Federalist Press | Defending Liberty — Informing America

Breaking News and Political Commentary

Heroes Fought Back: The Oregon School Shooting That Proved One Man’s Life Mission

By Leave a Comment

Three children and a young teacher died when a gunman attacked an elementary school in Bend. But many more may be alive because two ordinary citizens refused to remain victims — putting into practice the principle that the late school-safety trainer Dave Acosta spent years teaching across America.

There are stories Americans have heard far too many times. A gunman enters a school. Shots ring out. Children and teachers hide behind desks and locked doors. Frantic calls pour into 911 while police race toward a scene where every passing second can mean another life. Thursday’s horror at Silver Rail Elementary School in Bend, Oregon, began much that way. But it did not end that way.

This time, two people inside and immediately outside the school did something extraordinary: They fought back. One was a teacher who found herself face-to-face with an armed attacker. She threw her cellphone at him, tackled him and struggled for control of his shotgun. The other was Kaylub Giamanco, a 36-year-old Bend carpenter and father of two girls who attend Silver Rail. He saw what was happening, retrieved a legally possessed handgun from his vehicle, followed the shooter into the school and ran toward the sound of gunfire. When Giamanco reached the classroom, he found the teacher already fighting the attacker. Giamanco fired, and the attack was over before police could reach the gunman.

Bend Police Chief Mike Krantz believes their actions saved lives, saying the teacher “almost certainly helped prevent more bloodshed.” The gunman still had dozens of rounds of ammunition available when the attack was stopped.

What happened inside that Oregon classroom is also a remarkable reminder of another man — one who died six years ago and therefore never knew the names Kaylub Giamanco or Silver Rail Elementary School. His name was Dave Acosta, and preparing Americans for precisely this moment became his life’s mission.

Horror Arrives at an Elementary School

Shortly before 1 p.m. Thursday, October 15, a witness driving near Silver Rail Elementary saw something alarming: a teenager threw a gun over the school’s fence and then climbed over it. When the witness confronted him, the teenager responded by firing at the man’s truck, striking it at least three times. The driver escaped and placed the first 911 call at 12:59 p.m., beginning a frantic police response to what was already developing into a deadly attack.

Police identified the gunman as 16-year-old Griffin J. John II, a former Silver Rail student armed with a 12-gauge pump-action shotgun. When he reached the school’s locked double doors, rather than being deterred by the security measure, he fired through the glass panes and forced his way inside. He then entered a special-education classroom and opened fire, discharging as many as 15 rounds before two extraordinary acts of resistance brought the attack to an end. Investigators had not yet announced a motive.

The human cost was nevertheless devastating. Three children, ages 5, 8 and 11, and 25-year-old teacher Meghan Lambert were killed. A 7-year-old girl was seriously wounded, while another teacher, 54, was wounded but expected to survive. Lambert was at the beginning of a career devoted to children; Silver Rail was her first teaching job, and her family remembered her as compassionate, big-hearted and someone who “always fought for the underdog and those with special needs.” The youngest child killed was 5-year-old Rhoam Summer, while the families of the other two boys initially asked that their names remain private.

It was an almost incomprehensible loss. Yet the events that unfolded during the final moments of the attack provide compelling reason to believe that the death toll could have been considerably worse.

A Father Saw the Gunman — and Ran Into the School

Kaylub Giamanco had perhaps the most understandable reason imaginable to stay outside the building: his two daughters were somewhere inside it. He was not a police officer responding under a professional obligation to confront the gunman. He was a carpenter and a father who suddenly found himself watching an armed teenager attack the elementary school attended by his children.

Giamanco had witnessed the attacker shooting at the first man’s truck and then watched him blast his way through the school’s locked doors. At that moment, he faced a decision that few people will ever confront. Police had been called and were racing toward Silver Rail. Giamanco could have remained outside, taken cover and waited for trained officers to arrive. No reasonable person could have condemned him for doing so.

Instead, according to police, Giamanco retrieved the .40-caliber pistol that he legally kept secured in his vehicle. Then he turned back toward the school.

He went in.

Not knowing exactly where his daughters were, not knowing precisely where the shooter was, and not knowing what he would encounter on the other side of those shattered doors, Giamanco entered the building through the same entrance the attacker had just breached. He followed the sound of gunfire deeper into the elementary school, moving toward the danger from which every natural instinct would ordinarily tell a person to flee.

What he encountered when he reached the classroom was equally remarkable. Someone else had already decided not to remain a victim.

The Teacher Who Refused to Surrender

The teacher has not been publicly identified, but what police say she did deserves to be remembered. Faced with a teenager wielding a 12-gauge shotgun, she threw her cellphone at him and then physically attacked him, tackling the gunman and struggling with him for possession of the weapon.

She was not a police officer or a SWAT operator. She was a schoolteacher in a classroom where children were being shot. There was nowhere else for those children to go, and so she did something that required extraordinary courage: she attacked the person trying to kill them.

That struggle was underway when Giamanco entered. He saw the teacher wrestling with the shooter and fired multiple rounds, killing the attacker and bringing the massacre to an end. At approximately 1:02 p.m. — only about three minutes after the first 911 call — arriving officers learned that the suspect had already been shot by a community member.

The speed of the police response deserves recognition. Three minutes from the first emergency call to the arrival of officers is remarkably fast. But those same three minutes demonstrate the terrible arithmetic of an active-shooter attack. By the time police arrived, four innocent people had already been killed and others wounded. The people who were already there had been forced to make decisions before professional help could reach them.

Police say the gunman still possessed approximately 44 rounds of ammunition when he was stopped. No one can know how many more people he would have shot had the teacher not attacked him or had Giamanco waited outside for police. But a teenager who had already fired repeatedly inside an elementary classroom and still possessed dozens of additional rounds plainly retained the ability to continue killing.

The teacher disrupted the attack. The armed father ended it.

“Prepare to Be the Solution”

Years before Silver Rail, Dave Acosta summarized his philosophy in five words:

“Prepare to be the solution.”

Those words appear near the beginning of his book, VICTIMS NO MORE! Fighting Back Against An Active Shooter.

In Victims No More! Fighting Back Against an Active Shooter, veteran SWAT officer and international security expert Dave Acosta drew upon decades of real-world tactical experience to teach ordinary people how to survive the unthinkable. Through his Fight Back Nation program, Acosta trained thousands of teachers and school employees to move beyond helplessness—to escape when possible, protect those in their care, and, when there is no other choice, fight back. His message was simple and urgent: “Prepare to be the solution.”

I knew Dave, and I helped him tell that story. He had spent his adult life around violence most Americans thankfully never experience. Acosta began his law-enforcement career in Las Vegas and spent years in specialized assignments, including six years as the point man on the North Las Vegas SWAT Team. He later worked as an international tactical instructor and led high-risk protection teams in Iraq, Afghanistan, Africa, Mexico and Central and South America. His biography credited him with more than 1,800 real-world tactical missions.

Yet one of the causes that eventually consumed him wasn’t protecting diplomats or training elite tactical teams. It was protecting schoolchildren. Dave founded Fight Back Nation and began teaching teachers, administrators and school employees what to do during the few terrifying minutes between the first shot and the arrival of police. His objective was not to turn teachers into commandos. It was to teach ordinary people that they were not helpless.

Survive the Minutes Before Help Arrives

The foundation of Acosta’s program was the familiar principle RUN — HIDE — FIGHT. If you can safely escape, escape. If you cannot escape, secure yourself behind a locked door. And if the attacker reaches you and there is nowhere else to go, fight. But Dave believed that the third word was too often treated almost as an afterthought.

Law enforcement had changed dramatically after Columbine. Instead of assembling outside and waiting for specialized teams, officers in many jurisdictions were trained to enter immediately and move toward the gunfire. Dave praised that transformation, writing that responding officers were willing to run “into the gunfight because every second counts.”

But even an extraordinary police response takes time. Dave therefore posed a different and critically important question: What can the people already inside the school do during those minutes? His mission, he wrote, was to give schools the knowledge to become their own first responders until police arrived.

That distinction became terribly relevant in Bend. Police responded extraordinarily quickly. The first 911 call came at 12:59 p.m., and officers arrived at approximately 1:02. Yet by then four innocent people had already been killed. The attack had also already been stopped by people who were there when it began. Three minutes can be an eternity when someone is firing a weapon inside a classroom.

Dave Acosta Believed Teachers Could Fight Back

One of the most memorable sections of Victims No More! describes teachers arriving at Acosta’s training frightened by the very idea of discussing a school massacre. At one pilot training session, several elementary teachers told administrators they could barely tolerate thinking about someone attacking their children. Two wanted to leave, but they were persuaded to remain as long as they could tolerate the training.

Two hours later, according to the account in the book, their attitude had completely changed. They wanted more training. The difference wasn’t that they suddenly stopped fearing school shootings; they had learned that they could do something about one. The book describes the transformation as a movement from potential victim to “capable and confident protector.”

That was perhaps the most important thing Dave taught. Fear can produce paralysis. Training provides a plan. A plan can produce decisive action when seconds matter, and action can save lives.

What Dave Taught Happened in Bend

That is what makes the events at Silver Rail so striking. There is no indication that the teacher who attacked the gunman had ever met Dave Acosta or attended Fight Back Nation training, nor is there evidence that Giamanco had. But their behavior illustrated almost perfectly the principle at the heart of his work: Run if you can. Hide if you must. Fight when you have no alternative.

The teacher could not run. Children were being shot in her classroom, and she did not wait passively for someone else to arrive. She threw what she had — her cellphone — and attacked. Giamanco was in an entirely different position. He was outside the school and therefore could have remained outside. Yet his own children, along with hundreds of other people’s children, were somewhere in that building. He retrieved his legally possessed handgun and deliberately went toward the sound of gunfire.

One disrupted the attack. The other ended it. Together they bought something extraordinarily valuable: time — the very commodity Dave Acosta spent years teaching schools they could not afford to waste.

Dave Wanted Schools to Prepare as Seriously for Shooters as They Do for Fires

Acosta made another argument that deserves renewed consideration after Bend. American schools practice relentlessly for fires. Students learn evacuation routes, teachers know their responsibilities, alarms are standardized, and drills are repeated until the response becomes almost automatic. Dave wanted active-shooter preparation approached with similar seriousness.

He argued that although law enforcement transformed its response following Columbine, schools had never developed comparably consistent nationwide protocols beyond the general Run-Hide-Fight concept. Fight Back Nation therefore concentrated on the details. Teachers were taught to identify escape routes before an emergency. Classrooms could use a red-card system to signal to responding officers that someone inside required immediate medical attention. Acosta developed a Hall Boss concept intended to prevent children from blindly pouring into a hallway or outside area where a shooter might be waiting. Teachers were also trained to expect an extended lockdown after the immediate threat ended and to keep water, basic medical supplies, gauze and tourniquets available.

Acosta trained educators psychologically as well as physically. During lockdowns, he encouraged teachers to communicate with frightened students, explain what they were doing and give the children tasks rather than leaving them sitting silently imagining that death might come through the door at any moment. His program therefore amounted to considerably more than instruction about physically confronting an attacker. It was an attempt to build a culture of preparedness in which teachers and students understood what to do before the unthinkable happened.

Thousands of Teachers Heard the Message

Dave did not merely write about his ideas. He took them into schools. American Preparatory Academy says Acosta joined its school community in 2013 and trained thousands of its teachers over the years. The organization continues to credit him with having a lasting impact on its safety culture.

His book records that American Preparatory Academy made the training mandatory for its staff and that Utah’s Juab School District became the first complete district in the country to have its schools designated as Fight Back Nation certified. He also participated in the Utah County Sheriff’s Teachers Academy, working within programs that combined active-shooter response, self-defense, tactical medical care and other emergency preparation.

The acknowledgments of Victims No More! say Dave and his colleagues had helped transform more than 7,000 educators from potential victims into confident protectors. That represents thousands of classrooms in which someone had been taught one of Dave’s central lessons: helplessness was not the only option.

Then, Suddenly, Dave Was Gone

Dave Acosta survived dangerous assignments around the world. He worked alongside SWAT teams, operated in Iraq and Afghanistan, trained security personnel and prepared ordinary Americans for extraordinary violence. Then, on July 30, 2020, he went mountain biking near Spanish Fork Reservoir in Utah and never came home.

Someone found his bicycle near the Hidden Oaks Mountain Bike Trail that evening. Police and emergency personnel responded and discovered Dave nearby. There were no witnesses to the accident, and investigators said he had been wearing a helmet. He had apparently crashed and suffered fatal injuries.

The cruel randomness of his death was difficult to comprehend. A man who had spent so much of his life studying danger was taken during an ordinary afternoon bicycle ride. His family remembered him afterward as a father, grandfather, husband and community hero who put other people before himself. A fundraiser created for his family offered a remarkably concise summary of the life he had lived: “Dave gave his life to service.”

That may be the best epitaph anyone could have written for him.

Bend Shows Why His Work Mattered

There will be difficult questions following the Silver Rail massacre. Investigators will examine why a 16-year-old former student returned to his elementary school with a shotgun. They will examine how he obtained the weapon, which authorities say had been legally purchased by his mother. They will examine warning signs, school security and whether anything could have prevented him from reaching that classroom. Those questions should be asked.

But there is another question that should not be lost amid those investigations: What do people do when prevention has failed and the killer is already inside? Dave Acosta devoted the latter part of his life to that question.

The answer Thursday came first from a teacher whose name most Americans still do not know. She fought. Then it came from a carpenter and father named Kaylub Giamanco. He ran toward the danger.

Neither could undo what had already happened. Neither could bring back three children or Meghan Lambert. And Giamanco apparently understands that painfully well. His family says he is overwhelmed by what happened and wishes he could have saved more people. He has declined interviews and asked for privacy.

That response perhaps tells us more about the man than an interview ever could. He did not enter that school seeking recognition. He entered because children were being killed, and two of those children could have been his own daughters.

The Armed Citizen Who Ran Toward the Gunfire

There is something particularly important about Giamanco’s role that should not disappear into the larger debate that inevitably follows a mass shooting. Police did exactly what Americans have spent decades asking police to do in these situations: they came quickly. According to the reported timeline, approximately three minutes separated the first 911 call from officers reaching the school.

Giamanco was simply closer.

He possessed a firearm lawfully. He had secured it in his vehicle rather than carrying it recklessly into an elementary school. When a catastrophe suddenly unfolded in front of him, however, he retrieved that firearm and made a decision that placed his own life in obvious danger. He did not know whether there was one gunman or several, whether the attacker had a handgun, rifle or explosives in addition to the shotgun, or whether he himself might be mistaken for the shooter when police arrived. He knew only that an armed attacker had entered a school filled with children.

And so he followed him.

That does not mean Americans should ordinarily pursue armed criminals or substitute themselves for police. Circumstances differ enormously, and poorly considered intervention can make an already dangerous situation worse. But neither should what Giamanco actually did be minimized. In this particular emergency, according to the police account, an armed citizen reached the attacker before responding officers could and stopped the killing.

It is impossible to calculate how many lives that decision saved. But police found approximately 44 rounds of ammunition remaining with a shooter who had already demonstrated his willingness to use them against children and teachers.

That fact makes Giamanco’s choice extraordinarily consequential.

Two Kinds of Heroes

There were at least two kinds of heroism at Silver Rail Elementary. There was the extraordinary physical courage of a teacher attacking an armed man with little more than a cellphone and determination. And there was the courage of a father who could have waited for someone else to solve the problem but instead retrieved a lawful firearm and went through those shattered doors himself.

Police Chief Mike Krantz publicly thanked the people who intervened, telling them, “We owe you a debt of gratitude.”

We do.

But perhaps we owe something to Dave Acosta as well. Not because he was there; he wasn’t. Not because these people necessarily knew his techniques; there is no evidence they did. We owe him gratitude because he spent years insisting upon an uncomfortable truth that events in Bend have once again demonstrated: during the worst minutes of a person’s life, there may be no one else there yet to save him.

Sometimes survival depends upon ordinary people deciding that they will not surrender themselves — or the people entrusted to them — without a fight.

Near the beginning of Victims No More!, Dave recalled standing among survivors after the Sutherland Springs church massacre when a young television reporter asked him when the insanity would end. His answer was characteristically Dave: mass shootings would stop when they were no longer productive.

Then came the principle around which he built his life’s final mission:

Prepare to be the solution.

On October 15, 2026, inside a small elementary school in the Oregon high desert, a teacher and a father did exactly that.

Four innocent people still died. Two more were wounded. Families have been changed forever, and an Oregon community will carry the scars of what happened at Silver Rail for years to come. But a 16-year-old attacker entered that school carrying a shotgun and enough ammunition to continue killing. He apparently expected to encounter defenseless victims.

Instead, he encountered resistance. A teacher fought him. Then an armed father ran through the doors and stopped him. And the killing ended.

Somewhere, one would like to think, Dave Acosta would have understood exactly what happened in that room. His work was called Victims No More! In Bend, Oregon, two courageous people showed America what those words meant.

By James Thompson. James Thompson is an author and ghostwriter, and a political analyst.

Federal Investigation of Ilhan Omar Expands: Agents Seize Phone, Subpoena Relatives as Citizenship and Financial Questions Mount

By Leave a Comment

A court-authorized search of the Minnesota congresswoman’s Washington home has been followed by revelations of grand jury subpoenas, scrutiny of her citizenship records, and a separate investigation into dramatic changes in her family’s financial disclosures.

Federalist Press | October 15, 2026

WASHINGTON — What began as a renewed examination of longstanding allegations involving Representative Ilhan Omar’s immigration history has developed into a federal criminal investigation involving a residential search warrant, seized electronic evidence, and more than a dozen grand jury subpoenas.

Federal agents searched the Minnesota Democrat’s Washington, D.C., residence on Monday, October 12, as part of an investigation into possible fraud involving immigration documents submitted when Omar and her family entered the United States. By Wednesday evening, additional details had emerged.

Investigators seized Omar’s cellphone, according to Fox News and the Associated Press. Federal authorities have also issued more than a dozen subpoenas, including to members of her family, seeking evidence related to the family’s immigration history.

Meanwhile, U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro has acknowledged a separate investigation involving Omar’s congressional financial disclosures. The developments represent a significant escalation in federal scrutiny of a sitting member of Congress. They also raise questions about allegations that have circulated for years, including disputed accounts of Omar’s marital history and the circumstances under which she became an American citizen.

Omar denies wrongdoing and maintains that the Trump administration is using federal law enforcement to intimidate a political opponent.

A Federal Search Warrant and a Seized Cellphone

Homeland Security Investigations agents arrived at Omar’s Washington residence before dawn Monday to execute a search warrant obtained through the Justice Department. The department confirmed that agents had conducted a judicially authorized search as part of an ongoing criminal investigation.

The operation attracted immediate attention because Omar is a sitting member of Congress and a prominent critic of President Donald Trump. Investigators seized Omar’s cellphone during the search.

The seizure of a phone can provide investigators with access to potentially relevant communications, documents, photographs, application records and other electronically stored information, subject to the warrant’s scope and constitutional restrictions.

The search itself establishes that federal authorities persuaded a left-leaning judge that there was a legally sufficient basis to search the residence.

The Judge Imposed Restrictions on Investigators

An additional development emerged Wednesday when CNN reported that federal prosecutors had encountered resistance from the magistrate judge reviewing their proposed search.

U.S. Magistrate Judge Matthew Sharbaugh reportedly required limitations on investigators’ access to certain records because of constitutional protections afforded to members of Congress. Those protections arise principally from the Constitution’s Speech or Debate Clause, which shields legitimate legislative activities from certain forms of executive-branch investigation.

It indicates that the government could not simply search every congressional document or communication in Omar’s possession without regard to those protections.

The precise restrictions have not been publicly disclosed. Neither has the affidavit explaining the evidence that investigators presented to obtain the warrant.

Consequently, the public knows that the search received judicial authorization but does not yet know the specific facts supporting that authorization. Those facts will be essential to determining the strength of the government’s case.

The Citizenship Question: Was Omar Under 18?

One of the most consequential allegations involves Omar’s age when she acquired American citizenship. Omar was born in Somalia and entered the United States with her family in 1995 after spending several years in a Kenyan refugee camp.

Her father, Nur Omar Mohamed, subsequently became a naturalized American citizen. Omar has stated that she acquired citizenship through her father’s naturalization in 2000, before she turned 18. Under the citizenship laws applicable at that time, a child’s age could be critical to determining eligibility for derivative citizenship.

Investigators are now examining whether information concerning Omar’s birth date was accurate. The specific issue involves conflicting historical references to her birth year. Omar’s official biography identifies her birth year as 1982. However, older biographical materials maintained by the Minnesota Legislative Reference Library previously listed 1981.

According to emails obtained by the New York Post and described by Fox News, Omar’s congressional staff requested that the library change the year to 1982 in May 2019. The library complied.

But an important qualification appears in the same correspondence: the original 1981 listing reportedly came from secondary reference materials rather than an authenticated birth certificate. That means the discrepancy is a legitimate subject for documentary investigation.

Investigators would need to determine her actual date of birth, the information submitted in the relevant immigration proceedings, and whether any discrepancy was intentional and legally material.

The potential consequences could be substantial if fraud were established.

More Than a Dozen Grand Jury Subpoenas

The investigation has extended beyond Omar herself.

According to the Associated Press, federal authorities have issued more than a dozen grand jury subpoenas as part of the immigration inquiry. Some were directed to Omar’s relatives. Her sister, Sahra Noor, is among those subpoenaed.

The investigation reportedly involves a federal grand jury collecting evidence in Minnesota. Grand jury subpoenas can compel witnesses to provide testimony or produce documents relevant to a criminal investigation.

In this case, relatives may possess information about the family’s departure from Somalia, its residence in Kenya, its entry into the United States, or the documents used in subsequent immigration proceedings.

Investigators are also reportedly examining information supplied by Omar’s late father. Because he died in 2020, federal authorities cannot question him directly about the documents he submitted. That circumstance may increase the importance of surviving records and testimony from family members.

The Longstanding Marriage Allegation

Questions concerning Omar’s immigration history are not new. For approximately a decade, critics have questioned her marriage to Ahmed Nur Said Elmi, a British citizen whom she legally married in 2009.

The most serious allegation is that Elmi was actually Omar’s brother and that the marriage was arranged to obtain an immigration benefit. Omar has repeatedly denied the allegation.

The issue attracted considerable attention in 2019 when the Minnesota Star Tribune conducted an investigation into her marital history. The newspaper examined marriage records, divorce filings, business documents, university records and social media material. It identified several discrepancies that Omar had not fully explained.

Among them was the discovery that Omar had filed joint federal tax returns in 2014 and 2015 with Ahmed Hirsi, the father of her children, while she remained legally married to Elmi.

That circumstance raised legitimate questions about her tax filings and marital history.

The current federal investigation may provide investigators with access to immigration records and testimony unavailable to journalists examining the controversy years earlier.

But as of October 15, authorities have not publicly confirmed that the alleged relationship between Omar and Elmi is a specific subject of the current search warrant. Nor have they publicly produced evidence establishing the allegation.

The marriage controversy therefore remains relevant historical background rather than a proven element of the current criminal investigation.

The Financial Disclosures: From Thousands to Millions and Back Again

A second federal inquiry concerns Omar’s financial disclosures.

This investigation involves two businesses associated with her husband, political consultant and businessman Tim Mynett. The companies are eStCru LLC, a California winery, and Rose Lake Capital LLC, a venture capital firm.

Omar’s earlier congressional disclosures placed the combined reported value of the business interests between approximately $15,000 and $51,000 in 2023. Her 2024 disclosures subsequently listed their combined value between $6 million and $30 million.

That dramatic increase attracted scrutiny from House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer.

In February 2026, Comer requested financial records and communications concerning the businesses, including information that might explain their reported valuations. The investigation took another turn when Omar amended her financial disclosures in April. The amended filing substantially reduced the couple’s reported assets, placing their combined disclosed value between approximately $18,000 and $95,000.

Omar’s office explained that the earlier filings had failed to account properly for business liabilities. The office maintained that the original figures created a misleading impression of the family’s actual wealth.

The extraordinary difference between the original and amended disclosures prompted additional questions about the accuracy of the reporting.

On October 13, U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro confirmed that her office was examining Omar’s financial disclosures. The inquiry is separate from the immigration investigation that prompted Monday’s search.

The Minnesota Fraud Scandal and Questions About Political Connections

Omar has also faced scrutiny concerning her political relationships with individuals implicated in Minnesota’s massive Feeding Our Future fraud scandal. The underlying criminal case is among the largest pandemic-era fraud prosecutions in the country.

Federal prosecutors established that participants submitted fraudulent claims for meals supposedly provided to children through federally funded nutrition programs. More than 60 defendants have been convicted, and the scheme involved approximately $250 million in fraudulent claims.

The case exposed extensive failures in the administration and oversight of federal assistance programs. Some individuals associated with the scandal had political connections or made campaign contributions to elected officials.

Omar has faced questions about her relationships with individuals involved in the scheme and her legislative activities concerning federal meal-program oversight. Aimee Bock had suggested Omar should have known about irregularities involving restaurant operators.

Federal prosecutors have not yet charged Omar with participating in the Feeding Our Future scheme.

Could Omar Lose Her Citizenship?

