This election is a contest to see which party can do its best to lose. Looking forward from mid-September, President Donald Trump’s Republicans seem to be well ahead at this. But the Resistance (or don’t they call themselves that anymore?) Democrats are putting up a contest.

Second-term presidents tend to make political mistakes by doing things they think are right. Franklin Roosevelt and court-packing, Ronald Reagan and Iran-Contra, George W. Bush and the Iraq surge. You can see two examples of this in the second Trump term.

One is his insistence on haphazardly imposing tariffs. It is an example of providing a plentiful quantity of something for which there is no demand among the electorate.

That’s been true for a long time. William McKinley, cited by Trump as a tariff advocate, called for switching from protective to reciprocal tariffs in his last public speech in 1901. Over the next half-century, as economist Douglas Irwin points out in his definitive book “Clashing Over Commerce,” Republican presidents were leery of tariffs, which were supported by congressional leaders as a way of holding their majorities together: You vote for a tariff that helps my local industry, and I’ll vote for one that helps yours.

The definitive moment may have been when, as Jude Wanniski argued years ago, a proposal for a tariff on the dairy product casein got the progressive Wisconsin delegation to join the legislative mob that passed Smoot-Hawley in 1930. Over 1,000 economists signed a petition begging Herbert Hoover to veto the bill, but he signed it anyway, and the Great Depression followed.

Almost no one without a lobbyist wants tariffs now. And voters don’t have to read Irwin to realize that Trump’s tariffs raise prices for consumers and many manufacturers as well.

Trump stands on sounder ground, in my view, in attacking the regime in Iran, which has preached and practiced “death to America” since 1979. But, apparently believing that he could compel a surrender as he had against the Chavista gangsters in Venezuela, he launched a devastating assault without preparing the public for it and while promising a speedy resolution.

That hasn’t happened; wars turn out to be hard to predict. But it has brought higher gasoline prices and continued inflation and has destroyed Republicans’ previous edge on the economy.

Meanwhile, the president, in childish self-aggrandizement, is devoting political capital to his beloved ballroom, to renaming the lowest-altitude Great Lake “Lake America,” to Hunter Biden-style enrichment of his family members, to closing the Kennedy Center if he can’t put his name on it. “An extraordinary number of dumba** political takes,” as elections handicapper Nate Silver notes.

Just to make sure that voters don’t forget these things, the Trump political command has opened up its nine-digit war chest and is spending on ads centered on the president despite his 40% job approval and 58% disapproval. It looks like the strengths, maybe even the identities, of actual Republican candidates will get minimal airing.

If Republicans’ weakness is the self-indulgence of a second-term president, Democrats’ weakness is their propensity to embrace the wildest and least popular impulses of their political left.

There’s abundant videotape back from the left-wing craze that followed the death of a Minneapolis fentanyl user in May 2020 of Democrats’ demands for defunding the police, abolishing prisons and abandoning enforcement of immigration laws. Which is exactly what the Biden administration did, raising the number of foreign-born by 8.3 million in four years, 30% more than the Obama administration did in eight years.

That was five times as many as the foreign-born increase in the first Trump administration, and in the 20 months of Trump 2.0, the Census Bureau reports, the foreign-born population was declined by 2.8 million.

Democrats’ no-enemies-to-the-left posture is most obvious, perhaps, in Democrats’ reluctance to oppose boys playing in girls’ sports, their support for government-paid transgender surgeries for prison inmates and illegal immigrants, and their policy in states they govern removing teenagers professing gender dysphoria from the custody of their parents.

As the most effective pro-Trump ad of the 2024 campaign cycle put it, “Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you.”

That still could be a lively issue. So is the reluctance of Michigan Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed to distance himself from Twitch streamer Hasan Piker, the internet personality who campaigned by his side in the Democratic primary. Piker has said that “America deserved 9/11,” and that Hamas was justified in its Oct. 7, 2023, terrorist attack on Israel.

Piker has also been a prominent supporter of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.). Reporters and analysts who have been eager to ask Republican candidates whether they denounce extremist Republicans, even those from faraway venues, have rarely asked Democrats to denounce extremist Democrats.

