Three-time NASCAR Cup Series champion Joey Logano led for 95 of the 400 laps at Richmond Raceway this weekend on his way to a narrow victory over Chase Briscoe in the Cook Out 400.

“Kind of a fun, back-and-forth battle. Had some strategy there, too. A typical Richmond race,” Logano said afterward. It’s the third time in his career that Logano has taken the checkered flag at Richmond Raceway.

NASCAR has been racing in the state capital since 1953, when Lee Petty won on a half-mile dirt track. That route was paved in 1968, and the track was reconfigured to its current layout in 1988. “Qualifying here is extremely, extremely technical,” Virginia native Denny Hamlin said this week. “I would say it’s probably the hardest to qualify to hit your marks.”

Yet Saturday night’s event was NASCAR’s only visit to Richmond this season. The city hosted two races every year beginning in 1958 but lost its second race after 2024. That weekend is now used for a race in Mexico City.

Before the schedule change was announced, Hamlin pointed the finger at a lack of fan support at the track. “If the fans turned out here and we sold out every race, then there would be two races,” the NASCAR Cup Series points leader said two years ago. “They’re going to do things that the fans want to participate in. What’s crazy is that it’s always one of our top five [ratings] markets that watch us on TV, but [they] don’t actually come to the racetrack itself.”

Attendance is trending up, however, with a full house on hand this weekend. “To sell out the Cook Out 400 for the second year in a row shows just how special Saturday night NASCAR racing is for our fans at Richmond Raceway,” track president Lori Collier Waran told WWBT.

“We’re still committed to Richmond,” a NASCAR executive vice president told reporters in 2024. “It’s an important track, an important market, certainly, as we think about where our NASCAR fans are today. We’ve seen some exciting storylines certainly come out of that track over the past few years.”

Meanwhile, another Virginia track still holds two major races this year, and it will again host a pair in 2027. Next month, the ValleyStar Credit Union 300 will be held at Martinsville Speedway. It’s the third leg of the Virginia Triple Crown series. Kaden Honeycutt won the first race in June at South Boston Speedway, then Caden Kvapil took the second race at Langley Speedway last month.

On Nov. 1, Martinsville will host the Xfinity 500, the final race before the season-ending NASCAR Cup Series Championship Race in Miami. The track is known as “the paperclip” because of its unusual design: it’s a short track with hairpin corners that rewards strategy instead of simply celebrating raw engine power.

Overall, racing remains big business in the commonwealth. A study conducted for the Performance Racing Industry, a trade group, found that “motorsports generates $907.02 million in annual economic output, supports 5,555 jobs, provides $362.15 million in wages and benefits and contributes nearly $110 million in state and local taxes” in Virginia each year.

State Sen. Bill Stanley wants to protect that business. He started a caucus this year to promote and protect auto racing in Virginia. If lawmakers work together, “we cannot lose,” he said as the caucus was announced. One potential step would be to pass a “right-to-race” law that would allow tracks that had been operating before homes were built nearby to avoid noise lawsuits and continue to permit night racing.

THE DAILY CALLER NEWS FOUNDATION—A newly released email suggests that the nation’s top vaccine regulator encouraged Dr. Anthony Fauci and Dr. Francis Collins to leverage billions in scientific research dollars to study COVID vaccine side effects—but they never followed through on her request.

In the spring of 2021, Janet Woodcock, then head of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), wrote to the leaders of the National Institutes of Health—the country’s leading funder of medical science—to encourage a study into reports she had received of adverse events after COVID-19 vaccination.

Woodcock had received many of these reports from “healthcare professionals,” she wrote in the email released by Republican Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson and obtained from Fauci’s government email.

“The symptoms do not fit together into a distinctive syndrome and most are not easily quantifiable or evaluated with standard laboratory testing,” she wrote in the May 27, 2021 correspondence. “Clearly during mass vaccination you will get a lot of psychological reactions and it is hard to sort these things out. But the peoples’ main complaint is that no one takes them seriously, no one knows how to treat them, and there is no effort to study this.”

Woodcock said that these studies should be undertaken even if the vaccine makers would not support them.

“I doubt the industry would support, for obvious reasons,” she wrote in the email. “But my experience is, that if you let a problem fester, then it will come back to bite you later and you are not prepared.”

Woodcock was an FDA official for 37 years and cultivated a reputation for being friendly to the pharmaceutical industry and industry-backed patient groups. Yet she apparently recognized the importance of studying vaccine side effects outside of the context of the pharmaceutical companies’ clinical trials.

Woodcock warned that the existing safety surveillance systems at both the FDA and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) were not be sophisticated enough to adequately detect and describe some side effects.

“These problems are not the sort that a system like VAERS would be able to detect, or even a more sophisticated population-based active followup [sic] such as CDC has, or a medical record based system such as BEST [an FDA safety surveillance system],” she said.

Despite the roughly $5.5 billion in research dollars that Fauci steered as the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, it’s not clear the sort of study Woodcock suggested was ever conducted.

An April investigation by Johnson first revealed that another top FDA official, Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research Director Peter Marks, brushed off warnings from a safety data expert that FDA systems could be inadequately sensitive and missing statistically significant side effects. Marks said the analysis could “create erroneous conflicts that feed in to anti-vaccination rhetoric,” per Johnson’s report.

Fauci and Collins did not immediately respond to requests for comment. An email requesting comment from Marks sent through Eli Lilly, where he now serves as senior vice president of molecule discovery, did not receive an immediate response. An email requesting comment from Woodcock sent through Every Cure, a patient advocacy group with Woodcock on the board, did not receive an immediate response.

Regarding Woodock’s email, Fauci noted to Collins that “we cannot ignore her” and suggested alerting then-CDC Director Rochelle Walensky.

“Janet [Woodcock] asks what we think of this? We cannot ignore her. We should probably bring in CDC and see what Rochelle [Walensky] thinks,” he wrote.

Johnson’s office noted in a press release that it’s not clear whether she ever was.

When Republicans retook control of the Senate in 2025, Republican Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul gained the chairmanship of the key the Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee (HSGAC) and began the process of compelling testimony and subpoenaing records. Johnson simultaneously also became chair of the HSGAC’s chief investigative subcommittee.

Originally published by The Daily Caller News Foundation.

The Democratic Socialists of America website called deceased Cuban dictator Fidel Castro a “stalwart symbol of anti-imperialist struggle and self-determination,” while denouncing Secretary of State Marco Rubio as genocidal.

In a tribute to Castro on what would have been his 100th birthday Thursday, the DSA website commemorated the “historic significance of both this day and the man.”

The fast-growing socialist organization that’s made strong inroads in Democratic Party primary elections over the past year, said that they have “a long history of solidarity with the Cuban people, their revolution, and their self-determination.”

The DSA statement said that it used the Castro commemoration to “recommit ourselves to acting in solidarity with the Cuban people,” and to “opposing Marco Rubio’s genocidal war against the Cuban people and US imperialism writ large.”

They blasted the Trump administration but directed particularly strong criticism toward Rubio.

“The Trump Administration, under the leadership of Marco Rubio, is waging an indiscriminate war against the Cuban people and killing women, children, and babies by illegally blockading critical resources from the Caribbean nation. By intentionally imposing conditions calculated to kill a civilian population, Marco Rubio is leading a genocide,” the DSA statement read. 

DSA then listed a series of demands.

• an end to the genocidal blockade
• an end to all threats of military violence against Cuba
• an end to all imperialist aggression against Cuba
• the normalization of relations between the United States and Cuba
• reparations payments to be made to Cuba for the trillions of dollars in damages the blockade has cost the Cuban people 
• the prosecution of Marco Rubio for crimes against humanity

Other socialists also praised Castro this week including online influencer Hasan Piker who declared in a recent video, “I love [Vladimir] Lenin, I love Fidel Castro and I love Che Guevara. They are genuinely —- heroes.”

Social media users heaped criticism on the DSA for praising Castro and said that it was shameful for the organization to tout human rights while praising a brutal dictator.

Others called them anti-American.

Guy Benson at Fox News called the DSA “depraved commies.”

The State Department recently reported that Cuba has been a major source of far-Left activism and even terrorism in the United States and around the world since Castro came to power.

In a July report titled “Cuba: The Capital of 21st Century Communism,” the State Department explained how the small island nation has mastered spreading ideology as its chief export.

“To mistake Cuba’s poverty for harmlessness is to misunderstand the threat entirely,” the report argued. “Its material weakness was never the measure of its danger. Its power was always ideological, subversive, and parasitic—and it has proven remarkably durable, outlasting the Soviet empire that helped build it and grafting itself onto every new enemy of the United States that has arisen since.”

Rubio himself wrote on X Friday that Castro, “was a complete failure at everything except destroying Cuba and impoverishing, jailing and murdering his own people.

Rep. Carlos A. Gimenez, R-Fla., responded to Rubio, saying that Castro was a “serial-killer” who destroyed what was good about Cuba.

“Those who praise Castro belong with him in the ash heap of history!” he wrote.

Despite praising Castro, the DSA has reportedly said that it rejects “authoritarian visions of socialism.”

Three federal agencies gathered in San Diego on Wednesday to announce a new “treatment first” approach aimed at addressing California’s long-running homelessness crisis.

Since 2016, California has followed a “housing first” model after then-Gov. Jerry Brown required state-funded homelessness programs to incorporate its core components. On Wednesday, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), and the Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP)  jointly rolled out a different strategy. 

HUD Secretary Scott Turner exclusively told the Daily Signal the program pairs treatment with housing to build self-sufficiency among people experiencing homelessness.

