First Lady Melania Trump unveiled the White House Christmas decorations on Monday, wearing winter's most coveted coat -- the 2010s military jacket.

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Former President Joe Biden’s catastrophic administration sometimes feels like a bad dream. Nonetheless, memories of the Biden years, no matter how unpleasant or trivial, must never fade. Monday on the […]

The post Jill Biden's Nightmarish Christmas Display Goes Viral as Melania Trump Unveils Classy Holiday Decor appeared first on The Western Journal.

U.S. — Following a difficult year that saw the party lose the White House to Donald Trump and both houses of Congress to Republican control, a new survey revealed that Democrats' poll numbers had surged among the key narcoterrorist demographic.

Should the Trump administration or the courts determine whether an illegal alien qualifies for asylum due to threats of persecution, when the facts are not in dispute?

Supreme Court justices pressured a Justice Department lawyer on that issue Monday.

The case involves Salvadoran national Douglas Humberto Urias-Orellana, who claims he faced threats to his life from a hitman in his country. He illegally entered the United States in June 2021 during the Biden administration’s border surge. 

The question before the justices is whether federal courts should defer to the executive branch’s judgment on immigration deportation cases when facts are not in dispute. In this case, the federal court deferred to the Justice Department’s determination that the case did not constitute persecution. Plaintiffs argue the courts should make that interpretation.

For this reason, the plaintiffs did not focus on the hitman’s threat in the legal arguments, which seemed to perplex Justice Sonia Sotomayor. 

“I actually don’t understand why a credible death threat would not always cause suffering or harm,” Sotomayor said. “Are you arguing something quite different?”

Nicholas Rosellini, arguing for the plaintiffs, said, “We did not make that argument explicitly before the First Circuit.”

He added in the appellate court arguments, the government argued entirely for judicial deference to the Bureau of Immigration Appeals. 

“Deciding whether undisputed facts qualifies persecution under the law involves legal interpretation, not fact finding,” Rosellini told the court. “Courts have repeatedly established legal principles on things like sexual violence, religious persecution, economic deprivation, and beyond. The court did not establish those principles by pondering the term ‘persecution’ in the abstract. They interpret the law by applying the persecution standard to particular sets of undisputed facts.”

Arguing for the government, Justice Department lawyer Joshua Dos Santos said the Supreme Court has spoken to the issue in the 1992 case of Immigration and Naturalization Service v. Elias-Zacarias. In that case, the high court found a Guatemalan man could not seek asylum in the United States because an anti-government guerrilla group sought to force him into military service. 

Dos Santos added that Congress passed reforms of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, which reviews rules adopted by federal agencies, and the government’s standard for “persecution” is thoroughly reviewed by the executive branch. 

“There’s no way, no realistic chance, that when Congress was overhauling standards of review, in OIRA, … that it was either unaware of that practice, or silently departing from it,” Dos Santos said. 

Justice Brett Kavanaugh questioned giving too much deference to the executive branch without judicial review, and pressed Dos Santos. 

Dos Santos replied that the Bureau of Immigration Appeals and federal immigration judges “have expertise in looking at recurring fact patterns, and seeing all kinds of different versions of these cases, far more cases than any court of appeals is ever going to see.”

Immigration judges are Justice Department officials, and not members of the federal judiciary. The same is true of the Board of Immigration Appeals, which upheld the immigration judge’s decision in this case.

After the Department of Homeland Security sought removal of Urias-Orellana and his family, the family applied for asylum based on persecution. Urias-Orellana also sought protection under the United Nations’ “Convention Against Torture.”

Urias-Orellana contends his association with his half-brother Juan puts his life in danger. Under the Immigration and Naturalization Act, asylum seekers who have been denied relief by the Board of Immigration Appeals can appeal to federal courts. 