But surely it’s far to ask El-Sayed, and Democrats campaigning for him, whether he stands by the man he was pleased to summon to his side earlier this year.

Democrats, like most parties not controlling the White House, have no clear leader, and they are also more likely than some opposition parties to sign up for any new-fangled initiative. And particularly, given the contempt so many of their partisans feel for those who honor traditional lifestyles, for ideas and causes that seem exotic or repulsive to denizens of Middle America.

Politicians of both parties, including centrist-demeanor governors like Democrat Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania and Republican Greg Abbott of Texas, have been quick in recent weeks to switch and oppose artificial intelligence data centers, and many officeholders are giving serious consideration to AI regulation.

The danger for Republicans is that imposing regulation may seem at odds with traditional party beliefs and, at least at the moment, is directly contrary to the stand of Trump. The danger for Democrats is that they may seem to be switching too readily from one cause to another.

In the process they may seem unserious about everything. “The nuclear doomers become the climate doomers become the AI doomers,” as the Georgia-based radio talk show host Erick Erickson put it. “It is always the same apocalyptic crowd moving from one issue to the next,” in the words of the Kentucky Republican partisan Scott Jennings.

The general trend in off-year elections, the Trump slump in job approval, and Republicans’ continuing weakness in generic polls make Democrats the favorites to gain House and maybe Senate majorities this year. Their leads in the South—big in North Carolina and Georgia, narrow in Texas—are good news for them.

But voters’ continuing low regard for the Democratic Party, and Republicans’ poll showings in three Northern states that seemed earlier this year to be gimmes for the opposition—Maine, Maryland and Minnesota—suggest there may be surprises.

Which may be what you should expect in a year when both sides seem to be trying their hardest to lose.

COPYRIGHT 2026 CREATORS.COM

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

THE DAILY CALLER NEWS FOUNDATION—Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang dismissed warnings arising about the pace of artificial intelligence’s development as “doomsday narratives” in a Friday interview.

“2030 is not going to be the end of the world. There is 0% chance that’s going to be the end of the world,” the CEO of the world’s largest publicly traded company by market value, told CBS News’s Jo Ling Kent. “Scaring people is unnecessary. It is irresponsible.” Kent had asked Huang about former Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon’s social media posts claiming that AI could destroy humanity by the end of the decade.

Nvidia, which saw its valuation exceed $5 trillion amid the AI boom, did not immediately respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.

Coxon, who also worked as part of OpenAI’s technical staff from 2023 to mid-2026 before joining Anthropic for a few months, claimed on X the day he resigned from the latter that neither company is “acting responsibly.”

“I resigned from Anthropic today,” Coxon posted Sept. 8. “I spent the last three years doing pretraining research at both OpenAI and Anthropic. Neither company is acting responsibly. They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives.”

Coxon’s resignation came weeks after around 700 of OpenAI’s agentic AI models reportedly performed an unauthorized cyberattack against Hugging Face, an open source AI platform, in July. OpenAI subsequently released an Aug. 26 technical report reviewing the incident.

In response to the cyberattack, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei called for a three-step plan to temporarily slow down AI development and encourage cooperation between frontier AI companies and governments in a Sept. 12 essay posted on his blog titled “We Must Pace the Frontier.”

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and xAI CEO Elon Musk both appeared to signal on X that they agreed a slowdown was necessary the same day that Amodei’s essay was posted.

Huang, however, disagreed.

“We’re going to go as fast as we can, but we would never ever, and never should, ship products before they’re ready, deliver products that are unsafe,” Huang told CBS News. “And nobody’s expecting us to do that. But everybody’s expecting us to succeed and help America be as prosperous as possible.”

Huang appears to share a position similar to that of President Donald Trump when it comes to pacing that technological frontier. Trump had taken to Truth Social to reject calls to slow down AI’s development.

“The only control or ‘guardrails’ that AI needs is a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT, and the U.S.A. has that, in spades! The Trump Administration has stopped AI ‘people’ from doing bad, or potentially bad, ‘things,’ like Dario (Anthropic!), who is now pretending to be a ‘perfect little angel’ – and we will continue to do so,” Trump posted Sept. 14. “We already have tremendous CRIMINAL and REGULATORY power over these companies! There is a SICK conspiracy going on against AI and Data Centers, and the only one that is happy about it is China. WHOEVER WINS AI, WINS!”