“It’s not just treatment. What they’re used to is just housing. This is a totally different mindset. It’s treatment with housing. They have to go together. You can’t just house people and then leave them. That’s how you create a homeless industrial complex,” Turner said. “People literally getting placed inside of houses that are addicted to drugs and dying in that house because of housing first.”

“We are literally this continuum of care. It’s all in the name. You house them. You continue to treat them. You get them transformed, and then you get them to a life of self-sufficiency,” Turner added. “Again, there’s going to be pushback because people don’t want change. People don’t want transformation. People want the status quo.”

The administration describes the new approach as a first-of-its-kind toolkit that offers communities “practical and proven strategies to help Americans transition from homelessness and addiction to recovery and self-sufficiency.”

According to the toolkit, about 75% of homeless people struggle with addiction and an estimated 78% face mental illness. The framework outlines a seven-step process that includes street-level engagement, recovery-oriented housing, partnerships with faith-based and community organizations, and special attention to families and children.

The goal is for street outreach to move people into recovery programs, then through structured housing, employment, and independence, with clear accountability for results. The toolkit cites organizations already using similar methods, including Haven for Hope, Helping Up Mission, and The Mission at Kern County.

Haven for Hope published a 15-year review showing that 65% of people needed only one stay. Among those single-stay clients, more than 90% did not return to homelessness at the one-, five-, and 10-year marks. Housing retention after exit was roughly 92% to 94% still housed at 12 months.

In California, The Mission at Kern County reported placing 216 people into permanent housing in 2025 and celebrating 32 program graduates. In one job-training cohort with local partners, 90% of graduates received a job offer within 30 days and 82% remained employed later.

When asked what success would look like, Turner told the Daily Signal it would involve “public-private partnerships, faith-based entities coming together, private people coming together to attack homelessness by treatment, not just housing them.” 

“One at a time, one woman, one man, one family at a time. Get them off the streets. Treat their mental illness, drug addiction, domestic violence, prostitution, sex trafficking, whatever it may be,” Turner said. “Hit those head-on with industry experts, practitioners, the best of the best around the country, who are willing and able to do this. That’s who created our toolkit, along with HHS, us, and ONDCP.”

“The more people that you get healed and transformed out of mental illness, out of drug addiction, and to a life of self-sustainability, as you heard from the testimonies here today, it is possible,” Turner added. “There are many out here who have gone through treatment, housing, transformation, and now living their lives, getting their families back. That’s success. That’s what we’re after. Every waking moment that God gives us, that’s what we want to do.”

Under Democrat Gov. Gavin Newsom, the state has heavily promoted the housing first approach and spent an estimated $37 billion on housing and homelessness-related programs since the 2019-20 fiscal year, according to the California Legislative Analyst’s Office. The total includes major programs such as HHAP, Homekey, and Encampment Resolution Funding.

During the announcement, Turner told the Daily Signal he had not heard from the Newsom administration when asked about pushback as the announcement has just been rolled out.

“I’m not worried about pushback. Now I’m pushing back with policies. So no, I haven’t talked to them yet. But I don’t need to talk to them. What I need to do is get the right people at the table, the right partners at the table that want to be here to bring transformation, that want to help our most vulnerable people in our country as it pertains to homelessness,” Turner said. 

“So if Gov. Newsom, if Mayor [Karen] Bass, if they want to come to the table and talk about transformation, if they want to talk about treatment first and not housing first, I would welcome them,” Turner continued. “Them and anyone else that wants to join and do the right thing.”

A spokesperson for Newsom told the Daily Signal the administration’s work since 2019 has produced the “largest drop in unsheltered homelessness in 16 years,” citing “the Trump administration’s own data.”

“California’s work since 2019 to address homelessness and address a mental health crisis created under former Gov. Ronald Reagan has resulted in the largest drop in unsheltered homelessness in 16 years,” spokesperson Tara Gallegos stated. 

Despite Newsom previously citing a 9% decrease in unsheltered homelessness between 2024 and 2025, HUD’s full report released in July showed the actual decline was about 6.8%. Compared with when Newsom took office in 2019, unsheltered homelessness has risen roughly 6.8%, from 108,432 to 115,583 by 2025. 

Overall homelessness in the state has increased about 20% during his tenure, climbing from 151,278 in 2019 to 181,934 in 2025, according to HUD Point-in-Time counts.

Democrat state officials across the country have altered referendum language, which critics allege is aimed at manipulating the outcome of ballot measures this fall.

After California Attorney General Rob Bonta altered the language of California’s voter ID measure, Proposition 39, the Yes on 39 campaign alleged in court the alteration was misleading. A Sacramento judge on Aug. 7 sided with Bonta’s office, and the campaign supporting the measure has appealed the ruling.

Bonta changed the initial language from “Establishes additional voter identification and citizenship verification requirements,” to “Prohibits citizens from voting unless they present government-issued identification.”

This month, supporters of a voter ID measure in Arizona sued Secretary of State Adrian Fontes, saying his office omitted key provisions and inserted political commentary into the language that will appear on ballots this fall.

Ballot measures in two New England states were scrapped after Democrat state officials were first accused of issuing misleading descriptions.

Changing the framing on the ballot for otherwise popular measures has been a longstanding power play of the Left, said Ken Cucinelli, chairman of the Election Transparency Initiative.

“This is a George Soros mentality with Saul Alinsky tactics,” Cucinelli told the Daily Signal. “Conservatives don’t like those tactics, but we just need to shut up and go win.”

Cucinelli, a former Virginia attorney general, added that Bonta’s changes to California’s voter ID measure are not the most egregious; rather, he noted Virginia Democrats’ failed attempt to pass a redistricting measure as among the “most extreme and outrageous” examples.

In April, the Democrat-controlled Virginia legislature crafted language asking voters to amend the constitution to “temporarily adopt new congressional districts to restore fairness in the upcoming elections.” The gerrymandering measure would have changed the state’s congressional map from a 6-5 Democrat advantage to a 10-1 Democrat advantage.

Republicans sued and objected that the ballot language was not neutral. A state judge blocked the measure in part because of the language, but the state Supreme Court allowed the referendum to go forward for a vote. The gerrymandered map won with 51%, but the state’s high court determined that the legislature bypassed normal legal procedures for ratifying a constitutional amendment. The U.S. Supreme Court upheld the state high court’s ruling.

Politically motivated language can affect the outcome of a referendum, said Craig Burnett, chairman of the political science department at Florida Atlantic University. He co-authored a 2015 study that investigated the question.

“My coauthor and I picked two issues that were sticky for most voters and, as such, should not have been open to persuasion,” Burnett told the Daily Signal. “Simple changes to the text had significant impacts.”

However, he said, it’s difficult to know conclusively when altering ballot language changes an outcome of a real election.

“Unfortunately, we can never know,” he said. “Unless you have access to a simulated Florida where we can run two elections, we can only infer. If the election is close, it would be safe to infer the language matters.”

A separate 2021 study by Ted Rossier, political science professor at the University of North Georgia, found in one sampling “support for one measure was drastically reduced with the change in question framing.” However, the study found another sampling’s results were inconclusive; it also found that “experienced voters are no more immune to framing effects than inexperienced voters.”

Ballotpedia scores the readability of ballot measures, but not for bias. It measures readability based on metrics the Department of War used for troop manuals.

The organization evaluated 800 ballot measures and found that measures with more complex language are somewhat more likely to pass, said Ryan Byrne, the ballots team managing editor for Ballotpedia.

“Both sides tend to do this,” Byrne told the Daily Signal. “When you have elected officials writing the language for a ballot measure, it will likely be biased or at least be accused of bias.”

In Missouri, Republican Secretary of State Danny Hoskins approved ballot language for a measure that bans gender transition surgeries on minors and restricts some abortions and school transgender participation policies.

A state court ruled the language was insufficient because it didn’t tell voters the measure would repeal the “reproductive rights” ballot measure approved by voters in 2024. The Missouri Court of Appeals upheld the lower court’s ruling but went further by rewriting the ballot language.

Two ballot measures that likely would have passed were removed from the ballot this year in Maine and Massachusetts, one due to the language dispute.

In Massachusetts, a citizen-initiated ballot referendum to cut state income taxes from 5% to 4% had 66% public support in a Boston Globe and Suffolk University poll. Democrat leaders in the state legislature and unions warned it would create a budget shortfall.

Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Campbell, a Democrat, prepared a ballot summary stating the long-term capital-gains tax rate would remain unchanged. Opponents of the measure sued over the language, arguing that the initiative would actually reduce that rate as well.

In June, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruled that the attorney general’s summary was not sufficiently fair and prevented the initiative from appearing on the 2026 ballot. Justice Serge Georges Jr. wrote for the court, “The summary’s contrary statement is not a minor imprecision. It is significantly misleading and likely to influence voters.”

A since-removed citizen-initiated Maine “Protect Girls’ Sports” ballot measure would have prohibited biological boys from playing girls sports in schools.

While the matter is a moot point now, in April, Democrat Secretary of State Shenna Bellows altered the language of the measure. Her language would have asked voters if they wanted to “change civil rights and education laws to require public schools to restrict access to bathrooms and sports based on the gender on the child’s original birth certificate and allow students to sue the schools?”

Supporters objected to the framing in April, but by May, Bellows removed the measure from the November ballot, raising questions about 12,000 signatures. The Maine Supreme Judicial Court in July upheld her decision.

What binds the new Democratic Party to the new democratic socialists is a set of shared issues and values. That is, the radicalism of the Democrats in the age of Trump Derangement Syndrome—lawfare, de-balloting, the Mar-a-Lago raid, and calls to destroy the Electoral College, the nine-justice Supreme Court, and the filibuster—helped give birth to the socialists.

But the overriding commonality among those on the new Left is that if they do not get their way, they blame the “system.” Then they seek to change the rules, no matter how hallowed those laws and conventions may have been or how much they themselves benefited from them in the past.

