July upcoming, and in months and years to come, it should be refreshing to dip into their rich works and gain more knowledge of, and appreciation for, the wondrous deeds of those who came before us and of whom we are the fortunate, if too often the ungrateful, heirs.

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

June 18, 2026, marks 15 years since my father died, and as Father’s Day approaches, I find myself thinking less about the day he left us and more about what he left behind.

My father, Dennis Joseph Gerber Sr., was known by many as Big Dennis. I was Little Dennis. From the time I was old enough to understand what it meant to share a name, I loved it. I loved being his son, and I loved carrying a name that reminded me every day who I hoped to become.

Like many boys, I watched my father closely. I paid attention to how he treated people, how he carried himself, how he approached challenges, and how he showed up for those around him. Even today, my signature is little more than a poor imitation of his. I remember watching him intently as he signed documents, studying his signature and wondering how I could make mine look like his when I got older. Looking back, that seems fitting because much of who I am was learned the same way.

I was adopted as an infant, but I never spent a single moment wondering whether I belonged. My father never made me feel adopted, he made me feel chosen. He would often say, “God made you for us.” As an adopted son, those words carried special weight, but he was also expressing something deeper about how he viewed his life. He believed that God had entrusted him with responsibilities as a husband, father, neighbor, and citizen, and he embraced those responsibilities wholeheartedly. He never approached fatherhood as a burden. He approached it as a calling.

Perhaps that is one reason why St. Joseph has always occupied such an important place in my life. My father and I shared the middle name Joseph, but more importantly, we shared a devotion to the saint who taught both of us something essential about fatherhood.

When I think about St. Joseph today, I am struck by the quiet trust that defined his life. Scripture records none of his words, yet his actions reveal a man who accepts God’s will with humility and courage. He did not choose the circumstances placed before him, but he faithfully embraced the responsibilities entrusted to him. God the Father entrusted His Son to Joseph’s care. Joseph did not seek that responsibility, but when it was given to him, he embraced it completely. He protected Jesus, taught Him, worked for Him, and loved Him, all while knowing that the child entrusted to him ultimately belonged to God.

As an adopted son, that reality has always resonated with me. Joseph reminds us that fatherhood is not primarily a biological relationship. It is a vocation of love, sacrifice, and responsibility.

Looking back now, I realize that both St. Joseph and my father understood the same truth: Children ultimately belong to our Heavenly Father. Earthly fathers are entrusted with them for a time. Their task is to love them, guide them, protect them, and through their example help them come to know the love of the Father from whom all fatherhood takes its name.

My father understood that instinctively.

He was not a perfect man, but he was a remarkably loving one. We hugged often. We were never afraid to show our affection for each other. Sometimes, as we would walk together, he would simply place his hand on my head or the back of my neck. Those small gestures communicated something every child longs to hear: “I am here. I love you. You belong.”

Part of the reason we were so close was that he was always there. Whether it was a football game, a track meet, a school event, or some other activity that seemed enormously important to me at the time, I could count on seeing him there. He was present. He was interested. He was proud.

As a boy, there is something powerful about knowing your father is in the stands.

As a man, there is something even more powerful about realizing how many sacrifices it took for him to be there.

When I was home from college and working locally, we would go to lunch together almost every day. Those lunches remain some of my favorite memories. We talked about work, family, our community, and whatever else happened to be on our minds. When I was away at school or traveling for work, I called him every day, sometimes several times a day. It never felt like an obligation. He was simply the person I most wanted to talk to.

My father was also the kind of man who believed that if you wanted your community to be better, you had to help make it better. He coached our teams, served on the local school board, and served on the library board. What he lacked in technical expertise as a coach, he more than made up for in encouragement and leadership. He had a gift for making people believe in themselves.

More importantly, he taught me that when someone asks for help, the first response should not be whether helping is convenient. The response should be, “How can I help?”

He did not merely teach that lesson. He lived it.

Years after I became an adult, I began hearing something from friends that surprised me. More than one person told me, “Your dad was like a father to me.”

At first, I was caught off guard by those comments. Then I realized they made perfect sense.

My father had a gift for making people feel seen. He encouraged people. He listened. He showed up. Without ever trying to become a father figure, he became one for many people simply because he cared.

The week before my father died, my wife and I shared some joyful news with him. We had just learned that we were expecting our first child.

I still remember his response; he told me that I was going to be a great dad.

At the time, it felt wonderful to hear. Looking back, it means even more because those words came from the man who had been my model of fatherhood for my entire life.

Less than a week later, he was gone.

I was traveling for work in Egypt when he died unexpectedly. The loss devastated me. Even now, fifteen years later, it is difficult to put into words.

Yet one memory has remained with me through all the years since.

Before he left this world, my father gave me one final gift. He gave me confidence that I could do what he had done.

He told me I could be a father.

Today, my son Blaise is 3 years old. Like most little boys, he wants to do whatever his dad is doing. If he sees me exercising, he drops to the floor and tries to do pushups beside me. If I am getting dressed for Mass, he wants to dress like Dad. He wants to sit next to me, hold my hand, and be wherever I am.

Truthfully, he is my best friend.

Whenever I watch him imitate me, I find myself thinking about how much of my own life was spent trying to imitate my father. Children learn far less from what we tell them than from who we are.

There is something beautiful about watching a little boy carry a name that has been carried before him. Not because the name itself is important, but because of the men who carried it. My father taught me what it means to bear the name Gerber. Every day, I am trying to teach Blaise the same thing.

Fifteen years after my father’s death, I have come to understand what fathers leave behind.

Not merely a name, though I am proud to carry his. Not possessions, accomplishments, or even memories. Fathers leave behind examples. They leave behind habits, convictions, and a way of loving. They leave behind a vision of the kind of man their sons might become.

I see that inheritance every time I take Blaise’s hand. I see it every time he imitates something I am doing. I see it every time I find myself responding to the needs of another person with the same instinct my father had so many years ago: “How can I help?”

Fifteen years after his death, my father is still teaching a little boy how to be a man.

The difference is that little boy is no longer me.

It is Blaise.

And for that gift, I thank God the Father, St. Joseph, and Big Dennis.

Pride Month is difficult to avoid.

Whether you are logging onto your Hulu account, listening to the radio, or shopping online, it seems that many organizations support June’s dedication to same-sex marriage and transgenderism.

Navigating the cultural support of this issue as a Christian can be complex and practically challenging. It is important to understand why Christians cannot support Pride Month, and to be able to explain the reasons charitably and logically. To do this, we must use language precisely to speak about true love.

The Christian understanding of marriage is rooted in Biblical clarity. God created everything. God created human beings in his image and likeness. We are made for communion, and we are given the capacities for reason, freedom, and love. In these ways, we can see that we are made like God.

God created human beings as male and female. Human sexuality is reciprocal—the male body only makes sense within the context of the female body and vice versa. Man can give his entire body to woman, and woman can receive him completely. Man receives by giving, and woman gives by receiving. 

When husband and wife join together in this way, new life can emerge. The love between a husband and wife is so great that it can result in other human beings—completely new persons made in the image and likeness of God.

While most people understand these realities intuitively, few have ever reflected on them deeply and lack language to explain them. The Catholic Church uses the language of the “unitive” and “procreative” aspects of marriage. Marriage must be between a man and a woman because only two members of the opposite sex can truly unite with one another physically for the sexual act. Marriage is built on the unitive nature of the human body, which is divided into male and female.

Marriage is also founded upon a couple’s distinctive embrace, which has the unique capacity for procreation. A simple understanding of the human reproductive organs reveals that it is only possible for a man and a woman to have a sexual embrace. Two men or two women cannot. For this reason, two men or two women cannot have children together. Procreation is impossible between two people of the same sex.

This evidence is based on biology, not bigotry.

Such a distinction is critical in today’s world, where any opposition to a person’s feelings is met with great disdain.

The human person is male and female. Male and female come together to form new life, and marriage is the God-authored way new life is meant to be created and cared for. Speaking these truths helps people better understand their identities and what fulfills them.

One of the most famous articulations of the Christian view of sexuality is that of Pope St. John Paul II in his groundbreaking “Theology of the Body.”

In it he says, we “can deduce that man became the image of God not only through his own humanity, but also through the communion of persons, which man and woman form from the very beginning. The function of the image is that of mirroring the one who is the model, of reproducing its own prototype. Man becomes an image of God not so much in the moment of solitude as in the moment of communion.”

This “constitutes, perhaps, the deepest theological aspect of everything one can say about man. … On all this, right from the beginning, the blessing of fruitfulness descended.”

Nothing about the Christian view of sexuality is intended to offend those who experience same-sex attraction or know and love someone who is civilly “married” to someone of the same sex.