The potential consequences of the immigration investigation extend beyond ordinary criminal penalties.

Federal law permits the government to seek revocation of citizenship obtained through certain forms of fraud or unlawful procurement. Such proceedings are known as denaturalization.

The legal standards are demanding, and the government must establish grounds recognized under federal law. In Omar’s case, the legal analysis could be particularly complicated because she says she acquired citizenship as a minor through her father’s naturalization.

If investigators establish that inaccurate information was submitted, courts would still need to consider its materiality, the relevant citizenship statutes and the circumstances surrounding the alleged misrepresentation. The fact that a parent completed paperwork for a child could also be relevant.

Loss of citizenship would not automatically establish that a person should be deported. Removal would involve additional legal questions and procedures.

Nevertheless, the administration’s interest in the circumstances surrounding Omar’s acquisition of citizenship gives the investigation potentially far-reaching consequences.

The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday that federal investigators are examining whether evidence could support proceedings to revoke Omar’s citizenship.

Omar Accuses the Administration of Political Intimidation

Omar has responded forcefully to the investigation. Following Monday’s search, she accused the Trump administration of using federal law enforcement to target political opponents. Of course, that is terribly rich in light of her public delight when the Biden administration filed dozens of federal charges against President Trump to derail his presidential candidacy.

The dispute is particularly sensitive because President Trump has repeatedly criticized Omar publicly, including questioning her immigration history and political positions.

The search also occurred approximately three weeks before the November 3 midterm elections.

Justice Department practice has traditionally discouraged overt investigative steps involving political candidates close to elections when such actions could affect electoral proceedings.

That practice is not an absolute prohibition on legitimate criminal investigations. Nevertheless, the timing has prompted questions about whether ordinary prosecutorial safeguards were followed.

The administration maintains that federal law applies equally to elected officials. “No one is above the law.”

Vice President JD Vance said Tuesday that investigators should follow the evidence and proceed only if a genuine case exists.

Ultimately, the legitimacy of the investigation will depend on the evidence, the lawfulness of the investigative process and the decisions of independent courts.

What Evidence Is the Government Seeking?

The investigation has now reached a stage at which several developments could become decisive.

First, investigators may obtain historical immigration records capable of establishing Omar’s actual birth date and the information submitted when her family entered the United States.

Second, grand jury testimony may clarify the family’s immigration history and identify who prepared or supplied particular documents.

Third, forensic examination of electronic evidence may identify relevant communications or records.

Fourth, the separate financial inquiry may establish whether the dramatic changes in her reported business assets reflected legitimate accounting corrections or inaccurate disclosures.

Finally, the government may seek additional testimony concerning Omar’s marital history, although officials have not confirmed that the longstanding allegation involving Elmi is part of the current warrant.

A Test of Accountability and Due Process

The federal investigation of Ilhan Omar has entered a consequential stage.

A sitting member of Congress has had her residence searched under judicial authorization. Her cellphone has reportedly been seized. More than a dozen grand jury subpoenas have been issued.

Federal investigators are examining possible irregularities in her family’s immigration history, while a separate inquiry addresses extraordinary changes in reported financial assets. These are significant developments deserving careful public scrutiny.

The public interest is served neither by dismissing documented investigative developments as meaningless nor by treating unproven allegations as established crimes.

The next decisive development will not be another political accusation. It will be the disclosure of evidence capable of showing what actually happened.

For now, the investigation continues, and the questions remain unanswered.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio Remarks from the Athens Acropolis

By Leave a Comment

Federalist Press October 7, 2026

There are great ruins all across the world.  In many cases, they are places where history seems to have exhausted itself: remnants of distant cultures that have long passed beyond living memory.

But the Acropolis is different. 

For thousands of years, the civilization that built what stands behind me has captivated the imagination of the Western world.  Generations of our statesmen, artists, and philosophers have looked to it – they’ve looked to it with wonder and they’ve looked to it with awe.

Now time has a tendency to dull the senses: great victories and catastrophic defeats, they seem to  shrink to becoming like a footnote in a textbook, another fact for our schoolchildren to memorize and forget.  But the Greeks of antiquity, they seem to have an almost mystical hold on our memory.  They call us back to them, again and again. 

480 years before Christ, the armies of Xerxes arrived in this city and they put its sanctuaries to the torch.  Most Athenians had by then evacuated by ship to a nearby island.  But there was a handful of them that refused to leave their home.  So instead, they barricaded themselves in the rocky fortress of the Acropolis to fight an extraordinary last stand, heaving massive stones down the cliffs onto the Persian invaders and holding the greatest empire of the age at bay for days.  They were eventually overwhelmed.  The Persians plundered the temples, burned the shrines, and razed the Acropolis to the ground but when the Athenians returned, they gathered the broken remains of the old Acropolis and buried them in the hill where it had stood.  And decades later, under Pericles, they raised the Parthenon.

For 25 centuries since, the Parthenon has stood.  Empires have risen and fallen beneath its shadow.  And the progeny of the men who built it – the sons of Athens and Rome – have carried their civilization with them to the ends of the Earth.

Two and a half centuries after the founding of the American republic halfway across the world from where I stand now – I stand here today as the Secretary of State of that republic, and a great-grandson of settlers who arrived in the new world from Spain – I stand here to testify to a debt that no lapse of time, no distance of space can ever extinguish. 

The history of America, the history of my country, is covered with the fingerprints of antiquity.  Greece is literally carved into the architecture of our government: in the towering columns, in the domes and the monuments across our capital city.  The city where our Constitution was born – Philadelphia – is itself a Greek name.

The men who founded my country were fascinated by the heritage we inherited from yours.  They were exceptionally well-read in history – they were vividly aware of their unique place in it – but no other age of the past held their attention or their imagination quite like that of antiquity.  Many, many people are surprised to learn that the most commonly cited author in the Federalist Papers was not an Enlightenment philosopher or political theorist.  No, the most commonly cited author in the Federalist Papers was Plutarch, the Greek biographer of Greece and Rome’s great men.

Now, much has been written and said about the influence of ancient Greece on the ideas of the American Founders – and, for that matter, on all of the Western philosophers and statesmen that preceded them.  Most of us are familiar with the basic history.  Athens gave us democracy.  Plato and Aristotle gave us Western philosophy.  Our ideas of law, of virtue, of citizenship, and republican government were shaped in the Greek city-states.  Even much of our political vocabulary – words like democracy, tyranny, the word “politics” itself – found its origins here.

Now, all of that is true.  But the things we owe to this place – as Americans, and as Westerners – are actually far far deeper.  These institutions and ideas – these institutions and ideas were the outward expression of more fundamental qualities we see in the ancient Greeks – qualities that can’t be reduced to any particular political system or theory.

Here, in Athens, we found the first full realization of all the essential traits that would come to define the West: fierce individuality and relentless ambition; daring exploration and invention; a yearning for discovery, for adventure, risk and glory.  An insatiable curiosity about the world and the principles by which it operates, a hunger to know the mysteries of nature and grasp the secrets of the cosmos.  An impatience with the notion of impossibility, chafing at all boundaries and limits, straining to peer into the depths of the unknown.

These were not just the formulas or precepts of a particular school of philosophy.  They were the characteristic of a people – expressed in their traditions, their stories, their imagination; in the qualities they demanded of their citizens; in the things they lived and fought and died for.

To know them is to know ourselves.

What blossomed here in this place was the Western desire to uncover all that ignorance, darkness, and distance had kept hidden from the mind of man.  The Greeks did not just shape history; the Greeks gave us history itself. Much about – much of what we know about many ancient civilizations comes almost entirely from the records of Greek explorers and historians, explorers and historians who didn’t just chronicle the histories of their own people, but ventured outwards to observe and record the sagas of foreign peoples and cultures all across the world.

Where others looked inward, the Greeks were the first to direct their focus outward, to chase the thrill and glory of seeing all that was strange and new.  It was this trait – it was this trait that would push the West to create and build things that others could not, marking us out from so many other cultures and civilizations where stability and subsistence were the highest ends of life.

But it is not just the ambition to explore the unknown that we inherit from the Greeks; it is the conviction that the unknown canbe known.  The confidence that the world can be charted and measured and mapped and understood – and that there is a rational order to the cosmos, governed by certain fundamental laws, laws that men can observe and the mind can come to understand.

This was the foundation of the Western mind: our math, our science, our medicine.  Our philosophy, ethics, and religion.  It paved the way for the gospel of Jesus Christ to find fertile soil in Europe and flourish into the empire of Christendom. It was the foundation of the riches of Christian theology – of Augustine and Aquinas and the whole tradition of natural law.

It gave birth to a civilization marked not just by a common culture, it was marked by a common anthropology – a common view of man and his place in the universe.  Its descendants would share not just the idea of a natural order, but a distinctive understanding of virtue; of destiny and fate; of truth, goodness, and beauty; of a code that dictates how men ought to live; of objective standards and ideals to strive towards.

For the Greeks of antiquity, the pursuit of excellence was the very principle of man’s existence.  They organized all of civic life around contest, ambition, competition: in philosophy and poetry, in sculpture and drama, in athletics and art, in war and statecraft.  The classical Greek city was an arena for great men to test and prove themselves, to hone their potential through perpetual struggle – to be the best, the strongest, the most beautiful, straining to inch ever closer to perfection.

Now I know that to modern ears, what I just described, this way of life, may sound odd; it may even sound cruel.  The ideal of many ideologies in our time has, frankly, become a world of perfect safety, devoid of risk or failure, with neither the glory of victory nor the shame of defeat.  Too often these days, we build downwards. We design our standards to ensure no one will lose; we preoccupy ourselves more with the comfort of the worst than the potential of the best.  We hold the most exceptional things among us hostage to the average, the ordinary, the mediocre.

The men who made the Parthenon, they built upwards. They held that the highest and most noble aspiration in life was to surpass all others, to strive to be the best in all things.  The ancient Greek city-states were filled.  They were filled with intense passion and rivalry and faction and conflict.  But from that constant struggle for distinction – from that came the great flowering of art and philosophy and political and intellectual energy that would transform a collective of Mediterranean cities into the birthplace of the greatest civilization in the world.

The thumos, as the ancient Greeks called it – the fire of passion, strength, courage, pride – is the heart of great civilization.  And without it?  Without it, nations lose their will to fight, the will to strive, the will to survive. 

Today, too much of the West has forgotten this quality.  Over time, we in the West came to feel ashamed of the very things that made us exceptional.  We felt embarrassed that our achievements set us apart from the rest of the world.  Our prosperity somehow became a source of guilt.  We no longer believed we deserved and had earned our greatness. 

The word “nationalism” became a dirty word.  And so we tore down our monuments; we condemned our own history.  And in too many places, we taught our children to be ashamed of the countries they would inherit.  In the process, we opened our borders and outsourced our industry, and allowed our militaries to wither and to decay. 

And with every passing year, we seemed to outsource more of our sovereignty, transferring our decisions to global bureaucracies far beyond the reach of our control.

But others were all too happy to fill the vacuum that we left – the vacuum left behind by our weakness.  And as the West’s confidence faltered, its adversaries and its rivals only grew more assertive, building up their own wealth and their own power in our stead.

And now, today, we find ourselves at a crossroads.  Because the next decade and the decisions we make will write the story of the next century.  The course we take will determine whether the West maintains its place at the head of the world or resigns itself to a future of atrophy and servitude and decline.  We will either choose to act now or lose the choice to act at all.

Under President Trump, the United States has made its choice.  We choose the unapologetic pursuit of national power: to take back control of our critical supply chains, to reindustrialize our economy, to rebuild our defense, to fight for dominance of the technologies and industries of the future. 

We choose to reach for new frontiers: in advanced manufacturing and super intelligence; in drones, weapons, and warfare; in chips, minerals, cyber, and every other domain of human possibility.  To unleash our energy, to rebuild our factories, to return our astronauts to the moon and launch a new age of exploration in space.

Now for all their lofty ideals, the ancient Greeks were not naive.  They understood that nations have interests.  They understood that statecraft requires prudence and diplomacy, but they also understood that it requires the ability to wield force when prudence and diplomacy fail.  They understood that power requires not only having the means to defend yourself, it requires the credibility that you are willing to use it.

This is the classical understanding of politics and of statecraft that the Trump Administration hopes to reclaim – reclaim not just for our country, but for the whole of our civilization.

We believe that Europe can awaken from its long slumber and rekindle the fire that was lit here millennia ago.

There are already signs.

Across this continent, we are witnessing what we hope will be the beginnings of a generational shift: skyrocketing defense spending, a flurry of new partnerships and programs, expanded manufacturing and production, following on the historic defense commitments made last year in The Hague. 

Greece has been at the center of this shift.  The people of this nation have proved themselves once again to be an indispensable friend to Europe and to the United States alike, on everything from energy to migration to defense, where Greece has been a model ally.

And it’s our sincerest hope that all of Europe will follow your example.

Though passions may, at times, have strained the bonds of affection between the United States and Europe, it must not be allowed to break them.  Together, we must strengthen an alliance capable of confronting threats of our age.

And we can.  Because we do not believe the transatlantic friendship should be zero sum.  Quite the opposite: our vision is of an alliance whose strength is greater than the sum of its parts.  It is a vision we saw in action just last month, in an unprecedented new agreement between the United States, Denmark, and Greenland – an agreement that will reshape the Arctic and bolster the security of all of NATO.  All three partners in that deal emerged victorious.  All of Europe – and NATO and the United States emerged safer, stronger, and more secure because of it.

We want to win together.  We must win together.

Now it’s has become fashionable today to believe that enlightened foreign policy means prioritizing the global community over one’s own people.  And I think here, too, we have much to learn from the men of ancient Greece because they knew that there was nothing selfish or wrong about loyalty to your nation, nor anything selfish or wrong about fighting to defend its interests above all else. 

They believed – fiercely – in the ideal of the great man: the exceptional individual who obtains immortality through his own deeds.  But they believed that glory and fame, those things were won through striving, sacrificing and achieving greatly for something larger than yourself.  The recurring hero of the ancient Greek world was the man who was willing to pay any cost for a cause worthy of his loyalty.

We see this in Socrates, who refused to abandon the inquiry into truth even at the cost of his own life.  We see it in the legendary stand of 300 Spartans – surrounded and hopelessly outnumbered by the vast armies of Persia – who refused the chance to save themselves, choosing to fight to the last man rather than abandon their post or abandon their duty.  And we see it in the epic myth of Achilles, who is offered the choice to return home and live a long and peaceful life – but chooses instead to remain at Troy and perish in pursuit of eternal glory.

These – these are the qualities that would shape the Western moral imagination.  From the Christian martyr who refused to betray his faith to the patriot who gave his life for his country; from Saint Thomas More to the Battle of the Alamo, running through the immortal closing words of the Declaration of Independence of the United States which says, “We mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.”

It is from the Greeks that the West inherited its sense of duty – an unbreakable loyalty to one’s code, one’s cause, one’s country.  Our heroes, the heroes of the West are those who choose to remain faithful to their duty precisely when it is most difficult and painful to do so: the man who is bound by his word, the soldier who will not abandon his post, the captain, the proverbial captain, who goes down with his ship.

This is wholly different from what we see, even now, for example from fanatics like the radical mullahs of Iran, whose cult of death hails child suicide bombers as national heroes, and portrays martyrdom as an end to itself.

Our heroes – our heroes may be willing to die for their cause; but our heroes do not worship death.  It is precisely because we value life that we come to recognize the heroism in those who would sooner sacrifice it than to betray their principles.  Now, we take the West’s conception of these things – heroism, honor, duty – we take these things for granted.  We assume that these somehow are universal to all people in all times and in all places.  They are not.  They are the product of a distinct character, a distinct character which arose here and shaped the whole story of the civilization that came after it.  A civilization that we must fight to defend today with the same passion as our forefathers did.

The men who built the Parthenon were succeeded by the architects of European Christendom, who raised the cathedrals of Milan, Cologne, and Florence.  The quest to perfect the human form that moved the ancient Greek sculptors found a new expression in Michelangelo.  The Greek philosophers’ search for the structure of the universe was inherited by Copernicus, and then Galileo, then Kepler, and in Newton.

The hunger for new knowledge, that’s what gave birth to Magellan’s first expedition around the world, to Columbus’ discovery of the Americas, and ultimately to Apollo 11’s journey to the moon.  And the qualities that led Alexander to conquer the entire known world reappeared in Caesar, then Charlemagne, and Cortes.

And in America, that same tradition rediscovered itself anew.  An open and wild land became the site of a great revival of Western imagination and ambition.  The Greek aspiration for new horizons became the American frontier spirit.  The civilization of Athens and Rome transformed an infant seaboard republic into a continental empire.

The greatest Americans of every generation have carried the unmistakable features of their forefathers – born in Athens, formed by Rome, baptized in Christendom, hardened in the furnace of medieval Europe, endowed with the English genius for liberty, and then carried across the Atlantic to be reborn on the shores of a new world. 

Together, we must now rediscover that spirit.  We are at an inflection point – an inflection point not only in the history of my nation, but an inflection point in the whole of our civilization. 

The threats we face today are every bit as real as they were on the dramatic stage of antiquity.

National interests did not vanish in the face of international institutions.  War did not disappear simply because we preferred peace.  Other states continued to arm, to seek influence, to compete for territory, and technology, and resources, and markets, and energy, and power.

And now, there is war again.  There is new competition between great powers again.  There is vulnerability, aggression, terrorism, a whole universe of new threats and attacks again. 

And so we must rebuild our institutions and our alliances to face these threats together – understanding that the purpose of these things is not to abolish the sovereignty of the nations that constitute them; it is to defend them.  And that nations need not abandon their distinct identities in order to recognize their common interests.

We have built a model of that with our partners here in Greece.  In our defense partnerships, in energy and technology, in our shared ambition to secure Europe’s borders from the threats of mass migration.

Our friendship dates back to the earliest years of my nation.  When Greece rose in 1821 to recover its independence after centuries of Ottoman rule, Americans recognized something familiar in that struggle.  Three years later, the great American statesman Daniel Webster, he delivered a famous address to Congress, helping bring the cause of the Greek Revolution before the representatives of the young American republic.

And he began by calling their attention to everything around them.  This is what he said in his speech; he said:  “This free form of government, this popular assembly… this practice of free debate, and public discussion, the contest of mind with mind… even the edifice in which we assemble, these proportioned columns, this ornamented architecture, all remind us that Greece has existed, and that we, like the rest of mankind, are greatly her debtors.”

Those words are as true today as they were when he said them.  And all of us – not just Americans, but Europeans and our friends across the West – must relearn the lessons our forefathers took from this place and from its history.

The history of Greece – the history of Greece does not just offer us a glimpse – it does not offer a glimpse of our institutions in their earliest forms.  The history of Greece shows us an image of ourselves.

It shows us that ours is the inheritance of great heroes, and that we should be proud – that we should be intensely proud – of where we come from.  We should marvel at what our forefathers carved out of this countryside.  The story of our civilization is the greatest story ever known to man.  And it began here, with the first men and women of the West.  From them – from them – we can rediscover the virtues, the courage, and the strength to confront the dangers that we face in our time.

Thank you. 

Federal Agents Raid Ilhan Omar’s Washington Home in Criminal Immigration Investigation

By Leave a Comment

Justice Department confirms pre-dawn search of Minnesota congresswoman’s residence as federal investigators examine allegations involving her immigration history. No charges have been announced.

Federalist Press | October 12, 2026

WASHINGTON — Federal immigration enforcement agents searched the Washington, D.C., home of Democratic Representative Ilhan Omar early Monday morning, executing a court-authorized warrant in connection with an ongoing criminal investigation.

The operation, conducted by Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), represents a significant development in a federal inquiry that became public last month when White House border czar Tom Homan confirmed that immigration authorities were examining allegations involving the Minnesota congresswoman.

The Department of Justice acknowledged the operation in a statement.

“Today in the Washington, D.C., area, Homeland Security Investigations executed a judicially authorized search warrant secured by the Department of Justice.”

The department added that the operation was part of an ongoing federal criminal investigation.

Neither the Justice Department nor Homeland Security Investigations has publicly disclosed the specific allegations underlying the warrant, identified any evidence recovered during the search, or announced criminal charges against Omar.

The investigation remains active.

Investigation Reportedly Centers on Omar’s Immigration Records

The investigation concerns possible fraud involving immigration documents submitted on Omar’s behalf when she entered the United States as a child.

The documents reportedly were completed by her late father.

Omar was born in Somalia in 1982. Her family fled the country’s civil war, spent several years in a refugee camp in Kenya, and eventually resettled in the United States.

She subsequently became an American citizen and entered politics, winning election to the Minnesota House of Representatives in 2016 before becoming one of the first two Muslim women elected to Congress in 2018.

She currently represents Minnesota’s Fifth Congressional District, which includes Minneapolis. The reported focus on childhood immigration paperwork introduces potentially complicated legal questions.

Immigration applications frequently involve information supplied by parents or guardians on behalf of minor children. If investigators identify inaccuracies in such documents, establishing who supplied the information, whether the inaccuracies were intentional, and whether they were legally material would be important to determining whether any crime occurred.

At present, federal officials have not publicly established that Omar knowingly submitted false information or committed immigration fraud.

Tom Homan Confirmed Investigation in September

Monday’s search follows public statements made in September by Tom Homan, President Trump’s border enforcement adviser.

During a September 13 appearance on Fox News, Homan acknowledged that federal immigration authorities were examining allegations involving Omar. He characterized the matter as an ongoing criminal investigation but declined to discuss specific evidence.

Homan also emphasized that federal immigration laws apply regardless of a person’s position in government. His remarks followed years of allegations concerning Omar’s immigration history and marital relationships.

One longstanding allegation is that Omar entered into a marriage intended to facilitate immigration benefits. Critics have claimed that a former husband was her brother.

When questioned on September 18, Omar said Homeland Security had not contacted her about an investigation and characterized the allegations as politically motivated attacks.

The September statements established that federal authorities were investigating allegations. Monday’s execution of a search warrant marks a new investigative step.

What Does a Federal Search Warrant Mean?

The execution of a judicially authorized search warrant is an important legal development, but its significance should be understood precisely.

Under the Fourth Amendment, federal investigators generally must establish probable cause before a judge may authorize a search of a private residence. Probable cause requires a factual basis for believing that evidence associated with a crime may be found in the location identified in the warrant. It does not require prosecutors to prove that the homeowner committed a crime. Nor does it necessarily mean that the homeowner is the only person under investigation.

The search warrant itself, along with the affidavit supporting it, would provide considerably more information about the government’s allegations. Those documents may remain sealed while investigators continue their work. Federal investigators can seek records, electronic devices and other materials relevant to an inquiry, subject to the scope of the warrant.

As of Monday’s initial reporting, authorities had not publicly identified what, if anything, was seized from Omar’s residence.

The fact that agents obtained judicial authorization establishes that a judge approved the search. It does not establish the truth of every allegation being investigated.

Could Immigration Fraud Affect Citizenship?

The investigation raises questions about whether alleged fraud in immigration proceedings could have consequences for naturalized American citizens. Federal law provides mechanisms for revoking naturalization when citizenship was illegally procured or obtained through concealment of a material fact or willful misrepresentation.

But denaturalization is not automatic, and the legal standards are demanding. The government generally must establish that the relevant misrepresentation was material to the acquisition of citizenship or that citizenship was otherwise unlawfully obtained.

The circumstances surrounding an application submitted by a parent on behalf of a minor child can present additional questions about knowledge, responsibility and intent.

Immigration attorney Michael Wildes, discussing the allegations involving Omar in a September Fox News report, described the evidentiary burden facing investigators as substantial.

Even if federal authorities eventually identify inaccurate information in Omar’s childhood immigration records, that discovery would not necessarily establish grounds for criminal prosecution or loss of citizenship. Those determinations would depend on the evidence and the applicable legal standards.

A Political Confrontation Years in the Making

Omar has been among President Trump’s most outspoken congressional critics since entering the House in 2019. The two have clashed repeatedly over immigration enforcement, national security, American foreign policy and the administration’s treatment of immigrant communities.

Omar has criticized Immigration and Customs Enforcement and supported legislation seeking changes to federal immigration enforcement practices. Trump, meanwhile, has repeatedly questioned her political positions and immigration history. Their longstanding conflict makes Monday’s search politically consequential. It also places additional importance on transparency concerning the investigation.

Supporters of the investigation may view the search as evidence that federal authorities are willing to examine allegations involving powerful elected officials. Critics may question whether political considerations influenced the decision to investigate one of the president’s most prominent congressional opponents. Neither interpretation, standing alone, establishes whether the investigation is justified.

The underlying evidence, the legality of investigative procedures and any eventual court proceedings will be necessary to assess those questions.

Why the Timing Matters

The search occurred just three weeks before the November 3 midterm elections. Omar is seeking another term representing Minnesota’s Fifth Congressional District.

A federal investigation involving a sitting member of Congress naturally attracts public attention, particularly during an election campaign. However, the timing of a law-enforcement action does not, by itself, establish either political interference or improper conduct by the person being investigated.

The Justice Department has not publicly explained why investigators sought to execute the warrant on October 12.

Without the supporting court documents or additional official disclosures, it is not possible to determine what investigative developments prompted the search at this particular time.

The timing nevertheless ensures that the investigation will receive scrutiny from Congress, the news media and voters.