When the Left lost the White House, Congress, and, for the most part, the Supreme Court, it began clamoring to change the system. For left-wing Democrats, that angst also translated into calls to bring in two new blue states, weaponize the FBI and the Justice Department, ally with social media to suppress the news, and spy on congressional representatives. All the socialists and communists did was up the ante in destroying norms by calling for the end of the presidency, the Senate, the border, the police, and the Pentagon.

By 2021, it was time to destroy the southern border and welcome in some 10 million illegal immigrants—without audits, English proficiency, health checks, or the ability to support themselves.

Had Kamala Harris been elected in 2024, we would have had another four years and another 5 million illegal aliens. And perhaps America would have gone from 50 million foreign-born residents to 60 million, or about 18% of the population.

In this regard, the Left sees California as our most liberal—and most ideal—state and perhaps concludes that the reason is that 28% of its resident population is now foreign-born, with the majority arriving with vast needs for health, education, housing, and food subsidies.

Today, 50% of all births in California are paid for by Medi-Cal, which serves 40% of the population. When second-generation immigrants are added to the foreign-born population, the two groups together comprise roughly 45% of California’s current population. This demographic transformation is one of the most profound in American history and came at a time when traditional civic education stressing assimilation, acculturation, integration, and knowledge of American traditions, history, and values was nearly nonexistent in California public schools.

So one way of achieving radical change was to alter the demography and welcome as many immigrants as possible who, in the first or second generation, might follow the examples of Reps. Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, or Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed.

They represent an entirely new sort of immigrant who arrives—or is born to immigrant parents—with both complaints against and dependence on their host country. They can see only the sins of America, never the catastrophes of their homeland that drove them or their parents here. This strange demand to change the rules whenever they do not bode well for angry and aggrieved parties permeates every possible manifestation of the Left but is especially egregious when demanded by immigrants who came originally as uninvited guests but almost immediately damned their magnanimous host.

It is strange for so many new immigrants to act on an elemental desire to reach America—only on arrival to profess that it is full of toxic, sinful people, living and dead. Yet the damned hosts have inexplicably welcomed total strangers like themselves, and have allowed them to share in the freedom, security, and prosperity created by the dead whom the newcomers nonetheless endlessly slander and smear.

If particular minorities statistically did not do as well on the SAT as Asians and whites did on average, the solution was certainly not SAT tutorials in the inner city or K-12 SAT outreach, demands for tougher classes in grammar, math, and analytics, or a return to the melting pot rather than the current salad-bowl tribalist model.

Instead, after the George Floyd riots, the call went out to abolish the SAT entirely—as if there had never been a purpose behind its creation. In fact, merit-based SAT exams were designed in the 1920s and 1930s to allow anyone, regardless of race, gender, region, or class, to enter college through meritorious performance on the tests—and, in particular, to overcome old-boy insider preferences and regional and ethnic prejudices.

Yet when the SAT was mostly abolished for four or five years, higher education thought it had solved the problem of minority underrepresentation.

In fact, its racialist war on standards only magnified its dilemmas. The SAT had once informed admissions officers not only about applicants’ qualifications but also whether admitted students could do the work once enrolled.

But soon liberal professors learned that many of the newly admitted cohorts lacked the K-12 training necessary to do customary university coursework. Yet if professors maintained their regular courses, requirements, and grading, they might soon be labeled racists once particular minorities were shown to do less well than Asians and whites.

So universities inflated grades. They introduced new remedial and gut courses. And they reduced the required coursework. But again, racialism is never a solution to problems. Instead, it is a catalyst that fuels them—as we have seen with the new notion that plagiarism is not an actionable offense when the culprit can plead victim status, whether a former president of Harvard or a current professor at Cambridge. But there are ancient laws and norms that insist intellectual theft is a crime and should be punished, not rewarded or ignored.

Soon employers noticed that the reading, writing, and analytical skills of graduates from prestigious schools were proving dismal. Alumni complained both that the reputations of their almae matres were in decline and resting on the fumes of the past and that their own children, who had prepared diligently to ensure suitably competitive grades and SAT scores for admission, were being rejected solely on the basis of their race.

The Left likewise pushed for lower physical standards for the military’s ground-combat brigades so that women, on average far less strong than their male counterparts, could join elite units. Again, the same ignorance and arrogance were evident. Physical standards were based on a century of combat experience in which morale, group discipline, and unit success rested on ensuring that all soldiers achieved a common level of physical strength and endurance.

This neo-Marxist-driven demand to mandate equality—albeit now substituting racial and gender consciousness for class consciousness—requires the destruction of established traditions, laws, and norms. The radical Left’s key agendas—defunding the police, destroying the border, granting mass amnesties to illegal aliens, subsidizing wind and solar energy while waging a war on fossil fuels, and expanding racial essentialism in hiring and admissions—have never won more than 30 to 40% support among the general public. Yet the solution was not to ask why, and then to reflect, reboot, and recalibrate in order to discover how the Left had lost public support.

Instead, the solution was to alter or destroy the system that had denied them power.

So communists, socialists, and radical Democrats prefer moving the goalposts. When equality of opportunity was largely achieved, next they demanded a mandated equality of outcome.

With the ascendancy of a large, affluent middle class, the Left, in its eternal search for a victimized class, pivoted and replaced class oppression with racial victimization.

And when there were not yet enough victimized minorities to guarantee a majority constituency of the aggrieved, the Left redefined the victimized to include anyone who was not a white heterosexual male, regardless of income and privilege.

And when the people finally tired of the Leftists’ totalitarian social engineering, the Left sought to change the system by radically altering the way Americans vote, the manner in which government is formed and functions, and, finally, the very demography of America.

The common denominator? Human nature revolts at forced statism, coercive redistribution, and government-mandated equality of results. It instead yearns for liberty and freedom.

No matter how much deception, camouflage, or brainwashing is employed, statism, socialism, and communism can never sustain public support. Throughout history, the Left has therefore begun by changing the rules and altering the demography—if not initially through changes to election rules, bureaucratic fiat, and biased court orders, then eventually through sheer violence.

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

The battle to end DEI in higher education is one that can only be won through attrition against a stubborn enemy that won’t back away from the ideology that created it.

One might think that the Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard Supreme Court decision that prohibited racial discrimination in college admissions would have put an end to the issue. It didn’t. At least some of America’s top schools unsurprisingly appear to be doing their best to dance around the courts and the law.

For those who’ve paid attention to how higher education has behaved in recent decades, it was clear that many schools would find ways to cheat the system. It’s all the rage these days for students and administrators, I guess.

That looks to be the case at Duke Law school. The Department of Justice recently accused the school of responding to the Supreme Court decision by creating a stealthier way to discriminate.

The Department of Justice said that following the Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard decision “Duke Law emphasized racial diversity in admissions and engaged in a deliberate effort to preserve race-based outcomes for its incoming classes.”

The school highlighted “DEI” as one of the school’s “most important values” in late 2023 according to internal communications obtained by the DOJ and pledged to “work even harder” to admit “a racially diverse class.”

The DOJ memo said that following the Supreme Court decision, Duke Law revised its mission statement to include “equal justice, public service, and a ‘diversity of perspective and experience.’” The school then asked applicants to state how they would demonstrate commitment to those principles.

According to documents obtained by the DOJ, school admissions reviewers were told to tag this section and look for answers that captured “specific applicant characteristics that are commonly correlated with race.”

The result has been that black and Hispanic applicants have had a “substantially higher likelihood of admission to Duke Law than a white or Asian applicant with the same academic credentials.”

That means, the DOJ concluded that while admissions reviewers could say they haven’t seen demographics data, “Duke Law directed its admissions staff to highlight applicant information that could be used to advance Duke Law’s racial diversity goals.”

The result appears to show up in the numbers since there was a significant gap in LSAT numbers by race. That’s the standardized test students take before applying to law school.

“In 2024 and 2025, the median LSAT scores of rejected white and Asian applicants exceeded the median LSAT scores of admitted black applicants,” the memo said.

That’s hard to square if the school really wasn’t trying to at least somewhat select by race.

Duke responded to the accusations by saying that the school is following the law “in a manner that is consistent with our academic mission.”

The Justice Department remains unconvinced.

“Duke Law School doesn’t get a free pass to discriminate against white and Asian students simply because it thinks it has good intentions,” Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division said in a statement. “Using ‘diversity’ essay questions to identify preferred races for admission is still illegal discrimination based on race, and this Department is committed to eliminating it everywhere we find it, including in our nation’s law schools.”

This is an important case and a good sign that the DOJ is serious about enforcing the Supreme Court decision.

America’s elite schools have demonstrated a fanatical devotion to racial discrimination in the name of DEI.

As we’ve seen time and again, American colleges and universities have responded to nearly every law and court decision demanding they stop with the DEI racism by coming up with clever ways to skirt the rules.

The University of California spent decades coming up with clever ways to discriminate following the passage of Proposition 209, which banned affirmative action. They pioneered a “holistic” application process to get closer to the racial composition they wanted. They allowed race-based scholarships conducted by private organizations. And they even dropped SAT and ACT standardized testing requirements.

But after further lawsuits and maybe a little bit of sobering up, those California schools backed away somewhat from the insanity. Even the standardized tests are starting to make a return.

The lesson being that the only way to cure wokeness and DEI, especially in higher education, is through intense, relentless pressure.

Ensuring a certain level of racial diversity regardless of student merit is practically a religious prerogative. They aren’t going to back away without a fight and they aren’t going to reform themselves.

Some may even wish to continue the fight against the Trump administration’s enforcement of the law no matter what.

