The left’s war on men has spectacularly backfired as young men, once a reliably Democratic voting bloc, have led an exodus from the left to the right. 

Democrats are scrambling to figure out why, but the answer isn’t complicated: the party is increasingly driven by Marxist ideology, embraces assassination culture, promotes anti-male values, pushes extremist pro-trans rhetoric, and promotes an anti-American agenda. 

Young men are gravitating toward the America First movement because its leaders project strength and advocate for common sense: two genders, the family unit, law and order, faith, and the core principles that have made the West exceptional.

In a recent interview, Anthony Mackie – star of the 2025 film Captain America: Brave New World – told the hosts of The Pivot Podcast that “for the past 20 years, we’ve been living through the death of the American male; they’ve killed masculinity in our communities.”

“But I raise my boys to be young men and however you feel about that you feel about that. My boys will always be respectful. They will always say yes sir yes ma’am no sir no ma’am. They will always say thank you. They will always open a door for a lady. They will always make sure that their mother is taken care of and provided for. They will always be men, and that’s always been the case since they were young,” Mackie said.

Actor Anthony Mackie: “For the past 20 years, we’ve been living through the death of the American male, they’ve killed masculinity in our communities…”pic.twitter.com/5GlC9xR6JK

— Joe Rogan Podcast News (@joeroganhq) November 21, 2025

Perhaps now that the Overton Window has shifted away from “woke and weak,” it’s time to confront the mess created by the Democratic Party’s globalist agenda, which has waged a war on men and, with their Marxist nonprofits, such as Black Lives Matter, that declared war on the nuclear family (read here). 

• Brandon Smith: Men Of The West, We Are At War

“There’s absolutely nothing wrong with a man who is manly and boys shouldn’t be taught that there is. We’re screwing up an entire generation here. We’re politically correcting ourselves into extinction,” Daisy Luther of the Organic Prepper blog noted many years ago. 

There has been a war on masculine men for decades.
Weak men are easy to govern.
Weak men are easy to manipulate.
Weak men are easy to control.
Weak men are easy to attack.
Weak men are easy to steal from.
Weak men are easy to kill.
Dad’s need to be strong, but they also need to… pic.twitter.com/BRgKaQFnOZ

— Tim Kennedy (@TimKennedyMMA) June 9, 2025

There is nothing wrong with masculinity; in fact, it built the nation – that’s what men do. 

And with that understanding, it’s fair to raise serious questions about the Democratic Party’s war on men – and why it exists in the first place. If the goal is to undermine the nation by weakening men, confusing them about their identity, and eroding the foundations that hold the country together, then it becomes alarmingly clear that this agenda is aimed at destabilizing America from within. 

Seriously, what happened to men? pic.twitter.com/cUSifBKY2F

— Woke Archive (@WokeArchive) July 24, 2024

Why do globalists fear healthy men who eat beef and eggs? Clearly, they don’t fear soy boys.

Authored by Vince Bielski via RealClearInvestigations,

This is the third part of a series on academic publishing. Read part one here and part two here.

For many years, the prestigious journal Philosophy & Public Affairs published about 14 peer-reviewed articles annually. So its small volunteer staff of renowned scholars was shocked to learn that its publisher, Wiley, was demanding a significant increase in production, at one point requiring 35 new articles within 60 days. 

Instead of compromising its peer-review process and rushing low-quality papers into print, then-Editor-in-Chief Anna Stilz at the University of California, Berkeley, led a revolt that culminated in the mass resignation of the journal’s entire editorial staff and board.

“Wiley told me if I didn’t publish more, I wouldn’t have a journal for long. These conversations were very hostile,” said Stilz, explaining the mass resignations. “I wanted to give our readers high-quality pieces. We were selective.”

The rebellion is one of the latest examples of the crisis engulfing the influential world of scholarly journals, which have been a foundation of research and learning for centuries. In recent years, Wiley and four other major publishers of academic literature, called the Big Five, have generated robust profit margins by ushering in large and unprecedented increases in the number of published papers. The globalization of research, with China emerging as the world’s leader a few years ago, and the ongoing ethos of “publish or perish” that’s the lifeblood of academic success, have generated an avalanche of scholarship. The Big Five has accommodated and encouraged it by launching new journals and special issues and fattening others.