A Christian response to Pride Month must be concerned with speaking the truth in love. Truth is the mind’s conformity to reality. Love is willing the good of the other. Living in accordance with the reality of our bodies can cultivate a healthier nation full of healthier marriages.

The healthiest and truest context for the family is reliance on God, who is truth and love. When we ask God for the strength to love those closest to us, He will empower us to impact their lives and spread His love—no matter what month it is.

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

Major employers systematically—though perhaps unintentionally—blacklist conservative nonprofits from their employee charitable giving programs through a third party.

Corporate generosity platforms such as Benevity act as middlemen, connecting employers such as AT&T, Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, and Starbucks to a host of nonprofits. Benevity, for example, connects “nearly 1,000 enterprise companies” to a network of 513,000 nonprofits after vetting 2.2 million of them.

But these middleman platforms often refuse to partner with mainstream conservative or Christian nonprofits, because yet another third party—the Southern Poverty Law Center—puts those nonprofits on a “hate map” with chapters of the Ku Klux Klan.

The SPLC, which gained its reputation by suing Klan groups into bankruptcy, now stands accused of funneling money to Klan members, propping up the hate threat in order to raise money by claiming to oppose it. The SPLC claims it paid these Klan members as informants, to snuff out violent threats, but a federal grand jury indicted the SPLC for wire fraud and bank fraud based on claims that the SPLC paid for Klan robes and reimbursed a cross-burning, among other things.

At least one of these corporate generosity platforms has stopped using the SPLC in its entirety, but others continue to use it.

Calls to Stop Using SPLC

1792 Exchange, a nonprofit dedicated to bringing ideological balance back to public companies, and Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative Christian law firm on the SPLC “hate map,” called on corporate generosity platforms to stop using the SPLC.

“The scandal-ridden, federally indicted Southern Poverty Law Center has demonstrated for decades that it is a laughably unserious organization,” Greg Scott, executive vice president at 1792 Exchange, told the Daily Signal. “Its defamatory ‘Hate List’ is nothing more than a blacklist used to smear mainstream conservative, pro-life, and Christian organizations.”

“Charity processing platforms like Benevity, Deed, and YourCause should immediately stop relying on the SPLC to ban legitimate nonprofits from corporate generosity programs,” Scott added.

“Unfortunately, many business leaders still don’t realize their companies are indirectly relying on the SPLC’s thoroughly discredited ‘hate map’ to make important business decisions—imposing viewpoint discrimination on their own workforce and customer base in the process,” ADF Senior Counsel Jeremy Tedesco told the Daily Signal.

“No business leader wants to explain to their board why they’re outsourcing decisions to a federally indicted organization,” he added. “The reputational and legal risks of continuing to rely on the SPLC are entirely unjustified—and the only responsible move is to cut ties completely.”

Some companies have directed their corporate generosity platforms to stop using the SPLC to screen eligible nonprofits. DoorDash directed the platform Deed to stop using the SPLC for this purpose. According to Bowyer Research and previous reporting, companies that use Benevity have opted out of using the SPLC, including American Express, AT&T, Mastercard, McDonald’s, Morgan Stanley, Nvidia, and Salesforce. Verizon directed CyberGrants, another such platform, to stop using the SPLC for its employee giving.

Only one of these platforms has sworn off the SPLC, however.

Benevity

“Benevity’s platform is designed to give clients flexibility and control over which nonprofits are eligible for their programs, including which third-party data sources, if any, they choose to apply,” a company spokesperson told the Daily Signal. “These options are not a default setting.”

Scott has disputed this claim, saying it is “hard to square with [Benevity’s] own history.”

In 2021, then-Benevity CEO Kelly Schmitt delivered a PowerPoint presentation explicitly stating that the company had “vetted” almost “2 million nonprofits,” adding that it used the “Southern Poverty Law Center Hate List.”

Bonterra

Bonterra, the company that owns Deed and the similar platform CyberGrants, told the Daily Signal that it is giving the companies that use its services the option to stop using the SPLC as a filter and to remove the SPLC from the program as a recipient of grants.

“Bonterra is actively monitoring the SPLC indictment and evaluating any implications for our platform and the programs we support,” Melanie Mahaffey, senior director of strategic communications at Bonterra, told the Daily Signal. “We maintain nonprofit eligibility standards grounded in a robust internal compliance framework, which we review on an ongoing basis to ensure they remain current and defensible.”

“In light of this developing situation, we are giving our customers two options: the ability to disable SPLC-based vetting within their program, and the ability to remove SPLC as an eligible nonprofit organization within their platform — both at their discretion,” she said.

Groundswell

Groundswell, a similar platform that offers “workplace giving, volunteering, matching, and grantmaking technology,” said it no longer uses third-party vetting systems like the SPLC “hate map.”

“Historically, Groundswell incorporated third-party nonprofit data sources, including SPLC designations, as part of platform-level eligibility screening in line with common industry practices at the time,” Sarah Kuntsal, the company’s head of product marketing, told the Daily Signal.

In 2024, however, the company “introduced enhanced controls that give customers more granular authority over nonprofit eligibility and restrictions,” Kuntsal explained. “As a result, Groundswell no longer applies platform-level restrictions based on any single third-party designation system.”

The platform encourages employers to give workers “broad opportunities for participation and giving.” Groundswell “does not prescribe or advocate for any particular nonprofit screening methodology,” and it “does not discuss the specific configurations, preferences, or decisions of individual customers.”

Groundswell’s frequently asked questions page stated that the platform “does not process donations to organizations denoted as hate groups by the Southern Poverty Law Center” as recently as December 2025, but the page no longer includes this language.

Millie Giving

Millie Giving, another corporate generosity platform, published a blog post in 2022 citing the SPLC on “hate groups.” The blog post claims that “vetting for hate groups in-house would be very difficult,” and states that “All vetting for the Millie database is even through the SPLC!”

Millie Giving did not respond to the Daily Signal’s requests for comment.

2 More Platforms

Two other corporate generosity platforms partner with companies but have not said they use SPLC “hate map.”

The Daily Signal also reached out to Submittable, which runs a similar corporate giving platform, and Blackbaud, which owns the corporate generosity platform YourCause. Neither of these companies has publicly stated any use of the SPLC “hate map” in the past, and neither responded to requests for comment. 

The Southern Poverty Law Center did not respond to the Daily Signal’s request for comment.

Alaska is unlike any other state in the country. And when I say that, I’m not referring to its size or its natural beauty or even its resource abundance—although all three are relevant to the discussion.

Rather, what I mean is that Alaska is different from the other states in that everybody, everywhere, thinks they get to have a say in what happens there.

People in Montana, for example, don’t spend hundreds of thousands of dollars fighting to keep the people of Massachusetts from approving new businesses or utilizing their state’s physical assets.

People in Texas don’t organize groups and found nonprofit organizations to interfere in and oppose new development in Alabama, despite never having been there or only having visited for a football game or two.

For the most part, the states have a certain amount of autonomy over their own internal affairs. Of course, the federal government is often intrusive and overweening, but beyond that, states are generally left alone to govern themselves and their activities. Except Alaska.

Now, to be fair, a big part of this is the fact that the rest of the people in the country do “own” a larger chunk of Alaska than they do of other states—at least nominally. Roughly two-thirds of the state is federally owned and managed, meaning that about one-third of all federally managed lands are in Alaska, almost four times as much land as the state with the second-largest federal plot (Nevada).

Certainly, that gives people the impression that Alaska belongs to them at least as much as it belongs to the Alaskans.

A bigger part of the issue here, though, is that people tend not to think of Alaska as a “real” place where real people live, work, start businesses, and try to experience the American dream.

Despite being larger, geographically, than the next three largest states (Texas, California, and Montana) combined, Alaska has the third-smallest population in the nation. Couple that with the fact that it’s an extremely popular vacation destination and the subject of innumerable nature documentaries and reality shows, and people tend to think of it as little more than a massive entertainment experience, a theme park with bears and moose.

They don’t really care about how Alaska’s resources or the effort that its residents put into developing them. They only care that the fishing and the hunting and the big-game watching remain undisturbed long enough for them to visit—or visit again, as the case may be.

Consider that the Pebble Mine project in the Bristol Bay region of the state is estimated to hold the second-largest deposits of copper and gold in the entire world, but its development has been halted time and again, largely because out-of-state interests worry that mining there could maybe, possibly, theoretically disturb the salmon, herring, and rainbow trout fishing nearby.

In 2020, the Trump administration killed the permits to begin development on the Pebble Mine, in part because Donald Trump, Jr. and Tucker Carlson—the former of which likes the fish there—publicly objected to the project, despite the Army Corps of Engineers having determined that it would have “no measurable effect” on fish populations.