What Happens Next?

Several important questions remain unanswered. The Justice Department has not publicly disclosed the specific criminal statutes under investigation. It has not released the warrant affidavit, described the evidence investigators sought, or identified materials recovered during the search. It has not announced whether Omar is a target of the investigation or whether investigators are examining the actions of other individuals associated with historical immigration filings.

Omar’s response to Monday’s search also remains an important part of the developing story. The Associated Press reported that it had requested comment from her office but had not received a response at the time of its initial report.

Further information could emerge through official statements, court filings, congressional inquiries or subsequent investigative reporting. Until then, the allegations remain allegations.

The Larger Question: Accountability Under the Law

The investigation presents a question that extends beyond the political differences between Omar and the Trump administration. How should federal authorities investigate allegations involving elected officials without allowing political considerations to compromise either accountability or due process?

Members of Congress are subject to federal criminal laws. Holding elected office does not provide immunity from investigation into conduct unrelated to protected legislative activities.

At the same time, elected officials retain constitutional protections, including the presumption of innocence and the right to challenge government searches and criminal accusations. Those principles apply regardless of political affiliation.

The government’s responsibility is to investigate credible evidence lawfully and present any resulting charges in court. Omar’s responsibility, if formally accused, would be to respond through the legal process available to every American. And the public’s responsibility is to distinguish established facts from allegations that have not been proved.

Monday’s search is a documented development in an ongoing federal criminal investigation. Whether that investigation produces charges, uncovers evidence of wrongdoing, or concludes without prosecution remains unknown.

For now, federal agents have searched the home of a sitting member of Congress under judicial authorization. The evidence that prompted the search—and what investigators discovered—will determine the significance of what happens next.

Does Pres. Trump Plan to Announce That Extraterrestrials Are Visiting Earth Before the Midterm Elections?

By Leave a Comment

With the November elections approaching, the administration’s unprecedented UFO disclosure initiative raises an extraordinary question: Could the president make an announcement that changes humanity’s understanding of its place in the universe—and what would happen politically if he did?

By Federalist Press | October 9, 2026

President Donald Trump walks to a podium in the White House. Behind him stand senior military officers, intelligence officials, Congressional leaders, and representatives of the scientific community. He looks into the cameras and makes an announcement unlike anything ever delivered by an American president.

The United States government, he explains, holds convincing evidence that humanity is not alone in the universe. More astonishingly, he confirms that intelligent beings originating beyond Earth are visiting our planet.

For decades, such a declaration has occupied the imaginations of UFO researchers, science-fiction writers, conspiracy theorists and serious investigators alike.

But what if the announcement comes not years from now, but within the next few weeks? And what if it arrives just as Americans are preparing to vote in one of the most consequential midterm elections in history, where the left has moved ever closer to socialism and the end of the America we know?

These questions are speculative. As of this writing, there is no verified announcement that President Trump intends to confirm extraterrestrial visitation before Election Day. His staff has confirmed that he has such a speech prepared, and will deliver it when he judges it is appropriate.

Nevertheless, recent developments within the federal government make the possibility of a significant “D” disclosure worth examining.

The President Has Already Opened the Door

On February 19, 2026, President Trump directed federal agencies to begin identifying and releasing government records concerning unidentified anomalous phenomena, UFOs and possible extraterrestrial life. The administration subsequently established the Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters, appropriately abbreviated PURSUE.

The initiative involves the Department of War, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, NASA, the FBI, the Department of Energy and other federal agencies. Its stated objective is to identify, review, declassify and release UAP-related government records.

On May 8, the administration released its first collection of records. Additional releases followed on May 22, June 12, July 10, August 7, and September 18. The government has made videos, photographs, historical documents and military encounter reports available for public examination.

Some of these materials describe incidents that remain unexplained. Others provide historical context for government investigations extending back decades.

The administration has emphasized that an unresolved incident does not necessarily establish an extraterrestrial explanation. Nevertheless, the release of government records provides researchers and the public with more material to examine. The official archive is available through the PURSUE disclosure portal.

But releasing old documents is one thing. Acknowledging the existence of extraterrestrial visitors would be something additional.

The September Development That Deserves More Attention

One of the most consequential developments occurred on September 14.

The Department of War announced a targeted legal waiver authorizing current and former military personnel, civilian employees and defense contractors to disclose certain protected UAP-related national defense information directly to designated PURSUE representatives.

The waiver addresses restrictions contained in nondisclosure agreements and special-access-program agreements. Its purpose is to create a legally protected channel through which people possessing sensitive information can communicate with authorized investigators.

However, this is not blanket permission to disclose classified information publicly. The authorization applies to communications with designated officials operating within the disclosure initiative. Nevertheless, the development is significant.

For years, former intelligence officials and UAP whistleblowers have claimed that secrecy agreements, classification rules and compartmentalized military programs prevented knowledgeable individuals from describing what they had encountered.

The new waiver creates a mechanism for investigators to receive certain information without the same contractual obstacles. Whether that mechanism will produce evidence of extraordinary discoveries remains unknown.

But the administration has now established both a public-release system and a protected channel for gathering additional information. That raises an obvious question.

What happens if investigators encounter information that warrants an announcement from the president himself?

Disclosure With a Capital D

Within the UFO research community, the word disclosure has acquired a meaning far beyond the release of military photographs or intelligence reports.

For many researchers, Disclosure—with a capital D—means official acknowledgment that intelligent nonhuman beings exist and have interacted with Earth.

It could involve confirmation of recovered technology, evidence of biological material (bodies), documented encounters or other information that the government considers sufficiently reliable to establish an extraordinary conclusion.

Such an announcement would represent a profound departure from the federal government’s longstanding public position of denying that they have proof that Non-Human Intelligence exists. For a president to reverse that position credibly, the announcement would need to be accompanied by substantial evidence. Simply saying that extraterrestrials exist would invite immediate questions, especially when most of the legacy media have accused the president of lying about everything he says since he first announced he was running for the presidency.

Therefore, the president would need to include certain facts to back up the claim. What evidence supports the conclusion? How was it authenticated? Which agencies examined it? Could independent scientists evaluate the findings? And perhaps most importantly, why was the information not disclosed earlier?

Those questions would become central to the public’s understanding of any presidential announcement.

Why the Timing Matters

The November 3 midterm elections are now less than four weeks away.

Americans are preparing to elect a new House of Representatives, decide numerous Senate contests and select governors and other state officials. The elections are unfolding against a backdrop of considerable economic and international uncertainty. The continuing confrontation with Iran has disrupted energy markets and contributed to higher gasoline and diesel prices.

President Trump has argued that preventing Iran from developing and using nuclear weapons justifies substantial short-term costs, including temporary economic hardship.

On October 8, he clarified controversial remarks about the consequences of Iranian nuclear capabilities, emphasizing that his concern was the danger posed by a nuclear-armed Iran.

Meanwhile, the administration has been exploring ways to reduce fuel prices. On October 9, oil prices declined following Trump’s announcement that the United States would not resume strikes against Iran before the midterm elections and that discussions with Tehran were productive.

These developments illustrate the competing demands facing the administration. National security decisions can carry immediate economic consequences, while voters evaluate those consequences alongside domestic policy, inflation, employment and other concerns.

A presidential announcement concerning extraterrestrial visitation would introduce an entirely different subject into that environment. But would it change the political conversation? And if so, for how long?

An Announcement That Could Dominate the News

Consider the magnitude of the event. For generations, scientists, philosophers and theologians have debated whether intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe.

Modern astronomy has established that planets are common throughout the galaxy. Researchers have identified thousands of worlds orbiting distant stars.

But the discovery of planets is not the discovery of extraterrestrial civilizations. And the discovery of extraterrestrial civilizations would not, by itself, establish that they have visited Earth.

A credible presidential announcement confirming extraterrestrial visitation would therefore be extraordinary. News organizations around the world would seek immediate explanations. Scientists would demand access to the evidence. Foreign governments would ask what American intelligence agencies knew and whether allied nations had been informed. Religious leaders would consider the implications for their respective traditions. Congress would seek additional briefings concerning the history of any government programs involved.

The implications would extend far beyond American politics. Indeed, an announcement of this magnitude could become one of the defining news events of the century.

Would it produce a positive electoral result for the president? The public’s response would depend on the evidence, the circumstances of the announcement, the credibility of the officials involved and whether the information appeared to have been released for scientific and national-security reasons or for political purposes.

Could Disclosure Change the Midterm Conversation?

There are several plausible ways Americans might respond to an extraordinary presidential disclosure. Some citizens might welcome the information as a long-overdue act of government transparency. Others might question why the government had withheld such knowledge and demand accountability from successive administrations. Some might be skeptical of the announcement itself, particularly if the evidence were incomplete or unavailable for independent examination.

There is also a distinction between changing the national conversation and changing how Americans vote.

An extraordinary scientific or national-security announcement could dominate television coverage and social media without necessarily altering voters’ judgments about gasoline prices, household finances, immigration, healthcare or their congressional representatives.

A Reuters/Ipsos survey released October 9 found widespread concern about rising living costs, including among Americans who otherwise support the president. Those concerns provide important context for understanding the political environment in which any disclosure would occur.

The immediate news impact might be enormous. Its electoral significance would remain uncertain.

What Would the President Actually Have to Reveal?

There is an enormous difference between announcing that the government has investigated unexplained objects and announcing that extraterrestrial beings are visiting Earth.

The first is already established. The United States has investigated UAP for decades.

The second remains unproven in the publicly available official record. A credible announcement of extraterrestrial visitation would require evidence sufficient to distinguish nonhuman technology from classified American systems, foreign military capabilities, natural phenomena, sensor errors and mistaken observations.

Ideally, that evidence would be made available for examination by qualified scientists outside the agencies responsible for collecting it. The recovered crafts and alien bodies would need to be put on display for the public, and the scientific community.

The Question of Secrecy

Perhaps the most difficult questions would concern the past. If extraterrestrial visitors have been documented by American authorities, when did the government first learn of them? Which presidents were informed? Were congressional intelligence committees briefed? Did private defense contractors participate in research programs? Were any discoveries concealed from officials legally entitled to oversight? And if information was withheld, who made those decisions?

These questions have occupied UAP researchers for decades. Of course, it would be easy for this president to simply say, prior administrations hid the truth, but this administration will Disclose it.

The Trump administration’s PURSUE initiative represents an effort to examine and release that information. Full Disclosure would put the ultimate question to rest: yes, we are not alone in the universe, and yes, they have been visiting us for centuries.

What Happens Next?

As of October 9, there is no verified evidence that President Trump has scheduled an announcement confirming extraterrestrial life or visitation before the midterm elections.

The administration has not publicly established that extraterrestrial beings are visiting Earth. Nor has it released evidence that conclusively demonstrates such visitation.

Nevertheless, the developments of 2026 are substantial.The president has issued a disclosure directive. Multiple federal agencies are participating. Six collections of UAP materials have been released.

A protected mechanism now exists for certain defense personnel and contractors to provide sensitive information to authorized investigators. And members of Congress continue to pursue greater access to records and testimony.

These are concrete developments, regardless of one’s conclusions about the extraterrestrial hypothesis.

The next major disclosure could be another collection of military reports. It could be a previously classified document concerning an unusual encounter. It could involve testimony from individuals who claim firsthand knowledge of extraordinary government programs. Or it could be something more consequential.

For now, nobody outside the relevant decision-making circles can reliably say whether the president is preparing an announcement of that magnitude.

A Question Larger Than November

The approaching midterm elections provide a dramatic backdrop for speculation about presidential disclosure. But the underlying question is much older, and its implications extend far beyond any election.

Are we alone?

For centuries, humanity has looked into the heavens and wondered whether other intelligent beings inhabit the universe. Modern science has expanded our understanding of how many worlds may exist. Military encounters and government investigations have introduced additional questions about unusual phenomena observed within Earth’s atmosphere and surrounding environment.

Yet the fundamental question remains unanswered by publicly verified evidence.

If President Trump possesses information capable of resolving it, the significance would extend far beyond the remaining weeks of an election campaign. It would affect science, national security, philosophy, religion and humanity’s understanding of its own history. The American people deserve to know what the evidence establishes.

The discovery that humanity is not alone would belong not to one president, one administration or one political party, but to the entire human family. But President Donald J. Trump would forever be known as the one who Disclosed the truth, and that single accomplishment would set him apart from all other presidents for centuries to come.

The $224 Happiest Place on Earth: Has Disney Forgotten the American Family?

By Leave a Comment

A day at Disneyland can now cost $224 just to walk through one gate. Then come the $6.25 churros, $7 popcorn, $5.49 bottled drinks, hotel rooms, parking and paid line-skipping. Disney calls it dynamic pricing. Families may have another name for it.

There was a time when taking the children to Disneyland was expensive. Today, it can feel like a financial undertaking.

On October 6, Disneyland quietly implemented another round of price increases. An adult one-day ticket to one park now ranges from $104 on selected low-demand days to an astonishing $224.

That $224 ticket buys admission to one park for one person for one day.

Want to move between Disneyland and California Adventure? The Park Hopper option can add as much as $95.

Want access to Disney’s Lightning Lane Multi Pass to reduce the amount of your expensive vacation spent standing in lines? That’s another charge, beginning at $35 when purchased in advance.

A family of four arriving on one of Disneyland’s $224 peak days could therefore spend $896 simply walking through the gates, before buying lunch, a bottle of water, a souvenir, parking or a hotel room.

Add that $95 Park Hopper for each person and the theoretical admission bill becomes $1,276.

Add the advance Lightning Lane Multi Pass at $35 apiece and it reaches $1,416 for one day—before the family has eaten anything.

Welcome to the Happiest Place on Earth. Bring your credit card.

Remember When a Churro Was Just a Churro?

Parents who took children to Disneyland decades ago probably remember the experience of buying that first Disney snack and thinking, They want how much for that?

The humble Disneyland churro may be the perfect symbol. It is fried dough rolled in cinnamon and sugar. $1.49 at Costco. Disney gouges its visitors $6.25.

And that’s hardly an isolated example.

This summer Disneyland raised prices on more than 800 food and beverage items at 178 locations throughout Disneyland, California Adventure and the resort hotels.

A scoop of popcorn went from $6.50 to $7.

A regular coffee, tea or hot cocoa went from $4.79 to $5.49.

A vanilla soft-serve cone went from $6.29 to $6.99.

A funnel cake went from $8.79 to $9.49.

Bottled drinks—including ordinary soda and water—generally rose to about $5.49.

A chicken-tender meal at several locations reached $13.99.

Disney World Isn’t Much Different

Travel across the country to Walt Disney World in Florida and the numbers remain eye-opening.

Disney raised prices there again on October 6. A bottled soda or Vitaminwater is $5.50. A fountain drink is $4.99. Popcorn is $6.99. A Mickey pretzel is $8.49. Four chicken strips are $11.99. A Mickey ice cream bar or sandwich is $6.49.

And those aren’t meals at one of Disney’s celebrated sit-down restaurants. Those are concession-counter prices.

An analysis tracking Disney’s own menus found nearly 4,900 menu listings increased in price during the October adjustment, with an average increase of about 6.3%.

Some increases are individually trivial—a quarter here, 50 cents there. But families don’t buy one thing.

Four admissions. Four drinks. Four lunches. Snacks. Dinner. Parking. Perhaps a hotel. Perhaps Park Hopper. Perhaps Lightning Lane. Perhaps a souvenir so a six-year-old doesn’t leave Disneyland empty-handed.

The individual charges accumulate into something quite different from the price advertised on the entrance ticket.

The $229 Disney World Ticket

Disney World now has its own remarkable threshold.

Disney’s highest-priced one-day park ticket reaches $229 for dates released in its newest pricing calendar. Its cheapest one-day ticket remains lower—about $119-$120 depending on park and date.

Disney’s Incredi-Pass annual pass also rose by $120 to $1,749, while its premium Lightning Lane Premier Pass can reach $500 for a single person on a single day.

Think about that last number. That $500 doesn’t get you into Disney World. It is an optional premium product, purchased in addition to park admission, that provides one-time access to available Lightning Lane entrances for participating attractions without requiring guests to choose specific arrival windows.

Disney has transformed convenience itself into a premium product.

Then There’s the Hotel

A Disney vacation has always offered choices ranging from less-expensive accommodations to extraordinarily luxurious ones, and it would be unfair to pretend every family must stay at the Grand Californian or the Polynesian. They don’t.

The vacation increasingly resembles airline pricing. The ticket price changes according to the day. The hotel price changes according to demand. Park Hopper costs extra. Line-skipping costs extra. Premium line-skipping costs considerably more. Special experiences cost extra.

And the family must increasingly become a pricing strategist before becoming a tourist. There is a curious irony in needing a spreadsheet to visit Fantasyland.

Disney Says It Is Thinking About Affordability

Disney executives know families are feeling the pressure. Duh.

Disney’s own financial filings show just how powerful its parks business has become. For the quarter ending June 27, 2026, Disney’s domestic Parks & Experiences revenue reached $7.1 billion, up 11% from the corresponding quarter a year earlier.

Domestic Parks & Experiences operating income jumped 27%, from $1.65 billion to $2.09 billion.

Disney reported that theme-park admissions revenue benefited from a 5% increase in average per-capita ticket revenue. Parks and Experiences merchandise, food and beverage revenue benefited from a 3% increase in average guest spending.

In other words, higher spending per guest isn’t incidental to Disney’s business performance. It is part of the corporate profits growth story.

From Walt Disney’s Family Park to a Premium Experience

That raises a larger question about what Disneyland was originally supposed to be.

Walt Disney conceived Disneyland as a place parents and children could experience together. The famous story is that he watched his daughters ride a carousel while he sat on a bench and wondered why there wasn’t a clean, imaginative place where parents and children could have fun together.

That family ideal became one of America’s great cultural institutions.

Disneyland wasn’t merely an amusement park. It became part of childhood. Parents who visited as children wanted to take their children. Those children eventually wanted to take their own.

That multigenerational affection created something extraordinarily valuable: a reservoir of goodwill that few corporations in history have possessed.

Which makes Disney’s pricing strategy particularly consequential.

A $224 admission ticket isn’t primarily competing with another theme park. For a middle-class family, it competes with the mortgage, groceries, braces, school clothes, a car payment and the family vacation budget.

A family of five isn’t thinking about one $224 ticket. They’re thinking about $1,120 before anyone has eaten lunch.

And Disney Has Been Fighting Another Battle

The pricing controversy comes after years in which Disney has also found itself entangled in America’s cultural and political arguments.

Traditionalists have accused Disney of injecting leftist political and social themes into children’s entertainment and corporate policy.

Due to common sense pressures brought by average American families, the company itself has adjusted course in some areas. In 2025 Disney modified portions of its diversity and inclusion programs, replacing some DEI-related initiatives and tying its executive evaluation language more closely to business outcomes while maintaining a stated commitment to inclusion.

Former Disney CEO Bob Chapek recently said one of the lessons from his turbulent tenure was that the company should avoid becoming unnecessarily entangled in political battles. Current leadership has likewise emphasized entertainment as Disney’s central mission.

The movie business has produced mixed evidence rather than a simple story of collapse.

Disney’s live-action Snow White became a magnet for cultural controversy and opened to a disappointing $43 million domestically against a reported production budget of roughly $270 million. To counter those losses, and lacking new ideas, Disney went back to its former successes, and produced Toy Story 5, one of 2026’s biggest domestic releases. Yes–sequels are pumping life into a failing studio. #5!

So the fair criticism isn’t that Americans have universally abandoned Disney. They plainly haven’t. Fans are better to Disney than Disney is to its fans.

It’s that a corporation built upon extraordinary affection from generations of American families has repeatedly tested that relationship—culturally in some corners of its entertainment empire and financially at its theme parks.

Disney has clearly exhausted decades of built up goodwill.

“O Be Wise”: A Timely Warning Against America’s Costly Gambling Explosion

By Leave a Comment

At General Conference, President D. Todd Christofferson revived an old Latter-day Saint warning for a new generation carrying a casino in its pocket.

There was nothing complicated about the message.

“We are against it.”

With those words during the Saturday morning session of the 196th Semiannual General Conference of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, President D. Todd Christofferson, Second Counselor in the First Presidency, addressed a practice that has undergone a remarkable transformation in American life.

Gambling once required a trip to Las Vegas, Atlantic City, a racetrack or perhaps a convenience store lottery counter. Today the casino rides around in your pocket.

Sportsbooks advertise during games. Smartphones offer online casino games around the clock. Prediction markets increasingly invite people to wager on everything from elections to current events. A generation that might never walk through the doors of a casino can place a bet in seconds.

President Christofferson’s warning could hardly have been better timed.

“Gambling is morally wrong,” he taught. It can become consuming and compulsive, stealing time from education, relationships and careers. More fundamentally, he said, gambling is built around the desire to obtain something for nothing. And therein lies a principle much larger than gambling itself.

Something for Nothing

The Church’s position did not begin this weekend. The Church’s current General Handbook states unequivocally that it “opposes gambling in any form, including government-sponsored lotteries.”

That teaching stretches back generations. President Gordon B. Hinckley devoted a General Conference address to gambling in 2005. He quoted earlier Church presidents going back more than a century and observed that gambling cultivates “the taste of getting something for nothing.”

President Spencer W. Kimball likewise warned about seeking “something without effort.” President Joseph F. Smith condemned gambling, games of chance and lotteries in 1908. President Heber J. Grant described the Church as “unalterably opposed to gambling in any form whatever.”

President Christofferson therefore was not announcing a new prohibition. He was applying an old principle to a technological environment that has made violating it easier than previous generations could have imagined.

President D. Todd Christofferson, second counselor in the First Presidency, speaks during the Saturday morning session of the 196th Semiannual General Conference of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in the Conference Center in Salt Lake City on Oct. 3, 2026.

The warning is especially significant because gambling has ceased to occupy the cultural margins. It has become an enormous industry.

The American Gaming Association reports that legal commercial gambling in the United States generated a record $78.7 billion in revenue during 2025. Sports betting alone generated nearly $17 billion, increasing more than 22 percent in a single year, while legal online casino gambling exceeded $10 billion.

Those numbers represent something worth remembering whenever gambling is marketed as entertainment: The industry’s revenue ultimately comes from its customers’ losses.

And the legal market is only part of the picture. American Gaming Association research estimates that Americans wager approximately $673.6 billion each year through illegal and unregulated gambling operations.

A Church That Asks Its Members to Live Differently

President Christofferson’s message also fits within a much broader pattern in Latter-day Saint life. The restored gospel asks something of its adherents.

Members are taught to abstain from alcohol, tobacco, coffee, tea and harmful drugs through the Word of Wisdom. They are taught chastity before marriage and fidelity within it. They fast. They donate fast offerings to help the poor. They pay tithing. They are encouraged to obtain education, work diligently, avoid unnecessary debt, save for the future, strengthen their families and serve their communities.

None of those practices guarantees prosperity, perfect health or happiness. Latter-day Saints experience cancer, unemployment, divorce, depression, bankruptcy, addiction and tragedy just as human beings everywhere do.

But taken together, these teachings establish a remarkably consistent philosophy: Exercise self-control today in order to obtain something better tomorrow.

That principle is almost the exact opposite of the impulse underlying gambling. The gambler is tempted by immediacy: risk something now in hope of receiving much more without producing corresponding value.

The gospel repeatedly teaches delayed gratification: work, save, learn, sacrifice, give, serve and build.

The Word of Wisdom Is an Interesting Case Study

The health consequences provide perhaps the clearest measurable example.

The Word of Wisdom was recorded by Joseph Smith in 1833, long before modern medicine understood many of the consequences of tobacco and excessive alcohol consumption. Today faithful Latter-day Saints abstain from both.

A peer-reviewed study of 9,815 religiously active California Latter-day Saints followed from 1980 through 2004 found substantially reduced mortality among those practicing the healthy lifestyle associated with their faith. Researchers specifically identified abstention from tobacco and alcohol, education, marriage, church attendance and other lifestyle characteristics as important factors.

Among the particularly healthy subgroup studied, life expectancy from age 25 reached approximately 84 years for men and 86 for women.

Importantly, the researchers found similar advantages among people of other religions who practiced comparable healthy behaviors.

The scientific evidence does not demonstrate that merely being listed on Church membership records somehow makes a person healthier. Rather, it supports something much more interesting: principles taught by the Church can produce measurable benefits when people actually live them. The same logic applies beyond physical health.

Tithing Teaches the Opposite Lesson From Gambling

Consider tithing. A faithful Latter-day Saint learns to take income that could immediately be spent and voluntarily dedicate one-tenth to God.

Whatever one’s religious beliefs about tithing, the behavioral lesson is unmistakable. It requires planning. It requires living on less than one receives. It requires resisting immediate consumption. It requires placing a principle ahead of an impulse.

Fast offerings add another dimension. Members abstain from food and drink while fasting and are encouraged to donate generously for the relief of those in need.

Again, the lesson is not What can I get? It is What can I give?

President Hinckley made precisely this contrast when discussing gambling in General Conference in 2005. After describing lotteries and casinos, he expressed gratitude that the Lord had instead given the Church the law of tithing.

One system depends upon multitudes losing so that a few may gain. The other asks everyone to contribute so that God’s work can move forward and those in need can receive help.