A federal immigration judge denied the family’s applications for asylum, and determined this did not amount to persecution, or demonstrated reasonable fear of future persecution if they returned to El Salvador. As for the U.N. anti-torture claim, the judge found he didn’t report his harassment to the police. The BIA upheld the judge’s determination.

After that, the plaintiffs appealed the case to the First Circuit Court of Appeals, which found it should defer to the Board of Immigration Appeals’ decision since facts were not in dispute.

The post Who Decides Whether an Illegal Immigrant Gets Asylum for ‘Persecution?’ Supreme Court Weighs Arguments appeared first on The Daily Signal.

Parents are growing increasingly concerned about the prevalence of technology in classrooms, and the negative side effects that change is fueling among children nationwide.

Ever since the COVID-19 pandemic pushed schools to remote learning, many have only grown increasingly reliant on technology, shifting assignments into digital forms and handing every student a computer or tablet to aid their education in the classroom. But after seeing their kids become angrier, less sociable, and less educated, parents are asking where the teachers have gone.

“What are we doing with an iPad all day, for eight hours a day in our kids’ hands?” Patricia McCoy, a mother of four in Wyoming, told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “Honestly, it’s disturbing. They give your kids worksheets on the iPad. There’s no actual critical thinking happening because they’re given apps to replace the teachers.”

Even when parents ask for additional help for their struggling children, the solution at some schools always comes back to more technology.

“If your kid is struggling in math, instead of giving them tutoring, they’re going to recommend to you that your child use this app on their iPad to help teach them how to do this math,” McCoy continued. “But that app doesn’t teach them how to do the math. They enter the problem and it gives them the solution all written out and worked out, so there’s no critical thinking being done. The answer is being given to them. They have ChatGPT at the ready, and other things similar to ChatGPT, which, again, does all the thinking for them. And all they have to do is show up, log into the iPad, get the answers from one app, put it into another app and get the grade.”

This has some parents wondering where the teachers have gone and whether they are teaching their students at all.

“They Don’t Want to Teach”

“COVID did create a lot of this, and it made it a lot easier for some of the teachers now to just place these kids in front of a screen,” Mike Maldonado, a California father of five, told the DCNF. “And it makes it easier for some of these teachers because they don’t want to teach. They’re just there for a job.”

“We can’t ignore the fact that all this stuff makes it easier on the teacher, which actually, I think produces a worse result,” Jaime Brennan, member of the Frederick County Board of Education who spoke on behalf of herself and not the board, told the DCNF. “When a teacher can go online and make up an assignment using AI, now they haven’t thought. Now they’re not using their brainpower, and it’s like a trickle-down effect. We’ve already introduced screens and technology to the level that as humans, I don’t think we were designed to use, and we haven’t adapted to it very well.”

Critically, Brennan said, the use of AI has prevented students from developing automaticity, the skill of memorizing basic solutions, such as simple addition, to the point that you do not even think about it, which is a foundational skill students carry on throughout their education and adult life.

McCoy told the DCNF that the digital learning environment has left her youngest son academically “two to three years behind” his siblings, who did not go through this new screen-based school system.

“He is drastically farther behind academically,” McCoy said. “He does what he needs to to pass, but intellectually and academically, he is years behind his two brothers and his sister at this age, and that is sad and heartbreaking as a mother to know that I probably failed my child because I went along with what the school said was going to help them.”

Despite being “years behind,” McCoy’s son is on track to graduate on time.

“We graduate kids who have to go to community college and take remedial math,” Brennan mentioned. “Our kids leave 12th grade and they go to 13th grade. So we’re putting out kids that are not ready to operate in the regular world.”

Possessed by the Screen

Not only is she worried about his education, the concerned mom has seen a noticeable shift in her son’s mood as he is forced to rely on more and more screen time.

“I tried to take my son’s phone away one time, and it looked like a demon was looking back at me. My son was not looking at me,” McCoy recalled. “His eyes were completely black and cold. It was like he was a totally other person, like a drug addict, and you’re taking their drug from them. And he was 15 at the time.”

