By Joe Schaeffer

It’s been close to 11 full years since President Donald Trump first challenged the Republican establishment for the 2016 GOP White House nomination, and a hard question for MAGA loyalists is rearing its head once again. Why do so many party nominees for high-profile elective office seem to reflect the status quo that Trump’s grassroots […]

In each month this year, the number of consumer goods categories declining in price has grown.

The post Trump Effect: 80 Consumer Prices Fell in March appeared first on Breitbart.

Six-time convicted felon Hunter Biden is $17 million in debt and has self-deported overseas, according to his former attorneys suing him for unpaid legal bills.

The post Nolte: Hunter Biden Self-Deports to South Africa Fleeing $17 Million in Debts appeared first on Breitbart.

The family of a teenager in Texas has filed a lawsuit against the distributor of an energy drink after she died in October.

The post VIDEO — Lawsuit: Texas Family Claims 17-Year-Old Cheerleader Died from Consuming Energy Drinks appeared first on Breitbart.

A conservative legal group wants the Trump administration to investigate the gender identity policies of a Maryland school district that lost a Supreme Court case last year over mandating LGBTQ+ books for students.

America First Legal asked the Justice Department and the Education Department to investigate Montgomery County Public Schools, alleging that the school district has a policy of facilitating students’ social “gender transitions” while concealing them from parents deemed to be non-supportive.

The group says that the policy “Gender Identity in Montgomery County Public Schools“ accommodates student gender transitions including changes to names, pronouns, school records, bathroom and locker room access, and overnight field trip sleeping arrangements.

“The Handbook repeatedly instructs staff to condition parental involvement on whether the parent is deemed ‘supportive’ of their child’s gender identity,“ the complaint states.

The Daily Signal asked the school district whether it would challenge any characterizations in the complaint.

Montgomery County Public Schools spokeswoman Liliana López told The Daily Signal, “We are aware of the complaint. We will reserve comment until we have had the opportunity to review it.”

America First Legal contends these actions by the school district could violate parental rights under the First Amendment, the 14th Amendment, and the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, a 1974 law that gives parents the right to inspect school records and control their disclosure until their child reaches 18.

“Montgomery County Public Schools has constructed an elaborate system designed to keep parents in the dark about some of the most consequential decisions affecting their own children,” Ian Prior, senior counsel for America First Legal, said in a public statement.

“Federal law and the Constitution are unambiguous: Parents have the fundamental right to direct the upbringing of their children and to access their children’s education records. MCPS’s policies turn both of those principles on their head,” Prior continued.

Last year, the Supreme Court sided with a group of parents against the school district in a 6-3 decision in the case of Mahmoud v. Taylor. The court granted the parents a preliminary injunction as their lawsuit continued, allowing them to opt their children out of reading explicit books in school with gender and sexual content.

The school district reportedly reached a settlement in February with the parents, agreeing to pay them $1.5 million and to allow them to opt their children out of reading such books in the future.

America First Legal’s 13-page complaint alleges that the school district violates the Free Exercise Clause by excluding parents from critical decisions about their children’s identity and well-being.

It further alleges violations of free speech and the Equal Protection Clause, saying the school district discriminates against parents who disagree with gender ideology.

The post Complaint Alleges Maryland Schools Concealed Student Gender Identity Changes From Parents appeared first on The Daily Signal.

In 2011, when U.S. Navy Seals blew open the front door of Osama bin Laden’s fortified compound in Pakistan, stormed up the stairs, and shot him dead, they found more than a loaded AK-47 in his room. Bin Laden had been reading the Yale historian Paul Kennedy’s The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (1987), which told the story of military conflict since the 15th century. Kennedy’s argument was as dismaying to his fellow countrymen as it must have been heartening to bin Laden: the American empire, too, was mortal, and “imperial overstretch” was bringing inevitable decline. Kennedy wrote with such brio that his book climbed The New York Times bestseller list, peaking in March 1988 at number two, topped only by a real-estate mogul’s ghost-written memoir called Trump: The Art of the Deal.

This year, just days after President Trump committed the United States to join Benjamin Netanyahu’s Israel in bombing Iran into regime change, another Yale historian, Odd Arne Westad, published a book that also warns of relative decline and imperial overstretch. Westad, a Norwegian-born expert on Asia and the author of the highly regarded The Cold War: A World History (2017), focuses on the turn of the 20th century, when Europe’s Great Powers—prosperous, complacent, and at peace—lurched into civilizational catastrophe.