Both Huang and Trump are scheduled to meet with Chinese President Xi Jinping at the White House on Sept. 24.

Huang also told the outlet that existing laws were sufficient to protect people and that the AI industry does not need new guardrails.

“You have all kinds of liabilities associated with cybersecurity [and damage liability laws],” Huang said. “Apply that first—don’t let this doomsday narrative allow someone to relieve them of the laws that currently exist.”

Originally published by The Daily Caller News Foundation.

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney now believes he is more than just the Western foil to President Donald Trump and his MAGA movement—he is the global one.

Accordingly, he seems determined to demonstrate to the world how to stand up to Trump, to force Trump to lose the midterms, and to hurt the U.S. economy to such a degree that Trump will never again bully other nations.

So, at the 11th hour, Carney stormed out of an apparently completed tariff deal with the United States that would have privileged Canada over almost all of America’s other trading partners. Canada, we recall, has enjoyed a $50 billion goods trade surplus with the U.S. for years in a supposedly free and equitable North American trade zone.

Carney claimed that American proposals stripped away Canadian sovereignty and quashed Canadian culture, particularly French-Canadian culture. Yet he has not released the documents detailing the bilateral offers he rejected. Nor has he allowed his representatives to explain to the media why Canada blew up the negotiations at the last minute. Carney’s ever-changing excuses, explanations, and invectives about what happened are incoherent and contradictory.

That said, analysts on both sides of the border now concede that American digital-media companies do not customarily pay special taxes, as Carney demands, to promote local, regional, and ethnic culture while operating in Canada—any more than Canadian companies would be taxed for those purposes in the U.S.

Canada and the U.S. both agree that China dumps cheap steel and aluminum into Canada, allowing Canadian manufacturers to use that cost advantage to export assembled vehicles to the vast U.S. market at prices below those of American vehicles. In that way, Canada’s new partnership with China circumvents America’s tariffs on Beijing. China will also send nearly 50,000 electric cars and trucks into Canada under a meager tariff, ensuring that the Canadian EV market is increasingly dominated by Chinese vehicles.

But Carney’s ploy goes beyond helping the communist Chinese dictatorship gain trade leverage over his own NATO neighbor. He has eagerly concluded a comprehensive Chinese-Canadian pact involving travel, visas, food safety, energy, and public security. Carney has grandly described these new agreements with Beijing as part of a new paradigm in which “middle powers” like Canada play China against the U.S. (Canada’s annual nominal GDP is roughly the size of New York State’s).

How ironic that Carney attacks his neighbor, the U.S., for trade unfairness while warming to the communist dictatorship in China. Communist China, after all, is history’s greatest violator of trade protocols—guilty of manipulating its currency, dumping products to secure market share, violating copyright and patent laws, and imprisoning a million Uyghurs.

Has Carney learned anything from Panama’s misadventures after naively inviting in a Chinese omnipresence at the American-built Panama Canal? Does Carney recall that the American Monroe Doctrine originally was aimed at foreign intrusion into the North American west?

Canada’s new partner is a totalitarian police state that infected the world with its manufactured gain-of-function COVID-19 virus, which killed more than 1.5 million North Americans. China stonewalled inquiries and never offered details about the pandemic’s origins in its Wuhan lab. It has promised to conquer Taiwan and so terrified its democratic neighbors—Australia, Japan, the Philippines, Taiwan, and South Korea—that they have joined a defensive alliance with the U.S.

So what drives Carney’s hubristic fantasies? Has Canada’s natural wealth in oil, gas, timber, and minerals made it a military and economic dynamo, as it once was?

Hardly.

Canada’s population is 11.8% of America’s. Its economy is barely one-thirteenth the size of America’s. Canadian GDP per capita is only 60% of America’s.