Without his phone, McCoy said her son was a new person.

“That week, he was a totally different person. He wasn’t overly tired and drowsy all day. He was actually interacting with the family and spending time with us. Instead of being shut down and closed off in his room, he was playing with our dogs more,” McCoy said. 

Maldonado thinks these behavioral issues stem partly from the lack of human interaction children experience in increasingly screen-dependent classrooms.

“Part of the problem is that they’ve lost a lot of the interaction,” Maldonado said. “This is why some of these kids I think act out, because they don’t want to listen to the teacher. There has to be that communication between two people, two humans, and not a screen where they can’t really interact and get the tone, the voice inflection of a response.”

“That is a major issue,” Maldonado continued. “Without social skills, how do you function in society? And we see it all the time. Social skills are definitely learned, it’s a trait that you pick up from interacting with people when you’re young. And that’s the big thing, people don’t realize that if there’s no interaction, that person is going to be withdrawn, not just from the classroom, but from the home and from society.”

The issue is especially apparent in children who were younger during the COVID year, Maldonado said. The so-called COVID babies are typically “the ones who you can see have the majority of the behavioral issues.”

“It is hard to get some of these kids to actually look you in the eye and make eye contact. They don’t know human interaction,” Brennan concurred, adding that students today are not even dating as much as they used to. “I’m really concerned where that’s going to lead, and what our kids are going to be like. We’re already seeing negative impacts of kind of this disintegration, people are waiting till later to getting married. They’re not getting married.”

The Price America Is Paying

Meanwhile, as the use of artificial intelligence (AI) among youth increases, more data and stories are coming out revealing the tool often exposes children to inappropriate content, damages the development of critical thinking skills, and at times, drives kids to suicide by explicitly coaching them to do so. Brain scans from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) revealed that brain engagement was severely diminished under participants who used AI compared to those who used a traditional search engine, and memory recall following assignments completed with AI tanked.

Interestingly, schools that struggle with budget concerns and often fail to see promised districtwide staff raises somehow find funds to buy brand-new devices for every student—even when they already had slightly older, but still functional devices.

“Most of [the money goes] to administration and fees and other things that have nothing to do with the education of our kids, or they spend it on these expensive iPads and technology that shouldn’t even be in the classrooms, and then they go to the state and say, ‘You’re not giving us enough money. We need more money,’” McCoy told the DCNF. “Well, we keep throwing money at the problem, but the problem doesn’t get better or go away. It gets worse every year. So clearly, money isn’t solving the issue on why our kids can’t read, write and do math.”

“Stop spending the money on the iPads and put that money back in the classrooms instead,” McCoy continued. “Give it to the teachers.”

While Tina Descovich, co-founder and CEO of parental advocacy group Moms for Liberty, mirrors the concerns of many parents, she also told the DCNF there could be a place for technology in the classroom.

“I think they have to be used in a very responsible fashion,” Descovich said. “There’s so many wonderful teachers that would like to use AI in a way to help enhance their skills and teach their children better.”

Moms for Liberty signed a pledge with the White House in September to help foster innovation and interest in AI with America’s youth.

Brennan remains concerned that technology in the classroom prevents kids from thinking independently and may harm future skill building rather than facilitate an interest or expertise in technology.

“Are you trying to keep pace with the kids who are learning to use the technology, or are you trying to create the kids who are going to develop the technology? Because those are two different things,” Brennan said. “So if we’re just teaching our kids to be technology consumers, then sure, the easy way out is to do everything on the technology. If you’re trying to keep teach kids to be the technology developers, they need to learn to think and process away from the technology. They need to have other skills that are not technology based.”

Parents Still Have Power

For parents concerned about the technological takeover of their children’s classrooms who feel like their schools aren’t listening to them, Descovich said that along with helping their kids at home when possible, parents should “rally with likeminded parents.”