In the Duke Chronicle, one student wrote a long diatribe about how the school should go on to the end and fight the DOJ on the lawsuit. He argued that the administration has a bad case because the numbers of black and Hispanic students are lower in percentage than the national population.

Of course, that glides over the central issue that schools are supposed to choose students based on merit rather than race.

Big bucks are at stake. Schools that decide to go to the mat for DEI face the threat of losing federal funding. Most aren’t willing to take that risk given how dependent they are.

But they will if they think they have friends in the White House who won’t keep them accountable. Don’t forget that.

Former President Barack Obama will likely campaign for Abdul El-Sayed, the far-left Democrat who just won Michigan’s U.S. Senate primary.

The two spoke after the primary, and El-Sayed publicly said he hopes Obama will campaign for him. Michigan could determine control of the Senate, and Obama remains the most popular Democrat.

El-Sayed won despite performing poorly among black primary voters. His coalition skewed younger, whiter, college-educated and progressive. In Detroit, Michigan’s largest majority-black city, El-Sayed’s opponent won more than 60% of the Democrat Senate vote. That may work in a Democrat primary. But will it work in November?

Enter Obama.

During the 2024 presidential campaign, Obama visited a Kamala Harris campaign office in Pittsburgh and said he wanted to “speak some truths.” He complained that enthusiasm for Harris was weaker than when he ran and said the problem “seems to be more pronounced with the brothers.”

Obama said: “You’re coming up with all kinds of reasons and excuses. I’ve got a problem with that,” he said, suggesting some Black men “just aren’t feeling the idea of having a woman as president.”

Apparently, some of “the brothers” remained unpersuaded. Pew Research Center’s validated-voter analysis later estimated that 21% of black men voted for Donald Trump. Nevertheless, Obama will probably go to Michigan and explain to black voters who rejected El-Sayed in the primary why they should vote for him in November. After all, Obama and El-Sayed are closely aligned on policy.

Take health care. El-Sayed supports “Medicare for All.” Obama repeatedly said the ideal healthcare plan would be single-payer. “If I were starting a system from scratch,” Obama said in 2009, “then I think that the idea of moving towards a single-payer system could very well make sense.” Near the end of his second term, Obama said, “If I was starting from scratch, I probably would have supported a single-payer system.”

Then-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid called it a goal. Asked in 2013 whether Obamacare was ultimately a step toward single-payer health care, Reid answered, “Yes, yes. Absolutely, yes.”

Like Obama, El-Sayed chastises “the rich” for “not paying their fair share in taxes.” Like Obama, who said racism is part of the America’s “DNA,” El-Sayed believes racism remains a serious problem.

How far from Obama are these “far-left” Democrats? Last year, Obama called democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani during his campaign for New York City mayor, praised his campaign and reportedly offered to serve as a “sounding board.”

On Israel, there isn’t much daylight between the two. El-Sayed has called the Israeli government “evil,” “bloodthirsty” and a “rogue state.” He declined to directly answer when asked, “Do you believe Israel has a right to exist?” Obama never went that far. He repeatedly defended Israel’s legitimacy and security.

But Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu repeatedly clashed. Netanyahu fiercely opposed Obama’s Iran nuclear deal, warning that Tehran could not be trusted. Israel obtained an archive of Iranian nuclear documents that Netanyahu said proved Iran was lying about its nuclear-weapons activities and was not abiding by the terms of the deal.

The Obama-Netanyahu relationship became so poisonous that a senior Obama administration official reportedly called Netanyahu “chickens—-.” The White House distanced itself from the insult, but the hostility between the two leaders was no secret.

What explains El-Sayed’s weakness among black primary voters? In 2020, he explicitly said, “I believe we need to defund the police.” Polls show blacks want the level of policing in their community to remain the same, if not increased. Blacks are disproportionately victims of crime. Tupac Shakur said: “The same crime element that white people are scared of black people are scared of … Just because we black, we get along with the killers? What is that? We need protection, too.”

El-Sayed wants to abolish Immigration and Customs Enforcement, despite studies showing a connection between unskilled illegal aliens and lower wages and greater unemployment among black workers in the same skill group.

This brings us back to Obama. El-Sayed needs black voters who did not particularly want him. Democrats need Michigan to gain control of the senate.

So, expect the former president to show up. And when he does, Obama will give “the brothers” a message. You may not have wanted this candidate. His positions may be against your self-interests.

But vote for him anyway.

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

The Democratic Socialists of America is quietly building a network of activists to influence unions that are central to the Democratic Party.

The organization’s plan encourages young socialists to select jobs where they can either unionize or join existing unions and move them further to the Left. While most Americans are aware of DSA-backed officeholders Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Zohran Mamdani, the strategy of placing members in unions may actually yield more important dividends to the organization’s long-term goals.

The Rank-and-File Strategy

From 2018 to 2021, the Young Democratic Socialists of America adopted a “rank-and-file” strategy as a national priority, emphasizing that “socialists must enter the labor movement on the shop floor as rank and file members of labor unions.”

The goal, as the group explained it, was “to reconnect the labor movement to the socialist movement in order to strengthen the militancy and class consciousness of the multiracial, multigendered working class to fight capitalism.”

“We aim to turn the unions we join into strong, militant, democratic organizations that can win major gains for workers, by workers,” the rank-and-file project’s website stated.

Why infiltrate the unions? To leverage them for the Left’s omni cause, the group explicitly stated.

“We want to forge real alliances between unions and other social movements, like the climate justice movement, the racial justice movement, the movement for Palestine, and the movement for LGBTQ+ rights,” the website states. “And we think unions must serve a vital role in forging a political alternative to the hard-right, authoritarian Republican Party and the fake, corporate-friendly ‘progressivism’ of the Democratic Party.”

The YDSA added that it was organizing members to enter “strategic industries—such as logistics, education, and health care.”

DSA released a pamphlet titled “Why Socialists Should Become Teachers,” urging socialists to enter the teaching profession not just to make more schools join unions, but to shape how teachers’ unions make their demands. It presented as a test case a socialist group of West Virginia teachers. The union had demanded higher wages, but the socialists within urged leaders to make a more explicit demand: not just to pay teachers more, but to raise taxes on corporations and fossil fuel companies in order to finance it.

In the socialists’ vision, unions don’t just advocate for higher wages, they use those demands to shape government policy—sometimes on completely unrelated issues.

In 2020, the YDSA voted to build a pipeline to prepare students for these sort of strategic jobs.

Why Infiltrate the Unions?

America’s largest unions don’t just mobilize workers to fight for better wages and benefits. Many of them operate as hubs of leftist advocacy and engines for the Democrat Party.

As I documented in “The Woketopus: The Dark Money Cabal Manipulating the Federal Government,” America’s largest unions back Democrats and oppose Republicans.

The American Federation of Labor-Congress of Industrialized Organizations spent approximately $5.5 million supporting Democrats in the 2020 cycle and $1.15 million opposing Republicans. The Service Employees International Union spent $13.4 million supporting Democrats and $2.54 million opposing Republicans. The American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees spent $15.5 million opposing Republicans and $4.7 million supporting Democrats.

The National Education Association, America’s largest teachers union, gave $2.44 million to Democrats and only $64,830 to Republicans in 2020. The American Federation of Teachers, the second-largest teachers union, gave $2.54 million to Democrats and $7,002 to Republicans.

These unions also funnel millions of dollars to leftist nonprofits such as the Center for American Progress and the Human Rights Campaign, and to the Left’s dark-money foundations that bankroll a host of leftist causes.

If the DSA can dominate these unions, it will enjoy a massive organizing base—not just to win elections but to shift the entire apparatus behind the Democrat Party and the so-called Progressive movement.

Unlike many activist groups, unions enjoy organizational advantages, such as permanent membership roles, stable funding streams, paid staff, political influence, and the ability to mobilize large numbers of people. That’s why unions provide powerful organizing infrastructure—often for the Democrat Party.

Furthermore, the rank-and-file strategy’s website features a “case studies” page outlining historic attempts to mobilize and radicalize union members.

The case study into Teamsters for a Democratic Union outlines how a small number of radical union members fought for political dominance inside the International Brotherhood of Teamsters. This history shows how political battles within unions prove helpful training grounds for socialists as they prepare to enter mainstream politics.

DSA members running for public office have already garnered some support from local unions.

Zohran Mamdani received the endorsement of DC 37, New York City’s largest public-sector union, in August 2025. DC 37, an AFSCME affiliate that represents 150,000 city workers, had previously backed establishment Democrats. Socialists have praised the endorsement as a victory for “rank-and-file organizing,” though it seems that effort was separate from the rank-and-file project.

As the DSA turns its sights to unions, its influence on the Democrat Party will increase, and it will train up a new generation of political organizers.

Americans should pay close attention to these efforts.

With about three months remaining in the midterm campaign, it’s become time for the most desperate partisan gamesmanship, as our socialist-friendly media engage in helping the Democrats win.

Do not recognize the “independent media” and the “independent fact-checkers” as the referees of this campaign. These elitists should be identified as uniformed players for the Democrat team, since the following are their apparent rules of campaign communication:

1. Republicans can’t call Democrats “communists.” This applies even if you make campaign appearances with someone like Hasan Piker, who thinks mass-murdering communist Mao Zedong is “one of the great leaders of this world.” It applies even if you’re talking about New York’s Darializa Avila Chevalier, who published tweets about how great “The Communist Manifesto” is. That apparently proves nothing.

2. But Democrats can call Republicans fascists and Nazis. CNN and MS NOW seem like they’re on an endless loop of comparing President Donald Trump to Adolf Hitler amassing his tyrannical powers in the 1930s. Try looking for an article where PolitiFact throws a flag at a liberal calling a conservative a fascist or a Nazi. It doesn’t exist.