Canada quietly relies on the U.S. military to deter foreign powers from North America, whether by fending off challenges to Canada’s extensive Arctic claims—including its dubious claim of absolute sovereignty over the Northwest Passage—or by keeping Canadian skies free of foreign combat aircraft and missiles.

Canada’s navy—once one of the world’s preeminent surface fleets—has been reduced to fewer than 30 ships. Its 89 American-made jets are more than 40 years old.

Paradoxically, Carney’s dreams derive not from confidence and strength but from insecurity and defensiveness. Carney and former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau nearly ruined the Canadian economy despite the country’s treasure trove of natural resources. Canada has only half the GDP of California—a state currently decaying under neo-socialist governance—despite having roughly the same population.

Nearly 45% of Canadians are either foreign-born or the children of foreign-born parents. These often-impoverished immigrants impose gargantuan social-welfare costs that Canada’s European-style socialist economy simply cannot support. While Carney lectures on “Canadian values,” Canada’s fertility rate of 1.25 is among the lowest in the Western world, while euthanasia accounts for 5% of all deaths, the highest rate in the West.

Nevertheless, Carney now claims, in passive-aggressive fashion, that the U.S. bullies Canada—even as Canada runs trade surpluses with America, relies on the American economy for 72% of its exports, and depends on the American military for its safety. That asymmetry indirectly subsidizes Canada’s disastrous energy, immigration, defense, regulatory, and tax policies.

The Canadian energy industry depends on U.S. purchases of much of its tar sands oil, specialized U.S. refineries, and American pipelines. For over a decade, globalist Canada refused to meet its NATO commitment to invest 2% of GDP in defense, relying instead on American magnanimity to protect North America from foreign aggression.

No matter. Carney has melodramatically characterized his tiff with the U.S. as a “fight” and even a “war.” Yet, oddly for such an anti-American Canadian hyper-nationalist, Carney is a globalist banker who, until he became prime minister, held citizenship in three nations.

Yet the Canadian prime minister who urges Canada’s vulnerable working classes to decouple from America is himself—like thousands of Canadian grandees—deeply entwined with the United States. Some 91% of Carney’s investments are in U.S.-based companies, and two of his four children, like their father, attended college in the United States. Both now reside in America, along with nearly one million other Canadians. Apparently, Carney is so eager for a veritable economic, cultural, and political war with the United States that 91% of his holdings remain invested in the homeland of his enemy.

But why, from a position of such hypocrisy and vulnerability, has Carney blown up the trade agreement, ginned up anti-American Canadian nationalism—and done so now?

Only in this way, Carney believes, can he stop autonomy referenda in Alberta and Quebec. And only in this way can he openly interfere in the U.S. midterm elections by targeting new tariffs at red and purple border states while working directly with left-wing Democratic politicians to help Democrats regain control of Congress and restore the prior status quo.

His anti-American screeds have certainly worked at home. Canadians now boo at the mere sound of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” They brag of a new “elbows up” policy to stop U.S. “aggression.” Their social media is flooded with braggadocio about new ways to hurt Americans. Some three-quarters of the country has bought into Carney’s fantasies. Hating America is the new Canadian pastime.

But, sadly, this will not end well for Canada, for at least five reasons.

First, America certainly is not the cause of Canada’s maladies, other than by subsidizing its suicidal domestic choices for years. Canada’s self-destructive socialist and globalist policies are its government’s doing alone.

The United States did not force Canada to adopt European-style socialist policies of mass unvetted immigration, subsidized green energy, near-disarmament, and unsustainable social-welfare spending. America did not urge Canadians to stop having children or enlist their government to help them kill themselves.

In truth, America prefers a militarily and economically strong Canadian partner, not a weak one lashing out from insecurity.

Second, the American public has so far been mostly indifferent to the spat. But now that the North American media has begun revealing the extent of Canada’s anti-American venom, along with Carney’s brinkmanship and disingenuous rhetoric, anger is rising at his cheap politicking and the animus he has fanned.

In sum, Carney has no idea that he is reframing the dispute not as a conflict with Trump but as an affront to the American people themselves—who have long memories.