Gambling Reverses the Equation

President Christofferson made an especially perceptive observation during this weekend’s conference. Gambling, he explained, is structurally dependent upon one person’s gain coming at another’s expense.

“It’s hard to reconcile that with the commandment to love our neighbor as ourselves,” he said.

That gets beneath arguments about whether someone can “afford” to put $20 on a football game. The concern is not merely whether an individual gambler goes broke. It is about what kind of instincts we cultivate.

Work creates. Investment can create. Education develops human capacity. Entrepreneurship produces goods and services. Saving provides capital. Charitable giving helps another person.

Gambling produces no comparable good. Money simply changes hands according to an uncertain outcome, with the organizer taking enough from the transaction to ensure that the system remains profitable.

As President Christofferson put it: “Work leads to prosperous, just, and equitable societies. Gambling, even for fun, leads in the opposite direction.”

The Smartphone Changed Everything

There is another reason this warning deserves attention in 2026. Friction once protected people. A person who wanted to gamble might have needed to drive somewhere, enter a casino, visit a bookmaker or buy a lottery ticket. Every additional step provided another opportunity to reconsider.

Technology has eliminated much of that friction. A sporting event can now become a continuous sequence of betting opportunities. Instead of simply wagering on which team wins, users can be invited to wager throughout the contest on individual performances and events.

The casino never closes because the casino is the telephone. And that telephone accompanies its owner to work, school, the bedroom and the family dinner table.

President Christofferson specifically pointed to smartphones as one reason gambling has become so pervasive, particularly among young adults and youth. That makes the Church’s old-fashioned counsel look increasingly contemporary. Sometimes a boundary is liberating. Don’t start.

An Older Wisdom for a New Problem

There is a tendency in modern society to regard religious commandments primarily as restrictions.

Don’t drink. Don’t smoke. Don’t gamble.

Pay tithing. Fast. Keep the Sabbath. Remain sexually faithful. Live within your means.

Viewed separately, they can look like a collection of things one is denied. Viewed across a lifetime, however, another pattern becomes visible. They are habits of discipline.

A person who learns repeatedly to tell himself, I could do this, but I choose not to, develops something increasingly scarce in a world engineered around instant gratification: self-mastery.

That does not mean every faithful Latter-day Saint will be wealthy, healthy, highly educated or perpetually happy. Nor does it mean people outside the Church cannot possess these qualities in abundance.

It means that a religious culture emphasizing education, work, family, service, charitable giving, avoidance of addictive substances and resistance to gambling provides its members with a framework that can encourage human flourishing. The fruits depend upon how faithfully the principles are practiced.

“O Be Wise”

President Christofferson concluded his conference message with four words from the Book of Mormon prophet Jacob: “O be wise; what can I say more?”

Perhaps that is exactly the right conclusion. A society surrounded by advertisements promising instant riches might rediscover the virtue of earning. A culture drowning in debt might rediscover thrift. A generation accustomed to instant gratification might rediscover patience.

And people carrying casinos in their pockets might occasionally benefit from hearing a religious leader say something society increasingly hesitates to say: Some things that are legal, popular and entertaining still aren’t good for us.

For Latter-day Saints, there should be little ambiguity about gambling. There wasn’t ambiguity in 1908. There wasn’t ambiguity when President Hinckley addressed it in 2005.

And after President D. Todd Christofferson stood before the worldwide Church in October 2026, there shouldn’t be ambiguity today. “We are against it.”

Not because disciples of Jesus Christ should spend their lives looking for less. But because they have been invited to live for something more.

From “Buy Greenland” to Permanent U.S. Bases: What Trump Got America in the Arctic Deal

By Leave a Comment

Trump’s Art of the Deal: The agreement Trump signed with Denmark and Greenland gives the US greatly expanded, enduring military access to one of the most strategically important pieces of territory on Earth — while restricting potential Russian and Chinese military and economic footholds.

For years, Donald Trump’s fixation on Greenland was treated in much of the political world as something between an eccentricity and a diplomatic provocation.

Trump talked about buying the enormous Arctic island during his first presidency. After returning to the White House, he went considerably further, repeatedly arguing that American control of Greenland was necessary for national security. The rhetoric alarmed Denmark, angered some Greenlanders and generated months of friction inside NATO.

Then came the deal. Of course.

On September 22, President Trump sat beside Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen and Greenland Prime Minister Jens-Frederik Nielsen at the United Nations in New York and signed a sweeping new Arctic security agreement:

The agreement permits America to substantially enlarge its military presence;

  • modernize and expand Pituffik Space Base;
  • establish new defense areas at Narsarsuaq and Mestersvig;
  • propose additional defense areas in the future;
  • move American military aircraft, vessels, forces and vehicles broadly through Greenland;
  • develop components of the Golden Dome missile-defense system; and
  • prevent non-NATO nations from establishing military installations or maintaining a persistent military presence there.

The agreement has no expiration date and provides for its continuation even if Greenland eventually becomes independent, provided an independent Greenland remains within NATO and assumes the agreement’s obligations.

That is a very different outcome from the caricature that surrounded Trump’s Greenland campaign.

The Opening Demand Was Greenland Itself

Trump is the author, with Tony Schwartz, of The Art of the Deal, and he has long used large opening demands, public pressure and threatened alternatives as elements of negotiation. Supporters see the Greenland episode through precisely that lens; critics argue that his threats unnecessarily damaged relations with two friendly governments.

The chronology is nevertheless striking. Trump began with the maximal position: America needed Greenland.

Denmark said no. Greenland said no. Political leaders and commentators ridiculed the idea. Relations became sufficiently strained that Greenland’s prime minister now says trust with Washington will have to be rebuilt. Reuters reports that Trump’s refusal earlier this year to rule out military or economic coercion produced a diplomatic crisis and months of intensive negotiations.

Yet those negotiations did not end with Washington walking away empty-handed. They ended with Denmark and Greenland signing an agreement that grants the United States many of the strategic benefits that made Greenland attractive to Washington in the first place, without transferring sovereignty.

Whether that was Trump’s intended landing point from the beginning is known only to the people inside the negotiations. But as a negotiating sequence, it is unmistakable: an extraordinary opening demand was followed by months of resistance and bargaining, culminating in an agreement substantially expanding the American position.

The agreement provides permanent American access, basing and overflight rights and the ability to establish additional military installations when agreed under the treaty’s procedures.

Why Greenland Matters So Much

Pull out a globe rather than a conventional flat map and Trump’s interest becomes considerably easier to understand.

Greenland sits astride the Arctic and North Atlantic approaches to North America. A missile, bomber or other threat approaching the United States from parts of Russia would encounter the Arctic as a natural avenue of approach. Greenland consequently occupies valuable geography for early warning, missile tracking, space surveillance, air operations and North Atlantic defense.

America already operates Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, the Defense Department’s northernmost installation. The U.S. Space Force says the base supports force projection and space superiority and traces its missile-warning mission to the Ballistic Missile Early Warning Site established there in 1961. The 12th Space Warning Squadron today provides warning of ballistic-missile launches to U.S. national authorities and NORAD.

The new agreement goes considerably beyond preserving Pituffik.

It expressly allows the United States to modernize and expand operations there and establishes additional defense areas at Narsarsuaq in southern Greenland and Mestersvig in eastern Greenland. It also creates a procedure for additional American defense areas should future threats require them.

The agreement further gives U.S. military aircraft the ability to fly over and land throughout Greenland and gives American public vessels access and movement rights through Greenland’s territorial waters, subject to the treaty’s terms.

In strategic terms, America is no longer talking merely about one isolated Arctic installation. It has secured a framework for a much broader military posture across the island.

Golden Dome Moves North

Perhaps the most consequential words in the agreement concern missile defense.

The treaty specifically recognizes the parties’ interest in American military access necessary to defend Greenland, the NATO area and the American continent, “including through establishment of a Golden Dome defense system.” Geography is the reason.

Greenland lies along important northern approaches to North America. Hudson Institute senior fellow Liselotte Odgaard argued earlier this year that inadequate surveillance and response capability around eastern Greenland leaves vulnerabilities that Russia could exploit in posing a nuclear threat to both the United States and NATO. She noted that the 2026 U.S. National Defense Strategy identifies access to Greenland as important to homeland defense.

NATO itself has been expanding its focus on the High North. Seven of the eight Arctic states are now NATO members, and the alliance launched Arctic Sentry in February 2026 as part of its strengthened northern deterrence posture.

Greenland therefore is not simply a remote island covered in ice. It is part of the northern shield of North America.

Russia and China Are Effectively Locked Out Militarily

Article IX of the agreement is remarkably direct: No country outside NATO may establish a manned or unmanned military installation in Greenland or maintain a persistent military-force presence there unless the parties agree otherwise.

That provision has obvious implications for Russia and China.

Russia is an Arctic power with extensive northern military infrastructure. China, although geographically far removed from the Arctic, declared itself a “Near-Arctic State” in its 2018 Arctic policy and has sought economic, scientific and infrastructure footholds across the region. CSIS documents Chinese attempts over the past decade to participate in Greenlandic airports, an abandoned naval facility, a satellite ground station and mineral development; several projects were blocked because of Western security concerns.

The new agreement turns that concern into treaty architecture.

The Other Prize Beneath the Ice

Then there are the minerals.

Greenland contains iron ore, graphite, tungsten, palladium, vanadium, zinc, gold, uranium, copper and significant rare-earth resources. CSIS estimates Greenland ranks eighth globally in rare-earth reserves and identifies Kvanefjeld and Tanbreez as two exceptionally large deposits. China, meanwhile, remains dominant in important parts of the world’s rare-earth mining and processing system.

Europe understands the stakes as well. The European Commission has identified 25 of its 34 critical raw materials in Greenland and signed a strategic raw-materials partnership with Greenland in 2023.

Rare earths and other critical minerals aren’t merely commodities. They feed technologies used in electronics, energy systems and advanced defense equipment. Dependence on a geopolitical competitor for critical supply chains can therefore become a national-security vulnerability.

The Greenland agreement doesn’t hand Greenland’s minerals to the United States, and it would be inaccurate to describe it that way. Greenland retains control over its resources, and actually developing them remains difficult and expensive because of Arctic conditions and limited infrastructure.

What the agreement does do is strategically important.

It defines resource extraction as one of the “particularly sensitive” sectors covered by foreign-investment safeguards. Greenland, working with Denmark and in consultation with the United States and other partners, must prevent investors from countries outside NATO, NATO partner nations or the EU from obtaining control, significant influence or dangerous access to non-public information in sensitive activities when national security or public order would be threatened.

That creates another barrier against an adversarial power converting Greenland’s mineral wealth into strategic leverage.

Greenland and Denmark Got Something, Too

This was not a unilateral American acquisition, and understanding what Denmark and Greenland received is important to understanding why they signed.

The treaty explicitly reaffirms Danish sovereignty and Greenlanders’ right to determine their own political future. It requires the United States to use Greenlandic businesses for construction and servicing of defense areas to the maximum extent feasible, potentially directing substantial economic activity toward the island. It also commits the parties to respecting Greenlandic environmental, cultural and economic interests.

Prime Minister Frederiksen called the agreement one that could “last forever” and said it strengthens NATO while respecting Greenlandic self-determination. Prime Minister Nielsen likewise said a strong NATO presence in the Arctic is vital, although he acknowledged that trust between Greenlanders and Washington needs rebuilding after the confrontation over American acquisition.

Those facts complicate simplistic descriptions of the agreement as either an American conquest or an American retreat. It is a negotiated security arrangement in which all three governments accepted obligations and obtained benefits.

What did America Get?

The most interesting question may ultimately be whether possession was ever necessary to accomplish America’s principal strategic objectives.

The American flag will not replace Greenland’s flag. The island remains part of the Kingdom of Denmark. Trump did not obtain the territorial acquisition he repeatedly demanded.

But the agreement signed in New York gives the United States an enduring military framework across Greenland, two additional defense locations, the ability to expand Pituffik, broad military transit rights, provisions for Golden Dome, a mechanism for additional future bases, protection against non-NATO military penetration and safeguards against threatening foreign control of critical infrastructure and resource extraction. And it does so within NATO rather than by dissolving the alliance relationship.

Perhaps the most extraordinary provision is Article XI. The agreement has no end date.

Even if Greenland someday exercises its right to become an independent nation, the agreement requires Denmark and Greenland to ensure that the new state remains within NATO and assumes the defense agreement’s rights and obligations.

That is why the Greenland story looks considerably different today than it did when Trump’s opening demands dominated the headlines. The debate began with a seemingly audacious question: Will America own Greenland?

The agreement ultimately produced a different question, and perhaps the strategically more important one: How much of what America actually needs from Greenland can it secure without owning Greenland at all?

The treaty signed September 22 provides a substantial answer. President Donald Trump got exactly what he wanted in the deal—exactly what America needed. Anyone who doubts his powers of strategic negotiation has simply not been paying attention.

Deeper Dive Into White House UFO Tranche 6. The Files That Deserve Another Look.

By Leave a Comment

Three days after the government’s latest UAP release, researchers are finding details easily missed in the initial flood of documents: six maneuvering spheres reportedly traveling 480 mph, a military study of injuries following anomalous aerospace encounters, a 1952 UFO film the Air Force’s own laboratory struggled to explain—and evidence of how officials contemplated explaining that case to the public.

Still frame from the 2025 video showing 6 small apparent “spheres or orbs” over a U.S. military platform. Image via DoD. Read more about the latest Pentagon UAP files below.

When the federal government released its sixth tranche of UFO records Friday, the sheer volume made immediate analysis difficult.

The release contains roughly 70 records spanning more than seven decades: military videos, Project Blue Book records, an hour-long recording of Capt. Edward Ruppelt, local law-enforcement evidence, Defense Intelligence Agency contracts and dozens of technical studies dealing with subjects ranging from advanced propulsion to wormholes and antigravity.

Federalist Press reported Friday on one of the most historically remarkable items—the newly released 1952 recording of Ruppelt discussing the Air Force’s early UFO investigation. Article>

But researchers have now had a weekend to dig. And several other pieces of Tranche 6 deserve considerably more attention.

None proves that extraterrestrial spacecraft are visiting Earth. The Pentagon’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office continues to say it has found no verifiable evidence establishing an extraterrestrial origin for the phenomena. But some of these records raise questions that are difficult to dismiss with the word “balloon.” And there is nothing saying that non-human craft hail from far-way worlds. Some beleive they may come from “here.”

Six Objects. 480 Miles Per Hour. Changing Direction.

Perhaps the most immediately intriguing contemporary case comes from U.S. Central Command.

A one-minute infrared video recorded from an American military platform in the Middle East during 2025 shows what the accompanying mission report describes as six small spherical objects traveling together.

The report describes the objects as apparently agile and frequently changing direction.

Most remarkably, the observer estimated their speed at approximately 480 miles per hour.

Watch: Pentagon Tranche 6 — six spherical objects recorded by U.S. military

Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb has now taken a closer look at that report and raised an interesting question: could this simply have been a drone swarm?\ Possibly. But Loeb argues that the reported performance makes that explanation more complicated than it initially sounds.

Typical small drones operate nowhere near 480 mph. Loeb notes that even extremely fast racing quadcopters can approach roughly 300 mph only under unusual conditions, while coordinated drone swarms generally operate at considerably lower speeds. Maintaining a close formation while maneuvering becomes increasingly difficult as velocity rises because every aircraft must continuously know where its neighbors are while avoiding collisions.

Loeb estimates that coordinated swarms generally operate at speeds up to approximately 150 mph—less than one-third the speed reported in the military document. That doesn’t make the objects alien spacecraft. It makes “What were they?” a considerably more interesting question.

There is also an important limitation: 480 mph is an observer’s estimate recorded in the mission report, not necessarily an independently established speed derived from complete telemetry now available to the public. That distinction matters.

But so does the fact that the United States military recorded the encounter, documented the estimated speed and behavior, submitted it to AARO—and it remains unresolved.

Then There Is the Object Over the Yellow Sea

Another military video is intriguing for an entirely different reason. The 27-second infrared recording was submitted by U.S. Indo-Pacific Command following a 2023 encounter over the Yellow Sea. It appears to show a spherical object moving through or immediately above clouds.

Loeb points to what appears to be a faint trail associated with the object’s interaction with the clouds, arguing that this is evidence the image represents a physical object interacting with its environment rather than simply an internal camera artifact.

That conclusion should be treated as Loeb’s interpretation rather than a Pentagon determination. A short infrared video by itself doesn’t establish the object’s composition, distance or origin. Nevertheless, the apparent interaction with the cloud layer makes the footage worth examining closely.

The Government Studied People Who Were Allegedly Injured

Then we get to one of the strangest documents in the entire release. Consider a 38-page Defense Intelligence Reference Document produced in 2010 examining what its authors called evidence concerning injuries to human observers associated with anomalous advanced aerospace systems.

The study discussed three previously healthy and active individuals who reportedly experienced an anomalous aerospace-related event and subsequently developed physical symptoms. Those reportedly included skin heating and redness, hair loss and, in one individual, signs characterized as radiation illness followed over subsequent years by malignant changes.

The three individuals were reportedly antenna engineers. The researchers compared their cases with published and unpublished incidents involving known radio-frequency injuries and considered whether electromagnetic exposure could account for the effects.

The document’s author reached a provocative conclusion: enough incidents and medical information existed, in his assessment, to support a hypothesis that some advanced systems were already deployed while remaining incompletely understood by the United States.

And the Pentagon specifically cautions that the AAWSAP technical documents are reference and synthesis papers rather than proof that the concepts they discuss have been validated.

But the existence of the study is significant for another reason. The government wasn’t merely paying contractors to speculate about what UFOs looked like. Researchers were investigating whether some reported encounters might produce measurable physiological effects on human beings.

Loeb calls this one of the notable aspects of Tranche 6 and says the release explicitly connects investigation of physiological injuries with possible UAP encounters.

Then We Found the Tremonton File

This may be the most fascinating historical part of Tranche 6.

On July 2, 1952, Navy Chief Warrant Officer Delbert C. Newhouse was traveling near Tremonton, Utah, when he observed a group of bright objects moving across the sky. Newhouse had a movie camera. He filmed them.

The result became one of the most famous UFO films of the Project Blue Book era. The footage is included in Tranche 6.

The objects have been debated for more than seven decades. The government’s first attempt to debunk the video seven decades ago was that Newhouse filmed birds—possibly gulls—whose bodies reflected sunlight. But researchers examining the newly released government paperwork noticed something considerably more interesting than the film itself.

According to the technical material in the released Air Force file, the government’s own photographic laboratory concluded it was “reasonably certain” that the brightness recorded on the film exceeded that expected from birds. The analysis also questioned whether the objects were spherical and noted the absence of sound as a problem for an aircraft explanation.

That still doesn’t tell us what Newhouse filmed. But then comes the really interesting part.

What the Air Force Considered Telling the Public

Among the newly available records is an Air Force Memorandum for Record concerning how the Tremonton case should be handled publicly.

An independent analysis of the PURSUE archive by WARUFO drew attention to the apparent tension between the laboratory analysis and the contemplated public explanation. According to the memo, if public release became necessary, officials contemplated saying that although the Air Force could not positively identify the objects, it was reasonably confident they were balloons or gulls and therefore would pursue the incident no further.

The memo reportedly went even further when considering release of the underlying laboratory work, saying it would be poor policy to suggest that another military service had made an error.

It is historically important because it shows something UFO researchers have alleged for generations: the government’s internal uncertainty about a case could be considerably more complicated than the simplified explanation eventually contemplated for public consumption.

That is a much more defensible, and arguably more interesting, observation than declaring that the memo proves officials knew UFOs were extraterrestrial.

The Government Was Studying Warp Drives and Wormholes

Another part of Tranche 6 has generated spectacular headlines. The government really did fund studies involving subjects including warp drives, traversable wormholes, antigravity, negative-mass propulsion, invisibility cloaking and other exotic concepts.

Thirty-seven Defense Intelligence Reference Documents released in this tranche came from the Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications Program, or AAWSAP, established by the Defense Intelligence Agency in 2008.

AAWSAP received approximately $22 million in federal funding. That sounds extraordinary. But there is an important distinction being lost in some online discussion. The existence of a government study titled around warp drive does not establish that the government possesses a warp drive.

The Pentagon explicitly cautions that these documents should be understood as reference and synthesis products rather than original experimental research proving that the concepts work. Indeed, one of the antigravity studies acknowledges that proposed concepts were not then feasible from an engineering standpoint.

What the documents establish is still fascinating: The Defense Intelligence Agency considered these concepts sufficiently relevant to future aerospace threats to pay experts to examine them.

A Police Officer Adds Something New to the Government Archive

Another story has received relatively little attention.

For the first time in the PURSUE tranches, Release 6 includes a distinct category of evidence originating with local law enforcement rather than military or intelligence personnel.

The Colorado case occurred in October 2023. According to the released material, an officer observed and filmed an object described as silent, displaying red, blue and green flashing lights. The officer reportedly checked available radar information and found no aircraft in the area. More interestingly, the officer said the object remained stationary for approximately 15 minutes before appearing to move closer.

Four videos accompany the report.

“Calvine” UAP Photo taken near Perth, Scotland

We now have a trained civilian law-enforcement observer documenting what he was seeing contemporaneously, checking for conventional air traffic and recording the event.

And Then There Is the 74-Year Continuity Problem

This may ultimately be the most interesting observation to emerge from the entire release. Put the files side by side.

In 1952, Edward Ruppelt told his audience that approximately 20 percent of roughly 800 Air Force cases consisted of good reports from reliable observers for which investigators could draw no conclusion. He discussed silent high-speed objects, radar detections and concentrations around Los Alamos, Albuquerque and Oak Ridge.

In 2022, military personnel reported small objects moving erratically over the Middle East. In 2023, an American military sensor recorded a spherical object over the Yellow Sea. A Colorado law-enforcement officer separately filmed an unexplained silent object. And in 2025, U.S. Central Command documented six small spherical objects reportedly maneuvering together at an estimated 480 mph.

Different decades. Different sensors. Different witnesses. Different locations. Different agencies. Yet some descriptions are surprisingly persistent: spheres or orbs, unusual movement, high speeds, lack of obvious conventional propulsion and objects that remain unidentified after investigation.

So What Does Tranche 6 Actually Prove?

It doesn’t prove extraterrestrial visitation . . . yet. There is no recovered spacecraft in these files. No extraterrestrial body. No verified alien communication. No document in which the United States government formally concludes that a particular object originated beyond Earth. Even some of the most provocative technical studies are literature reviews rather than observational evidence.

But dismissing the entire release because it doesn’t contain an alien spaceship would miss what is actually happening.

The United States government has now publicly released hundreds of records showing that military personnel, intelligence agencies, scientists, pilots and now local police officers have encountered things they sometimes could not satisfactorily identify.

Some cases undoubtedly have ordinary explanations. Some almost certainly suffer from insufficient data. But some contain measurements, trained witnesses, military sensors or multiple pieces of evidence that justify further investigation.

And that may be the real story of PURSUE. For most of the modern UFO era, Americans argued about whether the government possessed serious information about unidentified objects at all. We don’t have to argue about that anymore. The government is publishing it.

The question now is whether scientists, journalists and the American public are willing to actually read it.

Explore PURSUE Release 6 yourself

The Pentagon Just Dropped UFO Tranche 6 — And a 74-Year-Old Recording May Be the File to Hear First

By Leave a Comment

The newest PURSUE release went public Friday morning. Among the newly posted government records is a remarkable 1952 recording of Project Blue Book chief Edward Ruppelt discussing unexplained objects, extraordinary speeds, radar contacts and UFO concentrations around America’s nuclear installations.

Capt. Edward J. Ruppelt was the director of Project Grudge from late 1951 until it became Project Blue Book in March 1952; he remained with Blue Book until late 1953.

For nearly three-quarters of a century, Americans have argued about what the United States government really knew about UFOs during the earliest years of the phenomenon.

Friday morning, the government opened another window into that history.

The Department of War has released Tranche 6 of the government’s Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters—PURSUE—the extraordinary disclosure initiative that has been releasing government UFO records in batches since May.

The sixth release went live this morning, September 18, following previous releases on May 8, May 22, June 12, July 10 and August 7. The government describes the archive as an effort to find, review, declassify and publicly release unresolved UAP records scattered across federal agencies and decades of government files.

Readers can examine the government’s complete archive themselves here: Explore the government’s PURSUE UFO archive

And while researchers will undoubtedly spend days combing through Tranche 6, one newly released item immediately stands apart.

It is an audio recording made 74 years ago. And the man speaking is Capt. Edward J. Ruppelt.

Listen to the Man Who Ran Project Blue Book

The government has now publicly posted a recording titled: “DOW-UAP-PR160, Presentation by Captain Edward J. Ruppelt, 1952.”

The recording runs one hour, five minutes and thirteen seconds and is dated March 26, 1952. According to the government’s description, Ruppelt discusses the Air Force’s reorganized investigation of what were then commonly called “flying saucers”—an investigation that became Project Blue Book.

This isn’t somebody remembering the UFO controversy decades later. It is the officer running the investigation speaking in 1952, while it was happening. That distinction makes the recording historically fascinating.