3. Republicans can’t call Democrats Islamists, jihadists, or pro-terrorist. Again, who are you if you campaign with Piker, who stated “America deserved 9/11”? Piker has hailed the mass-murdering terrorists of Hamas as “a thousand times better than the fascist settler colonial apartheid state” of Israel? The entire Democratic Socialists of America contingent of candidates has a platform supporting “Palestinian resistance” while rejecting calls to condemn Hamas, framing the Oct. 7, 2023, slaughter of innocents as an “inevitable” response to Israeli occupation.

4. But Democrats can accuse Republicans of Christian nationalist theocracy. Abdul El-Sayed can make speeches at a 2022 CAIR event comparing conservatives in Oklahoma preemptively banning Sharia law to the 19th-century murder of Indians, the Tulsa Massacre of 1921, and even the Oklahoma City Bombing of 1995. That, to our media elites, is considered fair commentary. PolitiFact used that fact-mangling to defend El-Sayed as reasonable.

But when Oklahoma’s superintendent of public instruction suggested putting the Bible in the classroom in 2024, CNN anchor Pamela Brown pushed back with a cartoonish brushback pitch: “Are you OK with all teachings of the Bible? If you want to bring it back into the classroom: rape, incest, beheading. Are you—Is that acceptable to you?”

5. Republicans can’t call Democrats extremists. The media consider it beneath their dignity when you recall their candidates denouncing Thanksgiving, Valentine’s Day, Halloween, and the “toxic masculinity” of football. They giggle at the ancient strains of “Woke One” in 2020, like those tweets were written on an IBM supercomputer in 1971. The journalists all rush forward to say these Democrats didn’t seriously mean “defund the police,” they just wanted reform or something.

6. But Democrats can describe anyone to the right of the left-wing extremists as “moderates.” If you support Hamas and oppose Thanksgiving, the media’s choice of adjective is “progressive.” If you don’t support eradicating the state of Israel or beloved American holidays, you get to be a “moderate.” In Minnesota, Rep. Angie Craig is a “moderate” because she voted for the Laken Riley Act. “Progressive” Peggy Flanagan trashes Craig for that vote, meaning she is staunchly opposed to detaining illegal aliens who are charged with crimes, including rape and murder.  

These rules are not in any way fair and balanced. They are stacked to favor Democrats over Republicans. One party is considered to be constantly punching below the belt. The apparently fascist party deserves to be punched there.

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

Earlier this week, Gov. Greg Abbott announced a new initiative aimed at protecting students in Texas schools from abuse.

During a visit to Lubbock on Tuesday, Abbott announced his initiative to combat abuse in public schools, targeting educators who engage in inappropriate relationships with students.

During fiscal year 2026, there were more than 1,600 allegations of inappropriate relationships between students and educators and more than 500 allegations of sexual abuse involving students at Texas schools, according to Texas Education Agency data.

During fiscal year 2025, there were 580 allegations of inappropriate relationships between students and educators and 304 allegations of sexual abuse involving students.

Abbott said new laws are needed to strengthen protections for students and hold educators who abuse their positions of authority accountable.

“This new law builds on previous and vital actions that crack down on inappropriate teacher-student relationships,” Abbott said. “We must protect our students and lock up predators. Together, we will keep Texas classrooms a safe space for children to learn, grow, and succeed.”

Under Abbott’s proposal, criminal penalties will increase for teachers and school staff convicted of an improper relationship with a student. The penalties would include mandatory sex-offender registration and a minimum 10-year prison sentence.

Those convicted also would not be eligible for community supervision, deferred adjudication, parole, or mandatory supervision before completing the 10-year prison sentence.

Texas House Speaker Dustin Burrows, who represents Lubbock, attended the meeting and said that he looks forward to working with Abbott to turn the proposal into law.

“Every child in Texas deserves to walk into school ready to learn and grow, not afraid that someone could prey upon them,” Burrows said. “To the survivors: we hear you, we see you, and what happened to you should never have happened. We must do better. The Texas House looks forward to partnering with Governor Abbott next session to turn these initiatives into action and make sure no other child suffers what you have suffered.”

Policy experts with the Texas Public Policy Foundation also voiced support for Abbott’s proposal, saying tougher penalties are needed.

“Gov. Abbott is doing the right by making it abundantly clear to predators that have been entering our classrooms that you will receive harsh penalties with no way to circumvent the legal system,” Mandy Drogin, senior fellow for the Government Reform & Oversight Coalition at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, told the Daily Signal.

Thomas Lindsay, policy director for the Higher Education and Next Generation Texas initiative at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, also told the Daily Signal that “public schools exist to educate children, not shield abusers.” 

“When adults in positions of authority violate that trust, the consequence should be prison time that actually removes them from society—not probation or quiet transfers,” Lindsay said. “Strong accountability protects liberty by ensuring government institutions fulfill their basic duty to keep our kids safe.”

Drogin added that pension forfeiture, severe financial fines, and similar penalties should also apply to administrators who aid or abet predators in schools or help them circumvent the rules.

“I really think that Gov. Abbott is doing a phenomenal job making it abundantly clear that we will no longer allow anyone that thinks that they can come in and abuse children to be in our public school system,” Drogin said. “I hope every single state in the union will follow his lead on this.”

The 90th Texas Legislature will convene on Jan. 12, 2027.

Understanding North Carolina before 1776 helps explain the crucial but often overlooked role it played in America’s break with Britain.

By the time of the Revolution, the colony had accumulated a volatile mix of political resentment, economic hardship, frontier independence, religious dissent, and frustration with government abuse and inadequate representation in its own colonial assembly. North Carolinians had spent years learning to question authority—and, when they believed their liberties and property were threatened, to resist it.

My own family played a role in this primed, rebellious era. From the wetlands of the Tidewater to the rolling hills of the Piedmont and into the western mountains, my lineage is full of North Carolina patriots. By 1776, my people had been there for more than a century. Descendants of English and Scotch-Irish immigrants, they were planters, farmers, tradesmen, local officials, militia members, pastors, elders, and deacons. Others were German immigrants whose Reformed communities remained separate for decades but helped shape Piedmont culture.

The real trouble began when Parliament passed the Sugar Act of 1764. The act directly impacted the colony’s major port in Wilmington, which depended heavily on Atlantic trade. It increased overhead costs, tightened commerce regulation, and strengthened British authority over the colony’s courts. It created economic uncertainty. But more troubling than that was the fact that Parliament was claiming the power to tax North Carolinians without the consent of the colony’s General Assembly.

The Stamp Act followed in 1765, taxing newspapers, pamphlets, letters, wills, books, almanacs, playing cards, and even dice to help offset the cost of troops stationed in the colonies. When Royal Governor William Tryon asked Speaker of the North Carolina Assembly John Ashe what the colony’s attitude would be toward the Stamp Act, Speaker Ashe resolutely replied, “We will resist it to the death.”

On Oct. 19, 1765, nearly 500 of Wilmington’s colonists hanged and burned an effigy of Stamp Master William Houston and then toasted “Confusion to Lord Bute and All His Adherents.” Wilmingtonians regarded these two men as everything that was wrong with Britain.

On All Hallows’ Eve, protesters staged a mock funeral for “Liberty,” carrying a coffin through the streets to St. James’ churchyard. Just before burying it, a man checked for signs of life and dramatically proclaimed that Liberty still had an existence in the colony!

Adding deeds to these words, a mob confronted Houston when he appeared in Wilmington several weeks later, demanding he renounce his office. He agreed and was escorted to the courthouse, where he formally resigned. The mob then forced Andrew Stewart, printer of the Cape Fear Gazette, to print the newspaper on unstamped paper. Afterward, they organized themselves into the Sons of Liberty, and Justice of the Peace Cornelius Harnett emerged as one of the group’s principal leaders. The Sons of Liberty pledged that they would unite and work to defeat the Stamp Act.

Their success came at a cost, since without a stamp master, business could not be conducted, and ships could not clear port. In February 1766, tensions erupted when British officials seized two ships on the Cape Fear River for lacking stamped papers. British authorities decided to send the ships to Nova Scotia for adjudication, enraging Justice Harnett and the Sons of Liberty. On Feb. 21, hundreds of men marched toward Governor Tryon’s residence in Brunswick Town, led by Justice Harnett and Speaker Ashe.

Harnett faced Tryon one-on-one, respectfully but forcefully demanding the resignation of Royal Comptroller John Pennington. He further demanded that public officials take an oath not to enforce the Stamp Act.

Faced with such strong opposition, Tryon relented.

Britain faced similar resistance across the 13 colonies, eventually making the Stamp Act impossible to enforce. It was repealed in March 1766. Resistance in North Carolina had been especially strong, with its Sons of Liberty among the most active associations opposing it. Their opposition took the form of everything from protest to armed confrontation with royal authority.

Meanwhile, North Carolina’s most significant pre-Revolutionary conflict was developing in the Piedmont.

As backcountry population grew, so did frustration with the royal governor and his representatives. North Carolinians complained that taxes were excessive and arbitrary, court and legal fees were burdensome, and local sheriffs and officials were corrupt or dishonest. Money was scarce on the frontier, but government officials’ lifestyles seemed opulent. Western settlers increasingly believed they were funding a corrupt, out-of-touch government in faraway New Bern.

Regulators generally considered themselves loyal subjects of King George III. They did not initially advocate war or independence; they wanted to regulate their colonial government, not overthrow it. The movement drew from a remarkably broad cross-section of backcountry society—farmers, artisans, tradesmen, small freeholders, and even some wealthy landowners.

