Ukraine’s armed forces are expected to begin receiving the first of dozens of F-16 fighter jets within weeks. In total over 60 are expected to arrive from Belgium, Denmark, and the Netherlands – at a moment Ukrainian pilots are still undergoing lengthy and highly technical training programs in the Europe and the United States.

But decision-makers in Brussels and Kiev already fear that they will make for highly attractive targets for Russian long-range and aerial strikes before they ever see aerial combat in Ukraine’s skies.

“Ukraine may keep some of the F-16 fighter jets it’s set to receive from its Western allies at foreign bases to protect them from Russian strikes,” a senior Ukrainian military officer was cited in the Associated Press as saying Monday. Likely the jets will be “hidden” hosted at bases in Romania and Poland, which are both NATO countries.

Serhii Holubtsov, who is head of aviation for Ukraine’s air force, confirmed that “a certain number of aircraft will be stored at secure air bases outside of Ukraine so that they are not targeted here.”

He described that warplanes kept outside of Ukraine can be used for further training of Ukrainian pilots, and can be held in reserve in instances where jets actively engaged in combat have to be grounded for repairs.

“This way, we can always have a certain number of aircraft in the operational fleet that corresponds to the number of pilots we have,” he said. “If there are more pilots, there will be more aircraft in Ukraine.”

But we might ask: what’s the point? Zelensky has since the start of the war been begging the West to “close the skies”. The F-16s were pledged toward that end (as a ‘compromise’ short of the West directly setting up a NFZ), but they haven’t even arrived yet and Kiev is essentially going to hide many of the expensive aircraft from the start.

It was once thought that US-made fighter jets could be used for Ukrainian forces to go on the offensive against entrenched Russian front lines, but that doesn’t look like it’s going to the case.

Stationing the transferred warplanes at airfields outside Ukraine also increases the chances of Moscow stumbling into a direct shooting war with NATO. Kremlin officials, including President Putin himself, have long warned Russia will strike airbases from which attacks against Russian forces are launched, even if outside of Ukraine’s borders.

Last year Putin began warning of Western aircraft, “If they are stationed at air bases outside the Ukrainian borders and used in combat, we will have to see how and where to strike the assets used in combat against us.”

NEW: Ukraine will station F-16 fighter jets to fight Russia at ‘foreign’ airbases in NATO territories, including Poland and Romania.

This report came from the Ukraine Radio Liberty quoting General Serhiy Holubtsov, Commander of the Ukrainian Air Force. pic.twitter.com/7zsWvzgR4y

— The Patriot Oasis™ (@ThePatriotOasis) June 10, 2024

He underscored that this “poses a serious danger of NATO being further drawn into the conflict” – and has also highlighted that the F-16s are capable of carrying tactical nukes. Thus, he said at the time, both the planes and foreign host bases themselves of necessity become a “legitimate target”. 

Authored by Bill Pan via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

More than 100 medical professionals and groups have signed onto a declaration that calls for a shift in focus toward addressing underlying psychological problems in children who experience discomfort with their sex.

The Doctors Protecting Children Declaration was issued by pediatricians, doctors, researchers, medical ethics advocates, and faith-based medical groups on June 6 at a news conference in Washington.

Spearheaded by the conservative American College of Pediatricians (ACPeds), the declaration highlights the long-term risks of subjecting gender-confused children to “gender-affirming” interventions, which involves “social transition” such as changing one’s name and appearance to align with a preferred gender, as well as the use of puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and genital surgeries.

Instead, psychotherapy for underlying mental health issues such as depression, autism, anxiety, and emotional trauma should be the “first line of treatment” for children who are confused or distressed about their sex, the declaration states.

“We are here defying the claims made by these medical organizations in the U.S. that those of us who are concerned are a minority, and that their protocols are consensus,” Dr. Jill Simmons, a pediatrician and the executive director of ACPeds, said at the event. “They are not consensus, and we are speaking in a loud and unified voice: Enough.”

Dr. Simmons was referring to protocols developed by the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH), an international nonprofit group dedicated to the study of transgender health.

WPATH’s guidelines, known as Standard of Care 8, recommend that adolescent patients diagnosed with “gender incongruence” be given access to puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgeries, as long as they can demonstrate “the emotional and cognitive maturity required to provide informed consent/assent for the treatment.”