Ruppelt explains that the Air Force had examined approximately 800 historical cases and that roughly 20 percent remained unexplained after technical analysis, according to the government’s newly published description of the recording. The unresolved reports included observations by military personnel, commercial pilots and other technically qualified witnesses.

Then it gets more interesting. The government’s summary says Ruppelt discussed concentrations of reports around sensitive national-security and nuclear-weapons facilities, including Los Alamos, Albuquerque and Oak Ridge.

And he described radar observations indicating unconfirmed speeds ranging from approximately 1,000 to 3,500 miles per hour.

Remember the date: March 1952. The first operational American jet fighter had entered service only a few years earlier. Sputnik was still more than five years away. Yet the officer responsible for investigating UFOs was discussing reports involving silent high-speed objects and radar indications of velocities reaching thousands of miles per hour.

That does not establish that these objects were extraterrestrial spacecraft. Ruppelt himself apparently emphasized that the Air Force had reached no conclusive determination about their nature or origin.

But it establishes something historically significant: the United States Air Force considered at least some UFO reports sufficiently difficult to explain—and sufficiently relevant to national security—to pursue systematic methods of gathering better physical evidence.

They Wanted Better Cameras, Better Radar and Better Data

Perhaps one of the most interesting aspects of the recording is how surprisingly modern the proposed investigation sounds.

According to the government’s description, Ruppelt discusses possible use of diffraction-grating photography and synchronized radar-scope photography to obtain objective evidence rather than relying exclusively on eyewitness accounts.

In other words, 74 years before today’s arguments about whether UAP evidence needs multiple synchronized sensors, the Air Force was already wrestling with essentially the same problem: How do you turn a strange observation into measurable scientific data?

Ruppelt’s later published account confirms that the Air Force pursued specialized cameras and sought assistance from prominent scientists as the 1952 UFO wave intensified. He wrote that the Air Force wanted every available piece of evidence and was attempting to determine whether the reports represented something genuinely unknown.

The newly released recording therefore gives Americans something unusual: not merely another government memo describing what happened decades ago, but the voice of the man who was there explaining the investigation in real time.

Congress Helped Pry This Recording Loose

There is another interesting story behind the recording. Rep. Eric Burlison of Missouri specifically went looking for it.

On May 8, Burlison sent MIT Lincoln Laboratory a letter requesting preservation and review of a reel-to-reel recording identified as “AF-ATIC-FILM, 03/52” and labeled simply: “flying saucer talk.” The listed briefer was Edward J. Ruppelt.

Burlison asked MIT Lincoln Laboratory to determine whether the recording survived and to coordinate with the National Archives regarding its preservation and archival review.

Now, four months later, the government has published Ruppelt’s March 26, 1952 presentation as part of PURSUE Release 6. The newly posted government copy identifies the recording as public domain and attributes its release through the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office.

That makes it one of the clearest examples yet of congressional pressure and the government’s current disclosure initiative bringing obscure historical UAP material directly to the public.

Capt. Edward J. Ruppelt discusses the Air Force investigation of UFOs in a March 26, 1952 presentation newly released by the U.S. government. The recording runs approximately 65 minutes. Source: Department of War/AARO/DVIDS. Listen to the complete 1952 Edward Ruppelt recording on the Defense Department’s DVIDS archive

But Tranche 6 Isn’t 65 Minutes of Smoking Guns

Much of the initial discussion surrounding Release 6 suggests that a significant part of the tranche consists of Defense Intelligence Reference Documents, or DIRDs, associated with the government’s later AAWSAP/AATIP research effort.

Those technical papers explore subjects at the speculative edges of aerospace engineering and theoretical physics. Early researchers going through Friday’s dump have noted that many of these documents had already become publicly available through previous government FOIA releases.

Seventy-Four Years Later, We’re Still Asking Ruppelt’s Question

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about listening to a recording from March 1952 is how little the central question has changed. What are these things?

Ruppelt and the Air Force were discussing radar, qualified observers, high speeds, nuclear facilities and the need for better scientific instrumentation.

Today’s military talks about infrared sensors, radar tracks, satellite observations, multisensor correlation and objects encountered in restricted military airspace.

The technology changed dramatically. The question survived. And so did Ruppelt’s insistence that the phenomenon deserved serious investigation rather than reflexive belief or reflexive ridicule.

His own later account of Project Blue Book makes clear that the Air Force could explain a large proportion of reports as balloons, aircraft, astronomical objects and other conventional phenomena. But it was the remainder—the well-documented cases that resisted easy explanation—that kept the investigation alive.

That same distinction should guide Americans looking through the files released today. Don’t begin with the conclusion. Begin with the evidence.

The Government Is Asking the Public to Look

One of the most unusual features of PURSUE is that the government isn’t simply releasing documents and declaring the matter closed. The Department explicitly says it welcomes private-sector analysis, information and expertise concerning unresolved cases. That amounts to an invitation.

Researchers can download the documents. Engineers can inspect the technical material. Pilots can evaluate aviation reports. Physicists can examine claims about performance. Historians can compare newly released documents against the government’s previous public explanations.

And ordinary Americans can look at the evidence themselves. That may ultimately be the most important change represented by PURSUE.

For generations, the argument surrounding UFOs was partly an argument over what information the government possessed but wasn’t showing us. Now hundreds of government records are sitting on a public website.

There will undoubtedly be prosaic explanations among them. There will be old material, duplicative material, dead ends and cases for which insufficient information will make an answer impossible. But there may also be cases that remain genuinely difficult to explain.

Tranche 6 is now public. The government has opened another box. And this time, one of the voices coming out of it has been waiting since 1952 to be heard.

Open PURSUE Release 6 and examine the files yourself

The Economic Numbers Americans Should See: Income Rises, Poverty & Crime Fall and Job Growth Rebounds

By Leave a Comment

Newly released Census and Labor Department figures contain some strikingly positive news for American households. Income reached a record high in 2025, child and Hispanic poverty reached record lows, and the latest employment report showed a sharp rebound in job creation. The numbers strengthen the economic case for President Trump’s agenda—but the underlying government data tell a more nuanced story in some areas.

Americans have spent years hearing about inflation, affordability, government debt and economic anxiety. Those problems have not vanished. But a remarkable collection of statistics released by the federal government this month deserves attention for another reason: several important measures of American economic well-being moved decisively in a favorable direction during 2025, the first year of Donald Trump’s second administration.

Median household income reached the highest level ever recorded by the Census Bureau. Official child poverty fell to the lowest level in the government’s historical series. Hispanic poverty reached its lowest recorded level. Black households registered a particularly large increase in median income. And the latest employment report, covering August 2026, showed payroll growth rebounding sharply after a period of weak job creation during the Biden years.

Those results form the centerpiece of a new economic assessment from the Committee to Unleash Prosperity, the conservative economic-policy organization associated with economists Stephen Moore, Arthur Laffer and Steve Forbes. Its presentation is unabashedly favorable to Trump’s economic record and compares a series of indicators under Trump and former President Joe Biden. The Economic State of the Union — Unleash Prosperity

And several of those numbers are striking.

Household Income Reaches a Record

The Census Bureau reported September 15 that median U.S. household income reached $87,460 in 2025, up from $85,210 in 2024. Adjusted for inflation, that was an increase of 2.6 percent in a single year.

More significantly, Census says 2025 median household income was the highest recorded in its data series going back to 1967.

Americans don’t experience prosperity merely through changes in GDP or the stock market. What ultimately matters to a household is what its income can purchase after accounting for rising prices.

The gains were not confined to the highest-income households. Census reported that median income increased 3 percent among White households and 4.8 percent among Black households between 2024 and 2025. The estimates for Asian and Hispanic households did not show statistically significant changes.

A 4.8 percent real increase in median Black household income is substantial.

There is additional good news after taxes. Census found that median household income after accounting for taxes and credits increased 3.1 percent, from $73,760 in 2024 to $76,060 in 2025.

Child Poverty Hits a Historic Low

Perhaps the most consequential statistic has received considerably less attention than most monthly political controversies. According to the Census Bureau, the official poverty rate among American children fell to 13.4 percent in 2025—the lowest level ever recorded under the official measure.

The overall official poverty rate also declined, from 10.7 percent in 2024 to 10.2 percent in 2025, leaving approximately 34.5 million Americans below the official poverty threshold.

The official measure compares pretax money income with poverty thresholds based on family composition. The Supplemental Poverty Measure incorporates taxes, government benefits, housing costs, work expenses and medical expenses.

By America’s long-established official poverty measure, child poverty reached an historic low in 2025. That is genuinely important news.

Hispanic Poverty Also Reaches a Record Low

The Hispanic poverty numbers are similarly striking. Census reports that the official Hispanic poverty rate dropped 1.2 percentage points in 2025, reaching 13.9 percent—the lowest recorded level in the historical series. Census says the record remains even after accounting for methodological changes in the survey over time.

Other groups also experienced declines. The Unleash Prosperity presentation highlights the racial and ethnic breakdown and argues that the gains undermine claims that Trump’s economic policies primarily benefit wealthy Americans.

The data establish the improvement. Annual income and poverty outcomes reflect many forces simultaneously: wages, employment, inflation, monetary policy, previous legislation, demographic changes and broader economic conditions.

Record real household income, record-low official child poverty and record-low Hispanic poverty are consequential economic developments and Trump’s policies certainly have earned the political credit.

Then Came a Much Stronger Jobs Report

The newest employment report adds another favorable development. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported on September 4 that employers added 162,000 payroll jobs in August, while unemployment remained at 4.1 percent.

The improvement from July was dramatic. July produced only 21,000 additional jobs. Over the previous 12 months, monthly job growth had averaged approximately 31,000. August’s 162,000 therefore represented more than five times the preceding 12-month monthly average.

Food services and drinking establishments added about 59,000 jobs. Local-government education added approximately 42,000. Manufacturing added 16,000, while information employment declined by 23,000.

Government Employment Is Moving in the Opposite Direction

One of Unleash Prosperity’s most dramatic charts concerns federal employment.

Its argument is ideological as well as economic: private-sector employment produces goods and services in the marketplace, while government employment is financed through taxation and borrowing. The organization therefore presents reductions in federal payrolls under Trump as evidence of “draining the swamp.”

The underlying direction is real: the federal workforce has contracted significantly since Trump returned to office. The precise comparison depends heavily upon which starting and ending months are chosen and how employees receiving severance or paid leave are counted, so the group’s headline figure should not be treated as a simple measure of government savings.

What can safely be said is that Trump’s second administration has deliberately pursued a smaller federal workforce while the Biden administration generally presided over federal employment growth.

The Inflation Story Is Better Than 2022

One of the most visually arresting Unleash Prosperity charts traces inflation from the Biden years into Trump’s second administration.

There is an important truth behind it: inflation reached 9.1 percent in June 2022, the highest 12-month CPI increase in four decades, before declining considerably.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported last week that consumer prices rose 0.4 percent in August 2026 and were 3.4 percent higher than a year earlier. Core inflation, excluding food and energy, was 2.4 percent over the year. Gasoline prices were responsible for more than one-third of August’s monthly increase.

Economic Growth Continues

The economy itself continues to expand. Real GDP grew at a 2.1 percent annual rate in the first quarter of 2026 and 1.5 percent in the second quarter, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis. Consumer spending, exports and investment contributed positively to second-quarter growth, while declining government spending partially offset them.

The composition is noteworthy. An economy in which private consumption, investment and exports expand while government spending contracts is different from one in which headline GDP growth depends heavily upon expanding public expenditures.

The third-quarter numbers, due later, will tell us considerably more about whether the August employment rebound is part of a broader acceleration.

Retirement Accounts Have Benefited From Strong Markets

Unleash Prosperity also highlights retirement accounts, arguing that average 401(k) balances lost purchasing power during the Biden years but have increased substantially during Trump’s two terms.

This is an area where the organization’s calculation requires more caution than its graphic suggests.

A 401(k) balance is affected not merely by presidential economic policy but by employee contributions, employer matches, withdrawals, participant demographics, asset allocation, interest rates and financial-market performance. Comparing average balances at presidential endpoints therefore cannot establish that a president personally “created” or “destroyed” the difference.

Nevertheless, strong equity markets and rising asset values unquestionably matter to tens of millions of Americans with retirement accounts. For households with substantial market exposure, asset appreciation can be an important component of financial well-being even when it doesn’t appear in household-income statistics.

Crime Has Fallen Dramatically

Another chart supplied by Unleash Prosperity attributes large crime reductions to Trump. The underlying decline is real—and remarkable.

The Council on Criminal Justice found that in its sample of large cities, homicide fell 21 percent in 2025 compared with 2024, gun assaults fell 22 percent, robbery 23 percent and carjackings 43 percent.

The improvement continued in 2026. During the first half of this year, homicide was another 18 percent lower than during the corresponding period of 2025, robbery fell 17 percent and carjacking fell 47 percent.

What the Numbers Actually Tell Us

The emerging economic picture contains a substantial amount of good news.

In 2025, inflation-adjusted median household income rose 2.6 percent and reached a record. Black median household income increased 4.8 percent. Official child poverty reached a record low. Hispanic poverty reached a record low. Overall official poverty declined. After-tax median household income increased. Crime continued falling dramatically. And now August 2026 has produced the strongest payroll-growth month in some time.

The Biden years included the 2021–22 inflation surge that sharply reduced household purchasing power.

Americans will ultimately judge Trump’s policies by results accumulated over years, and the latest results provide plenty worth noticing.

American household income is at a record high. Official child poverty is at a record low. Hispanic poverty is at a record low. Unemployment is 4.1 percent. August produced 162,000 new payroll jobs. And several categories of violent crime have continued their steep decline.

Those aren’t campaign slogans. They are measurements appearing in the latest reports from the Census Bureau, Bureau of Labor Statistics and independent crime researchers. And in an era when Americans are accustomed to being told what’s going wrong, they are also a reminder that sometimes the numbers contain genuinely good news.

America Has Seen This Movie Before: Don’t Let Fear, or China, Stop the AI Revolution

By Leave a Comment

From electricity and the automobile to mainframes, calculators, personal computers and the Internet, technological revolutions have repeatedly frightened Americans before making them richer, more productive and more capable. Artificial intelligence may be the next great test of whether America still has the confidence to build the future.

There is a familiar sound echoing across America today. Artificial intelligence is going to eliminate our jobs. Data centers are going to consume all our electricity. Computers are becoming too powerful. The technology is moving too quickly. Government must slow it down. Communities must stop the server farms. Perhaps America would be safer if we simply built less.

We have heard variations of this argument for generations. The technology changes. The fear does not.

For more than a century, Americans have repeatedly been warned that the newest machines would render human beings obsolete, destroy employment, disrupt communities and concentrate intolerable power in the hands of whoever owned the machines. The warnings were not always foolish; technological revolutions really do disrupt industries and livelihoods. But the recurring prediction of permanent mass technological unemployment has repeatedly failed.

Now America is having the argument again, only this time the machine is artificial intelligence—and there is an enormously important difference. The United States is not developing this technology in isolation. It is competing against China for leadership in what may become one of the most consequential technologies since electricity itself.

And there is now evidence that China-linked actors understand perfectly well what is at stake.

The Fear of the Machine Is Older Than the Computer

Fear that machinery would eliminate human labor goes back at least to the Industrial Revolution. The Luddites of early-19th-century Britain became so convinced that new textile machinery threatened their livelihoods that they destroyed machines. Similar fears resurfaced during the Great Depression, after World War II and during the great automation debates of the 1950s and 1960s. The American Historical Association notes that anxiety about “technological unemployment” has accompanied technological change for generations.

The automobile brought its own upheaval. The internal-combustion engine eventually devastated enormous portions of the economy built around horses. Blacksmiths, carriage makers, stable operators, harness makers and countless others saw their businesses transformed or disappear.

But America did not become poorer because it stopped organizing its transportation economy around horses.

It became vastly richer.

The HP-35 was HP’s first pocket calculator. It was introduced at a time when most calculators (including expensive desktop models) had only the four basic functions. The HP-35 was the first pocket calculator with transcendental functions.

Automobiles created assembly-line manufacturing, filling stations, repair shops, dealerships, trucking, road construction, motels, suburbs, drive-in restaurants, automobile insurance and industries nobody standing beside a horse-drawn carriage could possibly have predicted. The technology eliminated some jobs precisely because it allowed human beings to accomplish vastly more with less labor—and that increased productivity generated new wealth and new forms of employment.

Electricity did much the same thing. Electric motors and electrically powered factories replaced older machinery and transformed manufacturing. Electric appliances eliminated countless hours of domestic labor. Refrigeration changed food production and distribution. Electrified offices changed clerical work.

The result wasn’t the end of work. It was the beginning of an economy our ancestors could scarcely have imagined.

Economists have studied this phenomenon extensively. David Autor of MIT observed in the Journal of Economic Perspectives that automation certainly substitutes for some human labor, but it also complements labor, increases output and creates additional demand for labor. That is one reason generations of technological progress have failed to produce the permanent mass unemployment repeatedly predicted.

Then the Computers Were Coming for Us

The computer age generated another round of anxiety.

IBM introduced its revolutionary System/360 family in 1964. These were not cute little desktop machines. They were imposing corporate computers occupying specialized facilities and performing work that previously required rooms full of clerks, bookkeepers and human calculators. IBM itself describes the System/360 as a fundamental change in computing: software developed for one machine in the family could operate on others, allowing organizations to expand their computing capabilities without rebuilding everything from scratch.

Mainframes became more capable. The System/370 followed. Banks computerized accounts. Airlines computerized reservations. Corporations computerized payroll. Governments computerized records.

Once again came the question: What will happen to all the workers?

The anxiety became sufficiently serious that presidential candidate John F. Kennedy warned in 1960 that America stood on the threshold of an automation revolution carrying both the promise of prosperity and the danger of “industrial dislocation, increasing unemployment, and deepening poverty.” The feared permanent employment collapse never occurred. The American economy instead generated millions of additional jobs as computing transformed what workers could accomplish.

Then the computer escaped from the corporate data center.

Pocket calculators arrived. A machine small enough to fit into a student’s hand could perform arithmetic that once required paper, pencil, slide rule and considerable human effort. Surely that would make people intellectually lazy. Surely students would forget how to calculate. Surely accountants would become unnecessary.

Instead, the calculator became another tool.

Then came the personal computer.

The Apple II, Commodore, TRS-80 and IBM PC moved computing onto desks and eventually into homes. Word processors threatened typists. Spreadsheets threatened armies of accounting clerks. Desktop publishing threatened traditional typesetting. Computer-aided design transformed drafting.

The IBM PC Convertible (model 5140) is a laptop computer made by IBM, first sold in April 1986

Again, some jobs really did disappear. Others changed beyond recognition.

But the economy didn’t disappear with them.

Then Came the Internet—and Another Revolution

The Internet multiplied the disruption.

Email threatened postal mail. Online news threatened newspapers. Amazon and other online retailers threatened brick-and-mortar stores. Streaming threatened video rental. Digital photography devastated the film-processing business. Smartphones absorbed cameras, calculators, maps, calendars, address books, music players, flashlights and dozens of other formerly separate products.

Entire industries were diminished or destroyed.

And entirely new industries appeared.

Search-engine optimization specialist would have been a meaningless occupation in 1980. So would app developer, cloud architect, cybersecurity analyst, social-media manager, YouTube creator, e-commerce fulfillment specialist and countless other occupations employing people today.

Technological progress does not promise that every existing job will survive. It never has.

It promises something more important: human beings become capable of producing more value with the same amount of time and effort.

That is productivity. And over the long run, productivity is one of the foundations of rising prosperity.

AI Is the Next Tool, Not the End of Humanity

Artificial intelligence is unquestionably more powerful than a pocket calculator. It will disrupt occupations. Some tasks now performed by people will eventually be performed by machines, just as computers replaced filing cabinets and automobiles replaced horse-drawn wagons.

But focusing exclusively on what AI can replace misses what millions of Americans are already discovering it can augment.

A doctor can use AI to help examine medical information. A programmer can use it to inspect code. A small-business owner can analyze data that previously required a consultant. A researcher can process information in minutes that once consumed days. An engineer can test ideas more rapidly. A writer can use it as an editor, researcher and second set of eyes. A student can have concepts explained individually rather than waiting for the next classroom session.

Used properly, AI does not have to substitute for human judgment. It can increase the reach of human judgment.

The important question therefore isn’t merely, “What jobs can AI perform?”

It is also, “What can an American worker accomplish when the worker has AI?”

That distinction may prove as important as asking in 1985 what an accountant could accomplish with a spreadsheet rather than asking how many calculations the spreadsheet could perform without the accountant.

But AI Needs Factories

This brings us to the increasingly contentious subject of data centers.

Artificial intelligence may seem intangible when it appears on a laptop or telephone screen, but the computations behind it are intensely physical. AI requires semiconductors, servers, cooling systems, networking equipment, buildings—and enormous quantities of electricity.

Those data centers are effectively the factories of the information age.

And demand is unquestionably large. The International Energy Agency projects global data-center electricity consumption will roughly double from about 485 terawatt-hours in 2025 to approximately 950 TWh in 2030, with AI-focused facilities growing considerably faster. The United States and China are the two great centers of that expansion.

The U.S. Energy Information Administration now says data-center development is a major driver of America’s renewed electricity-demand growth. EIA expects U.S. electricity generation to reach a record level in 2026 and grow again in 2027, driven in part by data centers and manufacturing.

That is not an argument against AI.

It is an argument for building more energy.

Don’t Ration Electricity. Produce It.

America is an energy-rich continental nation. If AI requires more electricity, the answer should not automatically be to ration computation. It should be to ask how America can generate the additional electricity efficiently, reliably and affordably.

Natural gas can contribute. Nuclear power can contribute. Geothermal can contribute. Solar and wind can contribute where their economics and reliability make sense. New transmission and storage can contribute.

Indeed, the AI boom is already helping revive American nuclear power. NextEra recently secured a federal loan of up to $1.9 billion toward restarting Iowa’s Duane Arnold nuclear plant, with Google contracting for its output. Other projects are pursuing restarts of previously closed nuclear facilities, including Palisades in Michigan and a reactor at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania.

President Donald Trump has explicitly embraced this build-more approach. His July 2025 executive order accelerating data-center infrastructure identifies natural gas, nuclear, geothermal and other dispatchable power sources as infrastructure that can accompany major data-center projects. It also encourages appropriate federal lands, brownfields and other suitable locations for development.

That is much closer to the American answer to technological progress throughout our history:

Build the infrastructure the new technology requires.

We didn’t respond to the automobile by refusing to manufacture cars because existing roads were inadequate. America built roads.

We didn’t respond to electrification by banning appliances because the existing generating system couldn’t support them. America built generating stations and transmission networks.

We shouldn’t respond to AI by saying our electrical grid was designed for yesterday’s economy and therefore tomorrow’s economy must remain small enough to fit inside it.

Build the power.

Build the transmission.

Build the computing infrastructure.

A Data Center Doesn’t Belong Everywhere

Supporting data centers does not mean every proposed location is sensible.

People who don’t want a giant industrial complex immediately behind their homes aren’t Luddites. Communities can legitimately consider noise, transmission infrastructure, water consumption, land use, tax incentives and effects on local electricity rates. Congress is currently considering bipartisan measures intended to prevent ordinary ratepayers from being saddled with infrastructure costs attributable to large data-center customers.

Those concerns should be addressed rather than mocked.

But data centers possess an advantage many traditional industrial facilities do not: their product is information. They don’t need to sit on Fifth Avenue or beside a suburban subdivision to reach their customers.

There are technical limits to that principle. Latency matters for some computing applications, fiber connectivity matters enormously, and electricity and water infrastructure constrain possible sites. Information doesn’t literally move instantaneously; signals through fiber travel below the vacuum speed of light. But compared with a steel mill that needs raw materials or a retail store that needs customers physically nearby, computing facilities have extraordinary geographic flexibility.

America has enormous stretches of industrial land, brownfields, energy-producing regions and other suitable sites where large computing campuses can be developed with fewer conflicts with residential communities.

The intelligent response is therefore not “No data centers.”

It is “Build them where they make sense, and build the infrastructure to support them.”

And China Is Watching This Argument

Here is where the debate becomes considerably more serious.

China is not sitting around wondering whether artificial intelligence is fashionable. Beijing recognizes advanced AI as a strategic technology with economic, military, intelligence and geopolitical consequences.

And there is now evidence that China-linked actors have attempted to influence the American debate over the infrastructure necessary to develop it.

In June, OpenAI reported that it had disrupted a cluster of accounts that likely originated in China and were being used to generate social-media material for a covert influence operation. The operators posed as Americans from different backgrounds and produced English-language content criticizing U.S. AI and data-center development. OpenAI assessed that the operators were likely associated with a private Chinese technology company working for Chinese provincial-government clients.

Then in August, X reported finding roughly 200 accounts associated with a suspected Chinese bot farm posting in ways that could manipulate legitimate American debate over AI and energy policy. According to Axios, some posts emphasized electricity prices and grid strain or portrayed data-center operators enriching themselves at ordinary Americans’ expense.

That doesn’t mean the mother worried about her electric bill is a Chinese agent.

It doesn’t mean the homeowner opposing a data center next door is working for Beijing.

And it certainly doesn’t prove that every environmental organization or politician skeptical of AI infrastructure is secretly financed by China. Reporting examining some of the broader claims about Chinese funding has found the evidence for those sweeping accusations weak.