Although the Church of England remained North Carolina’s established church, Anglicanism struggled to keep pace with the rapidly growing Piedmont, where dissenting churches were growing. Baptists of English and Welsh descent, Scotch-Irish Presbyterians, and German Lutherans and Moravians far outnumbered English Anglicans.

Many ministers discouraged involvement with the Regulators; church members were admonished to submit to authority and support Gov. Tryon. Dissenters, emphasizing individual conscience, personal responsibility, equality before God, and suspicion of unjust authority undermined such timid messages. While some Christians submitted to their ministers, others joined the Regulators.

Herman Husband, a Quaker farmer, began correspondence with Benjamin Franklin in Philadelphia and became one of the Regulators’ most prominent spokesmen. Through pamphlets, meetings, and petitions, Husband exposed government abuse and sought accountability, peaceful reform, and tax reduction. Husband was even elected to the Assembly, but the colony’s royal government refused reform.

Nature itself now added to the growing unrest. Years of drought and economic depression provided fresh fuel to North Carolina’s already smoldering tinderbox of conflict.

Next week, this column will explore the next phase: the rejection of peaceful protest, defeat in battle, an increase in openly Patriot Protestant ministers, the rise of female participation, and, eventually, war for independence.

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

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

Mary, the mother of Jesus Christ, is the most important woman ever to live, and she is desperately needed in our culture.

The Christian faith holds that God is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—one God, three persons. God is a relationship of perfect communion. God the Son, through the power of the Holy Spirit, took flesh and became man. He was born of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Therefore, the role of Mary in salvation history is crucial.

On Aug. 15 and Aug. 22, the Catholic Church celebrates Mary, the Mother of God. Aug. 15 commemorates her Assumption into Heaven, body and soul. Aug. 22 commemorates her as Queen of Heaven, highlighting the importance of her place in salvation history and her maternal intercession for our needs.

Throughout Christian history, the faithful have always imagined what it would have been like to have been present at scenes detailed in the Gospels. St. Bernard of Clairvaux wrote that at the moment the angel Gabriel asked Mary to be the Mother of God, all of heaven held its breath, awaiting the response from this lowly virgin. In the gap of silence between Gabriel’s invitation and Mary’s fiat (yes), the world awaited the fulfillment of its redemption.

All this talk of redemption and salvation is necessary when we reference Mary—and whenever we speak of Christianity. For only those who know that they are sinners can recognize their need for a Savior.

We need Christ because we cling to selfishness over sacrifice. Our fallen nature means that we tend to seek what we desire rather than seek what is right and good. This is the result of the reign of sin.

The world needs Mary for one simple reason: Jesus gave her to us and told us to stay close to her. If God is real, and if Jesus Christ is God, then Jesus knows what is best for us. In his dying moments, he gave Mary to us as our mother. This was part of the scene at the foot of the cross, when he spoke to St. John, who stood in for all Christians:

“When Jesus saw his mother and the disciple there whom he loved, he said to his mother, ‘Woman, behold, your son.’ Then he said to the disciple, ‘Behold, your mother.’ And from that hour the disciple took her into his home.” (John 19:26-27)

These words are part of Christ’s dying wishes. He wanted us to have his mother. The role of Mary is to intercede for her children.

Lest you be worried that this understanding of Mary smacks of idolatry, it is important to understand precisely what is meant by this. The word “intercede” literally means to stand in between two parties. When we ask Mary to pray to Jesus for our sake, she stands in between us and her Son. Like any good son or daughter, he cannot refuse the wishes of his mom.

This does not mean, however, that Mary impedes our access to Jesus. In reality, Mary helps us to grow closer to Him. She leads us by the hand ever closer to her Son.

Mary is an avenue for believers to gain closer intimacy with Jesus Christ. In heaven, she calls the name of her Son over and over again, and he runs to her calls, asking what she needs. She then brings all of our petitions to Christ. Her position as mother of the King makes her the Queen of Heaven.

Mary has traditionally been held in such esteem, not because of any greatness apart from God, but because of the great favor that God has shown her. Since God knew from all time that Mary would bear Jesus Christ in her womb, He preserved her from the stain of original sin. She was the pure vessel for the Son of God to take flesh and be born. 

In today’s world, people are suffering. Anxiety and depression are increasing. Families are broken. Many struggle to find meaning in life.

Mary can be our guide. She reminds us that we must never lose hope in her Son. No matter the brokenness we experience, the cross is always followed by the empty tomb. Jesus defeated death, and he will conquer all darkness.

Mary is an advocate championing our cause. No living person is so lost that God cannot find him, for no one is ever abandoned by God. And, following her Son’s lead, the Mother of God never deserts us, either. Like any good mom, she waits for her children to call to her so that she can embrace them with love and help them cling to her Son.

We can ask for Mary’s help to love the Lord by praying the Hail Mary or by repeating her humble words to the angel Gabriel: “Behold, I am the handmaid of the Lord. May it be done to me according to your word” (Luke 1:38). These prayers are powerful, whether they are prayed for our own good or the good of others.

If you doubt the power or effectiveness of turning to Mary, I challenge you to recite one of these prayers for one month. The impact will be unmistakable.

We all need Mary—the entire world—and she is waiting for us to call upon her.

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

Edmund Burke, defending the “little platoons” of civil society against the leveling ambitions of revolutionary abstraction, would have found some to admire but little to recognize in the modern American corporation, an institution that has, in recent decades, developed an un-Burkean appetite for causes well beyond its charter. The Heritage Foundation’s Free Enterprise Initiative has taken up the overdue project of reminding corporate America what corporations are for.

The particular mechanism I want to focus on here is unglamorous: the shareholder proposal, that most procedural of instruments, filed and often quietly withdrawn once management gets the point. Heritage is, by virtue of its portfolio, a shareholder in a great many companies, and it has discovered what any student of institutions eventually learns: that influence exercised through patient engagement can be more durable than influence extracted through public confrontation.

Last proxy season, our initiative filed proposals at 26 companies; half were withdrawn, not because we lost interest but because the companies, upon inspection, either altered course or persuaded Heritage that no alteration was needed because the problem had already been remedied.

Consider Dell Technologies, which, in January 2026, found itself the subject of a proposal seeking transparency about its diversity, equity, and inclusion apparatus. Dialogue ensued. Then Dell confirmed that DEI metrics play no role in executive compensation, that hiring and promotion proceed on merit there rather than on racial or sexual arithmetic, and that its employee resource groups remain open to all comers—commitments the company has indicated will surface in its public disclosures. Heritage, satisfied that enough of the more glaring DEI-related risks to shareholder value targeted by the proposal had been addressed, withdrew.

A more curious episode involved Meta, Salesforce, and Mastercard, each of which had been routing its employee charitable-matching program, administered through a platform called Benevity, through the diagnostic apparatus of the Southern Poverty Law Center, an organization whose “hate map” has, over the years, done more to discredit its own judgment than to illuminate anyone else’s. The companies prevailed upon Benevity to abandon its screens of conservative organizations like Moms for Liberty, Alliance Defending Freedom, and Family Research Council.

One is tempted to conclude that it took a think tank’s proxy proposal to accomplish what ordinary managerial common sense might have accomplished unprompted; institutions, alas, rarely audit their own assumptions until someone else insists on it.

While shareholder proposals are routinely attacked as costly distractions, it is difficult to overstate how often we have presented material facts to a corporation that had apparently simply not made it onto the corporation’s radar screen. When the leadership of corporations like Apple apparently give 35 times more to Democrat causes than Republican ones, it should come as no surprise that blind spots exist (willful or otherwise) that The Heritage Foundation can illuminate.

Heritage’s fastidiousness extended to engaging one of its own largest corporate donors—corporate giving being, in any case, a modest sliver, under 2%, of our support—on matters of governance, a detail worth noting for those who assume we reserve our scruples for other people’s benefactors.

Not every engagement succeeded. Proposals concerning unmitigated corporate exposure to China and the retirement of environmental, social, and governance and DEI criteria from executive pay went to a vote and lost at several firms, as did efforts to persuade Starbucks and Amazon to abandon the SPLC’s diagnostic tools.

Although the proxy voting industrial complex raises red flags about how to interpret low vote counts on conservative proposals—including conflicts of interest—Heritage returns this season with dozens more proposals, undeterred by the Securities and Exchange Commission’s evolving approach to Rule 14a-8, which governs which shareholder proposals companies must include on proxy ballots and when they may exclude them.

The animating premise is neither novel nor, properly understood, ideological: A public corporation is a commercial enterprise, not a legislature, a congregation, or a tribune of the aggrieved. Its obligations run to shareholders. (To fulfill this obligation, corporations must, of course, treat their customers, employees, and suppliers well.)

When corporations drift into adjudicating contested social questions—underwriting gender-transition interventions for minors, for instance, or outsourcing moral judgment to organizations of dubious rigor (yes, I mean the SPLC)—they are not exercising some novel form of civic virtue; they are neglecting their own.

We’re not issuing a summons to convert the boardroom into a battleground for every cultural quarrel, which could invert the problem Heritage is trying to correct. We’re suggesting, through the ordinary medium of the proxy statement and shareholder proposal, that institutions perform best when they remember what they are.

James Madison thought factions inevitable and that checked power was the optimal solution. The Free Enterprise Initiative, more modestly, treats corporate mission creep as likewise inevitable, and shareholder vigilance a suitably and uniquely American remedy for it. Limited, accountable institutions doing their actual jobs well: This was once considered unremarkable. That it now requires a proxy season’s worth of proposals to say so is the real story here.

It has never been easier to feel virtuous without making much of an effort.

Put pronouns in an email signature, repost the slogan of the day, or join the online denunciation of someone who used the wrong word. In many circles, such gestures are expected. A person can take part with little at stake and still come away feeling that he has done something morally worthwhile.