Third, for all his globalist background and internationalist performance-art stunts, Carney is alone on the world stage. Europe may applaud his defiance, but it has no desire to join his anti-American campaign. When the United States finally insisted on symmetrical trade, only communist China and Canada—the latter enjoying the most generous entree into the American economy of any country in the world—slapped counter-tariffs on the United States. Apparently, other nations did not agree that Carney’s perennial $50 billion surplus was his birthright.

Fourth, Canada is far more vulnerable than the United States if Carney’s “war” continues. Canada relies on the United States for 72% of its exports, while America relies on Canada for only 15% of its own exports. Last month, even before the full effect of the new tariffs was felt, Canada lost 42,000 jobs while the United States gained 160,000. The damage will only grow, ever more asymmetrically, as tariffs mount on Canadian businesses.

Nearly a million Canadians reside in the United States, but only 350,000 Americans live in Canada. And it is easier for a Canadian to obtain an expedited U.S. work visa than for an American to do the same in Canada. Indeed, Canadians do not appreciate that they are nearly the only visitors in the world granted six months of residence in the United States without a visa.

Fifth, since Carney walked out at the last minute, it will be incumbent upon him to resume talks—especially as the damage he has done to Canadian workers and small businesses worsens. But should Carney seek to renew negotiations immediately after the Canadian provincial elections and the U.S. midterms, he will be exposed as a disingenuous politico who ginned up the fight to manipulate both Canadian and American balloting to benefit himself and his party.

If that happens, he may learn that the American friendship train has left the station. He will also discover that China treats obsequious outreach from Western “middle powers” as weakness to exploit, not magnanimity to reciprocate.

Carney’s political disingenuousness will eventually earn the animus of Canadians and Americans alike—who may ironically unite in their distaste for Carney and his fantasy house.

COPYRIGHT 2026 TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY

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

President Donald Trump is reportedly "open" to meeting Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian at the United Nations General Assembly in New York this week.

The post Report: Trump ‘Open’ to Meeting Iranian President at U.N., Deciding ‘If and When Do I Blow the Entire Nation Up’ appeared first on Breitbart.

Disney's "Spider-Man: Brand New Day" star Mark Ruffalo and the equally far-left Democrat Senator Elizabeth Warren, are begging radical California Attorney General Rob Bonta (D) not to drop his lawsuit attempting to prevent the merger between Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery.

The post Mark Ruffalo, Senator Warren Freak Out Over Reports of a Paramount Antitrust Lawsuit Settlement: ‘Don’t You Dare Cave’ appeared first on Breitbart.

President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinpeng will likely confront China’s ties to Iran, the artificial intelligence race, Chinese prisoners, and Taiwan policy in their meeting in Washington, D.C. on Sept. 24.

Adam Savit, director for China Policy at America First Policy Institute, said the summit should be viewed as a follow-up to Trump’s May trip to China, not a reset.

“It’s building on the gains that President Trump’s leverage brought to Beijing, basically opened up personal diplomacy and a channel for negotiations,” he told the Daily Signal.

Iran

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced sanctions on countries that support Iran, raising questions about if China, Iran’s top trading partner, would be included.

Trump will be able to talk directly with Chinese officials about the conflict, revealing how far the administration is willing to go to hold China accountable for potential involvement.

China claims they don’t directly fund Iran, but they accounted for 90% of their oil revenues at least before the war, which funds Iran’s treasure chest, Savit said.

“There’s an interesting tightrope that they’re walking, in which they’re trying to hold countries accountable for supporting Iran, but they also want to maintain a relatively predictable and stable U.S.-China relationship,” Heritage Foundation China expert Andrew Harding told the Daily Signal.

China has rare earth mineral leverage on the U.S., but the U.S. has leverage on chips, and both countries can play these tools against one another, said Michael Lucci, founder of State Armor.

“I would expect all that to be at play under the guise of both sides projecting as if the relationship is stable,” Lucci said. “The countries are competing extremely viciously and separating from vulnerabilities from one another as quickly as possible. But on the surface, both sides are content to protect stability.”

Artificial Intelligence

The AI race is top of mind for many in Washington heading into the summit.

Tech companies like Anthropic and Open AI have recently raised concerns about safety threats associated with rapidly developing AI, and many have urged the president to make a deal with Xi to slow down the AI race.