However, recently leaked internal videos and documents appeared to show that some WPATH members have questioned whether children were able to understand the full ramifications of those drugs and procedures.

Dr. Andre Van Mol, a Navy veteran-turned-family physician and adolescent sexuality expert at ACPeds, echoed such concerns.

“Minors cannot give truly informed consent,” he said at the June 4 event, speaking on behalf of the ACPeds, the Christian Medical and Dental Associations, and the American Academy of Medical Ethics. “Children have developing and immature brains, their minds change often, they are prone to risk-taking, they are vulnerable to peer pressure, and they don’t grasp long-term consequences.”

When it comes to the appropriate approaches to treating children who express discomfort with their sex, Dr. Van Mol spoke in favor of the traditional “desistance” method, saying that in most cases, those feelings will resolve on their own over the normal developmental process of puberty.

“The natural course of gender dysphoria is desistance by adulthood conservatively in 85 percent of the cases unless it is affirmed,” the doctor said, citing numbers matching a 2021 study on desistance among boys with gender identity concerns.

“The probability of both desistance and underlying mental health and other issues, is why watchful waiting, coupled with mental health evaluation and counseling for both patient and family, was once and is increasingly again recognized as the standard of care for minors with gender dysphoria,” he said.

Stressing the importance of focusing on identifying and addressing the patient’s underlying psychological problems, Dr. Van Mol urges health providers to pursue “mental health alternatives” instead of gender transition.

“Transition affirmation … does not reduce suicides,” he said. “It does not repair mental health issues or trauma.”

“There are good mental health alternatives to gender-affirming health care which address underlying issues, rather than dodging them,” the family physician added. “There is always a more honest way to deal with gender confusion than the chemical sterilization and surgical mutilation of healthy young bodies.”

The June 4 declaration also noted that several European countries have paused transgender medical interventions for children and, citing a need for caution, are instead focusing on addressing the underlying mental health issues.

Sweden, for example, decided in 2022 to restrict hormone therapy for children except in very rare cases, and ruled that mastectomies—the surgical removal of one of both breasts—for teenage girls wanting to transition may be performed only in a research setting. More recently, in April, Scotland’s health authority paused the prescription of puberty blockers to new patients younger than 18.

The declaration urges medical organizations in the United States to follow suit and “immediately stop” promoting the WPATH protocols.

It reads, “We also encourage the physicians who are members of these professional organizations to contact their leadership and urge them to adhere to the evidence-based research now available.”

It is somewhat surprising (but also not surprising given energy scarcity fears) that after two-and-a-half years of war, hundreds of thousands of lives tragically lost, and brutal grinding warfare which has also killed many civilians on both sides… that the oldest and biggest economic link between Russia and Europe is still in place: the transit of Russian gas through Ukrainian territory.

A five-year agreement which is set to expire by the end of 2024 has remained uninterrupted, though the share of Russia’s pipeline gas in EU imports has steadily diminished. Yet the reality is that if Europe hopes to diversify away from dependency on Russian LNG, establishing the necessary alternate infrastructure is a costly and lengthy process.

Bloomberg reported Monday that European officials are currently discussing plans to keep the gas flowing through a key Russia-Ukraine pipeline, and that Ukraine – which has hit desperation given its dire wartime energy needs and situation – favors it.

At this point from Kiev’s perspective there are equally bad options which requires pragmatically seeking the least worst-case scenario. 

Bloomberg acknowledges that Ukraine’s “transit revenue amounted to about $1 billion in 2021 — providing crucial funding for the war-ravaged economy.” If pipelines and supporting infrastructure aren’t used then they are likely to fall derelict or also can more easily become military targets for Russia.

Oleksiy Chernyshov, chief executive of Ukraine’s state-run Naftogaz, was quoted in the report as saying it must be remembered that “Ukraine has incredible infrastructure of transit and storage gas, which should be used, and Ukraine is predisposed to use this infrastructure because it brings a lot of advantages.”

Main buyers of Russian gas continue to be Hungary, Austria, Slovakia and Italy — all of which have continued to put ideological questions related to the war in the back-seat compared to the pressing and vital energy needs of the population and of industry.