The trouble begins when support for fashionable causes is treated as proof of good character.

Traditionally, classical virtues have been concerned primarily with conduct. Courage requires action when there is something to lose. Temperance means controlling one’s appetites. Prudence calls for sound judgment, while justice requires fairness, including toward people one dislikes.

A person acquires these traits by practicing them and working on himself. He must make the right choices repeatedly, often when nobody else knew or cared.

At about the age of 14, George Washington copied into his schoolbook 110 maxims known as the “Rules of Civility and Decent Behavior in Company and Conversation.” The exercise reflected an understanding that character had to be cultivated. Decades later, in an Aug. 28, 1788, letter to Alexander Hamilton, Washington described “the character of an honest man” as the most enviable of all titles.

Today, public allegiance often stands in for that hard work. Use the accepted vocabulary, support the cause of the moment and condemn whoever has fallen outside the boundaries of respectable opinion. That alone can be enough to earn a reputation for goodness.

When slogans and public denunciations attract the most praise, young people may conclude that morality is less about how they behave than about showing that they are on the right side. Expressing an opinion is much easier than governing one’s own behavior.

A teenager who admits to a lie that could have remained hidden takes a real step toward honesty. Another who refuses to join classmates in humiliating someone has shown strength of character. Keeping a promise after it becomes inconvenient inculcates responsibility.

But social media magnifies the problem by rewarding what can be seen and counted. An angry accusation can bring hundreds of likes within minutes, while years of decent conduct may attract no notice at all.

Too often, young people are taught to judge actions by the reactions they receive rather than by whether they are right.

That habit can follow them into adulthood. Someone who treats his politics as proof of goodness has little reason to ask whether he is arrogant, dishonest, or selfish. He can spend the day condemning strangers and still go to bed convinced of his own moral superiority.

Speaking publicly for a cause can be honorable when doing so carries a genuine risk. A person who defends an unpopular truth at the possible cost of his job or reputation has demonstrated something real. But repeating a popular view before an approving audience proves far less.

And that temptation is not confined to the Left. Conservatives can fall into the same trap. Opposing abortion, defending religious liberty or supporting traditional family values may reflect deeply held convictions. But holding the right position does not necessarily make someone a good person.

A man can speak passionately about the importance of the family and still be a neglectful husband or father. What matters is not only what we believe, but how we behave.

Ordinary life provides far better tests of virtue.

How does a person treat his family? Does he keep his word when breaking it would be convenient? Does he admit when he is wrong? How does he speak to a relative who tries his patience, an employee who cannot help his career, or a waiter who makes a mistake?

No social media profile can tell us how a person behaves in those moments.

Parents and schools should teach that virtue is not something a person announces about himself. It grows from choices made day after day.

That means giving children real responsibilities and holding them accountable. They should be expected to finish what they begin, admit wrongdoing without making excuses, and occasionally do something kind without telling anyone about it. They already know how to show that they hold fashionable views. Adults need to teach them how to govern their own conduct and treat others fairly, including those with whom they strongly disagree.

This matters not only for the formation of individual character but for the health of the country. A society depends on citizens who accept responsibility, exercise restraint, honor their obligations, and deal honestly with one another. When virtue signaling replaces those habits, public life becomes angrier, harsher, and less capable of sustaining genuine disagreement.

America does not need another generation skilled at advertising its virtue.

It needs one capable of actually practicing it.

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

How can anyone escape the irony that in this year, as we celebrate 250 years since the signing of the American Declaration of Independence, the principles of that declaration are being widely challenged?

When Americans should be basking in the light of our hard-fought-for freedoms, standing guard on our God-given rights noted in that declaration, there are Americans ready to turn their back on them.

Candidates advocating socialism, the antithesis of “all Men … are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights,” are winning elections.

Michigan Democrat candidate for Senate Abdul El-Sayed invokes “Inshallah”—”God-willing” in Arabic—that he will have success overturning our God-given rights.

The Manhattan Institute’s Jesse Arm convincingly criticizes Rep. Haley Stevens, who lost by one point to El-Sayed, for then stepping up and endorsing him.

Business as usual in party politics says this is the thing to do—to support, in the end, the party.

But the differences between El-Sayed and Stevens were not policy technicalities. El-Sayed and his socialist comrades hate our great, free country and want to dismantle it. This is not something to endorse.

Confused, lost progressives—a good portion of whom have no religion and no church they attend—are joining hands with El-Sayed and his socialist comrades to eradicate American freedom.

But why are so many grazing out like sheep to slaughter?

I am thinking about the very great speech about the Declaration of Independence given by Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas last April at the University of Texas, Austin.

Thomas spoke of his childhood in the South, stained with racism and the history of slavery. Nevertheless, said Thomas, “it was universally believed among those Blacks with whom I lived and who had very little or no formal education, that in God’s eyes and under our Constitution, we were equal. … Somehow, without formal education, the older people knew that these God-given or natural rights preceded and transcended governmental power or authority.”

They understood that what was wrong in the country was where there was departure from the God-given principles of individual freedom that defined our founding.

It’s the same point that Martin Luther King Jr. made in his 1963 “I Have a Dream Speech,” which he concluded with “Free at last, Free at last, thank God Almighty, we are free at last.”

What can Republicans do?

Thomas asks how it could have been that in 1896, the Supreme Court endorsed, with just one dissent, “government-enforced racial segregation and validated the Jim Crow South” in the Plessy v. Ferguson decision. He asks in bewilderment how this decision, against everything our country is about, held for 60 years until it was overturned.

Why? Thomas notes it is not because “there are too few people who know what is right.” Rather, it is “because there are too few people who are willing to do what it takes to do the right thing, to sacrifice popularity, flattery, comfort, and security that are the purchase price for principle.”

In this 250th anniversary of our declaration, it is time to fight like never before for our principles, knowing our problems come from where we have departed from the principles of our founding.

We are drowning in debt because over the years we opened the door to progressivism/socialism.

That progressivism/socialism drives inflation, hampers our health care and retirement, and drives our kids to failing public schools.

And let’s remember, as the anniversary of Sept. 11, 2001, approaches, when some 3,000 Americans were killed, that there is evil in the world and those who hate us and want to kill us.

Where we need government is spending for our defense. But we don’t have the money because it’s being sucked into bankrupt government social programs.

This is the time that Republicans must be shining the light of our free nation under God and drive out the darkness that is creeping across our country.

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

Nothing is more natural when buying a house than looking into how safe the neighborhood is and, if you have or plan to have children, whether the schools are any good.

Yet the last Democrat presidential administration tried to prevent real estate agents from answering those kinds of questions because it prioritized “diversity” over safety and education.

The Trump administration revoked the de facto gag rule this year, but the damage the Biden administration inflicted is still being felt.

What’s worse, state regulations in New York and elsewhere still prevent real estate agents from speaking freely to homebuyers about crime and schools.

Interfering with homebuyers was a first-week priority for the Biden administration:

Six days after he was sworn into office, Joe Biden issued his directive establishing enforcement priorities for the Department of Housing and Urban Development that would scare real estate agents into remaining silent on two of the subjects most important to their clients.

“Diverse and inclusive communities strengthen our democracy,” the executive memorandum began.

What mom or dad wants their community to be “inclusive” of failing schools?

Who wants diversity to mean mixing criminals with innocent people?

Black families don’t want to live in dangerous or educationally dead-end neighborhoods any more than people of any other color do.

Yet too many progressives believe racial equality is best achieved by demolishing standards for everyone.

That was the effect of Biden’s memo, which made clear that racial politics and the doctrine of “disparate impact” would now guide HUD’s enforcement of federal housing laws.

The major online real estate companies understood immediately what was being demanded of them—Realtor.com and Zillow stopped providing crime data, while Redfin, going out of its way to embrace the party line, even posted a blog proclaiming, “Neighborhood crime data doesn’t belong on real estate sites.”

The National Association of Realtors put up a webpage in early 2023 titled “How to handle client questions about schools and neighborhoods,” which told realtors to point homebuyers to other sources of information rather than providing the facts themselves.

The page is loaded with the jargon of diversity, equity, and inclusion, but it also testifies to the association’s worry that fair-housing laws will be interpreted aggressively, with Realtors who do tell their clients too much running the risk of punishment.

The Trump administration this April announced that Realtors and other real estate agents should not feel intimidated—”the Fair Housing Act does not require withholding useful information on school quality and crime statistics,” HUD announced.

The “Dear Colleague” letter from Assistant Secretary Craig Trainor goes into considerable detail and “strongly urges” the real estate industry “to revisit ethics training materials and reconsider public statements that stifle real estate agent speech … “

But the New York Association of Realtors, for one, says it can’t do that because “NYSAR members may be subject to liability under (New York state) law” if they do speak frankly to homebuyers about schools and crime.

How many voters know some state governments—and, under the last Democrat administration, the federal government—are muzzling real estate agents in this way?

How many know how easily the industry rolled over when Biden decided to put homebuyers’ safety and their children’s education at risk?

What the Biden administration did was unethical, and the industry did a disservice to its clients by giving in—though perhaps the prospect of selling more homes in bad neighborhoods appealed to the least scrupulous members of the profession.

Buying a home is a trust-intensive process: It’s not only expensive, but it ranks alongside marriage as one the most consequential decisions anyone can make, holding the potential for decades of happiness or misery.

Buying a home is buying a future.

It isn’t right to withhold any information a family needs about the neighborhood, and state laws as well as federal ones must put homebuyers—of all races—first, above any political commitment to abstractions like diversity and inclusion.

The point of withholding information about crime and schools is to get more people to buy homes where they otherwise wouldn’t want to live.

What could be more wicked, more destructive, than that?