The Trump administration has taken a light tough approach to AI, stressing the need to win the AI race with China instead of imposing regulations on emerging U.S. technology.

Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, said Trump and Xi would win a Nobel Peace prize if they made a deal on AI.

“Even if just the U.S. and China could agree on some shared standards and testing for development of this technology, I think that’d be a wonderful accomplishment that the two of them can deliver,” he told Fortune.

But Trump has made clear that he is not interested in pursuing a slowdown.

Altman, Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, and Qualcomm’s Cristiano Amon plan to attend next week’s Sept. 24 state dinner with Trump and Xi.

Trump’s AI policy is heavily influenced by Huang, who received approval from the government to sell H200 processors to major Chinese technology firms. Trump could make an agreement to sell more chips to China, though China hawks warn against weakening existing controls on semiconductors because it could enhance China’s military and intelligence capabilities.

Taiwan

“Even if there’s one or two mentions about it, that alone could be the defining issue of the summit,” Harding said.

Trump’s last visit to China left unanswered questions about potential changes to U.S. Taiwan policy. Trump said that arms sales to Taiwan can be “a very good negotiating chip,” though the U.S. usually uses arm sales as a way to help Taiwan deter China.

“President Trump should make clear that U.S. decisions on Taiwan policy, including arms sales, will be based on Taiwan’s security requirements and U.S. law and not used as bargaining leverage in any negotiation with Beijing,” writes Harding.

Lucci does not expect U.S. policy on Taiwan to change.

“President Trump, in his first year, approved a record amount of weapons for Taiwan,” he said, “and I think it’s very important to note that the amount of weapons Trump approved to Taiwan in 2025 is more than the entire four years of President Joe Biden.”

Release of Hostages

“This is just how the Chinese Communist Party negotiates,” Lucci said. “They grab a bunch of American hostages so that we have to ask for them back in the next summit.”

Trump is expected to discuss with Xi the release of American hostages such as Min Zin, a University of California-Berkeley scholar, who was detained in China in June when he traveled there for an academic workshop.

“Ezra Jin was released after the last summit, so I’m sure that we’ll be looking for more religious leaders and other people on exit bans and things like that to be released,” Lucci said.

Additionally, Jimmy Lai, a 78-year-old newspaper publisher sentenced to 20 years in prison, will die in prison unless Trump is able to secure his freedom. Trump promised in his 2024 campaign to free Lai, but it has not yet happened.

The hostages demonstrate that “the lack of freedom of religion in China, and that only state-sanctioned churches can can operate freely,” Savit said.

“What [Trump] can do is keep the pressure up, raise the issue, put it in the mix for the summit conversation, but you know it ultimately comes down to Beijing calculating their own interests in these exchanges,” he said.

While President Donald Trump wants to put an end to mail-in voting, more Democrats plan to vote in person this fall than in past elections, according to an NBC News poll released Sunday.

The post Poll: More Democrats Plan to Ditch Mail-In Ballots and Vote in Person in Midterms appeared first on Breitbart.

America’s top universities can’t quit and won’t quit DEI no matter how unpopular it is with the American people.

A recent editorial in the New York Times titled “This California Educational Juggernaut Doesn’t Need the SAT,” highlighted the mentality that has led to the erosion of merit in our nation’s top schools and the flagging public support that was once near universal.

The author of the piece, Miriam Pawel, acknowledged that the University of California’s abandonment of the SAT, which had already become quite watered down in recent decades, may have led to a less able student body, but that it didn’t matter.

By admitting more nonwhite students with weaker test scores, the state is fixing inequality through DEI by giving them a new leg up in a world that’s unfair to them, or something like that.

What about exceptional student applicants who don’t check the correct, “historically oppressed” boxes? Meh, too bad.

Pawel argued that the focus on equality over merit hasn’t really been a problem, and if it is, then the K-12 schools are really at fault and need to be fixed.

You can thank teachers’ unions and the leftists in the state capital who block any kind of reforms that would help on that front.

“What has made the University of California exceptional is its commitment to increase access without sacrificing excellence,” Pawel then wrote without evidence.