The same is true of the interminable debate over oil drilling in the coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR). Although the plain is home mostly to massive swarms of mosquitoes and other insects, its development has been debated and delayed for decades by out-of-state environmental activists, most of whom have never been to Alaska and all of whom think they know better than the state’s residents and mineralogical experts.

Next week marks the first anniversary of the launch of a financial product as unique as Alaska itself, an investment fund designed specifically to do two things to alleviate the impacts of the economic neglect created by outsiders’ treatment of the state: take advantage of the underinvestment in Alaska’s immense resources and opportunities that are typically overlooked because of politically animated opposition from outside the state; and provide investment dollars for the state’s vital but otherwise under-capitalized businesses.

That fund—The Frontier Economic Fund (AKAF)—was developed by Derek Kreifels of Prospr Aligned, in conjunction with Alaska’s business interests, and is managed by ETF and portfolio experts at Vident Asset Management. It is described on its website as “An ETF designed to help support resilient growth and opportunity within the Last Frontier”—i.e., to combat the perception that Alaska is just Disneyland on steroids.

AKAF tracks the Alaska Last Frontier Index—a rules-based, tier-weighted index of roughly 150 companies selected based on the extent of their business activities connected to Alaska: operational presence, natural resource utilization, local employment, capital investment, and participation in state-sponsored initiatives. The index methodology is designed to recognize the importance of companies doing business in the state and even motivate them to expand their presence there.

Unsurprisingly, given Alaska’s resource profile, the portfolio is heavily weighted toward industrials (35%), consumer discretionary (18%), energy (17%), and materials (12%). Top holdings include ConocoPhillips, Exxon, SLB, Halliburton, Baker Hughes, Delta, Alaska Air, UPS, FedEx—companies with significant Alaskan operations. It also includes smaller Alaska-specific plays like Northern Dynasty Minerals (the aforementioned Pebble Mine), Trilogy Metals, Novagold, Pantheon Resources, and several junior miners with Alaskan exploration projects.

As I said, AKAF is distinctive. When it was launched, the state’s then-Commissioner of Revenue, Adam Crum, described it as “prioritizing our top economic sectors including energy development, mining, tourism, cargo, transportation, and retail.” The fund’s launch was also timed to take advantage of the federal government’s recent interest in enabling the development of the state, exemplified in President Donald Trump’s January 2025 executive order, “Unleashing Alaska’s Extraordinary Resource Potential.”

Additionally, the fund serves as an unofficial embodiment of the pushback against ESG (environmental, social, and governance investing), the anti-democratic use of capital markets to advance the political predilections of a small, largely leftist group of investors and financial gadflies.

Given this last bit, AKAF has frustrated ESG supporters. This only makes sense, of course. ESG interests do not align with investors’ interests. Nor, for that matter, do they align with the interests of Alaskans. For this reason, the index excludes companies that have policies or made statements hostile to development in the state or that conflict with the best interests of the state’s residents, making an implicit but undeniable statement against politicizing investments.

Opportunity abounds in Alaska, yet it has been mostly overlooked and undermined by personal and political considerations of people and organizations from outside of the state. Creating an investment product that rebalances the scales and puts the focus back on development, profit, and shareholder returns is, in many ways, the opposite of politics. With returns of roughly 33% since inception (an admittedly short timeframe), AKAF makes that case for itself.

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

A coalition of litigation groups, at least two of which have been backed by taxpayer dollars, is targeting the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement in court.

The two leading organizations are Democracy Forward, chaired by Democratic lawyer Marc Elias, and UnidosUS, a Hispanic left-of-center group that has reportedly received millions in government funding in previous years.

The other partners include the left-leaning National Immigrant Justice Center, a group that has also received government grants; the libertarian-leaning legal group Institute for Justice; and the left-leaning Roderick and Solange MacArthur Justice Center.

The chief aim of the coalition is suing the government over alleged misconduct by officers with Immigration and Customs Enforcement or with Customs and Border Protection.

Specifically, the new national initiative plans to expand the use of the Federal Tort Claims Act, or FTCA. The law allows people to bypass sovereign immunity to sue the U.S. government for personal injury, property damage, or wrongful death caused by the wrongful or careless conduct of federal employees.

More than 100 lawyers from 60 organizations convened in Chicago last week for training and discussion on FTCA litigation.

“This convening is just the beginning of what will be a coordinated network of attorneys representing people harmed by federal officers’ actions at the administrative claim stage and in federal litigation, and Democracy Forward is honored to offer training, research, litigation guidance, screening tools, and ongoing technical support to make sure partners have the tools they need to hold government accountable,” Democracy Forward President Skye Perryman said in a public statement.

“The Federal Tort Claims Act can be an incredibly powerful civil rights accountability tool,” she said.

The nature of the statute makes it different from many of the politically oriented lawsuits that have amassed from groups on the left since President Donald Trump returned to office last year, said Robert Stilson, senior research analyst at the Capital Research Center, an investigative think tank.

“The Federal Tort Claims Act is for individuals wronged by government employees, and it could be legitimate complaints,” Stilson told the Daily Signal. “I wouldn’t call it lawfare. On the other hand, Unidos is clearly politicized. Democracy Forward is clearly politicized.”

UnidosUS, formerly known as the National Council of La Raza, has received tens of millions in funding through government grants. The UnidosUS website contends that federal immigration enforcement itself is rooted in structural racism.

“Immigration laws in this country are often designed to keep Latino immigrants out, or when allowed, treated as disposable, marginalized, and often illegal,” the website says.

In 2023, the group received $11.2 million from taxpayers, or about 20% of its budget, according to the Capital Research Center. From 2008 to 2017, the federal government provided about $38 million to UnidosUS. The group received no grants from 2018 through 2020 during the first Trump administration. But during the Biden administration, the organization received $35.9 million in federal grants from 2021 through 2023.

“Unidos is a good illustration of sending significant federal grant money to recipients with openly political agendas,” Stilson said. “It’s sending taxpayers’ money to groups representing one side of the political spectrum.”

A UnidosUS spokesperson did not respond to inquiries from the Daily Signal about the government grants. The group’s president, Janet Murguía, previously touted the initiative when it was launched in June.

“As mass deportation efforts escalate, holding the federal government accountable for abuses of power, excessive force, and misconduct is critical to protecting our communities and mitigating the harm these enforcement actions cause,” Murguía said.

Democracy Forward has filed more than 150 lawsuits against the Trump administration in the first year of Trump’s second term and dozens more in the first six months of 2026. Elias, the chairman of the board of Democracy Forward, served as an election lawyer for the Democratic National Committee and for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign.

The National Immigrant Justice Center, formerly the Midwest Immigrant Rights Center, provides pro bono or discounted legal services to low-income immigrants. It has advocated for halting ICE detention and defunding ICE.

In 2024, the NIJC received $2.6 million—or about 32% of its revenue—from government grants, according to the Capital Research Center.

An NIJC spokesperson did not respond to inquiries from the Daily Signal.

The MacArthur Justice Center litigates for people it considers to have faced injustice from the criminal justice system and advocates for overturning death sentences. The organization was founded in 1985 by the adult children of J. Roderick MacArthur.

The group, with a sizable $89.6 million in net assets, does not appear to receive government funding.

A spokesperson for the group did not respond to inquiries for this story.

The Institute for Justice has litigated against law enforcement abuse in the past but is perhaps best known for lawsuits in defense of property rights, the First Amendment, and advocating for deregulation. And there is no evidence the libertarian-leaning group gets government funding.

As major gun manufacturers relocate from Virginia to Georgia over firearm regulations, constitutional experts told the Daily Signal that the increasing momentum for left-leaning policies in the Peach State could jeopardize the manufacturers’ new home.

Their remarks come as Sen. Jon Ossoff, D-Ga., runs for reelection and former Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms, who is endorsed by former President Joe Biden, eyes the governor’s mansion.

Polls show that both candidates have a favorable chance of winning their respective seats.

“From the policy perspective, every time you have elected officials in office that are not protecting the Second Amendment, one runs the risk of losing ground to their policies,” Zack Smith, a senior legal fellow at The Heritage Foundation’s Institute for Constitutional Government, told the Daily Signal.

He added that businesses “would move to a more business friendly environment; they want to be in an environment where their Second Amendment rights are protected.”

In early June, Rideout Arsenal announced that it would relocate a firearm manufacturing factory valued at $22 million from Virginia to Georgia over new anti-gun laws enacted by Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger, a Democrat.

While Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp welcomed the move, saying his state “endures support for constitutional freedoms,” Republican political operatives say Ossoff’s anti-gun stance could jeopardize future moves by gun manufacturers.

“Whether it’s stripping law-abiding citizens of their right to safely own firearms, or protecting criminal illegals like Laken Riley’s killer, Jon Ossoff always puts the radical Left first,” National Republican Study Committee spokesman Nick Puglia told the Daily Signal.

During his 2020 campaign, Ossoff publicly said he supports “a ban on the sale of semi-automatic rifles and high-capacity magazines to the general public.”

The manufacturing plant that relocated to the Peach State specializes in semi-automatic firearms.

On a different occasion, Ossoff said he supports “universal criminal history checks for gun purchases” and “red flag laws to protect family members and domestic partners concerned about the mental health of their loved ones.”

Kyle Brosnan, general counsel for the Oversight Project, told the Daily Signal that Ossoff wouldn’t affect the pro-Second Amendment climate in Georgia “so long as the state Legislature and governor offices are held by pro-Second Amendment political leaders.”

However, he predicted that the anti-firearm stance of Spanberger and other blue-state politicians will continue to hinder those states.

“People and businesses have been voting with their feet in response to progressive, state-level policies for years now. That is why states like California, New York, and Illinois are projected to lose congressional seats following the 2030 census, and freedom-loving states like Texas and Florida stand to gain seats,” Brosnan said.

According to Smith, many blue states “violate the Second Amendment rights of their citizens,” driving businesses out.

“I think that like many business, gun businesses will continue to move to business-friendly environments. This is not good for local economies. Often, the jobs at manufacturing plants are high-skilled jobs. [Spanberger] should be concerned with the economic consequence of this.”

While some problems caused by California’s one-party government get significant press, there’s one major issue that’s virtually ignored: The state’s 911 system is dangerously outdated, and the attempt to update it has already cost taxpayers $502 million with little to show for it.  

California has an analog emergency warning system from the 1970s. There is broad agreement that the current system puts Californians at risk. Gov. Gavin Newsom proudly announced in 2019 that California would update its system.

In a 2019 press release, Newsom’s office explained some of the failures of the current system. At the time, there were 13 system outages a month on average. Newsom’s office said federal regulators estimated that speeding up average emergency response times by a single minute could save 10,000 lives each year.

The project is clearly necessary, but its cost has been astronomical, and progress has been sluggish. In 2019, Newsom asserted that the project would be completed by 2022 and cost approximately $132 million. He also explained that the project would be managed by a little-known governmental entity called the Governor’s Office of Emergency Services (Cal OES). With a name like that, Newsom cannot duck responsibility for the failure that has followed.

The contractors initially decided to implement regional systems, with the first place to enjoy the new service being Tuolumne County. This county has a relatively small population, around 53,000 at the time. Thus, minor kinks in the system could be worked out on a small scale.

However, the system had far more than just some minor kinks. It fell flat on its face, being unable to process many incoming calls, and it could not reliably identify locations or even callers’ phone numbers.

The failure in Tuolumne caused Cal OES to abandon the regional approach. But by then, Newsom was too busy trying to jump-start a run for president to respond effectively. It took years to pull the plug on the regional system. Of course, Newsom and his team blamed the contractors, but failures like this always start at the top.

Today, the statewide 911 system teeters on the brink of disaster. The state’s taxpayers have now spent $502 million and still don’t have a solution.

Cal OES put in place a bridge contract until the new system is up and running. The current backup provider will be paid $80 million a year for 30 months to operate the decrepit old system.

A representative of Cal OES told me, “Transitioning to a statewide NG [Next Generation] 911 system is a complex, multi-year effort. The bridge contract ensures Californians continue to receive reliable 911 service and allows for additional deployment of NG 911, particularly in high-priority areas like Los Angeles ahead of the 2028 Olympics.”

You can now sleep comfortably knowing they have matters under control.

The reason the public is largely unaware of this disaster is because its funding comes from designated fees on California residents’ telephone bills. The money collected goes directly to a secluded fund, and the state legislature has no control over the expenditure.

“California’s 911 system is funded through the State Emergency Telephone Number Account (SETNA) fee, and any costs do not impact the state’s general fund,” a member of the Cal OES team told me. “SETNA is a surcharge on telephone lines in California and is among the lowest in the nation.”

We finally found a low tax in California. The problem is it is being largely wasted.

A representative of Cal OES also told me that the office spent $138 million in 2025 from this secluded fund on NG 911. And the governor increased the amount for 2026 to $141.9 million “as a one-time increase in SETNA funds for 2026-27 to accelerate the statewide transition to NG 911.”

Cal OES is now hoping for full implementation of the system by 2030. Time will tell if that occurs.

The project—which was scheduled for completion in three years—will now be completed after 12 years. The project—which we were told would cost $132 million—will cost about $1.4 billion.

Based on the failure of the original regional plan, we can only pray this one will work.

A state’s 911 system has real consequences. People’s lives often hang in the balance. Given how blatant the failure to modernize the system has become, I’m not sure why people keep voting to keep the same clowns in charge of our state.

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

Hobson was an English horse dealer who famously gave customers only one horse to pick from, hence Hobson’s Choice. The expression sums up the mayoral contests in many American cities.

In Los Angeles, voters can choose between incumbent Karen Bass, whose “friend and mentor” was a communist, or Nithya Raman, who “has been aligned with the Democratic Socialists of America” and is compared to fellow ethnic-Indian immigrant Zohran Mamdani, New York City’s mayor.

As Jeff Blehar from National Review explained, “California’s election system … is rotten to its core and has reduced California politics to a mere test of activist strength between warring factions of the Democratic Party—who can turn out more ballots from homebound, largely disengaged voters, the ultimate insider’s game.”

Sounds like Washington, D.C., where voters have just chosen Councilmember Janeese Lewis George as Democrat nominee for mayor in November. The District of Columbia Council of 13 has 11 Democrats and 2 supposed “independents.”

Given that 92% of registered District of Columbia voters are Democrats, that means George is our next mayor. So, what are we in for?

Pundits considered current mayor Muriel Bowser a moderate in her 12 years running the District of Columbia, but she was hardly that.

Bowser tolerated riots and mayhem in the name of BLM in 2020, because “[t]here is a lot of distrust of police and the government.” She pushed for the District of Columbia to become a state. And Bowser created the District of Columbia’s Office of Racial Equity, with the goal of “eliminating racial and ethnic equity gaps.”

This is a DEI-infused approach of blaming all disparities between ethnic groups in terms of crime, education, and wealth on racial discrimination, to the exclusion of all factors, and correcting it through preferential treatment.

Bowser blew a brief increase in tax revenue on a menu of social spending that led to a projected billion-dollar budget deficit in her last year. However, she avoided fiscal ruin by raising taxes and cutting programs.

Despite her electorate’s opposition to President Donald Trump, Bowser also avoided direct confrontations that could have ended the city’s Home Rule, which dates back to the Nixon administration. And her administration reluctantly cleaned up a few parks that had been overrun with encamped vagrants since COVID-19. (I was hoping the one near me would reopen to taxpayers, but it has been fenced off, and its benches are now overgrown with grass … at least the rats have somewhere to play).

Don’t look for such restraint and realism from Lewis George, who “has promised an aggressive approach” to relations with Trump.

Lewis George is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, like Mamdani and Rep Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y. Today’s Democratic Party is not the one Bill Clinton ran in the 1990s. On issues from crime and immigration to welfare, the party’s present positions have moved far to the left.

On abortion, many mainstream Democrats went from “safe, legal and rare” to no limits at all.

On immigration, they went from the bipartisan 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act to calling for the abolition of immigration enforcement—which means open borders and no deportations.

On welfare, they went from Clinton’s signature Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, to calling critics of massive Medicaid fraud racists.

But if the Democrats have gone left, the Democratic Socialists of America are still much further to the left yet. As the City Journal explains, the DSA platform released in June commits them to “scrapping the U.S. Senate, ‘abolishing the carceral forces of the capitalist state,’ defunding the Department of War, amnesty for all immigrants, and ‘replac[ing] the President and Supreme Court with an executive and judiciary chosen by and subordinate to Congress.’”

Oh, and they want to name Jerusalem the capital of a Palestinian state, abolish the Electoral College, and nationalize private property.

Of course, individual DSA elected officials can differ with the national platform, but why call themselves DSA instead of Democrats unless they are with it in spirit?

Lewis George’s career so far shows her sympathies with the DSA agenda. She opposes a curfew to keep riotous teens at home and off Washington’s streets. During the campaign, she pledged not to attend “events focused on obfuscating the realities of occupation or promoting Zionism and apartheid.”