Even scientists admit that much of academic publishing has run amok, overwhelming the quality-control methods of many of the 12,000 journals owned by Elsevier, Springer Nature, Taylor & Francis, Wiley, and Sage. As RealClearInvestigations has reported, unscrupulous paper mills are exploiting the publishing breakdown, producing a growing number of fraudulent articles with fake data and AI-generated text that’s tainting the world of science. 

The publishing mess has consequences outside the hallowed halls of academia. The $12 billion in annual revenue that the Big Five and smaller publishers collect from research papers is also an issue for taxpayers. A sizeable chunk of this revenue comes from public universities and federal grants that pay fees to publishers for making scholars’ articles available to readers through either journal subscriptions or freely on the internet. The fees, coupled with the low production costs – journal editors typically work for free – have given the Big Five profit margins in the 30%-40% range, matching Microsoft and Alphabet and surpassing Apple last year.  

“The biggest problem is that taxpayer money that was supposed to be spent on research instead goes to these publishing companies,” said University of Ottawa Professor Stefanie Haustein, a leading researcher of the publishing market. “I’m not saying publishing should be free, but these companies are making an insanely high profit. They are price gouging taxpayers.” 

NIH Moves To Rein In Fees

The Trump administration is moving to rein in the fees. Jay Bhattacharya, the director of the National Institutes of Health, said in July that the publishers’ article processing charges (APC) are “unreasonably high.” These charges are an increasingly popular alternative to subscriptions because papers become “open access,” or freely available to the public. To protect taxpayers, Bhattacharya said price caps or other restrictions will be placed on the publishing charges for NIH-funded papers starting in January. 

The Big Five oppose the caps, saying their fees fairly reflect the many costs involved in publishing. “An APC funding cap is a blunt instrument that would create more problems than it solves, restricting author choice, exacerbating inequities, and destabilizing the publishing ecosystem,” a Taylor & Francis spokesperson told RCI.

Some critics are looking beyond price caps for a “radical change in academic publishing,” according to a report by Cambridge University Press. It surveyed the views of 3,000 researchers, librarians, and funders and came to a conclusion that it admits is “surprising” for a publisher: The industry should churn out fewer articles, and focus on quality over quantity, while the academic community builds out lower-cost alternatives to commercial publishing. 

“[T]he sheer volume of publications threatens to overwhelm the ecosystem. Important work risks being lost or drowned out by a surge of low-quality or AI-generated content,” Mandy Hill, managing director of the press, wrote in the October report. 

Academic Publishing’s Secret Sauce

It’s hard to imagine a better business model than commercial academic publishing. The Big Five’s dominance, accounting for more than 50% of indexed published papers, has given them the market power to raise fees often above inflation, research shows. Universities are caught in a costly vicious circle: Although they often protest the fees that have increased to about $11 million a year on average, or about a third of a library’s total budget, they also pressure their scholars to publish at a brisk pace. That, in turn, ensures robust demand for space in journals, particularly the prestigious ones such as the Big Five’s Nature and Cell with the highest fees.

In addition to a captive market, academic publishers also enjoy a sizable cost savings particular to their industry. Publishers have various operational costs, but they don’t pay researchers who write the papers, editors who revise them (with the exception of a small honorarium for the editor-in-chief), and academic peer-reviewers who provide basic quality control. 

All told, the publication cost on average for a paper is about $400, while the average article processing charge collected by journals is $1800, according to a 2021 study by Alexander Grossmann of Leipzig University in Germany. 

“[T]he scholarly community must eventually make a number of decisions if it is to tackle the affordability problem,” writes Grossmann, a professor of publishing. “Are profit margins of 30-40% on taxpayer funds tolerable?”

The Big Five deny they are gouging taxpayers. A Taylor & Francis spokesperson told RCI that the charges are needed to cover “the full spectrum of publishing services, including submission and peer review management, editorial development, ethics checks and investigations, metadata tagging, indexing, metrics, content preservation, technology development and much more.” 

A Springer Nature spokesperson told RCI its article processing charges are in line with the expenses associated with publishing an article. “The outreach and editorial support we provide, the promotion of scientific work we conduct, and the infrastructure we maintain and invest in are all undertaken with one goal in mind: enhancing the reach and impact of research,” the spokesperson said.