The intrepid journalist Helen Andrews, who’s never afraid of a controversy, deserves credit for calling attention to this corruption of the real estate industry in a recent essay for the web magazine Compact.

This is a big story, one that ought to be on voters’ minds as they think about the state and local elections, as well as federal ones, coming up in November.

If Americans don’t want their real estate providers gagged, they have to speak up themselves at the ballot box.

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

Democrat attorneys general have sued to block the Trump administration from accessing records on commercial driver’s licenses.

The Trump Department of Transportation has stepped up enforcement of commercial driver’s licensing rules, seeking more information from states to find unqualified truck drivers, including illegal immigrants. It has threatened to withhold about $10 million in funding if states don’t hand over the records.

However, Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul led a group of 21 Democrat-leaning states and the District of Columbia in filing two lawsuits in the Eastern District of Virginia, just over a year after an illegal immigrant truck driver caused a Florida Turnpike collision that killed three people.

“Yet again, the Trump administration has threatened to hold federal funding hostage in order to obtain personally identifiable information of millions of Americans for improper purposes,” Raoul said.

“This database was created 40 years ago so states could share information with each other to stop unsafe drivers from operating commercial vehicles, and the federal government’s decision to ransack that database puts the whole system in jeopardy,” he added. “I will continue to push back on the unnecessary and unlawful attempts of the Trump administration to misuse Americans’ most personal information.”

The state’s commercial licensing data is stored centrally with the American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators, an organization that represents state DMV officials. The federal agencies gave the association a deadline of Aug. 17 to share the information; when the association said it could not meet the deadline, the Department of Homeland Security subpoenaed the records.

The Department of Transportation contends the association operates the commercial driver’s license database under a federal government contract.

“Every administration since 1988 has had access to this basic database, so let’s be clear on what this ridiculous lawsuit is really all about,” Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said in a statement.

“These radical state AGs want to make it harder for my Department to enforce the rules of the road and easier for dangerous illegal immigrant truck drivers to operate a big rig,” Duffy added. “They may not care about keeping you and your family safe, but President [Donald] Trump and I do. We will fight this lawsuit tooth and nail to prevent more senseless crashes by unqualified drivers.”

Since Trump signed an executive order to restore integrity to the trucking industry in April 2025, the Department of Transportation says it has revoked 30,000 illegally issued commercial driver’s licenses across noncompliant states. It also removed about 10,000 fraudulent or unqualified commercial driver’s license training providers from the federal registry.

Both lawsuits name the Department of Transportation and the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration as defendants. The second also names the Department of Homeland Security.

The lawsuits claim the agencies are violating multiple federal privacy laws by secretly setting up their own database, and further claim the demand for data violates the Administrative Procedure Act.

The complaint says that, to approve a commercial driver’s license application, states validate the driver’s identity, medical fitness, immigration status, and each applicant’s licensing and driving history in any state where the driver could have been licensed. When a license is issued, states maintain a record of each driver that includes personally identifiable information such as the driver’s name, date of birth, Social Security number, driver’s license number, and the name of the state that provided the record.

Joining Illinois in the lawsuit are Democrat attorneys general from Virginia, California, the District of Columbia, Arizona, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Vermont, Washington, and Wisconsin. In Pennsylvania, which has a Republican attorney general, the governor’s office joined the lawsuit.

One of America’s most influential “experts” on combating hate just got arrested on charges of fraudulently funneling cash to white supremacist groups and financing her romantic relationship with a leader of a neo-Nazi group.

In a 2021 testimony to the House Committee on Veterans Affairs, Heidi Beirich declared, “There is no question that the major terrorism threat to the U.S. is coming from the far right.” That testimony forms part of her influence on federal policy, military policy, artificial intelligence companies, social media content moderation, and international advisory bodies.

Yet Beirich now stands accused of conspiring to create fake bank accounts to prop up the very extremism she has built a name for herself supposedly combatting.

Beirich Arrested

Federal authorities arrested Beirich Wednesday after a grand jury handed down an indictment charging her with wire fraud conspiracy, bank fraud conspiracy, and conspiracy to commit concealment money laundering.

Her arrest marked the first in a groundbreaking fraud case against the Southern Poverty Law Center, a left-leaning nonprofit known for bankrupting the Ku Klux Klan in the 1980s and for publishing a “hate map” of extremist organizations that includes mainstream conservative groups alongside Klan chapters.

The SPLC maintained an informant program, paying Klan members to report on violent plans before they took place. Prosecutors allege, however, that the SPLC secretly funneled donor cash to prop up the very hate groups it claims to exist to oppose.

Beirich had managed the SPLC’s “Intelligence Project,” the project behind the “hate map,” for eight years, but she also started a spin-off organization in 2020 called the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism. Through that group, she has contributed to the removal of content on social media and worked with the State Department under President Joe Biden, as well as with foreign governments and major philanthropies, as a supposed gatekeeper on extremism.

Yet, according to a superseding indictment unsealed Wednesday, she had been romantically involved with a member of the neo-Nazi group National Alliance, whom the indictment refers to as “F-9.” Their lifestyle was funded in part with donor money.

“Beirich was also in a relationship with F-9,” the indictment states. “During this relationship, Beirich and F-9 shared a house and two bank accounts.”

“Between 2015 and 2021, approximately $140,000 in donors’ money flowed from the SPLC operating account, through the Tech Writers account, and was ultimately deposited into the joint bank accounts held by F-9 and Beirich,” the indictment states. “This amounted to approximately 66% of all money ever deposited into their joint bank accounts. Beirich then used donors’ money to pay the couple’s personal living expenses.”

These new allegations raise serious concerns about Beirich’s influence and advocacy, which did not stop when she left the SPLC in December 2019.

Beirich’s Group

Big Tech, corporate America, banking institutions, and even the FBI have used the SPLC “hate map,” treating the SPLC as a gatekeeper and arbiter on “hate.” Beirich, along with another former SPLC staffer, led the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism to carve out a similar role for itself.

Like the SPLC, the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism uses a broad brush to define far-right extremism. The group frames opposition to mass immigration and transgender ideology as rooted in “hate,” “white supremacy,” or “Christian nationalism.”

However, the group openly admits that it “does not cover far-left extremism,” claiming far-left groups do not “attack individuals for their identity traits,” do not “advance rights-restricting agendas,” and that “far-left extremist movements have not in recent years engaged in mass violence in the manner that the far-right has.”

They found an eager audience in President Joe Biden’s administration, participating in the Biden State Department’s “Summit for Democracy” in 2021.

The Christchurch Call Advisory Network, created to call for social media censorship after a New Zealand terrorist killed 51 Muslims in 2019, added Beirich’s group as a member in 2021. The Biden State Department joined the Christchurch Call’s pledge to eliminate violent extremist content online in 2021.

Although Google told the Daily Signal the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism is not a priority flagger for YouTube and the organization does not appear on Meta’s website for political engagement, the group has repeatedly celebrated deplatforming moves from the former management of Twitter and from TikTok that followed its recommendations.

Craig Newmark Philanthropies, a charitable entity created by the founder of Craig’s List, partnered with the group on a project countering extremism and later renewed the partnership.

The AI company Anthropic mentions the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism on its “Transparency Hub” addressing “Terrorist and Violent Extremist Content.”

The Daily Signal reached out to the office of Biden, the Christchurch Call Advisory Network, Craig Newmark Philanthropies, and the offices of Democrats who chaired the committees to which Beirich testified. None responded by publication time.

These new allegations do not prove that all of Beirich’s research on extremism is wrong. They do, however, raise serious questions about the judgment of the institutions that elevated her as one of the country’s foremost arbiters of hate and extremism.

Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger is starting a new, bipartisan election integrity task force prior to the midterm elections.

The announcement comes following the announcement of the FBI’s investigation into 708 records of Fulton County’s 2020 election files.

Raffensperger commented on the members of the task force in an interview, the Georgia Recorder reported.

“This group here, they’re well-respected members of the community. They’re on both sides of the aisle, but they are also recognized as being fair brokers of the truth,” he said in an interview with the news outlet.

Mike Hassinger, public information coordinator for Raffensperger, commented on the purpose of the task force.

“The task force was created to examine any issues—including voter list maintenance, public transparency, election misinformation, best practices for election administration, and county compliance with existing laws, rules, and standards,” Hassinger told the Daily Signal.

Additionally, the members “will assist with regional election worker trainings, appear at roundtable policy discussions and help coordinate with local election officials on the ground,” according to the Georgia Recorder.

The task force will include members on both sides of the political aisle, including Democrats like former Gov. Roy Barnes and former Atlanta Mayor Shirley Franklin, and Republicans like former Sen. Saxby Chambliss and former Rep. Drew Ferguson.

Hassinger says that the new task force is another effort by the state and Raffensperger to ensure “secure elections.”

“Secretary Raffensperger has spent his two terms making sure that the state of Georgia has the most secure elections in America, and he intends to keep it that way through the remainder of his time in office,” he said.

“Georgia’s standards serve as a model for any state that needs to protect every legal vote and strengthen public confidence in the elections process.”

However, some have voiced distrust of the state’s voting system.

Mark Davis, president of Data Productions Inc. and a member of the Georgia Republican Party’s Election Confidence Task Force, pointed to the controversies surrounding the 2020 election, saying, “I don’t think we’re ever going to know how much double voting really happened in Georgia.”

Davis told the Daily Signal that he conducted a residency analysis of the 2020 election and found “thousands of residency violations.”

“About a minute later, I suddenly found myself staring at what I knew to be evidence of systemic irregularities in that election—data suggesting we’d had tens of thousands of residency violations as well as felony violations of other state and federal election laws,” he said.