She wants Washington, D.C.—the seat of the federal government—to end all cooperation with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the branch of the federal Department of Homeland Security that is tasked with enforcing immigration law.

Lewis George is a strong supporter of District of Columbia statehood. I wrote in 2024 the obvious five reasons why the federal District of Columbia should never be a state, starting with the Constitution and then the city’s failure to educate its children, or control corruption, crime, and vagrancy.

If, as expected, Lewis George becomes mayor, we can expect her to double down on socialist policies that have been proven to fail, time after time, in country after country. A fifth of the city is on food stamps. Forty percent are on Medicaid. They’ll always vote, if they vote at all, to keep the taps flowing.

Those of us who pay for it all are stuck with Hobson’s Choice of socialists.

Thursday morning, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth spoke at the headquarters of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in Brussels, announcing a six-month review of American force posture and funding relating to NATO as part of the Trump administration’s efforts to build “NATO 3.0.”

In 2026, the U.S. is forced by geopolitical necessity to prioritize deterring China, a monumental effort that will require a shift in resources and a change in force posture, with the U.S. moving forces and funding into the Pacific. Despite this, the U.S. has security and economic reasons to care about the future of Europe and is pushing for a revitalized and reshaped alliance in the form of NATO 3.0.

It is no secret that there has been legitimate debate in Washington about America’s future role in NATO, largely stemming from Europe’s larger and wealthier nations dismissing their own national security interests since the end of the Cold War.

Maintaining continued American engagement partially depends on the sovereign decisions of European allies, as demonstrations of European commitment to collective security in Europe make the case to Americans that Europeans are taking their own security seriously and that European NATO members are capable and committed allies of the U.S. in advancing shared security goals.

Some European NATO members are already doing more for their own security and deserve credit. Many NATO countries, especially the Baltic states, Nordic states, Poland, and Germany, are significantly increasing their defense spending and moving toward the new defense spending target ahead of schedule while also making significant shifts in planning and force posture that demonstrate real commitment to collective deterrence.

Other NATO countries, notably those in Southern Europe (and especially Spain), continue to lag behind in defense spending and serious commitments to taking more responsibility for European security. Parts of Western Europe, like the United Kingdom, meet their spending targets but have deeply concerning problems with readiness and maintenance.

Improving Atlantic security through burden-sharing will serve the U.S. by positioning it to pivot to the Pacific while ensuring that its NATO allies can provide most of their own conventional deterrence and defense.

The Heritage Foundation’s special report “NATO 3.0 and American Security Strategy in Europe” advocates reducing the total number of troops in Europe but moving the troops that remain east, shifting a brigade of American soldiers from Germany to Poland. At the same time, it recommends that European allies permanently station more troops in the Baltic states and to procure more airpower, warships, and strategic airlift and refueling capabilities to account for U.S. shifts to the Pacific.

The American nuclear umbrella provided as part of U.S. membership in NATO is especially critical, given the huge imbalance between the large Russian nuclear arsenal and the small nuclear arsenals of the U.K. and France.

Without the U.S., Russia would almost certainly engage in nuclear blackmail against countries like Poland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Finland. The Heritage Foundation has therefore advocated for increasing the number of U.S. tactical nuclear weapons in Europe even as conventional troop commitments are reduced.

This shift in resources and forces is not a matter of preference but a geopolitical necessity given the economic and military rise of China. The U.S. military is not currently prioritizing deterring the rise of the People’s Republic of China, although China has publicly warned about its plans to invade Taiwan and clearly seeks hegemony in Asia. A NATO in which European allies provide most conventional deterrence is one in which the U.S. has fewer security concerns in the Atlantic region and can focus on the Pacific.

A militarily strong Europe capable of defending its sovereign interests is in the national interest of the U.S., and America should promote European military capability so that European allies can take the lead in their own collective defense.

The stronger America’s European allies are, the safer the Atlantic world will be, and the success of this vision for NATO 3.0 is critical to ensuring that the transatlantic alliance endures to the mutual benefit of Americans and Europeans.

A 35-year-old woman was found wasting away to skin and bones on Los Angeles’ Skid Row, barely conscious on the floor of a fetid tent, nodding in and out amid the fentanyl haze. She died on June 17, 2026, in a hospital bed of meningitis and sepsis triggered by terminal malnutrition. Her body surrendered. 

The woman was Daveigh Chase, the voice of Disney’s beloved Lilo in “Lilo & Stitch,” and the nightmare Samara crawling from the well in “The Ring.” She had millions in unclaimed residuals from her child stardom sitting untouched in accounts because she was “too far gone” on heroin and fentanyl.

Her longtime manager, John Ryan, and stepsister, Gaia Brown, had hired a private investigator months earlier after videos of her on Skid Row surfaced. They raced to intervene, but by then it was too late. Talent, youth, money, love—everything the homelessness industry swears the desperate lack—none of it could save her.

Chase’s tragedy is a real and brutal case study in the lethal failure of progressive compassion.

Would LA Mayor Karen Bass’s taxpayer-funded dentures have saved her? 

Bass insists meth addicts “can’t succeed without teeth” and pushes public dental programs so the toothless can flash a smile at their next job interview. Give them comprehensive dental care, she says, and watch them waltz into employment and self-respect.

Yet Chase once had the perfect Hollywood smile, the perfect voice, and the perfect resume—everything Bass claims the unhoused lack—and she still ended up skeletal and septic in a Skid Row tent. A smile does not fix a brain hijacked by fentanyl.

Would a job have saved her? 

Progressives love to say the homeless “just need a job” and a little opportunity. Chase already had the Hollywood resume, the industry connections most Americans could only dream of, and millions in the bank. Addiction had long since burned away the last remnants of discipline, reliability, and the will to show up for life itself.

Would “housing first” and a subsidized apartment have saved her? 

With millions in residuals, she could have bought stability many times over. The money existed. She chose—or illness compelled her toward—the streets. Unconditional housing for the actively addicted becomes just a nicer place to use and isolate until the body gives out.

Would harm reduction—clean needles, test strips, cash cards—have saved her? 

Decades of that approach in California turned Skid Row into an open-air fentanyl supermarket. Chase had access to whatever she wanted on those streets. The paraphernalia didn’t restore her; it sustained the spiral that left her hospitalized for starvation before the infections finished the job.

For years, blue-city progressives have peddled the soothing fiction that homelessness stems from a shortage of housing, cash, and “dignity.” California has squandered billions on unconditional apartments, dental programs, needle exchanges, and Prop 47’s decriminalization of hard drugs. The results? Exploding tent cities, sidewalks turned sewers, and a former child star with millions, still dying emaciated on camera.

If these solutions work, why did a woman with millions die skeletal and septic while her residuals gathered dust? 

The addicted brain is not a rational actor waiting for better incentives. It is hijacked—prioritizing dope over dignity, food, or future. Progressive policy refuses to admit this, preferring performative empathy that enables until the obituary is written.

The Left’s sacred rule that we must never “criminalize homelessness” shows how upside-down the morality has become. Letting a talented young woman decompose publicly on Skid Row, muttering to phantoms, is not liberty. It is state-sanctioned slow suicide. 

We commit the suicidal. We restrain the delirious. We quarantine the contagious. But the fentanyl zombie injecting in broad daylight? Her “autonomy” is sacred.

Chase was exactly the kind of person progressives insist should never end up homeless: a millionaire child star with substantial earnings, industry connections, and a devoted support network that refused to give up on her. Yet even she died skeletal and septic in a Skid Row tent.

Even her own manager and family understood that only forced treatment and rehab could have saved her. They tried desperately, planning to stabilize her in Los Angeles before flying her to a treatment facility in Costa Rica, but by the time they reached Skid Row, she had disappeared. They were too late.

Addiction destroyed her, while progressive ideology made sure nothing stopped it. Bass’ denture diplomacy and the endless liturgy of more tents and needles only mock her memory.

How many more Chases must waste away before progressives finally abandon their delusion? 

Homelessness has become a subsidized lifestyle under their policies. This is a medical and moral emergency. Progressive policies do not merely tolerate this misery, they subsidize it with cash, housing, needles, and zero accountability. Forced treatment is not cruelty; it is the recognition that some lost souls cannot choose life until the state compels detox, medication, structure, and accountability.

Anything less is performative compassion with body bags as the finale. Daveigh deserved rescue. So do the thousands still haunting our cities. The time for pretending is over. It’s time to trade platitudes for intervention—before the next viral video becomes another preventable tragedy.

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

Social activism among corporate elites isn’t going away, but the Trump administration and the Securities and Exchange Commission have a solution to curb the influence of Wall Street’s largest asset managers, a conservative policy group argues.