On the Russian side too, Gazprom has taken deep hits due to the war. “Gazprom is unlikely to recover gas sales lost as a result of Vladimir Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine for at least a decade, according to a report commissioned for the Russian energy group’s leaders,” a recent FT report has indicated. “The company’s exports to Europe will average 50bn-75bn cubic metres a year by 2035, barely a third of prewar levels, the research predicted.”

Ukraine national media reports earlier in the conflict strongly hinted that the contract for Russian gas would not be renewed. “The position of the Ukrainian side is clear: the transportation contract ends at the end of this year, we are not going to negotiate with the Russians and renew the contract. This is what the Prime Minister of Ukraine informed his Slovak counterpart,” RBC-Ukraine said in January [machine translation].

But even upon that announcement, there were key caveats and exceptions given: “To extend transit, an option is possible when the Slovak company itself leases the capacity of the Ukrainian gas transportation system. In this case, gas transit can be continued after 2024. But this is still only an assumption,” the publication said at the time. As Bloomberg is now subsequently reporting, this leaves things open for significant wiggle room, ‘discussion’ and compromise.

By Grzegorz Adamczyk of RMX.news

Aleksandra Fedorska who works for independent radio WNET and news outlet Biznes Alert has reported that migrants are being handed over to Polish border guards by German officers and are then transferred to hostels in bordering areas.

According to her, many of the migrants have told staff that they arrived in Germany from the Netherlands, Austria and other countries, rather than via Poland. 

Bez butów, głodni i zdesperowani – taki jest stan ludzi wydalonych przez Niemców do Polski

Osoby oddane polskiej strazy granicznej przez Niemcow sa przez straz graniczna rozwozone do roznych noclegowni na terenach wojewodztw przygranicznych. W tych noclegowniach wiele z tych… pic.twitter.com/kICbrt5wKF

— Aleksandra Fedorska (@a_fedorska) June 6, 2024

The Polish journalist asked German federal police for data on illegal migrants on the border with Poland. According to the data produced, Germany has sent back 3,500 migrants out of the 5,600 people who are alleged to have crossed from Poland into Germany illegally.

“From Jan. 1 to April 30, 2024, the federal police registered a total of 5,621 people who illegally crossed the Polish-German border. Of these, 3,578 people were returned to Poland,” wrote Fedorska on her account on X.

The EU migration pact, which will come into force in 2026, makes a provision for member states to choose whether to receive relocated illegal migrants or pay €20,000 for every migrant they refuse. 

Migration is a key issue for voters in three German eastern states this autumn. Germany makes no secret of its hope that the migration pact will enable it to reduce the number of migrants on its territory. 

Continue reading at RMX.news

Authored by Howell Keiser via RealClearHistory,

The work of the eighteenth-century English economist Thomas Malthus has been famously used to defend the indefensible. Malthus’s warning of the dangers of overpopulation, labor redundancy, and environmental degradation in urban-industrial societies have served as the basis for programs ever since that are aimed at curtailing political liberty.

Today, World Economic Forum (WEF) founder Klaus Schwab has addressed the problems of industrialization and population redundancy in highly Malthusian ways. With the advent of artificial intelligence and other new technologies, Schwab has stated that employees are bound to “face redundancy unless they can migrate to a new position with an organization.”

Yuval Noah Harari, a key WEF advisor, likewise agrees that technological advancements have created an atmosphere where a sizable decrease in the world’s population will happen in the next decades. Harari has noted that “these technologies will increasingly make redundant and will make it possible to replace the people.” Replaced people, he adds, will become “useless eaters,” straining both subsistence and the global footprint.

Antebellum political economists at major Southern universities instructed students – future southern leaders – in these Malthusian ideas in a completely different context than our own. Like Schwab, Harari, and the WEF, leading Southern intellectuals at that time fostered an intense commitment to an anti-democratic philosophy invested in the regulation of human populations, movement, political independence, and economic freedom.

According to the historian Eugene Genovese, slaveholders embraced Malthusianism, because they “viewed with foreboding the laws of diminishing returns in agriculture … and of the tendency of population geometrically to outstrip subsistence.” Southern apologists concluded, Genovese writes, that in an industrialized free labor society “‘the masses of mankind’ are inescapably ground up if they did not rise with fearful violence to destroy the social classes that imposed misery upon them.” It was for this reason that slave apologist Daniel Hundley believed Malthus’s writings to be a “great science” for shaping society.