But foreign influence operations rarely need to invent an American disagreement. Their more effective strategy is to find an existing disagreement, amplify its most inflammatory arguments, encourage Americans to distrust one another and push the controversy in a direction favorable to the foreign power.

That appears to be precisely why the AI infrastructure debate is attractive.

China Doesn’t Have to Defeat American AI if Americans Defeat It Themselves

Imagine the strategic outcome if the United States spends the next decade making large computing facilities almost impossible to permit, refusing to build enough reliable electricity, allowing transmission projects to languish, frightening investors away from AI infrastructure and treating every increase in electricity demand as evidence that the underlying industry must be stopped.

China would hardly need to sabotage an American data center.

We would have sabotaged ourselves.

The United States has an enormous advantage precisely because it combines scientific talent, capital markets, innovative companies, abundant energy resources, world-class universities, semiconductor expertise and a political tradition that historically allowed entrepreneurs to build things.

Those advantages aren’t permanent laws of nature.

They have to be used.

The Real Lesson of 150 Years of Technological Panic

None of this means artificial intelligence is harmless.

AI can be abused for fraud, propaganda, cybercrime and surveillance. Powerful systems require sensible safeguards. Workers whose occupations change deserve opportunities to acquire new skills. Data-center developers should pay the appropriate costs of the infrastructure they require rather than quietly shifting them onto homeowners. Communities should retain a meaningful voice over land use.

But managing a technology is fundamentally different from fearing it.

America has repeatedly encountered technologies that destroyed old ways of doing things. Electricity did. The automobile did. Automation did. Mainframe computers did. Calculators did. Personal computers did. The Internet did.

The important historical fact is not that nobody was hurt by those transitions. Many people were.

The important fact is that America as a whole became vastly more productive and prosperous because it adopted the technologies rather than trying to preserve the economy that existed before them.

Artificial intelligence presents us with the same choice on a much larger scale.

We can build the computing capacity. We can build the power plants. We can build the electrical grid. We can train Americans to use AI as an amplifier of human intelligence rather than treating it exclusively as a competitor to human labor. We can locate data centers intelligently instead of pretending they must either be built in someone’s backyard or prohibited entirely.

And we can remember that while Americans argue over whether the future is too frightening to build, our principal geopolitical competitor is working very hard to build it.

America did not become the world’s technological leader by being the country most afraid of the next machine. It became the world’s technological leader by inventing it, improving it, powering it, putting it to work—and discovering opportunities that nobody could see before it existed.

Artificial intelligence should be no different.

The question is not whether the AI age is coming. The question is whether America intends to lead it.

Is Islamic Terror Winning? 25 Years After 9/11: America Must Remember What Happened

By Leave a Comment

Is Osama bin Laden winning? The attacks of September 11 did not emerge from nowhere. They were the culmination of years of escalating Islamist terrorism against Americans and others. A quarter-century later, remembrance requires more than mourning the dead. It requires remembering the ideology that motivated their killers.

Twenty-five years ago this morning, Americans turned on their televisions and watched something that seemed impossible.

A passenger jet had struck the North Tower of the World Trade Center. At first, millions assumed they were witnessing a terrible accident. Then, at 9:03 a.m., United Airlines Flight 175 slammed into the South Tower before television cameras and millions of witnesses.

America was under attack.

Before the morning was over, another hijacked airliner had crashed into the Pentagon. A fourth, United Flight 93, was brought down in a Pennsylvania field after passengers learned what was happening and fought the hijackers. Both towers of the World Trade Center collapsed. Nearly 3,000 innocent people were killed. Twenty-five years later, Americans are gathering again at Ground Zero, the Pentagon and Shanksville to remember them.

But September 11 did not come without warning.

The War Had Already Begun

For years before Americans understood that they were confronting a new kind of enemy, radical Islamist organizations had been telling the United States precisely what they intended to do.

On February 26, 1993, terrorists detonated a truck bomb in the underground garage beneath the World Trade Center. Six people were killed and more than 1,000 injured. The objective was vastly more ambitious than the death toll suggests: mastermind Ramzi Yousef intended to topple one tower into the other, potentially killing tens of thousands. The FBI later described the bombing as a deadly dress rehearsal for what would happen eight years later.

The plotters were Islamist extremists. Yousef had trained in a camp associated with Osama bin Laden, and his uncle was Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who would become the principal architect of the September 11 plot. Investigators subsequently uncovered another conspiracy to bomb New York landmarks, including the United Nations and the Holland and Lincoln tunnels. In 1995, authorities in the Philippines disrupted the Bojinka plot, which envisioned blowing up a dozen U.S.-bound airliners over the Pacific; Yousef and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed were involved.

The attacks continued.

In November 1995, a bombing in Riyadh killed five Americans and two others. In June 1996, terrorists bombed the Khobar Towers housing complex in Saudi Arabia, killing 19 American servicemen and wounding hundreds. The 9/11 Commission attributed that attack primarily to Saudi Hezbollah, with assistance from Iran—a reminder that the terrorist threat Americans faced was not confined to al-Qaeda or to Sunni jihadism.

Then came Osama bin Laden’s declaration of war.

In February 1998, bin Laden and other Islamist leaders issued a purported religious decree calling for Muslims to kill Americans, military and civilian. Six months later, al-Qaeda simultaneously bombed the U.S. embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. The attacks killed 224 people, including 12 Americans, and wounded thousands.

In December 1999, an attempt to bomb Los Angeles International Airport was stopped when Ahmed Ressam was caught entering the United States from Canada with explosives.

Then, on October 12, 2000, suicide terrorists maneuvered an explosives-laden boat alongside the USS Cole while the American destroyer was refueling in Aden, Yemen. The explosion ripped a massive hole in the ship, killing 17 American sailors and injuring nearly 40. The FBI concluded that al-Qaeda planned and carried out the attack. Investigators also discovered that the terrorists had previously attempted to attack the USS The Sullivans, but their overloaded explosives boat sank before reaching its target.

The pattern was no longer obscure. Indeed, the bipartisan 9/11 Commission later concluded that by September 2001 America’s government, Congress, news media and public had received unmistakable warning that Islamist terrorists intended to kill Americans in large numbers.

The Ideology Behind the Terror

Islamism is a political ideology seeking to organize government and society according to particular interpretations of Islamic law and authority. Jihadism is its revolutionary and violently extremist manifestation—the ideology embraced in differing forms by al-Qaeda, ISIS and affiliated organizations.

Twenty-five years after 9/11, jihadist terrorism has not vanished. Europol reported this year that it remained the primary terrorist threat in the European Union: jihadists accounted for 24 of the EU’s 45 terrorist attacks in 2025 and 347 of its 486 terrorism-related arrests. Modern jihadism increasingly operates through propaganda and online radicalization that can mobilize lone actors without the enormous organizational machinery al-Qaeda required for September 11.

Western societies therefore have two responsibilities that are entirely compatible: refusing to treat peaceful Muslims as terrorists because of their religion, while refusing equally to sanitize or ignore a violent Islamist ideology because acknowledging it might offend someone.

September 11, 2001

Nineteen al-Qaeda terrorists boarded four commercial aircraft that Tuesday morning.

At 8:46 a.m., American Airlines Flight 11 crashed into the North Tower.

At 9:03, United Flight 175 struck the South Tower.

At 9:37, American Airlines Flight 77 crashed into the Pentagon.

On Flight 93, passengers receiving telephone calls learned what had happened in New York and Washington. Understanding that their airplane was itself a weapon, they acted. They rushed the cockpit. At 10:03, the hijackers crashed the aircraft near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, before reaching their intended target.

At 9:59, the South Tower collapsed. At 10:28, the North Tower followed.

The scale of the destruction almost defied comprehension. Firefighters and police officers ran upward while thousands fled downward. Ordinary office workers carried injured strangers. Passengers aboard Flight 93 knowingly confronted armed terrorists rather than permit their aircraft to destroy another American landmark. Nearly 3,000 people were murdered in a matter of hours.

And then something remarkable happened. America became America again.

For a Brief Time, We Remembered That We Were One People

The flags appeared everywhere.

They hung from houses and apartment windows. They flew from pickup trucks and highway overpasses. Blood-donation centers filled. Churches filled. Americans donated money, food and equipment. Firefighters drove toward New York from communities hundreds of miles away.

Political divisions that had seemed enormous on September 10 suddenly looked trivial.

There was widespread agreement about several basic facts. America had been deliberately attacked. The killers were al-Qaeda Islamic terrorists motivated by a radical Islamist ideology. The country had a right to defend itself. Terrorist organizations could not be allowed sanctuary from which to organize mass murder.

The mistake came later, when parts of Western political and media culture increasingly treated concern about Islamist ideology itself as though it were indistinguishable from prejudice against individual Muslims. Islamophobia was born on CNN and other liberal outlets.

One can defend a Muslim American’s constitutional right to worship while vigorously opposing Islamism. One can welcome an immigrant who embraces America’s constitutional order while questioning immigration policies that import people hostile to that order. And one can condemn anti-Muslim bigotry while demanding that governments confront jihadist organizations without euphemism.

Twenty-Five Years of an Argument We Still Have Not Resolved

The intervening quarter-century did not make the underlying problem disappear.

Al-Qaeda survived in altered form. ISIS established a territorial caliphate before losing it and inspired or directed terrorist attacks abroad. Europe endured jihadist massacres in Madrid, London, Paris, Brussels, Manchester and elsewhere. America suffered attacks at Fort Hood, the Boston Marathon, San Bernardino, Orlando and other locations.

And on October 7, 2023, Hamas and other armed groups poured across the Gaza border into Israel, murdering civilians and taking hostages. A United Nations investigative mission subsequently found reasonable grounds to believe that rape and gang rape occurred at multiple locations during the attack and clear and convincing information that hostages were subjected to sexual violence, including rape and sexualized torture. The same UN investigation also rejected some specific allegations for which evidence did not hold up—an important reason to distinguish documented atrocities from rumor.

None of this means Muslims collectively bear responsibility for terrorism. They do not. Collective guilt is both unjust and intellectually lazy.

But neither does that truth require the West to avert its eyes from radical Islamism.

Even today Americans remain profoundly divided about that question. A Pew Research Center survey released just before this anniversary found that 51 percent of Americans believe Islam is more likely than other religions to encourage violence among its believers, compared with 25 percent in March 2002. The partisan divide is enormous: 76 percent of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents said so, compared with 29 percent of Democrats and Democratic leaners.

That does not establish which interpretation of Islam is correct. It demonstrates something else: the argument America seemed to have settled on September 12, 2001, is very much alive 25 years later.

Europe Learned Some Lessons the Hard Way

Immigration makes the issue still more difficult because several distinct questions are routinely collapsed into one.

Europe has experienced serious problems involving integration, radicalization and—in some communities—forms of criminality whose cultural dimensions authorities were reluctant to discuss. Britain’s group-based child-sexual-exploitation scandals are an especially grim example. A major British government audit concluded in 2025 that national ethnicity data remained too inadequate to establish a definitive nationwide perpetrator profile, while also examining significant local evidence involving men of Pakistani heritage. The British government has since established a statutory inquiry specifically charged with examining ethnicity, religion and culture alongside institutional failures.

The lesson should not be that Pakistani men, Muslims or immigrants are collectively responsible for these crimes. That would substitute prejudice for analysis.

The lesson is that governments must be willing to investigate uncomfortable facts—including cultural or religious factors when the evidence supports them—without suppressing discussion because officials fear accusations of intolerance.

A civilization confident in itself should be capable of doing both things simultaneously: protecting innocent minorities from collective blame and protecting the larger society from genuinely dangerous movements within minority populations.

The Strange Political Coalitions of the Post-9/11 Era

One of the more remarkable developments of the past 25 years has been the political convergence, on certain issues, between elements of the Western progressive left and Islamist political movements. Their underlying philosophies are hardly natural allies. Secular progressivism and traditional Islamist doctrine profoundly disagree about religion, sexuality, women’s roles, family structure and the proper relationship between religious authority and government.

Yet alliances can form around common political causes—anti-Americanism, anti-Zionism, opposition to Western foreign policy, immigration politics or a shared conception of certain groups as oppressed and others as oppressors.

That phenomenon deserves scrutiny without turning every Muslim political candidate, immigrant or Palestinian advocate into an Islamist. American Muslims are politically diverse, just as Christians, Jews and atheists are.

The constitutional question is ultimately straightforward. Americans may believe whatever religion they choose. They may criticize Christianity, Judaism, Islam or atheism. They may advocate socialism, capitalism or almost any other political philosophy. But America’s constitutional system—not religious law, racial identity or revolutionary ideology—remains the governing compact.

Immigration policy has a legitimate role in protecting that compact. Citizenship should mean more than physical residence. A country has every right to ask whether those seeking to join it are prepared to live peacefully under its laws and constitutional institutions.

Did Bin Laden Succeed?

Osama bin Laden failed in his most obvious objective.

He did not destroy the United States. He did not establish an Islamist state here. Al-Qaeda’s original leadership was devastated, bin Laden was eventually killed by American forces, and the United States has prevented another foreign terrorist attack approaching the scale of September 11.

But the more disturbing question on this 25th anniversary is whether he succeeded in a different way.

Terrorism is intended not merely to kill people but to alter societies. Bin Laden hoped to provoke conflict, deepen divisions and undermine confidence in the Western order. Twenty-five years later, Americans distrust one another profoundly. Our understanding of national identity is contested. Even basic discussions about borders, assimilation, religion, terrorism and Western civilization can become exercises in partisan accusation.

It would go too far to attribute those changes to bin Laden. They have many causes, most of them originating within the West itself.

But that makes the lesson of September 11 more important, not less.

Bin Laden therefore failed to conquer America, but he succeeded in making America change itself. Every security checkpoint, every fortified airport, every counterterrorism bureaucracy and every hour an innocent traveler spends proving that he is not carrying a weapon is part of the enormous price a free society has paid because a small number of men were willing to murder strangers in the name of an extremist ideology. Necessary precautions may protect liberty, but their necessity itself represents something we lost on September 11. The America of September 10, 2001—where ordinary citizens could move through many public spaces with a degree of openness that younger Americans have never experienced—is a country that in some respects no longer exists.

The Freedom We Lost After September 11

There was another victory the terrorists achieved that Americans rarely discuss when commemorating September 11: they permanently changed the way ordinary Americans live. Before 9/11, family members could routinely accompany travelers to an airport gate and wait there to embrace them when they stepped off the airplane. Airport security was comparatively unobtrusive. Americans traveled without removing shoes, surrendering bottles of water, measuring shampoo into tiny containers or routinely submitting themselves and their belongings to elaborate screening. Today we accept identification checkpoints, scanners, metal detectors, restricted areas, security lines and searches as ordinary features of American life. Some of those precautions are reasonable responses to genuine threats, but that does not change why they became necessary. Nineteen terrorists demonstrated that civilian transportation could be transformed into a weapon of mass murder, and hundreds of millions of innocent travelers have lived with the consequences ever since.

The transformation went far beyond airports. Congress created the Transportation Security Administration in November 2001 and the Department of Homeland Security in 2002, producing an enormous federal security apparatus devoted to aviation security, border protection, intelligence coordination, cybersecurity, emergency preparedness and counterterrorism. The federal government acquired surveillance and investigative powers that would have generated extraordinary controversy before September 11. Buildings strengthened security. Public events acquired checkpoints and bag searches. Police departments developed counterterrorism units. Governments spent vast sums hardening transportation systems and potential targets. Whatever one thinks of each particular policy—and some unquestionably prevented or complicated subsequent attacks—the larger historical fact is undeniable: terrorism imposed a tremendous tax on American liberty, privacy, time and money. The passengers standing barefoot in an airport security line a quarter-century later are living, however indirectly, with the consequences of September 11.

There is an additional frustration in the necessarily generalized nature of modern security. A grandmother, businessman, child or mother traveling with breast milk can find herself subjected to rules created because terrorists learned to conceal explosives in shoes, liquids, underwear, electronics and other ordinary objects. (Breast milk is actually exempt from the TSA’s normal 3.4-ounce liquid limit, although it must be declared and may receive additional screening.) The principle of equal treatment means security procedures generally cannot simply assume that someone is harmless because of race, sex or appearance—and racial or religious profiling would also sweep enormous numbers of innocent people into suspicion while potentially missing terrorists who do not fit a stereotype. Yet there is a bitter irony here: law-abiding Americans who had nothing whatsoever to do with Islamist terrorism surrendered freedoms and conveniences because governments had to devise systems capable of detecting the comparatively tiny number of people who might commit it. The terrorists did not merely murder nearly 3,000 people on September 11. They forced an open society to spend the next quarter-century protecting itself against another September 11.

Never Forget Means Remembering All of It

“Never Forget” cannot merely mean remembering collapsing buildings once a year.

It means remembering the people inside them.

It means remembering the firefighters climbing stairwells from which they would never return. The police officers running toward destruction. The passengers aboard Flight 93 deciding that their own lives might have to be sacrificed to save strangers. The husbands and wives who made final telephone calls. The children who went to bed on September 10 with two parents and did not have them both the following night.

And it means remembering why they died.

They were not killed by an airplane accident, poverty, American intolerance or an abstraction called “extremism.” They were deliberately murdered by 19 al-Qaeda terrorists acting in service of a radical Islamist ideology that had declared Americans legitimate targets.

Remembering that fact does not dishonor peaceful Muslims. Blaming peaceful Muslims for September 11 would itself betray America’s principles of individual responsibility and religious liberty.

But refusing to name an ideology that openly seeks our destruction would betray those principles in another way.

Today, at the Pentagon, Ground Zero and Shanksville, Americans are again reading the names of the dead. Twenty-five years have passed, and an entire generation has grown up knowing September 11 only through photographs and recordings.

We owe that generation the truth—neither hatred nor historical amnesia.

On September 11, 2001, Americans saw what radical Islamist terrorism could do.

For a brief period afterward, we also saw what Americans could do when they remembered that beneath every political disagreement, race, religion and region, they belonged to one country.

Twenty-five years later, perhaps the most important words remain the simplest:

Remember the dead. Remember the heroes. Remember the enemy that attacked them. Defend the Constitution that the terrorists could not destroy. And never forget.

The ‘Choice’ the Left Hates: Our Children’s Education

By Leave a Comment

Democrats speak constantly about choice. But when parents want to choose where their children are educated, and where the public money assigned to those children is spent, the party and its most powerful education allies suddenly discover the virtues of monopoly.

There is perhaps no government service in America for which failure would be more consequential than education. A school can lose money and recover it. A district can replace a superintendent. A legislature can rewrite a curriculum. But a child gets only one fourth grade, one eighth grade and one senior year. When a school fails him year after year, government cannot return those years at age 25 and allow him to try again.

That is the moral case for school choice, and it is far more important than the institutional arguments surrounding it.

For most of modern American history, the public education system has operated on a principle that would be considered strange almost anywhere else: government assigns a child to a school largely according to the family’s home address, sends enormous amounts of taxpayer money to the institution, and then asks parents to trust that the institution will deliver. Wealthy parents have always possessed school choice because they can move to a desirable district, pay private-school tuition or hire tutors. The families most thoroughly trapped by geography have generally been those with the fewest resources.

Arizona decided to challenge that model.

The result is one of the broadest educational marketplaces in the country: traditional district schools, open enrollment across district lines, charter schools, private schools, homeschooling and Empowerment Scholarship Accounts that allow eligible families to direct state education money toward an educational setting they choose.

The operating principle is almost embarrassingly simple:

Fund the child, not the building.

Arizona Turned the ZIP Code Into a Starting Point, Not a Sentence

Arizona’s public-school open-enrollment law says families can seek admission not merely to another school within their district but to schools in other districts, subject principally to available capacity and specified enrollment preferences. Districts must publish capacity information and accept students throughout the year when space exists.

That alone changes the relationship between school and family.

A neighborhood district school no longer possesses a guaranteed customer simply because a child lives within a particular boundary. If parents believe another district school offers better academics, discipline, athletics, special education or simply a better environment, they can pursue it.

Arizona then added one of America’s largest charter-school sectors. State financial data show approximately 231,660 students were enrolled in Arizona charter schools in fall 2024, across roughly 560 schools. And the state went further still.

Arizona’s Empowerment Scholarship Account program is now universally available to resident K-12 students who satisfy the program’s requirements. Instead of automatically directing the child’s state education allocation to the neighborhood school, an ESA permits qualifying educational expenses such as private-school tuition, tutoring, curriculum and other approved services. As of August 31, 2026, the Arizona Department of Education reported 104,644 students enrolled for the 2026-27 ESA year.

That is not a pilot project anymore. It is an alternative education system operating alongside the traditional one.

For decades, the political answer to disappointing educational results has been remarkably consistent: spend more money. Yet the states themselves provide a natural experiment demonstrating the limits of that prescription.

New York spends roughly three times as much per public-school student as Arizona. $30,000 vs just $11,000 per student. Arizona operates under this fiscal constraint familiar throughout the West: enormous portions of its territory remain under federal ownership and therefore outside the normal state and local property-tax base. Congress makes Payments in Lieu of Taxes to Western communities partly because those governments cannot tax federally owned land the way communities elsewhere tax private property.

Yet, Arizona has built one of America’s broadest educational marketplaces on a comparatively very lean public-education budget. District schools compete with other district schools through open enrollment, with charter schools, and increasingly with private and alternative educational arrangements through Empowerment Scholarship Accounts.

What Happens When Schools Have to Compete?

The economic argument for school choice is one conservatives will immediately recognize. Competition normally disciplines providers.

A grocery store that provides bad food at high prices loses customers. A restaurant that treats patrons contemptuously eventually closes. A manufacturer that ignores what consumers want watches a competitor take its business.

Traditional public education largely insulated schools from that feedback mechanism. A chronically underperforming school could lose the confidence of thousands of parents while retaining most of those parents’ children because geography, transportation and finances left them nowhere else to go.

School choice changes the incentive.

When money follows students, losing families eventually means losing revenue. At that point, parental dissatisfaction is no longer merely an unpleasant school-board meeting. It has financial consequences.

Arizona’s experience is especially interesting because most educational competition does not involve private schools at all. An earlier Goldwater Institute examination found that, in sampled Maricopa County districts, more than 30 percent of students were attending a district school other than the one assigned by residence; combined with charter attendance, roughly 47 percent were attending something other than their geographically assigned public school. That analysis predates today’s universal ESA program, but it illustrates something frequently lost in the voucher debate: school choice often means choosing another public school.

And there is evidence that competition can improve the schools students leave behind.

Research on Ohio’s voucher program, for example, found academic improvement among students remaining in public schools close to the threshold for voucher eligibility—a competitive effect also found in earlier Florida research. That does not prove every choice program produces the same result, but it undermines the assumption that choice can benefit only the child who leaves.

That point deserves more attention. A school-choice program does not have to destroy public education. Properly structured, it can force public education to compete for the privilege of educating the public’s children.

The Charter Evidence Is Particularly Difficult to Ignore

One of the strongest arguments for choice comes not from a conservative think tank but from Stanford University’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes.

CREDO’s major national charter-school study compared charter students with demographically and academically similar students in traditional public schools. Nationally, charter students showed greater average progress in both reading and mathematics.

Arizona’s results were notable. According to CREDO data summarized by the Goldwater Institute, Arizona charter schools produced stronger reading growth than comparable district schools in about 35 percent of comparisons while producing weaker growth in approximately 12 percent; the remainder were statistically similar. In mathematics, Arizona charters were stronger in about 38 percent of comparisons.

Those numbers do not say every charter school is excellent. Some are not, and bad charter schools should close.

That is the point. Choice should never mean replacing a government monopoly with an entitlement for private or charter operators. It should mean permitting schools to compete, measuring results, giving families useful information and allowing unsuccessful institutions to lose students.

Accountability through choice is meaningful only if failure carries consequences.

America’s Educational Results Give Parents Every Reason to Demand Something Different

The backdrop to this debate is a national educational performance crisis that neither political party should minimize.

On the 2024 National Assessment of Educational Progress—the Nation’s Report Card—only 31 percent of fourth-graders were at or above NAEP Proficient in reading. Sixty percent reached at least Basic, meaning roughly four in ten did not. Fourth-grade reading performance actually declined from 2022.

Mathematics was somewhat better but hardly reassuring. Thirty-nine percent of fourth-graders reached Proficient in 2024. Among eighth-graders, only 28 percent reached Proficient in mathematics, while 61 percent reached Basic or above.

Then there is civics. The most recent national eighth-grade NAEP civics assessment found only 22 percent of students at or above Proficient. The average score fell from 2018 and was statistically no better than it had been when the assessment began in 1998.

This is the context in which defenders of the educational status quo ask parents to be patient. Parents have already been patient. Children are still failing to read. Millions struggle with mathematics. Basic understanding of American government is frighteningly weak.

At some point, insisting that every family continue patronizing the same institution ceases to look like loyalty to public education and begins to look like loyalty to the institution itself.

Detroit Is Paying Children to Show Up

One of the articles that prompted this discussion captures the dysfunction in an almost surreal way.

Fox News reported this morning that Detroit-area public schools are experimenting with incentives of as much as $1,000 in gift cards for perfect attendance, an attempt to combat severe chronic absenteeism. The same segment discussed districts elsewhere lowering academic standards in attempts to improve reported performance.