The Bull Moose Project says that, in the past, the investment firms BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street amassed significant control over shareholder votes through their dominance of passive index funds and used that influence to advance environmental, social, and governance initiatives and diversity, equity, and inclusion policies while wielding outsized power through shareholder proxy voting. However, the group contends that current decision makers at these investment firms are likely to steer these initiatives in the future if they remain in positions of influence.

“Many executives at these firms are major Democratic donors, and that’s their right. They may be cozying up to the current administration. But ESG hasn’t gone away,” Aiden Buzzetti, president of The Bull Moose Foundation, told the Daily Signal.

The firms collectively own about one-quarter of the U.S. stock market and are the largest single shareholder in about 90% of S&P 500 companies, according to a Bull Moose Project report titled “The Corporate Voting Cartel: How to Stop Wall Street Weaponization of Americans’ Retirement Plans.”

“[F]earing scrutiny from the Trump administration and Republican Congress, the Big Three have temporarily backed away from much of their overtly pro-ESG and pro-DEI voting behavior,” the report says. “But the same biased personnel remain entrenched within the firms’ stewardship teams, with the same conviction that they have every right to weaponize their customers’ investment dollars to advance radical agendas when the time is ripe.”

President Donald Trump signed an executive order in December on “Protecting American Investors from Foreign-Owned and Politically-Motivated Proxy Advisors.” The order largely targeted proxy advisory firms such as Glass, Lewis & Co. and Institutional Shareholder Services, which offer voting recommendations to shareholders in public companies. It did not address direct asset managers, and more action should be taken, The Bull Moose Project says.

Buzzetti said he is “fairly confident” the Trump administration and the SEC will take action. 

“Just as some Republican state legislatures have banned DEI and critical race theory long term, we think it’s important to block ESG for the long term,” Buzzetti said.

The report names Tanya Levy-Odom, BlackRock’s head of investment stewardship of the Americas, who has authored articles focused on ESG and DEI. It also names State Street’s Americas head of asset stewardship, Holly Fetter, who discussed “wealth redistribution, economic and racial justice” in a 2018 podcast and is an advisory council member with the Clayman Institute of Gender Research at Stanford University.

The firms have countered that they focus on getting the best return on investments for their customers, not on political concerns.

“Vanguard does not have a house view on corporate governance nor do our funds vote in a uniform manner,” Netanel Spero, a spokesperson for Vanguard, told the Daily Signal in a written statement. “Proxy voting for Vanguard funds is managed, depending on the company in question, by the respective third-party managers, separate stewardship teams representing the two internal Vanguard investment managers, and via Vanguard Investor Choice.”

BlackRock declined to comment for this story, but referenced its annual report, which said it is “legally required to make proxy voting determinations on behalf of clients who have delegated voting authority to us in a manner that is consistent with their investment objectives.” It further states proxy votes are cast on a “financial materiality-based approach and are focused solely on advancing clients’ long-term financial interests.”

BlackRock also points to a report by the Committee to Unleash Prosperity, a conservative economic group that opposes ESG. The report examined 600 investment management companies on 50 ESG proposals in 2024. BlackRock was among the 11 that received an “A” rating.

A State Street spokesperson declined to comment.

The Bull Moose Project report recommends the SEC issue guidance encouraging or requiring “mirror voting,” in which passive index fund managers would vote their shares in the same proportion as active investors at shareholder meetings.

“Asset managers are signaling they are backing off ESG and social activism for now, but the reason we are pushing for mirror voting is because when a Democratic administration eventually takes power, they will eventually utilize that power,” Buzzetti said.

The report explains under “mirror voting,” if active shareholders supported a proposal by a 55%-45% margin, passive funds would automatically cast their votes in the same ratio.

“Mirror voting simply holds passive funds to their own sales pitch: mirroring the market, not distorting it,” the report notes.

The topic of mirror voting came up at an early June SEC Investor Advisory Committee meeting.

Among the examples cited in the report is the 2021 proxy fight at Exxon Mobil. All three asset managers voted to back the environmental hedge fund Engine No. 1’s successful effort to add two members to the Exxon Mobil board of directors.

Gov. Mike DeWine on Tuesday revealed his stance on the death penalty, ruffling the feathers of many Ohio Republicans in the process.

“I believe Ohio should abolish the death penalty. The Legislature could take this action, and I think they should take this action,” the governor said during a press conference.

DeWine, a Republican leader who has been in Ohio politics for decades, cosponsored Senate Bill 1 to reinstate the death penalty while he was a state lawmaker. That bill was signed into law in 1981.

The Columbus Dispatch reported that DeWine supported the death penalty when he was lieutenant governor, a member of the U.S. Congress, and also Ohio’s attorney general.

“When I voted for the reinstatement of the death penalty in 1981, I believed that in some cases capital punishment could serve as a deterrent to keep some people from killing. For me, it was the moral justification for having the death penalty,” DeWine explained.

He no longer believes it is a deterrent, however, and even said it is “impossible to make the case” today.

A bipartisan bill in the Ohio Senate Judiciary Committee, Senate Bill 134, pertains to abolishing the death penalty. The bill’s sponsors include state Sen. Nickie Antonio, a Democrat, and state Sen. Stephen Huffman, a Republican.

ACLU Ohio posted that DeWine “can and must use his executive authority to issue commutations to death row inmates who have exhausted all of their appeals in the courts.”

DeWine received some support at the federal level as well, including from U.S. Sen. Bernie Moreno, R-Ohio, who referenced his pro-life beliefs from “conception all the way through natural death.”

“I support his moral point of view,” Moreno said about DeWine’s stance.

State Rep. Brian Stewart, who supports the death penalty, nevertheless called the governor’s announcement “the least surprising news imaginable.” He further expressed his own support of the death penalty by highlighting individuals convicted of vicious crimes and by noting that the General Assembly “has already spoken” when it comes to keeping the death penalty as the law.

Dave Yost, who left his attorney general role earlier this month to work for Alliance Defending Freedom, posted on X that his replacement, Andy Wilson, signaled his commitment to keeping the death penalty.

Wilson issued a statement on Wednesday that referenced his own experience as a prosecutor.

“Having personally handled several death penalty trials, I understand the value of the death penalty as an option for prosecutors and victims in very limited circumstances. The decision to seek the death penalty is the most serious decision a prosecutor can make. My experience working with prosecutors across the state is that they do not make this choice lightly,” it read.

Wilson’s statement also referenced that there are a few cases where “the death penalty is the only option that can bring a measure of justice and closure to the families of victims who rely on the criminal justice system to help them through the worst moments of their lives.”

Despite DeWine’s stance, Wilson noted that the death penalty is “currently allowable under Ohio law.”

Both the Republican and Democrat nominees running to replace Wilson for attorney general favor keeping the death penalty, reflecting bipartisan opposition to DeWine’s new stance.

Auditor Keith Faber, the Republican nominee, stressed a need to utilize the current law and to “work with the General Assembly to identify constitutional methods of execution that can be implemented immediately.” He also argued that the death penalty serves as a deterrence to crime.

Democrat candidate John Kulewicz said he supports “the continued existence” of the death penalty, given that there are some crimes, “such as prisoners killing guards,” for which there “can be no other remedy.”

“We must be exceedingly cautious, careful, and deliberate in applying it, because it is irrevocable,” Kulewicz said.

The last time Ohio carried out the death penalty was in 2018. Although DeWine paused executions in 2019, the next execution has been scheduled for Jan. 13, 2027, right after DeWine leaves office, the Columbus Dispatch also noted.

Leaders of Georgia’s Republican-controlled Legislature on Wednesday announced they will not redraw the state’s district maps this year despite a U.S. Supreme Court decision in April that said race-based gerrymandering is unconstitutional.

Recently, some lawmakers in the Georgia General Assembly argued in favor of drawing new district lines for the 2028 elections following the high court ruling. Gov. Brian Kemp added it to the agenda for the special legislative session that began on Wednesday.

However, in a statement released on Wednesday, Senate President Pro Tem Larry Walker III explained that the Legislature would not tackle the issue at this time.

“We believe it is prudent to allow the judicial process to continue developing in other states and to carefully evaluate how courts rule on newly adopted district maps across the country,” he said. “With this guidance, we are confident that Georgia’s new districts will ultimately withstand legal scrutiny and that Georgia will prevail in defending its position in court.”

“For these reasons, the Senate sent a letter to Governor Kemp informing him that redistricting will not be taken up during this Special Legislative Session,” Walker added.

Instead, lawmakers will spend the session focusing on issues such as property tax relief, ratifying the suspension of the state gas tax, and election integrity.