William and Mary President Thomas R. Dew, a notable apologist for slavery, also made these arguments prominent in his defense of the “peculiar institution.” Dew postulated that if Southern society gave way to Northern industrialization, “the powerfully elastic spring of our rapidly increasing numbers … shall be crowded into our manufactories and commercial cities – then will come the great and fearful pressure upon the engine.” Whereas Northern industrialism hastened a degraded “rural landscape,” giving way “to factories, tenants, and large cities,” Dew contended that slaveholders believed their agricultural society achieved a perfect balance between populations and resources.

Like antebellum Southerners who, according to historian David Silkenat, used the fear of “environmental destruction” to elevate their low population agrarian philosophy, environmentalists today see the “impact of population” and industrialization as combining to “deplete natural resources and degrade the environment.” Population and industrial growth, therefore, must be controlled.

But how can this be achieved? Vice President Kamala Harris stated that “when we invest in clean energy, and electric vehicles, and reduce population, more of our children can breathe clean air and drink clean water.” Of course, Harris leaves the best means of implementing depopulation and regulating economic freedom unanswered.

Ultimately, the perspective put forward by Vice President Harris is not entirely different in principle from some of the solutions offered by leading slaveholders. They endeavored to limit urban industrialization, mocked urban boosters as un-Southern, and posited that the best way to regulate populations was through eugenics – “manipulate the sex ratio.”

The issue with Malthusianism, both past and present, is obvious. How could population and industrial reduction occur if not by curtailing private industry, economic freedom, and an individual’s reproductive autonomy? If accepted wholesale, our nation’s tradition of political liberty would be shoved aside for a program based on a very different set of principles.

Antebellum Southern history teaches us that this ideology gives rise to anti-democratic philosophies opposed to bodily freedom, economic liberty, and political independence. The language of collapse inherent in this ideology serves as a powerful tool in undermining the power of individuals to enjoy life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness on their own terms. It is therefore useful to see the Malthusianism of the pre-Civil War South as a warning. After all, the past often informs the present.

Howell Keiser is a Post-Doctoral Research Associate at the University of Virginia and is a fellow with the Jack Miller Center.

Authored by Matthew Vadum via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

The Supreme Court on June 10 agreed to look at a large shareholder lawsuit that claims Facebook parent Meta Platforms Inc. deceived investors regarding a data-harvesting controversy that involved Cambridge Analytica, a political consulting firm.

The Supreme Court’s eventual ruling in the case could have an impact on corporate disclosure standards going forward.

The case involves a private securities fraud-related class action arising out of the now-defunct UK-based Cambridge Analytica’s “wrongful acquisition and misuse of Facebook user data,” according to Facebook’s filing with the nation’s highest court.

Meta agreed in December 2022 to pay out $725 million to settle a class-action proceeding that said the company permitted third parties, including Cambridge Analytica, to gain access to as many as 87 million users’ personal information. The incident was made public in 2018.

Cambridge Analytica previously worked for then-candidate Donald Trump’s successful presidential campaign in 2016, and had access to personal data from millions of Facebook accounts for purposes of targeting and profiling voters. The account holders did not consent and had their data harvested by means of an app.

The scandal led to government investigations and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg was called to testify before Congress.

In 2019, Facebook agreed to pay $5 billion to resolve a U.S. Federal Trade Commission probe into its privacy practices and $100 million to settle a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission proceeding that alleged it misled investors about the misuse of their data.

At the same time, Meta is being investigated by the European Union for possible breaches of child safety rules on its Facebook and Instagram platforms.

The Supreme Court granted the petition for certiorari, or review, in Facebook Inc. v. Amalgamated Bank, in an unsigned order.

No justices dissented and the court didn’t explain its decision. At least four of the nine justices must vote to grant the petition for it to advance to the oral argument stage.

The Supreme Court will examine whether a federal appeals court erred in allowing the multi-billion dollar lawsuit to proceed premised on allegations that Facebook, as the company was known at the time, inflated share prices by failing to provide adequate disclosure that its user data would be misused.

