California has introduced an official LGBT Business Enterprise certificate, which comes with all sorts of cool tax breaks if you're a certified gay. Sounds great, right? However, the state is doing its due diligence by testing all applicants to determine if they are gay enough.

'It all happened within eight seconds'

Michigan’s punitive law that generally requires individuals who do not possess a Michigan Concealed Pistol License to obtain a government-issued License to Purchase (“LTP”) before they can buy, possess, carry, or transport a pistol is the topic of a new lawsuit filed in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Michigan. On June ... Read more

The post NRA Files Challenge To Michigan’s Unjust Licensing Requirement For Gun Purchases appeared first on The Truth About Guns.

The United Arab Emirates (UAE) on Thursday became the first Arab nation to join the worldwide trend of banning social media for children. The UAE set a minimum age of 15, with mandatory age verification rules for providers.

The post United Arab Emirates Bans Social Media for Children Under 15 appeared first on Breitbart.

Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s video from Daily Signal Senior Contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to see more of his videos.

Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for the Daily Signal.

There’s been a lot of news lately about the university’s higher education crisis, and universities are now competing for students rather than students competing with each other to get into universities.  

Maybe the elite universities still, because of their brand name, although they’ve suffered a great deal and their admissions reflect that and their applications are down, they’ll always make it—the seven or eight so-called top tier. 

But most four-year colleges and universities are in a bad strait. And why is that? 

First of all, it’s demography. During the 1960s, the fertility rate reached, in 1960, about 3.6 children per family. It’s recovered a little bit the last three years, but it’s 1.7. So, the cohort of 17-, 18-, and 19-year-olds is less than half. 

So, they are competing for a much smaller pool of young people. 

The second thing that’s really turned people off is that tuition has increased, over the last 50 years, three times more than the annual rate of inflation.  

Now, why is that? 

Mostly it is because of administrative bloat.  

Where I work, at Stanford University, The Wall Street Journal recently suggested that if you count graduate and undergraduate students at Stanford, and you count administrators and their staff, there is roughly one administrator or staffer for every student. 

This is because the university became in loco parentis. It said, “I am a parent, and I’m going to monitor the 360-degree, 24/7 life of a student. If he’s not happy, we’re gonna deal with it. If somebody accuses you of sexual harassment, we’re gonna deal with it. We’re gonna deal with everything, and we’re going to try to be political. 

“Our job is not disinterested, inductive education. It is to turn out left-wing people who can offer an antithesis to the family, nuclear family, the community, religion, etc. We believe society is biased with corporations and family and religion, and we’re gonna offer an antithesis.

That turned off people, believe me. 

Professors themselves are unique in American life. Nobody else has the same conditions of employment. After six years, they get tenure. Outside the exclusive schools, it’s almost automatic. Where I worked at the [California State University], I think 90% of assistant professors got tenure. 

Release time is very common now. You can say, “I want to be a part-time administrator,” or “I am tutoring,” or “I have a special project,” and you can get a reduced teaching load. 

Remember that the teaching load has gone way down. In most colleges, it’s between two and four courses a year. A year. 

Maybe not at the CSU, but even CSU has gone down on many campuses. That’s the California State University system, the largest in the world. It has gone from four classes to three classes a semester. 

And part of the way that they finesse that was when you increase the administrative budget and you increase release time for full-time faculty and decrease teaching, you hire part-time, temporary lecturers, and you exploit them. 

You pay them about 40% per class of what you would pay a full or associate professor. You don’t really give them the same type of benefits. And at some universities, the percentage of courses that are taught by part-time, exploited lecturers is getting up to 40% and even 45%. 

Another thing that turned the public off about these universities: They grant-gouge. 

We’re starting to learn that, say, on NIH grants, many of these universities were charging not 10% or 15% commission, but 40% and even higher. 

In other words, if a professor got a million-dollar grant from the federal government, a university would step in and say, “Well, you’re using your office or your phone or your lab, so we want 40% of it.” 

And they use that because the whole system is financially unsound. Financially unsound. 

Largely because, again, of administrative bloat and the creation of centers and programs that have nothing to do with education but form a huge overhead. 

Another thing that got people very worried is another way they financed this debt, expanded their administrators, and cut back on teaching: They brought in over a million foreign students. 

And unlike American students, there are no scholarships. There are no discounts. Foreign students pay the premium, if not a little bit higher tuition. 