Lawmakers also face a July 1 deadline for whether to remove QR codes from ballots as required by a prior law. A bill was introduced on Wednesday to extend the deadline to 2028 due to administrative confusion in the middle of this year’s election cycle. Georgia began using the codes in 2020 to count ballots.

The decision comes amid several legal cases that lack a verdict in Georgia, as well as in other states that have been reassessing their maps following the Louisiana v. Callais decision. The Supreme Court stated that “lower courts have sometimes applied this Court’s precedents in a way that forces states to engage in the very race-based discrimination that the Constitution forbids.”

Kemp has argued for the unconstitutionality of Georgia’s current district maps, redrawn in 2023, following the high court’s ruling. However, he admitted governors do not have the authority to force legislators to create new maps.

The Daily Signal reached out to state Sen. Nikki Merritt, D-Grayson, for comment regarding redistricting in Georgia.

A spokesperson for Merritt responded, “She [Merritt] strongly believes that it should be something that the state senators come together and agree upon, when it comes to redistricting, and that should be based on the census that we conduct every 10 years, not by any personal interest.”

House Speaker Jon Burns, a Republican, echoed this sentiment when discussing the future of the state and what issues affect Georgians most at this time—not “partisan gain.”

The debate between lawmakers has raised a discussion about the role race should play, if any, when it comes to redistricting.

Walker said lawmakers will continue to monitor the redistricting process in other states, such as Alabama and Tennessee, which have sought to reconfigure their maps consisting of certain majority-Black districts. In South Carolina, legislators considered redistricting but ultimately chose to drop the matter.

Senate Minority Leader Harold Jones II, a Democrat, noted resistance from Georgians, which he claims pressured Republicans to abandon their hopes for redistricting.

Nearly three decades after the end of the Troubles, Belfast, the capital of Northern Ireland, is once again on fire.

On Monday, June 8, a Sudanese “asylum” seeker attacked a local man on the street with a kitchen knife, slashing him across the face and neck. Graphic video of the attack, which blinded the victim in one eye, rapidly spread online.

The suspect, identified as Hadi Alodid, has been charged with attempted murder, possession of a knife in a public place, and making threats to kill.

In response, Belfast erupted.

Rioters took to the streets, hurling bricks and bottles at police, torching vehicles, and burning homes in some Belfast neighborhoods with large migrant populations. Police deployed water cannons. Families were forced to flee burning buildings. The Northern Ireland Fire and Rescue Service responded to 62 incidents in a single night. At least 27 people have been left homeless.

Lest there be any doubt: Arson, mob violence, and the burning of innocent people’s homes are all indefensible acts. Mobocracy is here, there and everywhere the enemy of civilization. The masked men who burned out their neighbors for no reason disgraced themselves and their cause.

But that hopefully obvious point aside, here is the question the Western press refuses to ask: Why does this keep happening?

Because it does keep happening. Almost exactly a year ago, Northern Ireland convulsed in riots after two Romanian teenagers were charged with the attempted rape of a schoolgirl in Ballymena. The year before that, riots swept across England itself—Southport, Rotherham, town after town—following a mass stabbing at a girls’ dance class by a Muslim terrorist.

The pattern is not difficult to discern. A horrific crime, or series of crimes, is committed. The perpetrator is a migrant, often some variety of “asylum” seeker. The government responds by condemning the violence of an enraged public while studiously avoiding any reckoning with the underlying policies that generated the crime and the inevitable subsequent rage. The Pravda press dutifully follows the official, regime-approved script.

This week’s coverage has been instructive. The framing in outlet after establishment outlet has been nothing if not predictable: “anti-immigrant violence,” “far-right protesters,” “racist riots.” Northern Ireland’s first minister called the rioters “thugs” but had very little to say about the fact a Sudanese national blinded a constituent in Northern Ireland’s largest city.

British Prime Minister Keir Starmer condemned the stabbing as “sickening”-fine—but devoted considerably more rhetorical energy to warning that “violence against people based on their background would not be tolerated.”

As the late Canadian comic Norm MacDonald so memorably quipped a decade ago: “What terrifies me is if ISIS were to detonate a nuclear device and kill 50 million Americans. Imagine the backlash against peaceful Muslims?”

No one in the current British or Irish political leadership has earnestly asked whether a government that imports the whole world, with inadequate vetting and nonexistent assimilation, bears some meaningful share of the culpability for the social fractures now detonating like dynamite all across the British Isles. Why bother with any introspection? Far easier to just blame the “fascist” street thug menace.

As for the regime media: It’s not that the press fails to condemn mob violence. On the contrary, it condemns it loudly and with great self-satisfaction. The press’s failure is more insidious: It’s the deliberate suppression of honest inquiry into cause and effect. It’s the refusal to consider why working-class people across Britain and Ireland are at a boiling point.

The question goes unasked, the fateful underlying policies go unexamined, and the pressure cooker keeps building.

The relevant facts are not in dispute. The United Kingdom has presided over one of the largest and least-managed immigration expansions—and, specifically, Muslim population expansions—in modern Western history. Applications for asylum, legitimate or not, have surged. Vetting has been porous. Integration has been an afterthought. And communities that were never consulted have borne the consequences most acutely.

They have been told, repeatedly, that their discomfort reflects moral failure on their part rather than policy failure on the government’s part.

That is British snobbishness at its absolute worst. Call this, instead, what it is: social transformation without representation. And ruinous social transformation, at that.

At some point, the people who actually live with the consequences of the elite’s destructive policies cease asking permission to be heard. The answer is not to excuse violence but to take the underlying grievances seriously before the violence erupts in the first place.

Starmer does not want to have that conversation. The BBC does not want to have that conversation. The New York Times most certainly does not want to have that conversation.

But Belfast is having it—and it’s ugly.

Worse, it may not stop anytime soon. Because unless Western governments stop treating skepticism of mass migration as a thought crime and start treating it as a legitimate concern, the fires will keep burning.

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

THE DAILY CALLER NEWS FOUNDATION—Socialist City Councilwoman Janeese Lewis George won Washington, D.C.’s Democrat mayoral primary putting her on track to be the deep blue city’s next leader.

Lewis George won 52.9% of the first-choice vote, beating out her closest challenger former City Councilman Kenyan McDuffie who garnered 36.4%, The Associated Press reported Thursday with 75% of the vote counted. The AP called the race nearly two full days after polls closed Tuesday night.

The race took long to call partly due to the fact that this was the first D.C. mayoral election conducted using ranked choice voting. No other candidate in the race received more than 4% of the vote.

Lewis George has represented the District’s Ward 4 since 2021, when she defeated a more moderate Democrat in the primary. During her campaign she has been compared to New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, and she is a self-described socialist. Like Mamdani, her campaign focused on cost-of-living issues and strengthening public services.

Democrat D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser, who has led the nation’s capital since 2015, did not seek reelection to a fourth term.

McDuffie has served as D.C. council for Ward 5 for nearly ten years before spending three as an at-large council member.

During Lewis George’s last reelection campaign, her opponents criticized her for being soft on crime. McDuffie has pointed out that Lewis George did not vote for sweeping crime bills in 2023 and voted against allowing landlords to evict potentially violent tenants, according to WAMU 88.5.

Lewis George told Fox 5 that her vision is “someone who addresses retention, recruitment, morale and police enforcement.”

Teen takeovers have been infiltrating D.C. leading to several arrests and violence occurring within the city. Lewis George said she was against the idea of implementing a youth curfew to combat teen takeovers and youth violence, according to USA Today.

Lewis George has claimed that the cities teen takeovers can be solved by “investing more in safe spaces and activities for teenagers,” according to the outlet.

“It is dangerous because we have federal troops who are in our city, masked [U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement] ICE agents who are in our city,” Lewis George said in May.

“These are the people enforcing this law in our young people, and these individuals are not trained in deescalation,” she added, according to USA Today.

McDuffie criticized Lewis George’s take on crime and claimed that “doing nothing is not an option,” USA Today reported.

In an effort to crack down on crime President Donald Trump deployed national guard to D.C. in August 2025.

Lewis George was endorsed by the Working Families Party, the Metro D.C. Democratic Socialists of America and Our America, according to the AP.

Originally published by the Daily Caller News Foundation

After hearing that Vice President JD Vance had installed a chicken coop at the Naval Observatory, some people treated it as a political statement, but I suspect it is something much simpler.

Recent estimates suggest roughly 11 million American households keep backyard chickens. That means the chicken coop behind the vice president’s residence is not unusual. The unusual thing is how many Americans have quietly decided they want a closer relationship with their food.