The investors claim that the controversy contributed to two 2018 price drops that led to the company losing more than $200 billion in market capitalization.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit ruled against Facebook in the case at hand in October 2023.

Facebook is asking the Supreme Court to dismiss the lawsuit.

The federal district court threw out the plaintiffs’ claims three times but the 9th Circuit revived the claims, which Facebook said in its petition “adopted extreme outlier positions.”

“The Ninth Circuit’s decision will light a beacon for class-action lawsuits that would be dismissed in any other circuit,” the petition stated.

The respondent, Amalgamated Bank, argued the circuit court decision was correct and the Supreme Court should reject the appeal.

“There is no circuit conflict,” the bank said in a brief.

The 9th Circuit “applies the same rule as the other circuits Facebook cites: a statement is misleading if it treats a material risk as hypothetical when the risk has already materialized.”

The Supreme Court is expected to hear Facebook Inc. v. Amalgamated Bank in its new term that begins in October.

Meanwhile, the Supreme Court justices are currently deliberating two cases that deal with social media platforms.

Supreme Court justices seemed skeptical of state arguments on March 18 that the federal government was wrong to communicate with social media platforms about public health issues during the recent pandemic.

At the same time, during oral argument in Murthy v. Missouri, the states argued that the federal government strong-armed social media companies into censoring disfavored views on important public issues such as side effects related to the COVID-19 vaccine and the government-imposed lockdowns. Applying this kind of pressure violates the First Amendment, the states argued.

Dr. Vivek Murthy is the U.S. surgeon general. The state of Missouri and other parties sued the federal government for alleged censorship by pressuring social media companies to suppress certain content.

On Feb. 26, Florida and Texas told the Supreme Court they should be allowed to regulate how social media platforms moderate content. During oral arguments, the justices seemed to be grasping for a new rule they could use to apply free speech principles to online discussions.

At stake is the right of individual Americans to freely express themselves online along with the right of social media platforms to make editorial decisions about the content they host. Both rights are protected by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

The challenge to the Florida statute regulating social media is Moody v. NetChoice LLC; the challenge to the Texas law is NetChoice LLC v. Paxton.

Both states’ laws impose restrictions on deplatforming users and force platforms to explain their content moderation decisions, a mandate the platforms consider to be overly burdensome.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit struck down part of the Florida statute, finding that “with minor exceptions, the government can’t tell a private person or entity what to say or how to say it.”

Even the “biggest” platforms are “private actors whose rights the First Amendment protects … [and] their so-called content-moderation decisions constitute protected exercises of editorial judgment.”

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit took the opposite tack, finding the Texas constitutional and rejecting the “idea that corporations have a freewheeling First Amendment right to censor what people say.”

Rulings in these two cases are expected by the end of June.

We guess gold demand really is picking up…

In Long Beach this past week, a monster-sized gold nugget that is worth $82,000 was stolen from a coin expo and now, ironically, $10,000 is being offered as a reward for its safe return, according to Fox 11 Los Angeles. 

Bob Campbell, a Utah-based coin dealer and owner of the gold nugget, reported a theft at his booth, captured by security cameras. The video revealed a man exploiting a flaw in the display case to steal the nugget, which weighs about 27 ounces.

“He’s trying locks, looks to see who’s watching,” Campell told Fox watching the video. 

Approximately 30 seconds after tampering with the case, the thief concealed the nugget, casually checked his surroundings, and left the scene.

Campbell said this incident marks his most significant loss at a coin show, emphasizing not just the monetary worth of the gold, but its historical value as well.

The nugget, unearthed during the California Gold Rush near the Oregon border, is a rare survivor from a time when most such finds were melted down.

With the nugget’s unique history at risk of being lost if melted down, Campbell is hopeful that public recognition of the thief from the footage will lead to the recovery of the artifact.

He concluded, lamenting: “The bigger the nugget, the more they’re worth. It’s not uncommon to see them go for two, three, even four times the gold value.”

Authored by Susan Crabtree via RealClearPolitics,

The political ground shifted in Texas last week, and the impact of the electoral shakeup could send aftershocks across the nation for months, if not years, to come.