The world that World War I brought to a close has powerful resemblances to our own, Westad warns, adding, “We take an immense risk by engaging in large-scale warfare.” He did not predict the new Iranian war, of course, but he does point clearly to the Israeli-Iranian breach as one into which Great Powers risked getting drawn if they were not careful. “Having stateless peoples at the center of an already volatile region is a recipe for disaster,” he observes, noting both Israel’s Palestinians and Iran’s Kurds. “The greater danger in an era of intensified Great Power competition is that the Palestinian conflict with Israel, and the conflict between Israel and its neighbors, could come together with other clashes and lead to a larger conflagration.”

***

Comparing the run-up to World War I with whatever it is we’re entering into now, Westad finds parallels between the nations that, in each era, knit the world together through their institutions—pre-1914 Britain, with its empire; post-Cold War America, with its alliances. Each seemed to be a new and exceptional kind of power. “Britain,” Westad writes, “was a hegemon that carried its role lightly.” But each faced an upstart challenger that seemed to have come out of nowhere.

Germany hadn’t even been a nation-state until Otto von Bismarck unified it after the Franco-Prussian War of 1870. By the 20th century, taking advantage of the free-trade system that Englishmen had designed, Germany was outcompeting Britain and driving it out of one manufacturing market after another. Nor was it always scrupulous about respecting British patents. Britain’s share of global manufacturing fell from 23% in 1890 to 13.5% in 1913. Britain, unrivaled on the oceans until then, now discovered that Germany’s shipbuilders had learned to make advanced battleships.

Mismanagement compounded the problem, as Britain found itself beset by internal strife. In 1912 it underwent a wave of strikes. The 40 million workdays lost that year, Westad notes, were 20 times as many as in any previous year. The problem had begun at the turn of the century, when Britain embarked on a series of foolish, expensive wars for ill-defined reasons. Soon, an important part of the public was mesmerized by a businessman-turned-politician—in this case, Joseph Chamberlain, father of the future prime minister, Neville. The elder Chamberlain began arguing for tariffs, of all things, on the grounds that the money wealthy people saved on their goods from abroad was actually coming from the low foreign wages against which working-class Britons now had to compete. The parallels to 21st-century America are too obvious to need drawing: Britain was a country that had gained the world and (perhaps thereby) lost its domestic tranquility.

Read the rest here.

The post The Lamps Are Going Out appeared first on The American Mind.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has seized enough fentanyl to kill 19 million Americans in 2026 alone, FBI Director Kash Patel revealed in his weekly internal update.

The post FBI Has Seized Enough Fentanyl to Kill 19 Million Americans in 2026 Alone appeared first on Breitbart.

DUBAI/BEIRUT/JERUSALEM/ISLAMABAD, April 10 (Reuters) – Iran said on Friday that blocked Iranian assets must be released and that a ceasefire must take hold in Lebanon before peace talks can proceed, throwing last-minute doubt over negotiations scheduled for Saturday in Pakistan.

Iran’s ?parliament speaker Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf said on X that the two measures had been previously agreed with the United States and warned that negotiations would not start until they are fulfilled.

There was no immediate comment from the White House.

Earlier, Vice President JD Vance, who will lead the U.S. delegation, set off for the talks in Pakistan saying he expected a positive outcome. But “if they’re going to try to play us, then they’re going to find the negotiating team is not that receptive”, Vance added.

Iran has been unable to obtain tens of billions of dollars of its assets in foreign banks, mainly from exports of oil and gas, due to U.S. sanctions on its banking and energy sectors.

President Donald Trump announced a two-week ceasefire in the six-week war on Tuesday, just hours before a deadline after which he had threatened to destroy Iran’s civilization. However, the truce is tenuous with Israel’s continuing bombardment of Lebanon and the ongoing closure of the Strait of Hormuz proving key sticking points for both sides.

The ceasefire has halted the campaign of U.S. and Israeli air strikes on Iran. But it has so far done nothing to end the blockade of the strait, which has caused the biggest-ever disruption to global energy supplies, or to calm a parallel war waged by Israel against Iran’s Hezbollah allies in Lebanon.

Iran was doing a “very poor job” of letting oil through the strait, Trump said in a social media post. He also warned Tehran against trying to collect fees from ships crossing it. “That is not the agreement we have!”

Israel has also said that its parallel campaign against militant group Hezbollah in Lebanon was not part of the agreed ceasefire.

Israeli strikes continued across southern Lebanon on Friday, with more than a dozen people reported killed in various towns. One strike killed eight members of Lebanese state security forces, the country’s state media said.

Originally published by Reuters.

The post Iran Demands Lebanon Ceasefire, Unfreezing of Assets Before Peace Talks appeared first on The Daily Signal.