It would be unfair to blame teachers for all of this. Chronic absenteeism has enormous causes outside school—family instability, poverty, post-pandemic habits, neighborhood conditions and parental disengagement among them.

But the spectacle still tells us something. An education system in which government must pay students simply to enter the building is not suffering from too much parental choice.

It is suffering from a collapse of confidence and accountability.

Seattle Offers Another Window Into the System

Seattle Public Schools entered this school year facing an estimated $100 million budget gap while its teachers union considered a strike.

According to reporting cited by Fox, 91 percent of participating Seattle Education Association members authorized a strike if negotiations failed to produce a new contract involving higher compensation, benefits and special-education provisions. Superintendent Ben Shuldiner, hardly a conservative school-choice activist, publicly rebuked the union and said the district was “broke.” The district reportedly has roughly 5,000 fewer students than in 2019.

The union’s position deserves to be represented accurately. Its concerns include compensation, working conditions and special-education supports, and unions argue that recruiting and retaining competent teachers requires competitive pay and manageable workloads.

But Seattle exposes the structural problem. What happens when enrollment declines but the institution’s financial and labor obligations do not decline with it? The traditional answer is usually more money.

The school-choice answer is different: ask why families are leaving.

Why Teachers’ Unions Fight Choice

The National Education Association and American Federation of Teachers make no secret of their opposition to private-school choice.

This summer the two unions jointly urged Democratic governors to reject the new federal private-school scholarship initiative, calling it a threat to public education. The AFT adopted a 2026 resolution declaring that public funds should remain in public schools and arguing that vouchers divert resources, disproportionately subsidize families already using private schools, increase segregation and permit private institutions to operate without the same obligations imposed on public schools.

The unions’ fundamental premise is that public education is a public institution with obligations no private school necessarily shares. District schools must accept the children who arrive at their doors, including students who are expensive to educate. Private schools may charge tuition above the value of a voucher, enforce admission standards or offer fewer services for students with significant disabilities. Critics also argue that widespread ESAs can subsidize families who were already paying private tuition rather than induce students to leave public schools.

Arizona’s own data give that last criticism some substance. For FY2025, Arizona’s Joint Legislative Budget Committee reported 87,602 ESA participants and $872.2 million in awards. State data also show that among newly entering universal ESA students in grades 1-12 during a reporting period, 57 percent had been enrolled in public school immediately beforehand—meaning a substantial share had not.

School-choice advocates should not duck that debate. Universal eligibility costs money, and lawmakers have a legitimate responsibility to prevent fraud, audit expenditures and determine whether the program is delivering value to taxpayers.

But there is an enormous philosophical difference between regulating a choice program responsibly and declaring that parents should not have the choice at all. The unions consistently favor the latter when public money would follow a student into private education.

Democrats Have Made Their Position Official

The alignment with the Democratic Party is not speculation.

The Democratic Party’s most recent national platform explicitly opposed “private-school vouchers, tuition tax credits, opportunity scholarships” and similar programs that transfer taxpayer-supported education funding outside public schools. Democrats argue that these programs drain public-school resources and lack sufficient transparency and nondiscrimination protections. The platform simultaneously called for greater investment in teachers, public schools and increased charter-school accountability.

So the divide could hardly be clearer. Democrats generally seek to strengthen the existing public-school system through more funding, staffing, collective-bargaining protections and government-directed reforms.

Republicans increasingly seek to strengthen education by giving families leverage over the system. Those are fundamentally different theories of accountability.

One says experts, elected boards and governments should improve schools from inside. The other says parents should have the ability to walk away.

Follow the Child

There is a revealing phrase used repeatedly by opponents of school choice: “Taking money away from public schools.”

But whose money is it? If a school receives money because James is enrolled there, and James leaves, why should the school continue receiving the portion intended to educate James?

We do not normally say a restaurant was robbed because a customer ate across the street. We do not say a university was defunded because a student enrolled somewhere else. The public-school system exists to educate children. Children do not exist to finance the public-school system. That reversal of priorities may be the most important idea in the entire school-choice debate.

Choice Is Especially Important for Families Without Money

The wealthy will always have educational choice. They can buy a house beside the best public school. They can pay $20,000 or $30,000 in private tuition. They can hire tutors. They can move. They can homeschool with one parent staying home.

The child trapped in the worst school is disproportionately the child whose parents cannot do those things. That makes opposition to educational portability strangely regressive.

A politician who sends his own children to private school while telling a poor mother that public money must remain with her failing neighborhood district is not defending equality. He is defending his choice and denying hers.

The Conservative Reform Should Be Choice Plus Accountability

There is one place where conservatives should resist ideology of their own. Simply handing money to any educational provider and declaring victory would recreate the same problem in another form.

Arizona and other choice states should insist upon aggressive financial auditing, transparent academic information, swift prosecution of fraud, easy comparisons among schools and consequences for providers that consistently fail students. Parents cannot exercise meaningful choice without meaningful information.

Universal choice should be accompanied by rigorous measurement. Reading. Mathematics. Science. History. Civics. Writing. Parents should know whether a school is teaching them. And taxpayers should know what they are buying.

That is not an argument against school choice. It is how a serious school-choice system should work.

The Institution or the Child?

At bottom, the argument isn’t really about charter schools, ESAs or vouchers. It is about who possesses the presumption of authority.

The education establishment begins with the institution: this is the public school, this is its funding, this is its staff, and reform must occur within its walls.

School choice begins with the child: this is the child’s education, and the institutions must earn the family’s confidence.

One system asks parents to wait while professionals repair failing schools. The other gives parents an exit. America has been waiting for decades.

Only 31 percent of fourth-graders are proficient readers. Only 28 percent of eighth-graders are proficient in mathematics. Only 22 percent of eighth-graders were proficient in civics on the latest national assessment.

At some point, protecting the system from competition becomes harder to justify than protecting children from the system’s failures.

Arizona has chosen competition. Other states increasingly are following. At least 18 states now have education-choice programs with universal eligibility, according to the Education Commission of the States.

The question for the rest of America is increasingly straightforward. If a public school is excellent, why should it fear choice? It should attract families. It should grow. It should prosper.

And if another school can teach a child to read better, calculate better, understand American history better and leave school better prepared for citizenship and adult life, why should government prevent his parents from choosing it?

The purpose of public education is not to preserve a particular collection of buildings, bureaucracies or bargaining units.

It is to educate the public.

And when the interests of the institution and the interests of the child diverge, there should be no question which one comes first.

The Red Line Moves: The Socialist-Islamist Insurgency No Longer Hides at the Democratic Party’s Fringe

By Leave a Comment

Abdul El-Sayed insists he isn’t a socialist. ‘Socialist’ may be too weak for a man who seems more enamored of an Islamist Caliphate. From Michigan to New York to Florida, candidates once relegated to the ideological fringe are defeating establishment Democrats—and beginning to look less like a faction than a possible future of the party. Totalitarian candidates are on the rise in the Democrat Party.

For years, conservatives warning that America’s progressive movement was marching steadily leftward were routinely accused of exaggeration. Democrats were not becoming socialists, Americans were told. Bernie Sanders was an eccentric outlier. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez represented an unusually liberal congressional district. The Democratic Socialists of America were activists operating at the edges of a much larger and fundamentally conventional political party.

That explanation has become increasingly difficult to sustain.

The story unfolding in 2026 is not that every Democrat has suddenly become a socialist. Not completely–not yet. Is democratic socialism synonymous with Soviet-style communism? Again, not yet. The more consequential development is that candidates openly identifying as democratic socialists, and candidates closely allied with that movement, are demonstrating that they can defeat traditional Democrats, capture Democratic nominations and build a political infrastructure capable of reproducing those victories.

And Michigan Democratic Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed may be the most revealing example precisely because he publicly rejects the socialist label.

The Candidate Who Says He Isn’t a Socialist

El-Sayed is now the Democratic nominee for the U.S. Senate in one of America’s most important battleground states. He defeated the more centrist Rep. Haley Stevens in Michigan’s Democratic primary and will face Republican Mike Rogers in November. His victory followed endorsements from Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and every current member of the congressional “Squad.”

El-Sayed nevertheless insists that descriptions of him as a socialist are wrong. “I’m not somebody who is a socialist,” he told CNN during the campaign, adding that he believes in capitalism but believes it must be regulated. In another interview he described himself as “a capitalist who’s actually read about capitalism.” A wholistic survey of his totalitarian-leaning statements provide a textbook definition of Mussolini-styled fascism.

Fox News reported that El-Sayed appeared at six DSA events between 2017 and 2020. He headlined a 2019 fundraiser that raised approximately $10,000 for Detroit DSA, whose organizers reportedly described him as a “longtime friend.” At one event, El-Sayed and Rep. Rashida Tlaib were photographed behind imagery depicting a hand labeled “DSA” choking a snake labeled “capitalism.”

Streamer Hasan Piker, left, and Abdul El-Sayed take a selfie with young fans following a campaign event at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, on April 7.  (Julia Demaree Nikhinson/AP)

Then there is the coalition behind him. Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez campaigned with El-Sayed. The entire Squad endorsed him. DSA members have gravitated toward his campaign even without a formal organizational endorsement. His agenda includes Medicare for All and an aggressive attack on corporate concentration and money in politics.

Whether El-Sayed personally checks the “socialist” box is therefore almost beside the point. He has become a vehicle through which America’s socialist left can exercise power in a state that Donald Trump carried twice. That is much more significant than a label.

The Deleted Posts

El-Sayed’s past rhetoric has received renewed attention as he attempts to broaden his appeal for the general election.

CBS News reported this week that it verified two deleted El-Sayed posts comparing America’s COVID death toll with the nearly 3,000 people murdered on September 11. He is for it. Another deleted post from the 20th anniversary of 9/11 compared the victims with deaths resulting from subsequent American military interventions.

Then there is is close relationship with Hasan Piker. Piker, the enormously popular left-wing streamer who infamously said that “America deserved 9/11” appeared at El-Sayed campaign events. Their association has become sufficiently controversial that fellow Democrats have demanded a repudiation.

This is no longer simply Republican opposition research. It has become an argument inside the Democratic Party about how far its insurgent wing has traveled and which associations should remain beyond the pale.

The same problem surfaced after an attack on a Michigan synagogue. El-Sayed initially discussed the attack partly through the assailant’s personal loss in the Middle East and said that “hurt people hurt people.” He subsequently apologized to Michigan’s Jewish Democratic Caucus, saying he had not intended to excuse violence and regretted the pain his words caused.

Taken together, the statements illustrate that a candidate who developed his political identity within America’s activist left is now attempting to translate that identity into statewide political power. And he is hardly alone.

Zohran Mamdani Proved the Model Could Work

The political earthquake really began with Zohran Mamdani.

Mamdani doesn’t run away from the terminology. He is a democratic socialist and was sworn in as mayor of America’s largest city in January after campaigning on universal childcare, free bus service, rent freezes and higher taxes on wealthy New Yorkers.

More importantly, Mamdani isn’t treating his victory as a one-off New York phenomenon. He told CBS that democratic socialism “can flourish anywhere.” The movement is now testing that proposition.

In June, all three congressional candidates endorsed by Mamdani won their New York Democratic primaries. Brad Lander defeated incumbent Rep. Dan Goldman. Darializa Avila Chevalier defeated Rep. Adriano Espaillat. Claire Valdez captured the nomination for an open congressional seat. At least a dozen NYC-DSA-backed candidates won races that night.

That is not an activist club issuing manifestos. That is an electoral machine. And because these are overwhelmingly Democratic districts, primary victories can be tantamount to election.

The Insurgency Spreads to Michigan

Then came Michigan. State Rep. Donavan McKinney, a DSA member, defeated incumbent Democratic Rep. Shri Thanedar for the Democratic nomination in Michigan’s 13th Congressional District. McKinney ran on Medicare for All, ending military aid to Israel and rejecting corporate PAC money. He was backed by DSA and other progressive organizations and is heavily favored in his Democratic district.

On the same primary night, El-Sayed defeated the more establishment-oriented Stevens for the Senate nomination. Consider what that means.

A democratic socialist knocked a sitting Democratic congressman out of office. A Sanders- and AOC-backed progressive with longstanding DSA relationships captured the party’s Senate nomination. And the results occurred not in Brooklyn or San Francisco, but in Michigan, one of the states that determines who governs America.

Reuters now describes El-Sayed and McKinney as part of a broader test for the democratic socialist movement as it attempts to expand its coalition beyond younger progressives and into constituencies, including older Black Democrats, that have traditionally been more skeptical of the socialist left.

Florida Just Delivered Another Warning

Florida provided yet another data point. State Rep. Angie Nixon stunned the Democratic establishment by defeating Alex Vindman for the party’s U.S. Senate nomination. Nixon joined the Democratic Socialists of America in June, although she has emphasized that she doesn’t endorse every position taken by the organization.

After winning, Nixon told CBS that voters weren’t interested in ideological terminology. “It’s not about labels,” she argued.

That phrase is becoming remarkably common. El-Sayed says he isn’t a socialist. Nixon says labels aren’t important. Mamdani says democratic socialism can flourish everywhere.

Conservatives would be foolish to become obsessed with terminology while ignoring the underlying transformation. Look at the policies. Look at the alliances. Look at who is winning.

A Democratic Leadership Vacuum

Former Democratic fundraiser Lindy Li offers one explanation for why this is happening.

Li, who raised money for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris before breaking with the party and now identifies as conservative, told Fox News that the Democratic Party’s post-Biden leadership vacuum has created an opening for DSA.

“Power abhors a vacuum,” she said. “They’re simply filling a vacuum. There’s no one there.” Li’s political conversion obviously gives her a point of view, and her characterization of DSA should be understood in that context. But the underlying observation is difficult to dismiss.

Who currently defines the Democratic Party? The Biden generation is gone. The old Clinton-era centrism has little emotional hold on younger Democratic voters. The party establishment remains institutionally powerful, but establishment-backed incumbents have repeatedly discovered that institutional power doesn’t guarantee victory in a Democratic primary.

The socialist left, meanwhile, has something establishment Democrats increasingly lack: an ideology, an activist base, recognizable national personalities, an economic narrative and an organized mechanism for identifying and electing candidates. It knows what it wants.

Socialism With Better Marketing

There is also a reason the movement is succeeding that conservatives should understand rather than caricature. Its candidates rarely campaign by giving voters lectures on Marx.

They campaign on rent. Groceries. Health insurance. Childcare. Corporate power. Housing.

Young Americans facing enormous housing costs, student debt and health-care expenses (all created by Democratic policies) are told that their economic insecurity is not primarily the result of scarcity, regulation, monetary policy, taxation or failed government programs. They are told instead that the system has been captured by billionaires and corporations, and that government can make life affordable by transferring more economic power to the public sector.

That message has political potency.

Mamdani’s campaign was built around affordability. Nixon stresses everyday costs. El-Sayed continually redirects interviews toward housing, health care and the price of living. Even Reuters’ examination of the socialist movement today notes that its candidates are concentrating on affordability as they try to broaden their electoral appeal.

Supporters see these policies as democratic government correcting market failures, restraining monopolies and providing necessities that private markets have failed to make affordable. They reject comparisons with authoritarian communism and point to social-democratic programs throughout Europe and elsewhere. That is the strongest argument for their side.

But conservatives should recognize what is occurring beneath the friendlier vocabulary: the acceptable boundary of government intervention in American economic life is moving dramatically.

Policies that would have been considered outside mainstream Democratic politics a generation ago are increasingly presented not as radical experiments but as obvious moral necessities.

Yesterday’s Fringe Is Tomorrow’s Establishment

That is the real lesson of Abdul El-Sayed. It isn’t necessary to prove that he secretly keeps a copy of The Communist Manifesto under his pillow. It isn’t even necessary to win an argument over whether “socialist” “communist” or even “caliphate” is the technically correct description of his political philosophy.

Watch the movement instead. Bernie Sanders spent decades as an eccentric independent socialist from Vermont. Then came AOC and the Squad. Then came Mamdani.

Now Mamdani has become mayor of New York City and helped knock incumbent Democrats out of Congress. DSA-backed candidates are winning nominations in Michigan. A DSA member has captured Florida’s Democratic Senate nomination. And a politician who spent years appearing at DSA events, enjoys the backing of virtually every major figure in the congressional socialist left and advocates some of its signature economic policies is now the Democratic nominee for the United States Senate in Michigan.

The socialist movement has not quite captured the entire Democratic Party. A few moderate Democrats may still exist, often resist it somewhat, and in many parts of the country remain more electorally successful. But that is no longer the relevant threshold.

The question is whether socialism has moved from the Democratic Party’s fringe into a position from which it can plausibly compete for the party’s future.

The 2026 election cycle is supplying an increasingly uncomfortable answer: It has.

And Americans who were once told that warnings about the Democratic Party’s leftward march were merely conservative hysteria no longer have to speculate about where the movement wants to go.

Its candidates are telling us. Its organizations are mobilizing. And increasingly, Democratic primary voters are putting them in office.

Do Liberal Women View Lindsay Clancy Murders Akin to Late Term Abortions?

By Leave a Comment

As the Lindsay Clancy jury deliberates, hundreds of supporters dressed in pink have turned a horrific triple killing into a national debate over motherhood, mental illness—and criminal responsibility

Three children are dead. Their mother killed them. Those two facts are not disputed by either side in a Massachusetts courtroom.

Cora Clancy was five years old. Her brother Dawson was three. Their baby brother, Callan, was eight months old. On January 24, 2023, their mother, Lindsay Clancy, strangled all three children with exercise bands in the basement of the family’s Duxbury home after she sent her husband to pick up medication and takeout food. After murdering her three children, Clancy then attempted to kill herself, ultimately leaving herself paralyzed.

What the jury must decide is something considerably more complicated: Was Lindsay Clancy legally responsible for what she did?

After five weeks of testimony, the case went to a Plymouth Superior Court jury Thursday. The panel deliberated for several hours Thursday and approximately seven more Friday without reaching a verdict. Jurors requested to examine prescription medications and the knife involved in Clancy’s suicide attempt before being dismissed for the weekend. Deliberations resume Monday morning.

The jury has five potential outcomes before it: first-degree murder, second-degree murder, manslaughter, outright acquittal, or a finding that Clancy was not criminally responsible because of mental illness. A first-degree murder conviction could result in life imprisonment without parole; a finding of no criminal responsibility could result in confinement in a psychiatric institution rather than prison.

The defense: This was psychosis, not murder in the legal sense

Nobody seriously disputes that Clancy was suffering psychologically before the killings.

She had sought psychiatric treatment, experienced suicidal thoughts, contacted crisis resources and underwent hospitalization. Her defense maintains that she developed postpartum psychosis following the birth of Callan and was subjected to an ineffective and excessive succession of psychiatric medications. Defense experts testified that she was psychotic when she killed her children and therefore incapable of appreciating the wrongfulness of what she was doing.

Defense attorney Kevin Reddington consequently isn’t asking the jury to believe someone else killed Cora, Dawson and Callan. He acknowledges that Clancy did it. His contention is that mental disease had so profoundly destroyed her rational capacity that Massachusetts law cannot hold her criminally responsible.

That could be a legitimate legal defense, and it deserves to be considered on the evidence rather than dismissed because the crime is horrifying.

But prosecutors have presented a profoundly different interpretation.

Prosecutors say there was planning

The prosecution contends Clancy was depressed and psychologically troubled but not psychotic to the degree required to eliminate criminal responsibility.

Prosecutors emphasize the sequence preceding the killings. Clancy sent her husband Patrick awayt from the house to obtain medication for one of the children and collect dinner. While he was away, she had the opportunity she needed to kill the children. She strangled them individually with exercise bands before attempting suicide.

Prosecution experts also challenged Clancy’s subsequent account that she heard a voice directing her to kill the children. Forensic psychologist Kirk Heilbrun testified that he doubted she was suffering an acute psychotic episode and concluded that she understood the wrongfulness of her conduct. Other prosecution experts pointed to inconsistencies in her descriptions of what happened.

That conflict—not whether Clancy killed her children—is the case the jury is deciding.

Then came the women in pink

Outside the courthouse, however, something unusual happened.

Hundreds of Clancy supporters assembled wearing bright pink. Associated Press reporters estimated approximately 300 women and a few men participated in one demonstration. Shirts carried messages including “Believe,” “She Needed Help” and “Peace For Lindsay.” Some supporters traveled considerable distances to attend.

These supporters have said nothing about Cora, Dawson and Callan in this extraordinary public spectacle.

Whatever ultimately happened inside Lindsay Clancy’s mind, three human beings incapable of defending themselves were brutally murdered. The oldest had barely begun school. The youngest had lived only eight months.

A society can demand better psychiatric treatment for mothers while remembering their murdered children. Those propositions do not conflict.

When the accused becomes the symbol

The unsettling feature of the demonstrations is not concern about postpartum psychosis. That concern is legitimate and potentially lifesaving. The uncomfortable question is why the person who killed three children became the visual centerpiece of the movement.

There are countless women who have suffered postpartum depression and psychosis without killing anyone. Their experiences deserve attention. So do women who recognized frightening symptoms and sought emergency intervention, families who protected mothers and babies during psychiatric crises, and physicians attempting to recognize an uncommon but extremely dangerous condition.

Making Clancy herself the symbol creates an unavoidable moral ambiguity.

One recent commentary from the political left demonstrates how far that reframing can go. Left Voice, a self-described revolutionary socialist publication, published an essay with the remarkable headline “In the Trial of Lindsay Clancy, Capitalism Is the Guilty Party.” Its authors argued that the capitalist healthcare system—not Clancy—was the true guilty party.

That is no longer simply an argument that mental illness can eliminate legal responsibility. It relocates moral responsibility from the individual who performed a murderous act onto “the system.” It echoes Luigi Mangione shooting United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson in the back, and the large cast of young liberal supporters of that “heroic” act of murder.

And that deserves examination.

Compassion cannot require forgetting the victims

Mental illness is real. Postpartum psychosis is real. A human being suffering a genuine psychotic break may be incapable of understanding reality in a way that fundamentally changes criminal responsibility. American law has recognized versions of that principle for generations.

The jury, not demonstrators, commentators or politicians, must determine whether the evidence proves that happened here. But compassion for a mentally ill defendant need not require the moral displacement of her victims.

There is something deeply uncomfortable about seeing hundreds of people assembling around the person who admittedly murdered three defenseless children while the children’s names risk becoming secondary characters in their own deaths.

Cora. Dawson. Callan. They were not abstractions in a debate about America’s healthcare system. They were children. Beloved by their decimated father and extended family members.

Is there a broader cultural question?

The spectacle also raises a difficult cultural question that extends beyond this particular defendant.

Modern political debate increasingly frames traditional obligations through the vocabulary of autonomy. Marriage can be discussed primarily in terms of personal fulfillment. Pregnancy becomes a question of bodily autonomy. Parenthood is frequently discussed in terms of its economic and psychological burdens. Abortion politics, particularly regarding later stages of pregnancy, places the competing moral claims of mother and unborn child at the center of an intense national disagreement.

The Clancy case is legally and morally different from abortion, and it would be inaccurate to claim that the women outside the courthouse necessarily connect the two.

Nevertheless, a conservative cultural critique can legitimately ask whether something happens to a society when the language of adult autonomy consistently becomes louder than the language of obligation toward dependent children.

That is a philosophical question, not evidence concerning Clancy’s guilt.

But this case makes the question difficult to avoid.

Now twelve jurors must decide

The jury of nine women and three men has already spent more than ten hours examining an enormous record developed during five weeks of testimony. Their early requests for prescription medications suggest, although we should not speculate too far, that they are carefully considering the medical evidence central to Clancy’s defense.

They return Monday. Their responsibility is narrower than America’s. They must determine Lindsay Clancy’s criminal responsibility under Massachusetts law.

The rest of us confront a different question. Can we acknowledge severe mental illness without romanticizing the person who commits an atrocity? Can we identify failures in psychiatric medicine without automatically transferring responsibility from individuals to institutions? Can we have compassion for a desperately ill mother while reserving our deepest compassion for three children whose lives were taken from them?

We should be capable of all three. Whatever verdict eventually comes from Plymouth Superior Court, one fact should never become obscured by pink shirts, political ideology, psychiatric terminology or television cameras.

Cora Clancy was five. Dawson was three. Callan was eight months old. They deserve to remain at the center of this story.

For What Possible Reason? The Political Movement That Opposes the People

By Leave a Comment

There is a question Americans ought to ask whenever they encounter a political position that seems, at first glance, difficult to understand: What principle connects it to the other positions being advanced at the same time? Taken separately, arguments over illegal immigration, voter identification, gun ownership, government fraud, taxation, regulation and the growth of the federal bureaucracy can appear to be unrelated disputes.

Taken together, however, they illuminate one of the oldest disagreements in American political life: whether government exists primarily to protect the liberty and sovereignty of the individual citizen, or whether increasingly consequential decisions should be entrusted to an expanding administrative state.

What Possible Reason for an Open Border?

Consider the border. A sovereign country has both the authority and responsibility to decide who may enter, who may remain, and who may become a citizen. What obligation does the federal government have to the existing citizenry when immigration occurs illegally or at a scale that strains housing, schools, hospitals, public assistance and law enforcement? Immigration policy is not merely a discussion about the people seeking admission. It is mainly a question about the government’s responsibilities to the people who already constitute the nation. Those people ARE the government.