A wave of Republican incumbents fell to conservative challengers in the Texas House in last week’s primary run-offs, turning an already red legislature crimson and threatening the state House GOP leader’s hold on power. Those who helped lead the intra-party Texas fight now have their sights set on defeating centrist Republicans in other red states, including Tennessee, Georgia, Idaho, and South Carolina.

A concerted joint effort by Gov. Greg Abbott, outside groups, and a deep-pocketed donor flipped the seats of 14 Republicans who had opposed Abbott’s school-choice measure – a state record.

Abbott’s effort to pass school choice died last fall when 21 House Republicans – mostly from rural districts – voted to strip a voucher program out of a larger education bill. Of those 21 voucher opponents, 15 now aren’t returning. The coalition defeated six GOP incumbents in March, then three more in last week’s run-offs. Additionally, the group filled four of the five retiring Republican seats with voucher supporters, and then a voucher backer won a special election run-off.  

The leading factor in these Republicans’ historic defeats hasn’t been making the most national headlines or even the most local news. It’s unrelated to Abbott’s border fight with President Biden, state Attorney General Ken Paxton’s resentment over efforts to impeach him, or even widespread local protests over the state’s skyrocketing property taxes.  

Those issues all played out in the election, but school choice was far and away the most lethal campaign issue across the Lone Star state. Its impact was especially potent considering the totality of political spending and blitz of advertisements focused on school vouchers and related issues dominating the Texas airwaves and inundating inboxes.

Abbott was determined to make good on his threats to boot anti-school voucher Republicans who have blocked his ambitious crusade to give parents taxpayer-funded options to educate their children outside public schools. After several challengers he backed won their run-offs last week, the governor declared victory and announced that the House “now has enough votes to pass school choice.”

“While we did not win every race we fought in, the overall message from this year’s primaries is clear: Texans want school choice,” said Abbott. “Opponents can no longer ignore the will of the people.”

House Speaker David Phelan, who supported the effort to scrap the school voucher language from the bill last fall, managed to eke out a run-off win by less than 400 votes. But that razor-thin victory likely dooms his chances of holding onto his leadership post next year.

On the national level, Abbott is best known for his immigration showdown with President Biden, which included the deployment of thousands of Texas Guard members to shut down the border and the decision to send busloads of illegal immigrants from the southern border to places like New York, Washington, D.C., and Texas.

Texans, however, are well aware that Abbott has made school vouchers his top priority, pouring more political capital into the vouchers than any other issue in his eight years in office. The sometimes-cautious governor campaigned for reelection on the issue in 2022 and made universal education saving accounts a central theme of his most recent State of the State addresses. The ESAs would use taxpayer funds to provide parents a voucher worth $10,500 a year per student to use at a private school.

Texas teacher unions have staunchly and successfully opposed school-choice bills for years. They say the programs deprive public schools of essential funds and mainly benefit wealthy families who are already sending their children to private schools.

The Texas chapter of the American Federation of Teachers called the school-choice movement a “scam” which eliminates transparency and public accountability.

“When vouchers strip more money away from our already strapped neighborhood schools, the only people who will benefit are the richest parents, who are already sending their children to private schools. For everyone else, vouchers will crowd classrooms and put every member of the school community who keep the hubs of our communities running on the chopping block. And it’s the hardest hit, and often more rural communities, that get left further and further behind,” the Texas AFT wrote in a blog post.

Abbott and his allies vigorously rejected those arguments, countering that most parents desperately want and need the funds to choose the best educational path for their children, especially while public school test scores in Texas and across the nation are continuing to fall. He then redoubled their efforts to pass his voucher plan.

The Texas legislature cannot vote on any bill until 60 days into its legislative session unless the governor declares the measure an “emergency item.” Abbott gave the voucher issue this expedited status. He held two special sessions devoted to passing the initiative, including the one last fall in which opponents, including Phelan, stripped it from a bill providing $6 billion in additional funds to Texas public schools. Those funds would have boosted teacher pay and other public school funding – key negotiating chips that still failed to attract enough supporters.

Heading into the fight, opponents were well aware that they could face consequences at the ballot box if they continued to oppose Abbott’s voucher language.