Now, the problem with that is when you bring in 300,000 students from China or over 200,000 from the illiberal Middle East, and when you look at the origin of most of these students, they are from autocratic and illiberal places in Africa, Asia, and the Western Hemisphere, particularly the Middle East and China. 

Then you start to politicize the student body, and you can see what happened after Oct. 7. 

We had enormous demonstrations, often led by foreign students, chanting, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” That’s essentially code for destroying the state of Israel. 

And we had violent demonstrations often led by people from the Middle East. 

And, of course, the FBI suggests that 1% to 5% of Chinese students are actively engaged in espionage. 

The public knows this, and they’re not fond of that idea—that sometimes their children don’t get into school because the universities are letting in foreign students because they pay a premium. 

DEI did damage—diversity, equity, inclusion. 

The idea that the universities, despite state referenda and Supreme Court decisions and the Civil Rights Act, were deliberately, consciously, insidiously using race as a barometer to admit people, to hire people, to retain people, and to promote people on the basis of their superficial appearance, their sexual orientation, or their gender. 

It was entirely anti-meritocratic. It was like the Soviet commissar system. It was like the McCarthy period. 

If you wanted to get a job at a university, you had to fill out, in most cases, a diversity statement. 

And believe me, if you wrote on that diversity statement, “Honestly, I believe that DEI is anti-meritocratic,” you were not going to be hired. 

There’s another reason that these universities are in crisis. 

The federal government came in and guaranteed student loans. 

Once they did that, the universities jacked up the rate of tuition, as I said, three times higher on an annual basis than the inflation rate. 

So the government came in and said, “You guys can loan students money, and we will back it up, so they will pay you back with federally guaranteed dollars.” 

And we know now that there’s a 30% to 35% non-compliance rate, that people are either late or have defaulted. 

And so, when you have $1.7 trillion in debt and you see that the debt is increasing because the students are not graduating in four years—the average graduation now is six years. 

About 30% to 40% of people who enter college do not ever graduate. 

But the whole thing is subsidized by loans from banks that are guaranteed by the federal government, and that gave a green light for universities to offer these crazy courses that nobody wants—peace studies, race studies, Black studies, environmental studies, etc., studies—because the students took them and the government paid for them. 

And nobody worried about whether they graduated or whether employers found a well-educated and empirical product coming out with a B.A. 

Finally, we’re short a couple million plumbers, electricians, blue-collar carpenters, sheet rockers, and roofers. 

These are very important to the economy of the United States. 

But when these universities said, “Come to us, and maybe even if you don’t graduate—40% of you—or if those who do average six years, and even though you’re gonna run up a big debt, you can take psych and sociology. It’s a good time to kind of float around, live in your basement, and have a good time in your 20s.” 

But the economy answered back: We’re wasting kids’ formative years in their 20s. 

We need master electricians. We need oil workers. We need skilled carpenters. 

And the irony is that if you graduate with a bachelor’s degree in psychology or sociology versus being a master electrician at the age of 22, the electrician these days is going to be making $100,000-plus, and the sociology B.A., or the person with two or three years of psychology, is either going to be unemployed or not using that education at all in employment. 

Or, if he is hired, he will be making half of what the electrician or the roofer or the carpenter makes. 

Add it all up, and the universities are in bad shape, and they’re in desperate need of coerced reform because they will not reform on their own. 

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

  

Mars Inc. is encountering unexpected challenges as it works to remove artificial food dyes from some of its products, underscoring the difficulties facing food manufacturers amid a broader push by the Trump administration to phase out synthetic color additives. The maker of...

Thursday on MS NOW's "The Moment," Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA) said people in the Trump administration were "unworthy of their positions" when asked about the Department of Justice investigation into him and his wife.

The post Newsom: Many in Trump Administration Are ‘Unworthy of Their Positions’ appeared first on Breitbart.

During an appearance on Fox News Channel's "The Ingraham Angle," Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) said that while details about the terms of the agreement between Iran and the United States were not clear, there had been substantive improvements in Iran's ability to develop a nuclear weapon.

The post Hawley: Iran’s Nuclear Program ‘Buried Under 1,000 Feet of Rubble,’ ‘Not Going Anywhere’ appeared first on Breitbart.

Vice President JD Vance on Thursday lashed out at Israeli critics of the Iran deal, saying President Donald Trump is Israel's only true ally and pointing to billions of dollars in U.S. military assistance.Vance defended the agreement reached this week to wind down the war...