The Democrats oppose controlling our borders. For what possible reason? They oppose removing illegal aliens. For what possible reason?

What Possible Reason to Oppose Election Integrity?

The same fundamental question arises in election administration. Americans can reasonably disagree about precisely which safeguards provide the best combination of ballot access and election security. But the objective itself should be overwhelmingly shared: every eligible citizen should be able to vote, every lawful vote should be counted, and unlawful votes should not be counted. Requirements such as voter identification, accurate voter rolls, auditable election procedures and effective citizenship verification should therefore be evaluated according to whether they accomplish those objectives without improperly disenfranchising qualified voters. Election integrity should not belong to Republicans or Democrats. Confidence in legitimate elections is infrastructure for the republic itself. Yet, Democrats oppose election integrity at every step. For what possible reason?

What Possible Reason to Oppose Gun Ownership?

Then there is the Second Amendment. The Constitution does not merely mention firearms as an incidental matter of public policy; it expressly protects a right of the people to keep and bear arms. Americans should recognize the deeper philosophical question underlying the debate. A society in which peaceful citizens possess enforceable rights independent of government is fundamentally different from one in which government decides which privileges citizens may exercise. The distinction between a right and government-granted permission is central to the American constitutional experiment. The right to keep and bear arms exists before, during and after the existence of the federal government, and the government has no ability to “infringe” that right. For what possible reason would Democrats seek to restrict or eliminate that right?

What Possible Reason to Oppose Ending Government Fraud?

Perhaps nowhere should political agreement be easier to achieve than in the effort to eliminate waste, fraud and abuse from government.

Whether the amount ultimately uncovered is billions or hundreds of billions of dollars, every dollar fraudulently obtained from government originated with taxpayers or public borrowing. A fraudulent Medicaid payment, fictitious government contractor, nonexistent beneficiary, corrupt grant recipient or improperly obtained federal benefit is not free money. Someone earned the money that government collected, and future taxpayers must ultimately service the debt incurred when government spends money it does not have.

That should make aggressive auditing one of the least partisan propositions imaginable. It is not. Democrats oppose ending government fraud at every step, and their abhorrent treatment of DOGE and Elon Musk are clear evidence of their disdain.

If investigators identify apparent fraud, investigate it. If an audit discovers payments going to ineligible recipients, stop them. If government databases contain glaring inconsistencies, reconcile them. If contractors are billing taxpayers for services never performed, prosecute the responsible parties where the evidence warrants it. If an agency cannot satisfactorily account for enormous amounts of public money, require it to do so.

After all, a government confident in its integrity should welcome serious auditing because an audit that disproves an allegation is valuable too.

The Answer

There is one common answer to each of these simple questions. Who could possibly oppose doing what is best for the American people, rather than what is best for unvetted foreigners, election fraudsters, Leftist politicians with totalitarian desires, and financial fraudsters?

Those who benefit, is the common answer.

Democrats benefit from a permanent underclass, who will vote against America’s interest to elect politicians who promise massive benefits and cash for little effort.

Democrats benefit from promoting and defending those involved in election fraud, because those illegal votes are nearly 100% cast for Democrats.

Democrats are always engaged in anti-Second Amendment activities, because they, like every wanna-be totalitarian government that preceded them have trouble taking away American rights if American’s are armed.

Democrats oppose investigating and prosecuting fraud because it is their operatives who engage in it, funneling billions to friendly recipients, and many millions of those ill-gotten dollars end up in Democrat campaigns coffers.

I challenge anyone to offer sound reasons why these conclusions are not true. There is no other possible reason for Democrats to take these harmful and foolish positions.

Supreme Court Hands Trump Major Victory on Mail-Ballot Safeguards Ahead of Midterms

By Leave a Comment

High Court removes key legal obstacle to administration’s election-integrity order as battle over mail voting enters critical final weeks

The Trump administration scored a significant victory at the U.S. Supreme Court Monday as the justices cleared away a major legal obstacle that had prevented the administration from implementing new safeguards governing mail-in ballots ahead of November’s midterm elections.

The Court lifted an injunction affecting 23 states that had challenged President Donald Trump’s March executive order. Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented. The Justice Department and U.S. Postal Service indicated that they would move toward implementing the revised requirements.

The administration has made election integrity a major priority, Monday’s ruling removes an important roadblock at a critical moment.

What Trump actually ordered

Much of the political argument surrounding the order has been reduced to the phrase “restricting mail-in voting.” The actual provisions are more specific.

Trump’s March 31 executive order directs the Department of Homeland Security, working with the Social Security Administration, to compile state-by-state lists of confirmed U.S. citizens of voting age. It also directed the Postal Service to develop standards for handling federal-election mail ballots.

Those postal safeguards include unique Intelligent Mail barcodes on ballot envelopes, standardized Official Election Mail markings and USPS-compatible envelope designs. The administration also called for state-specific lists identifying people participating in mail or absentee voting.

The Postal Service subsequently produced a 95-page final rule. Under the rule, states participating in the system would provide USPS with information concerning voters receiving mailed ballots and use unique barcodes on outbound and return ballot envelopes. USPS says the system is intended to provide an auditable trail and assist enforcement of federal election laws.

Those details matter.

Whatever one’s opinion of Trump, barcoding an election envelope so that it can be tracked is fundamentally different from examining the voter’s choices. USPS says postal employees would not inspect ballot contents, and the system would not collect party affiliation. The information maintained would concern the exterior of the envelope, including addresses and tracking information.

The argument for the safeguards

Supporters see a straightforward principle at work: voting should be easy for eligible citizens, but the mechanisms used to distribute and return ballots should also be auditable.

Mail voting introduces a logistical chain that does not exist when a voter personally appears at a polling place. A ballot can travel from an election office through the postal system to a residence and back again.

The administration argues that unique identifiers and voter-list verification create a stronger chain of accountability without examining how anyone voted.

Postmaster General David Steiner described the objective in practical terms: USPS wants to ensure that ballots states believe they sent correspond with what actually entered the postal system.

The administration also emphasizes something on which there is little legal controversy: noncitizens are prohibited by federal law from voting in federal elections. Trump’s order cites existing federal statutes imposing criminal penalties for unlawful registration and voting and directs federal agencies to improve citizenship-verification capabilities.

The political dispute is therefore not principally about whether noncitizens should vote in federal elections. They cannot legally do so. The argument concerns what verification measures government may employ, which level of government possesses the authority to impose them, and whether the federal executive branch has exceeded that authority.

The constitutional objection

Opponents have a substantial constitutional argument of their own.

The Constitution gives states primary responsibility for determining the “Times, Places and Manner” of congressional elections, while granting Congress authority to alter those regulations. Democratic-led states and voting-rights organizations contend that this structure does not give a president independent power to redesign state election administration through executive action.

They also warn that introducing substantial procedural changes only weeks before voting begins could create confusion or prevent otherwise eligible voters from receiving ballots. Some states are preparing to distribute ballots very soon, making the timing particularly consequential.

Those arguments have not disappeared because of Monday’s decision. They may ultimately determine the fate of portions of Trump’s program.

An important distinction from another recent Supreme Court ruling

There is another reason for precision.

This case should not be confused with the Supreme Court’s June ruling involving Mississippi’s deadline for receiving mailed ballots.

In Watson v. Republican National Committee, the Court rejected a challenge to Mississippi’s law allowing ballots postmarked by Election Day to arrive and still be counted during a subsequent grace period. That decision therefore went against the Republican challengers seeking an Election Day receipt deadline.

Monday’s case concerns a different set of federal mail-ballot procedures stemming from Trump’s executive order.

The distinction is worth emphasizing because headlines describing the Court as simply “limiting mail-in voting” can blur two quite different legal controversies.

The larger question: confidence in elections

Beyond the lawsuits lies a problem neither political party can afford to dismiss: Americans need confidence that elections are both accessible and secure.

Critics of Trump’s approach point to studies finding documented mail-ballot fraud to be rare and argue that sweeping new restrictions address a problem that has not been shown to alter modern national election outcomes. Supporters respond that election safeguards should be preventative rather than imposed only after substantial fraud has occurred. The Supreme Court has sided with President Trump.

A system can have historically low documented fraud while still benefiting from technologies that make ballot movement more transparent and auditable—provided those safeguards do not improperly prevent qualified citizens from voting.

That is ultimately the standard against which the new rules should be judged.

A consequential victory—but not the last word

For President Trump, Monday’s Supreme Court action is unquestionably a significant legal victory. A lower-court barrier to one of his administration’s most ambitious election-integrity initiatives has been removed at precisely the moment preparations for the 2026 midterms are accelerating.

But it is not necessarily the final word from the judiciary. The unresolved question is whether the administration’s proposed safeguards survive the remaining constitutional challenges—and whether they can be implemented effectively in the short period remaining before Americans vote in November.

What Monday’s ruling guarantees is that the administration will have an opportunity to press forward with its case: that modern mail voting can remain available while becoming more verifiable, trackable and auditable.

For a country in which confidence in elections has itself become a deeply contested political issue, the American people are one significant step closer to regaining their confidence in a system that has been hijacked by widespread fraud.

The Growing Cloud Over Sen Ruben Gallego: Money, Staffers, Swalwell and Questions Arizona Deserves Answered

By Leave a Comment

A federal investigation into campaign spending, newly revealed family travel, reported relationships with congressional aides and Gallego’s extraordinary closeness to Eric Swalwell are creating a very different picture of Arizona’s junior senator than the carefully managed public image.

Arizona Sen. Ruben Gallego increasingly has a Washington problem that cannot simply be dismissed as partisan gossip.

The latest disclosure came this week, when campaign records reviewed by the New York Post showed that Gallego’s political operation spent more than $2,000 flying his sister-in-law and the family’s Brazilian au pair to Washington ahead of his January 2025 Senate swearing-in. The campaign reportedly spent approximately $1,227 on airfare for his sister-in-law and another $777.91 flying the au pair from Mexico City. Campaign funds were also reportedly used to purchase roughly $661 worth of customized stationery announcing the birth of Gallego’s daughter to political donors.

These revelations arrive while the Department of Justice is already investigating whether Gallego improperly used political money for family travel and personal expenses dating back years. CBS News, Axios and ABC News have independently confirmed the existence of that federal investigation.

Disney, Miami Beach, St. Barts and the Super Bowl

The spending now under scrutiny is extensive.

Reports based on Federal Election Commission records show Gallego-associated political committees paying for travel involving Disneyland, Disney World, Miami, Chicago, Puerto Rico, Nantucket and the Caribbean. His JUNTOS PAC reportedly spent approximately $1,500 on meals and lodging connected to a Disneyland trip and about $2,900 at Disney World. Gallego’s family accompanied him on some of these trips.

Then there was Miami Beach.

Gallego and his wife stayed at the Loews Miami Beach Hotel during a trip coinciding with her birthday, with political funds reportedly covering more than $9,000 in hotel expenses.

There was also a trip to St. Barts associated with the birthday of Gallego’s wife’s employer. Again, Gallego’s representatives have described the travel as part of a broader political and fundraising itinerary.

And then there is the Super Bowl.

Gallego and former Rep. Eric Swalwell created a joint fundraising vehicle known as the Swallego Victory Fund. FEC records reportedly show that committee spending more than $37,000 on Super Bowl tickets and meals surrounding the 2023 game in Arizona. Gallego says the Super Bowl event was a fundraiser.

Federal campaign records also raised questions about a 2021 Puerto Rico trip surrounding Gallego’s wedding. Swalwell’s campaign reported approximately $1,522 in expenditures at the Hyatt Regency Grand Reserve, the resort where Gallego was married, while Gallego’s campaign separately reported a $2,000 payment to another Puerto Rico resort.

Federal Election Commission rules are fairly straightforward in principle: campaign funds cannot be converted to personal use. The FEC applies what it calls the “irrespective test.” If an expense would have existed regardless of the person’s candidacy or duties as an officeholder, campaign funds generally cannot pay it.

More Than $18,000 in Childcare

Gallego’s committees have reportedly paid or reimbursed more than $18,000 in childcare expenses since 2019. Among those payments was approximately $400 paid to his mother-in-law for babysitting during a fundraiser.

The Department of Justice Is Investigating

The Department of Justice has opened an investigation into Ruben Gallego for suspected campaign-finance violations.

CBS News reported that the investigation was triggered by a whistleblower complaint originating in Southern California and is examining Gallego’s use of campaign money since approximately 2019 for family travel and related expenses. Axios and ABC News separately confirmed the federal investigation.

Gallego denies wrongdoing and says the Trump administration is politically targeting him because he has criticized the president.

Federal investigators now have an obligation to follow the money wherever it leads and explain publicly, when legally possible, what they found.

The Congressional Staffer Relationships

Then there is Gallego’s personal conduct on Capitol Hill.

Multiple sources told the New York Post that Gallego had sexual relationships with at least two female congressional aides while serving in the House. Other outlets, including ABC News reporting on subsequent congressional reform discussions and The Independent, reported the allegations.

The ethical concern being debated in Washington is instead the enormous power disparity between an elected member of Congress and junior congressional employees.

When reporters asked Gallego about the reports concerning the two staffers, he did not issue a detailed denial. He said: “I’m not going to engage in gossip.”

Arizona voters can decide whether it is an adequate answer from a senator whose political future increasingly attracts scandalous national attention.

The Divorce That Was Kept Sealed

Gallego’s personal history became an issue years earlier because of the unusual circumstances surrounding the end of his first marriage.

In December 2016, while his then-wife Kate Gallego was pregnant and nearing the birth of their son, Ruben Gallego filed for divorce. Contemporary reporting described the couple as expecting their first child, and later-unsealed records confirmed that the petition was filed shortly before the birth.

Gallego also sought to have the divorce record sealed.Years later, after litigation by the Washington Free Beacon, Arizona courts ordered most of those records released.

Critics have understandably focused on the human element: a husband initiating divorce proceedings while his pregnant wife was approaching childbirth.

And Then There Is Eric Swalwell

Perhaps no relationship has produced more uncomfortable questions for Gallego than his close friendship with former California congressman Eric Swalwell.

These were not two Democrats who occasionally sat together in committee hearings.

Gallego described Swalwell as one of his closest friends in Congress. They were roommates on Capitol Hill. Gallego chaired Swalwell’s short-lived presidential campaign. The two created the Swallego Victory Fund. They traveled together. Their families socialized together. Gallego subsequently supported Swalwell’s political ambitions.

When serious sexual misconduct allegations against Swalwell emerged this spring, Gallego said he was shocked and quickly distanced himself, claiming that despite their extremely close relationship and many travels together, he had no idea about Swalwell’s constant womanizing.

Swalwell denied the allegations, but eventually withdrew from California’s gubernatorial race and resigned from Congress. Federal agents have since seized electronic devices and searched his Washington residence as part of an investigation into multiple sexual-misconduct allegations. Swalwell continues to deny wrongdoing.

How could someone so extraordinarily close to Swalwell have known nothing?

Skepticism is reasonable when two politicians were roommates, campaign partners, travel companions, joint fundraisers and publicly described close friends for years.

Gallego was sufficiently concerned about the political fallout that he hired former Biden deputy press secretary Andrew Bates for crisis communications, including specifically to deal with matters involving Swalwell and Gallego’s own ethics problems.

The “Cool Kids” Culture on Capitol Hill

Recent reporting has also linked Gallego, Swalwell and Rep. Jimmy Gomez socially as members of what has been described as a Capitol Hill “Cool Kids Clique.” Gomez is now himself facing an Ethics Committee investigation after acknowledging an extramarital relationship with a younger congressional staffer; his accuser disputes Gomez’s characterization that the relationship was consensual. Gomez has denied assault.

This accumulation of misconduct allegations involving interconnected lawmakers has generated a broader institutional question that Congress can no longer avoid: whether an entrenched culture allowed powerful elected officials to treat junior staffers as part of their social and dating pool.

The Money Questions Are the Most Concrete

Sexual gossip attracts headlines. The campaign-finance records may ultimately matter more.

Federal filings do not depend upon anonymous rumors. They document money leaving political committees.

The Justice Department now has the authority to determine whether Gallego’s travel, childcare, family airfare, political events and other spending complied with federal law.

The FEC’s governing principle is remarkably simple: Would the expense have existed irrespective of the campaign or the officeholder’s official duties?

If yes, campaign money generally cannot pay it. If no—if the expense genuinely resulted from campaign or official activity—it may be lawful.

That means investigators can examine each trip individually. Why was Gallego in Miami? What political events occurred? Who attended? How much money was raised? How much of the hotel expense was political and how much personal? Why was the family traveling? Why did the campaign pay airfare for relatives or childcare providers? Were reimbursements made for personal portions? Were contemporaneous records kept?

Arizona Deserves Answers

Arizona sent Ruben Gallego to Washington to represent its citizens—not to create a political financial ecosystem so complicated that voters need federal investigators to determine where political expenses end and personal life begins.

The Justice Department should finish its investigation. The Federal Election Commission should examine any expenditures requiring review. Congress should close the loopholes that permit lawmakers to engage sexually with junior employees outside their own offices.

And Ruben Gallego should answer the questions directly rather than dismissing them as gossip, smears or partisan persecution.

Because eventually every politician facing a growing stack of receipts reaches the same point: The explanations have to be better than the questions.

No Debate, No AG Interview: What Is AZ Gov Katie Hobbs Hiding?

By Leave a Comment

Arizona’s governor won’t debate Rep. Andy Biggs. She won’t sit for interviews requested by investigators examining pay-to-play schemes. Meanwhile, her campaign is spending heavily to falsely define her opponent without facing him.

Arizona voters are being asked to give Katie Hobbs another four years as governor. Why would they do such a foolish thing?

It is remarkable how many questions the governor appears unwilling to answer, even in the traditional forums where politicians are expected to answer them.

Hobbs has announced that she will not debate Republican gubernatorial nominee Andy Biggs before November’s election. She similarly refused to debate Republican Kari Lake during her successful 2022 campaign and has not participated in a televised political debate since 2018.

Hobbs is no stranger to controversy over institutional conflicts. During the 2022 gubernatorial election against Kari Lake, Hobbs simultaneously served as Arizona’s Secretary of State—the state’s chief elections officer—and Democratic nominee for governor. Hobbs rejected calls to recuse herself from election duties, and ultimately certified the very questionable election declaring herself the winner.

Hobbs refuses to submit submitted to a formal interview requested months ago by investigators working for Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes—a fellow Democrat and close friend of Hobbs—who is conducting a criminal investigation into allegations of a pay-to-play scheme involving one of Hobbs’ major political benefactors.

Rep. Andy Biggs will attend debate vs. sitting Arizona governor Katie Hobbs whether she shows up or not.

Hobbs says she is cooperating with the Attorney General’s Office, but Mayes reports that Hobbs is refusing to sit with criminal investigators for an interview.

After two years for stonewalling investigators, Arizona voters are entitled to wonder why obtaining straightforward answers has proved so difficult.

The $400,000 Question

At the center of the controversy is Sunshine Residential Homes, a company providing group-home services for children in Arizona’s foster-care system.

The basic chronology is not a partisan invention. Sunshine and its leadership made more than $400,000 in political contributions benefiting Hobbs, her inaugural operation and the Arizona Democratic Party during 2022 and 2023. Sunshine previously had little history of political giving.

Then came the state money. After Hobbs became governor, her Department of Child Safety approved a substantial special increase in the rate paid to Sunshine for caring for foster children, worth millions of dollars.

Other providers seeking increases had been turned down. And yes, Sunshine got one.

The resulting increase ultimately took its rate from approximately $140 to $234 per bed, according to Capitol Media Services—a rise of more than 60 percent.

That combination—large political contributions followed by favorable specific government treatment worth many millions of dollars—was sufficiently troubling that it eventually triggered multiple investigations.

It presents exactly the kind of circumstances that investigators exist to examine.

Three Investigations—and Two Years Later, Still No Answer

Attorney General Mayes opened her investigation in June 2024. That means Arizona has now entered the third year of an investigation involving its sitting governor.

And Mayes isn’t the only prosecutor looking at the matter. Republican Maricopa County Attorney Rachel Mitchell has conducted a separate investigation, and the Arizona House retained outside attorney Justin Smith to conduct an independent inquiry for lawmakers. That is important because criticism of Mayes’ handling of the investigation has inevitably been complicated by politics. Mayes and Hobbs are both Democrats, and are closely aligned.

The extraordinary duration of the investigation, and Mayes’ inability or unwillingness to say whether investigators will actually get the governor into an interview room, naturally invites scrutiny.

In April, Mayes publicly confirmed that investigators are seeking to interview Hobbs. “Our investigators are prepared to do that interview,” Mayes said at the time, calling it appropriate to ensure that the investigation was thorough.

Months passed. No interview.

Although earlier this month, Mayes insisted that “no one can blow off the Attorney General’s office,” Hobbs has done exactly that. Despite numerous invitations and demands by prosecutors for interviews, Hobbs has refused each and every opportunity to tell her side of the public corruption story.

Last week, Hobbs told KTAR that her office remains in discussions with Mayes’ office about the request but offered no explanation for why she has not simply sat down and answered investigators’ questions. That is difficult, if not impossible, to understand.

If the governor had nothing to do with Sunshine’s favorable treatment, as she maintains, why has arranging an interview with investigators required months of “negotiation”? The answer becomes more obvious with each passing week.

In reality, a criminal investigation involving a sitting governor cannot simply drift through an election indefinitely. Either the evidence supports her story in the criminal investigation, or it doesn’t. And after more than two years, Arizona deserves answers.

Even worse, Hobbs Vetoed a Contract-Transparency Bill

There is another awkward chapter in the Gov Hobbs criminal investigation saga.

Republican state Sen. T.J. Shope proposed legislation requiring companies seeking state contracts and grants to disclose certain political donations, gifts and financial connections involving the governor and her political network.

Hobbs vetoed that legislation in June.

Politically, the optics are extraordinary. A governor under criminal investigation over allegations involving political contributions and a lucrative state arrangement vetoes legislation specifically designed to expose relationships between political contributions and state contracts.

Arizona taxpayers should not have to work this hard to discover who is giving politicians money while simultaneously seeking taxpayer-funded business.

Hobbs Won’t Debate Biggs Either

Against that backdrop comes Hobbs’ other refusal. She won’t debate her opponent, Rep. Andy Biggs.

Hobs likewise refused to debate Kari Lake in 2022. She also refused to debate her Democratic primary opponent that year. Her last televised political debate was reportedly in October 2018.

Biggs, meanwhile, has committed to appearing at the October Clean Elections debate whether Hobbs shows up or not.

Arizona voters deserve better than dueling television commercials.

Hobbs’ “23 Percent Tax” Attack Is a Lie

Hobbs has instead gone aggressively negative against Biggs, particularly with advertisements claiming he wants to impose a 23 percent sales tax that would make groceries, gasoline, rent and other necessities 23 percent “more expensive.”

The truth is that Biggs has discussed replacing federal income and payroll taxes with a national consumption tax.

Its central premise is to abolish federal individual income taxes, payroll taxes and several other federal taxes and replace that revenue with a simple, across the board consumption tax.

Of course, that is merely restructuring the manner in which federal taxes are levied and collected. It does not add any tax.

A gubernatorial debate would be an excellent place for Hobbs to challenge Biggs on that, and for Biggs to react to a few of the allegations against Hobbs. She has chosen not to debate him—likely, for that very reason.

Arizona Really Does Have an Affordability Problem

There is one criticism of Hobbs that doesn’t require exaggeration. Arizona has become painfully expensive.

A 2026 Common Sense Institute analysis ranked Arizona 45th among the 50 states and Washington, D.C., for affordability, down sharply from 2019. Arizona PBS reported the study as placing the state seventh-least-affordable nationally. Housing is the largest problem: CSI estimates that only about 42 percent of Arizona households could afford the monthly mortgage on an average-priced home under conventional affordability standards, compared with 66 percent in 2019.

Much of Arizona’s housing-price explosion began during the pandemic and the Biden inflation mistakes. Hobbs touted and even embraced those democratic party policies, and now seeks to escape her responsibility for the affordability crisis in Arizona.

Again, that sounds like an excellent debate question.

Arizona Deserves Answers Before November

Arizona voters shouldn’t have to choose their governor first, and receive answers about the governor’s criminal investigations afterward.

They deserve to know why a company and its principals suddenly became major political benefactors and subsequently received unusually favorable state treatment, resulting in millions of dollars in benefits.

They deserve to know whether anyone in the Governor’s Office influenced that decision They deserve to know what Mayes’ investigators found after spending more than two years examining it They deserve to know why Hobbs still has not sat for the interview investigators requested months ago.

And they deserve to see their governor stand across from the man seeking her job and answer questions without handlers, campaign advertisements, or carefully controlled events separating the candidates.

Hobbs says she has nothing to hide. Andy Biggs says he is prepared to debate. Kris Mayes says nobody can blow off the Attorney General.

Excellent.

Then there should be a remarkably simple solution to all three controversies: Answer the investigators. Debate the opponent. And let Arizona voters hear the answers before they cast their ballots.

Economy

Elections

Foreign

Crime

Science Tech

Reader Responses