She also went with this incredible line: “Students on University of California campuses may struggle with basic math, but they are graduating at record rates.”

In other words, students at California’s “flagship” universities may lack the basic skills once expected of them, but they are graduate regardless. See, everything is fine!

The truth is that at the end of the day bringing in the best and brightest students and giving them the tools to actually succeed isn’t their priority.

A college degree in far too many cases is no longer about developing people with the greatest skills, the most expansive minds, and the strongest leadership abilities. Instead, our top schools have become racial and ideological sorting machines, giving stamps of approval to the next generation of pseudo-elites regardless of their abilities.

The left-wing, racialist mindset is pervasive. It saturates the ever-expanding bureaucracies that control higher ed and explode costs for students and taxpayers. It creates a chilling atmosphere among the dwindling faculty who still take their expertise and roles as educators seriously. And it vicariously infects every institution that relies on college graduates.

Unwinding this system is daunting, but it must be done. It won’t happen at the behest of the universities themselves. They’ve too successfully created a self-replicating system of DEI that builds upon itself.

Instead, it’s going to take a massive, ongoing, and relentless effort at the state and federal levels to undo the DEI problem. And not just through the courts. This Trump administration has taken that job even more seriously than the first go around. That’s likely, at least in part, because of the Great Awokening opening so many eyes to the threat.

But their efforts are nonetheless commendable. No longer are America’s top universities going to be handed a blank check to carry out a perverse, discriminatory agenda. They will either reform or face lawsuits and defunding.

For instance, the Treasury Department announced in early September that “schools rebranding race-based preferences as equitable, inclusive, or diversity-enhancing does not change their discriminatory nature,” and proposed regulations to “establish a clear standard, and the institutions that continue to use discriminatory practices will no longer receive the benefits of federal tax-exempt status.”

Wonderful.

As one might expect, this announcement from the Treasury Department wasn’t taken very well by higher education’s white knights, er, I should say perfectly statistically racially diverse knights in the left-leaning media.

“Trump’s Latest Move Threatens Any College That Seeks to Promote Equality” read one headline at Inside Higher Ed.

“New IRS proposal threatens universities’ tax-exempt status over diversity programs,” read another from Politico.

The administration isn’t going after “diversity” or “equality” in higher education. It’s going after a broad set of programs that illegally racially discriminate—mostly against white and Asian students—to boost favored racial groups that many of our nation’s top schools have decided to admit even if their qualifications don’t match their peers.

Now, you might be thinking, “Hey, didn’t the Supreme Court already rule against that nonsense?”

It did.

But as we’ve seen, schools have found ways to dodge the ruling by relabeling programs, changing admission metrics to appear neutral while fishing for particular racial outcomes, and fishing for the “right” groups by essentially asking students to mention their race in admissions essays, giving them a leg up in admissions.

These schemes are eroding the quality of the student body at many schools, but they clearly don’t care. The few lonely voices on the inside practically begging their institutions to bring in students who don’t require years of remedial courses have mostly been ignored.

If our nation’s top schools want to commit institutional seppuku on behalf of DEI, it’s not going to be easy to stop them. But we can, at least, do what should have been done long ago: remove the massive financial aid the federal government has handed them on our behalf for generations.

And if they want to essentially take the path of passive-aggressively propping up DEI now, tomorrow, and forever, we have every right—in fact, I’d say our government has the prerogative—to remove its considerable support entirely.

Honestly, I wish it didn’t have to be this way. There was a time, long ago, in which it made sense for Americans to extend broad funding to our nation’s colleges and universities. They’ve provided the U.S. with a significant technological edge; they were once a pathway for Americans of many different backgrounds to find success.

But the ideological excess that was once fringe and ancillary has become their primary reason for being. Not only has higher education been compromised and gobbled up by its far-left wing, it’s for far too long shut the door on talented young Americans because they have the “wrong” skin color. They’ve become racialist, barely disguised activist factories.

The only thing that’s going to stop the scam is for this administration and ones that follow to methodically, relentlessly pressure them to change, obey the law, and start serving the American people rather than the interests of globalist, race-obsessed leftists.