“Start educating your community,” Descovich said. “I think when parents really understand what’s happening and what the concerns are and what the risks are, they will want to take action. And when you have enough parents showing up at school board meetings and speaking about an issue we have, as we know, you definitely can make an impact, and they will listen.”

Originally published by the Daily Caller News Foundation

The post ‘No Critical Thinking’: Parents Sound Alarm as Tech Begins to ‘Replace the Teacher’ appeared first on The Daily Signal.

In his opening essay, Jesse Merriam calls for a more positive, more substantive, and more ambitious legal conservatism. An almost exclusive focus on originalism, he suggests, has made the conservative legal movement too narrow, technocratic, and reactive. Merriam argues it has become overly concerned with means, such as the correct rules of constitutional interpretation, instead of ends, like securing the common good. It is too preoccupied with correcting old wrongs, like reversing erroneous precedents, instead of achieving positive results, such as fostering the conditions of a virtuous and orderly society. The scions of legal conservatism, Merriam contends, should learn from the great legal-political movements of the past like the New Deal and the civil rights movement and seek, through legal and political activism, to build the kind of legal order necessary to restore the nation’s traditional political identity.

Merriam concludes his argument by warning that “The future of legal conservatism depends on whether the movement can break its own institutional habits and dare to articulate a new constitutional morality for the demographic and spiritual crises of our age—the crises of belonging, fertility, and meaning—and align jurisprudence with the task of civilizational renewal.” This is probably asking what no legal or political movement can accomplish. Any successful practical undertaking must bear in mind the difference between a laudable ambition, on the one hand, and unrealistic expectations, on the other. Nevertheless, I am sympathetic to the general thrust of Merriam’s pitch, but with certain important qualifications.

He is certainly correct that conservatism must be about more than just conserving the Constitution understood as a written document. Without a positive governing agenda, this project is a loser, both politically and in substance. American voters rightly expect politicians who seek public office to propose something constructive for the government to do—to preserve what is good about our society and improve it where possible. This is the lesson of the repeated failure of mere constitutionalists to capture the nomination of the Republican Party and then win the presidency.

Much of what makes America a good nation is not required by our written Constitution. It is possible, after all, to succeed in getting the Supreme Court to jettison the judicially invented “right” to abortion and still have a nation in which abortion is common because most states permit it. To take another example of current interest, the Constitution permits the federal government to pursue a policy of absolute open borders, on the one hand, or, on the other, to impose a complete ban on any immigration at all. The right kind of immigration policy will promote the common good, and the wrong kind will be ruinous—but the Constitution provides no specific guidance on this question.

Generally speaking, a society that seeks to be healthy, strong, and happy will encourage citizens to develop the traditional virtues, to work in dignified professions, to get married, to have and raise children, to worship God, and to help their communities. Yet we can follow the written Constitution without achieving any of these essential ends. Preservation of the Constitution, then, ought to be understood as a necessary but not sufficient condition of a successful conservative political and legal movement.

A Virtuous Profession

Accordingly, Merriam is also right that a useful legal conservatism needs to focus not only on litigation and adjudication but also on political and legal activism in the service of preserving (or restoring) the essentials of our civilization.

His argument calls to mind Alexis de Tocqueville’s no longer accurate account of the American legal profession in his classic, Democracy in America. Tocqueville found the lawyers of the 19th century to be one of the most naturally conservative elements in American society. The legal profession Tocqueville observed was deeply attached to traditional civilizational standards, and determined to preserve them from the progressive forces unleashed by modern democracy, with its indifference to tradition and form.

Nowadays, many lawyers seem to think of a legal career as a vocation for social transformation. This is a serious problem for America, and the conservative legal movement ought to dedicate thoughtful reflection and resources to correcting it. Fixing this problem, however, cannot be accomplished by litigation—it can only happen by reforming American legal education, which in turn requires that those who pay for such education take an interest in this important question.