In response to a ballot question in 2022, 88% of GOP primary voters indicated that they support parents’ “right to select schools, whether public or private, for their children, and the funding should follow the student.” Another poll conducted by the University of Houston Hobby School of Public Affairs in January found that 66% of Republican primary voters said they would be less likely to vote for an incumbent who rejected school choice last year.

“[Abbott] made it very clear during the special session that there’s an easy way and a hard way,” Dave Carney, the governor’s longtime political strategist, told RealClearPolitics. “The hard way was we’ll pass it in 2025 with a new legislature. They were informed, well-warned.”

Carney said Abbott has done nearly 100 events on school choice so far this year, cutting television, cable, and digital ads and directing millions of digital impressions to targeted audiences. Abbott’s political action committee also paid for advocates to knock on 400,000 across the state.

Still, Abbott had some powerful help, what Carney describes as a seamless, collaborative effort.

“We’re not taking a victory lap yet, because we still have to get through the general election,” he added. “But we’re anticipating to pick up seats.”

Last fall’s voucher defeat attracted national groups with deep pockets, including the American Federation for Children, a national pro-school choice group, and the Club for Growth, a conservative anti-tax group. Along with Abbott’s PAC, the groups spent a combined $27 million to back pro-voucher challengers against incumbents.

A big portion of those funds came from Jeff Yass, a Pennsylvania billionaire and national Republican megadonor who strongly supports school vouchers. Worth nearly $30 billion, Yass is a co-founder and managing director of Susquehanna International Group, a Philadelphia-based trading and investment firm. The firm was an early investor in TikTok, which nearly doubled Yass’ net worth in the years since the pandemic when the app’s popularity soared.

Working with Trump’s education secretary, Betsy DeVos, a longtime proponent of helping parents subsidize private school tuition, Yass has spent tens of millions boosting the issue, channeling $23 million to the DeVos-backed American Federation for Children’s political action committees since 2021.

In December, Yass cut Abbott’s PAC a $6 million check, the largest single donation in Texas history. He’s also a multi-million dollar donor to the Club for Growth, which has long supported Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and Rep. Chip Roy, who represents Austin and San Antonio.

The Club for Growth, through its School Freedom Fund, spent roughly $4 million in the Texas primary and $4 million more in the run-offs, including $1.5 million against Phelan. David McIntosh, the group’s president, credited Abbott with the leadership to take on his fellow Republicans, who blocked school-choice options for Texas’ 5.4 million public school students.

“I give Gov. Abbott a lot of kudos for his leadership,” McIntosh said in an interview. “Many Republican governors don’t want to take on sitting members of their own party and would not have done the same … that was a crucial factor in us being able to win.”

Early in the effort, McIntosh told his team that big victories in Texas would build momentum for similarly aggressive campaigns in other red states, including Tennessee, Georgia, Louisiana, and Indiana.

“Texas now shows that you can’t be a conservative Republican and oppose education freedom,” he said. “It’s now a marker for whether somebody is a genuine conservative or not. It’s going to be something the Club and our School Freedom Fund champion for years to come.”

McIntosh says the school choice initiatives align with the group’s conservative economic agenda because giving parents more alternatives to public school creates market pressure in the education system.

“That benefits the kids,” McIntosh said. “They get a better education, and it benefits the parents who have more control over the resources, and [it] takes the education bureaucracy out of the equation. Schools start operating like a business world, saying, ‘Who’s my customer?’ Right now, they don’t have that pressure.”

The American Federation for Children’s Victory Fund, another key group in the school-choice fight, spent $7 million on the Texas primary and run-offs alone – boosting Texas challengers’ campaigns and helping establish school choice as a GOP litmus test.  

“The primary election results in Texas – the Lone Star earthquake – represent the single biggest movement in favor of school choice in modern history, a result that will prove life-changing for countless Texas families,” Tommy Schultz, the group’s CEO, told RCP. “Republicans lost the moment they chose loyalty to unions and corrupt establishment over students.”

Schultz said he and the coalition of school-choice proponents “anticipate that many other states will remember the Lone Star Earthquake ahead of their own primaries and legislative sessions.”

“If you’re a candidate or lawmaker who opposes school choice and freedom in education – you’re a target,” he added. “If you’re a champion for parents – we’ll be your shield.”  