Much of contemporary life—with its bureaucracy, homeowners associations, and planners—often seems to resist this trend, one arbitrary rule at a time. I do not believe that this resistance is rooted in a mistaken belief that chickens are somehow dangerous. I think it is because chickens are decentralized. They produce food close to home, and this reminds people that not every solution requires a large, stifling system.

Long before I owned a ranch in Texas, I lived in Knollwood Country Club Estates, a golf course community in Southern California. I was a restaurant owner with a backyard chicken coop, a compost pile, a worm bin, and a growing fascination with where food comes from.

The chickens taught me that food does not magically appear on grocery store shelves. They taught me that waste is often just a resource in the wrong place. They taught me that healthy soil, healthy plants, healthy animals, and healthy people are all connected.

For decades, Americans have become increasingly disconnected from the production of their own food. Most people never question the arrangement until something goes wrong. Egg prices spike, supply chains break down, or grocery shelves sit empty of favorite ingredients. Then suddenly people realize how dependent they have become on systems they do not control, or even understand.

That is why backyard chickens matter. Not because they will replace all of commercial agriculture, but because they reconnect people to food production.

Chickens are the gateway drug to food sovereignty, and America seems to be rediscovering them. And the market has begun to take notice. Twenty years ago, finding a chicken coop usually meant a trip to a farm supply store. The other day, I walked through Costco and found ready-made chicken coops for sale. A few aisles away sat hydroponic towers designed to grow vegetables at home.

Retailers do not dedicate floor space to products nobody wants. The desire to reconnect with food is real.

For nearly all of human history, producing food was not a hobby. It was simply life.

The appeal of collecting eggs still warm from the hen is not reserved for homesteaders or hobby farmers. Every one of us is only a few generations removed from an agrarian society. Whenever you gather eggs, plant a tomato, or harvest food with your own hands, you experience a kind of recollection of this reality.

That recollection extends beyond food production itself; it also changes the way people think about waste.

Roughly one-third of America’s food supply goes uneaten. A chicken sees opportunity where we see garbage. Vegetable scraps, stale bread, and even garden weeds become eggs. Yesterday’s leftovers become tomorrow’s breakfast.

In Belgium, thousands of households received chickens as part of a waste reduction initiative. Instead of creating landfill waste, families are empowered to create food.

One of the lessons farming has taught me is that God’s technology is often better than ours.

A chicken takes weeds, insects, food scraps, and leftovers and transforms them into food while producing fertilizer for the next crop. No batteries or software updates are needed—just biology doing exactly what it was designed to do.

Food sovereignty does not mean complete self-sufficiency. It simply means having some ability to participate in the production of your own food. Backyard chickens remind us that food can move directly from the land to the family without passing through a maze of institutions along the way.

A flock of six hens will not feed a city, but it changes the way a family thinks. Then comes a tomato plant, a garden, composting, healthier soil, and eventually a deeper appreciation for where food comes from.

A healthy society does not consist entirely of consumers. It consists of participants: people who grow some of their food, know their farmers, compost their scraps, and contribute to the life of their communities.

That is why the chicken coop behind Vance’s house matters. It reminds people of something many Americans have forgotten: Food production is not reserved for corporations, governments, or professional farmers.

Long before I owned a ranch, I learned that lesson in a golf course community in Southern California. It started with a chicken coop I was not supposed to have and eggs collected warm from the nest.

Looking back, I was not just raising chickens. I was remembering something humans have known for thousands of years.

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

If you want to find out why our country has been so successful, you should study the people who built it.

America is about to turn 250 years old. It should be easy to celebrate America. Aside from the healthy patriotic pride anyone should feel, we are the greatest country in the history of the world. We enjoy freedoms most people could only dream about. We have the strongest military in the history of the world. We have the most dynamic economy. We put men on the moon.

For those born after the end of the Cold War, it’s easy to take this for granted. It can feel like America has always been dominant. It hasn’t. Especially because public schools don’t teach it, we need to look at the roots of America’s greatness. That’s easy to discover if you read the words of the Founding Fathers. They weren’t shy about what—or rather who—deserved the credit.

“We have appointed a continental Fast,” former President John Adams wrote to his wife Abigail Adams on June 17, 1775. This was during the Second Continental Congress. “Millions will be upon their Knees at once before their great Creator, imploring his Forgiveness and Blessing, his Smiles on American Councils and Arms.”

Government officials calling for God’s help happened repeatedly during the American Revolution. In March 1775, Connecticut Gov. Jonathan Trumbull issued a proclamation for “a day of public fasting and prayer” in order “that God would graciously pour out His Holy Spirit on us … and make this land a mountain of holiness and habitation of righteousness forever.”

He set that day of prayer for April 19, 1775. History buffs may recognize this as when “the shot heard ’round the world” was fired at the Battle of Lexington and Concord.

This language from elected officials is shocking—even scandalous—to modern ears, but it was commonplace at the time of America’s birth. While the colonists didn’t share a common denomination, most shared a common Christian faith.

On March 16, 1776, William Livingston successfully proposed that the Continental Congress declare a day of fasting and prayer. The Founding Fathers sought a time “that we may, with united hearts, confess and bewail our manifold sins and transgressions, and, by a sincere repentance and amendment of life, appease his righteous displeasure, and, through the merits and mediation of Jesus Christ, obtain his pardon and forgiveness.”

Further, “it is recommended to Christians of all denominations to assemble for public worship.”

The Founding Fathers believed God answered these prayers. Toward the end of the war, Gen. Benedict Arnold agreed to betray General George Washington and West Point. After the plot was improbably foiled, Washington credited God.

“The Providential train of circumstances which led to it affords the most convincing proof that the liberties of America are the object of Divine protection,” he wrote about the incident.

This devotion wasn’t limited to wartime, as “The American Story: The Beginnings” by David and Tim Barton details. In 1787, as the Constitutional Convention threatened to fall apart, Benjamin Franklin urged those assembled to pray.

“How has it happened, Sir, that we have not hitherto once thought of humbly applying to the Father of lights to illuminate our understandings?” Franklin asked. He continued, “The longer I live, the more convincing proofs I see of this truth-that God governs in the affairs of men.”

Also, “We have been assured, Sir, in the sacred writings that ‘except the Lord build the House they labor in vain that build it.’ I firmly believe this.”

Today, many Americans don’t. It’s led to what we’ll examine next week—the threats to America’s greatness.

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

Los Angeles voters are set to decide whether noncitizens should have a say in city elections after the City Council on Wednesday voted 10-5 to place a controversial voting measure on the Nov. 3 ballot.

If passed, the city would have the legal authority to create a program allowing certain noncitizens to vote in Los Angeles municipal and LAUSD elections.

The proposal would not allow noncitizens to vote in federal elections. However, many questions remain about how the system would work, and how officials would ensure participants receive ballots only for elections in which they are permitted to vote.

According to LA City Councilman Hugo Soto-Martínez, who introduced the proposal in April, eligibility would be limited to residents with some form of legal status. This would include Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals recipients, green card holders, and individuals with temporary protected status.

Supporters of the measure argue it would give long-term residents a voice in local decisions that affect their families and communities.

“People have spent many years here, and in many cases, decades, contributing to the city of Los Angeles,” Soto-Martínez said during the council debate. “This is about local representation and local democracy.”

He later added, “We say LA is for everyone, and that means no exceptions.”

Opponents, however, argue that voting should remain tied to citizenship, and that letting noncitizens vote could harm public confidence in elections.

Councilman John Lee warned that changes to voting eligibility should be approached with caution.

“Election laws are different from ordinary policy decisions,” he said. “They establish rules under which elected officials are chosen and held accountable, and because of that, changes to voting eligibility should be approached with the utmost public trust and legitimacy.”

Others, including Ira Mehlman, spokesperson for the Federation for American Immigration Reform, are concerned about the potential devaluing of citizenship.

“Citizenship does mean something. It means you are a fully participating member of society,” he said in an interview with the Los Angeles Times. “It doesn’t seem unreasonable to say you’ve got to do some time here and demonstrate that you’re somebody that we want as a citizen.”

Many questions remain about how such a law would be carried out.

Los Angeles relies on Los Angeles County to administer elections, and city officials have yet to explain how noncitizen voters would be registered, what documentation would be required to prove eligibility, or how separate voter rolls would be maintained.

Questions also have been raised about how election officials would ensure participants receive ballots for races they are legally allowed to vote in, while preventing them from receiving ballots for state and federal contests.

California law currently requires citizenship in order to register to vote. But multiple cities in the Golden State have implemented similar policies, including San Francisco in 2016, and Oakland in 2022, both of which allow noncitizens to vote in school board elections.

If approved on Nov. 3, city officials would begin the process of determining who qualifies, how the program would be administered, and whether it can withstand potential legal challenges.