I also agree with Merriam that legal conservatism, to the extent that it maintains a necessary focus on judicial appointments, should take an interest in the virtues required to be a good judge besides mere skill in legal interpretation.

Much of the work judges do—work that must be done well in a good society—does not even raise difficult questions of legal interpretation, much less of constitutional meaning. It rather requires judges to use their legitimate legal discretion prudently in the service of a just and orderly society. Obviously, we do not need or want judges who subscribe uncritically to the view that criminal defendants are really the victims of an unjust society. Good judges should be skeptical of all novel legal theories, especially ones presented by activist lawyers trying to change the character of our society. And good judges will be respectful of the rights of all citizens, including criminal defendants and the most unpopular litigants.

Limits of the Judicial Power

Despite my sympathy with Merriam’s critique, the conservative legal movement must maintain its commitment to originalism as the correct—and properly American—approach to constitutional interpretation.

In the first place, originalism is more than just a formal or procedural principle for interpreting the Constitution. It also involves living in continuity with our Founding—a worthy goal that appeals to the moral imagination of conservative voters, and American voters more broadly.

More specifically, originalism is essential to preserving a core aspect of our national identity: self-government under the rule of law. In America, the people govern, but under the limits imposed by the Constitution as our fundamental law. Our freedom as a self-governing people depends on the majority being subject to the Constitution, not to the discretion or will of someone in a political office. The rule of law is not the same thing as rule by judges—even by conservative judges seeking defensible outcomes. Originalism in constitutional interpretation is necessary to ensure that judges are interpreting and applying the law, not inventing it.

Moreover, this judicial discipline of being bound by the original meaning of the Constitution involves the exercise of a virtue that is necessary to safeguarding the moral quality of our civilization: honesty. As a condition of entering into the judicial office, all judges take an oath to uphold the law and the Constitution—and that is all they should be doing. As Alexander Hamilton indicated in The Federalist, the proper execution of the judicial duty requires that “nothing be consulted except the Constitution and the laws.”

For these reasons, the kind of conservative legal movement for which Merriam calls must remain mindful of the proper limits of the judicial power and not give in to the temptation to try to impose outcomes—however desirable they may be—that are not really required by the Constitution.

To take one obvious and important example, a robust legal conservatism will seek to preserve and strengthen the family based on marriage between a man and a woman. In pursuing that aim, it would be proper, among many other necessary steps, to try to get the Supreme Court to reverse its constitutionally groundless holding in Obergefell v. Hodges that the Constitution requires legal recognition of same-sex marriage. A conservative Court would abuse its power, however, if it were to hold that states have no right to recognize same-sex marriage if their voters choose to do so.

As this example indicates, there are limits to what judges can do to preserve or renew civilization in a self-governing society. If a community is so foolish and lacking in elementary respect for justice and its own interests as to eliminate cash bail or to elect prosecutors who give a free pass to certain kinds of crime, there is not much that judges can do about that.

Merriam suggests that civilizational renewal is possible “if there is a will” for it. He is right. And this renewal ought to be the work of a serious conservative legal and political movement.

The post Mere Constitutionalists Are Not Enough appeared first on The American Mind.

A new collaboration between JP Sauer and Field Ethos, the Exception 9.3×62 Sauer 100, is a new offering that I think fills a rare gap in today’s rifle market. Built on a modern Sauer 100 action, the 9.3x62mm Mauser version of the rifle is meant to give you the same power and precision that historical ... Read more

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Christmas got political in Portland, Oregon, on Friday night during the city's 41st-annual holiday celebration.

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House Democrat Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) on Monday wrote that President Donald Trump and congressional Republicans "don't give a damn" about the cost of health care and called for a "handful of Republicans" to back a clean extension of enhanced Obamacare subsidies.

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Brent Dusing could have gained the world. After selling his mobile coupon company, CellFire, for $108 million, his options were limitless. But a crisis in America nudged his soul. As […]

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