“Scroll less and live best” is the catchy message of the new 43-page report “Surgeon General’s Warning on the Harms of Screen Use.” The implicit message that spending hours doomscrolling is not the best way to live is practically common sense, yet easier said than done.

Published in May, the advisory enumerates a litany of statistics linking excessive screen use to poor developmental, mental and physical health, and educational outcomes in children and teens. The document is more than just a warning. It also provides common-sense recommendations in the form of “the 5 Ds” (discuss, do, delay, divert, and disconnect) to help families navigate their children’s healthy use of screens.

If the impact of previous surgeon general reports is any precedent, the new advisory could reshape common norms and practices of American households.

The “Surgeon General’s Warning on the Harms of Screen Use” joins a long list of influential surgeon general reports, including one that transformed American health over 60 years ago: the “Surgeon General’s Report on Smoking and Health.” The 1964 report linked cigarette smoking to lung cancer and other poor health outcomes, launching one of the most important public health campaigns. Since then, cigarette smoking rates have fallen 73% among U.S. adults, avoiding an estimated 8 million American premature deaths.

Given that 97% of Americans own a smartphone and 81% of parents and 57% of children spend between four and 12 hours a day online, the latest surgeon general’s report could transform Americans’ relationship to their screens if they heed its advice.

Like the 2023 advisory on social media and youth mental health, the advisory on screens is less revelatory as it is confirmative and timely. Summer months for families means kids are at home with more free time: the perfect time to create a family media plan or even go on a digital detox.

For parents who are unbothered by their children’s screentime, consider this statistic from the report: “By adolescence, children may spend more time on screens than sleeping or attending school.”

The report’s emphasis on the role of families and responsibilities parents have in shaping practices in their home is noteworthy. The advisory urges families to “be present in the moment,” “connect with children without a distraction,” and “delay screen time for as long as possible.”

The report encourages parents to model healthy screen habits themselves, treating families not only as regulators of children’s digital practices, but also as their primary guides to developing healthy technology habits. This recognition is critical. Acknowledging the household’s role in shaping digital citizenship is vital to developing holistic, family-centered policies.

Policies regarding children’s technology use should reflect an existential truth: technology should be shaped to serve the home; the home should not be shaped to serve technology. Parents hoping to form a well-ordered household can look at the advisory’s suggestions as a basic starting point to achieve that vision.

While the advisory does not implement policy or regulations, its data-driven safeguards and practices rightly center on the institution which most impacts children—the family.  

However, it’s not fair for parents to bear the brunt of this fight. In addition to families, the report provides recommendations to schools, health providers, researchers, policymakers, and technology companies. Without proper guardrails, tech companies will continue to exploit people’s fallible ways, monopolize attention, and influence the minds of children, all of which serves technology over humans.

The surgeon general’s warning does not condemn all technology digital screen time. It recognizes that connecting with friends and family members, researching interests, and learning new skills and hobbies are joyful experiences—ones that serve humans. But it also fundamentally acknowledges that living real life means disconnecting from screens. In other words, “scroll less, live best.”

'Agents launched a probe into a criminal matter.'

NASHVILLE, TN — While commemorating the film's 20th anniversary, former Vice President Al Gore explained that while An Inconvenient Truth did not prove to be accurate, it did make him incredibly rich.

Migrants awaiting processing for deportation at a community hall in the eastern South African city of Durban staged a protest on Wednesday and wound up in pitched battle with police, who used rubber bullets and stun grenades to disperse the crowd.

The post Police Battle Migrant Protesters at South African Deportation Facility appeared first on Breitbart.

Dozens of senior Iranian officials and military commanders were eliminated during Operation Epic Fury, including Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

The post Iran Reaches Peace Deal Having Lost Dozens of Its Top Officials appeared first on Breitbart.

HOUSTON, TX — News broke this afternoon that Pastor Joel Osteen kicked congregant Jeff Janovec off the church softball team after Janovec reportedly wrote a Bible verse on his Lakewood Church team hat.

Socialist City Councilwoman Janeese Lewis George won Washington D.C.’s Democratic mayoral primary putting her on track to be the deep blue city’s next leader. Lewis George won 52.9% of the first choice vote, beating out her closest challenger former City Councilman Kenyan McDuffie who garnered 36.4%, the Associated Press reported Thursday with 75% of the […]