Some Texas insiders are already making comparisons to Colorado’s rapid transformation from a Republican-dominated state in the mid-2000s to a Democratic one over a four-year time frame. For years, progressives have touted their success in Colorado in turning a red state blue, an effort by Democratic politicians and outside groups taking advantage of new campaign finance laws and working with donors willing to commit unprecedented resources to promote progressive policies and win local races.

In a book titled, “The Blueprint: How Democrats Won Colorado,” the authors hailed the joint effort as a model for creating permanent Democratic majorities across the country.

Texas was already a solid red state before the school choice fight, but now its legislature has shifted even further to the right, undermining years-long Democratic efforts to cast it as trending purple based on its growing Latino population. Instead, t he school-choice coalition’s Texas successes have sparked a conversation over whether they’ve developed a “redprint” model that can help solidify permanent conservative majorities across the country.

Yet, Carney points out that Abbott isn’t the first governor to target GOP incumbents opposed to school vouchers. Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds started the trend in 2022 when the Iowa legislature tried to pass school choice but failed by one vote. It was an election year, and Reynolds and school choice advocates challenged six school anti-school choice incumbent lawmakers. They unseated all nine and passed the measure during the next legislative session.

After the string of defeated GOP incumbents in Texas, other governors are already pledging a similar political litmus test. Late last week, Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee vowed to vet future GOP primary candidates in the next election cycle to determine whether they support school choice, although he didn’t commit to working to defeat Republicans who oppose school choice.

“This year what I’m talking to candidates about is education freedom and choice for parents,” he told a local broadcast station late last week. “I want to know where new candidates stand on that issue because it’s so important to me, so you’ll see me talking to candidates.”

Earlier this year, Lee said he expected a school choice “revolution” to take place in Tennessee, but those hopes were dashed in March when a school-choice bill died in the state legislature. But given strong GOP voter support for the issue, the state Republican Party is poised to adopt a strongly worded pro-school-choice platform over the next few months, which will ratchet up the pressure on Republican legislators with a history of opposing voucher programs.

The Club for Growth and the American Federation for Children are monitoring Tennessee closely to see if Lee will follow in Reynolds’ and Abbott’s footsteps.

“It’s a hard decision for governors to make, and you hope you can persuade people to do the right thing, and you don’t have to take out incumbents, but I will have to see what they decide to do,” McIntosh said.  

Yet, the most effective advocate for school choice wasn’t Abbott, Reynolds, or any other GOP governor or outside group, Carney argues. That honor, he says, goes to American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten, who fought children’s return to public school during the COVID pandemic and used the global health crisis to extract union concessions for teachers, sparking a parent revolution in the process.

“Most families can’t afford to make that choice to give their kids a different option,” Carney remarked, decrying what he called the public education system’s “Praetorian Guard” who try to keep parents at bay while implementing “woke” programs and teaching methods while students’ test scores continue to plummet.

Susan Crabtree is RealClearPolitics’ national political correspondent.

The latest chaotic example of California’s criminal and social justice reforms backfiring erupted in South Los Angeles early Monday morning, where a street takeover resulted in a mob of looters ransacking an AutoZone store. 

Local media outlet KTLA reported that the Los Angeles Police Department received multiple calls of a street takeover at the intersection of Century Boulevard and Hoover Street around 0400 local time. Then, minutes later, a mob of 50 people looted a nearby AutoZone. Officials believe other stores in the area were hit as well. 

“At least three businesses were hit within a four-mile radius and authorities were working to determine if the crimes were connected,” Fox 11 said.

Elon Musk commented on the video with “!!.”

The video is reminiscent of BLM looting scenes several years ago.

!!

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) June 10, 2024

How long until socialist radical Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez comments on the incident, explaining how the looters were only stealing so they could fix their cars? 

Several years ago, remember what AoC said during BLM riots, “They feel like they either need to shoplift some bread or go hungry.” 

The lack of law and order in progressive cities has sparked a nationwide surge in crime and chaos over the years (though not according to the official data that AG Garland so proudly flaunts, but that’s another story).

According to polls, law-abiding Americans are fed up with progressive policies that are increasingly transforming cities into scenes of the video game Grand Theft Auto.