Growth of the Big Five

The crisis in academic publishing has been decades in the making. In the 1970s, the Big Five controlled less than 10% of the market – sharing it with scientific societies and university publishers – mostly through journal subscriptions to libraries. The subscription model was controversial from the get-go, with the Library of Congress calling out the “sharp and alarming increases” in subscription prices – hovering between 5% and 12% in most years, well above inflation – that were “damaging to the development of the library’s” collections.

With stagnant university library budgets crushed under with weight of increasing subscription prices, a rebellion of academics and librarians gave rise to the open access movement in the early 2000s. It sought to both lower publishing costs and freely share papers with an expanding global research community in the developing world whose universities couldn’t afford multi-million-dollar subscriptions. Under open-access deals, universities or researchers would pay a one-time article-processing charge for each published paper, which would be freely available to the public forever, made possible by the internet.

The Big Five, having expanded their market share almost fivefold after two waves of consolidation in the 1990s, resisted the new open-access model first rolled out by a few smaller publishers, such as BioMed Central. But as open access gained steam, Springer gobbled up BioMed in 2008, a first step in the Big Five’s embrace of the model, giving it a second revenue stream. Today, researchers applaud the growth of open access, which accounts for almost half of all published papers globally, as a triumph for the dissemination of knowledge. But rather than reducing the costs of publishing, they keep going up. 

In an extensive study of fees from six major publishers for the period 2019-2023, Haustein, who codirects the Scholarly Communications Lab at Ottawa, found that researchers paid $2.5 billion in article processing charges to these publishers in 2023, triple the amount in 2019. Almost 90% of the journals had increased the charges, often above inflation. The average charge was about $2,900 per paper, with a high of $11,700 for high-profile journals.

“Our analysis demonstrates that there is a massive amount of money spent on APCs and that this amount is growing at a rate that is almost certainly unsustainable,” co-author Haustein wrote.

When publishers are paid by the article, it provides an incentive to maximize production and helps explain the boom in papers. The total number of indexed articles soared 47% between 2016 and 2022 to 2.8 billion, according to a study by University of Exeter’s Mark Hanson. 

The publishing spike was led by MDPI, a big publisher devoted to open-access papers. It made most of its revenue from article processing charges for special issues built around a research theme. They epitomize the crisis of quantity over quality. For special issues, guest editors drive demand by soliciting articles from researchers, breaking with the standard practice of allowing researchers to submit papers when they are ready. The turnaround time from submission to acceptance is also sped up, according to Hanson’s study, allowing less time for editors to scrutinize articles for weaknesses and even fraud. And MDPI stood out among the publishers for having lower rejection rates of papers.

“If a publisher lowers its article rejection rates, all else being equal, this will lead to more articles being published,” Hanson wrote. “Such changes to rejection rate might also mean more lower-quality articles are being published.”

The blowup at Hindawi, another publisher focusing on special issues, alerted the publishing world to the magnitude of its fraud problem. Wiley bought Hindawi for $298 million in 2020, calling it an “innovator in open access publishing,” to expand into that fast-growing market and reap the article processing charges. Three years later, Wiley discovered that Hindawi had been heavily infiltrated by paper mills, forcing the retraction of 8,000 suspect articles and ending the Hindawi brand. It lives on as Exhibit A for an out-of-control publishing industry.

Detecting Fraudulent Paper Mills

The Big Five now say they are serious about curbing the publication of fraudulent papers, which are growing at an even faster rate than legitimate publications, according to a 2025 study. Springer Nature, which received 2.3 million submissions last year, has invested many millions in technology and a team of 75 experts to identify suspicious articles, such as AI-generated text and images, before publication and ensure the credibility of its research, the spokesperson said. Taylor & Francis says its integrity team prevents “thousands of fraudulent articles from being published every year.”

But plenty of flawed and fake papers continue to be published, which raises the question of whether the Big Five could be investing more in the battle against paper mills. For example, it can take years for journals to retract junk science articles after they have been flagged as suspicious, and by then it’s often too late, said Nancy Chescheir, chair of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), which recently issued new guidelines to speed up the retraction process. “Editors need to act more quickly in retracting papers before they get included in systematic literature reviews and clinical care, which is happening,” Chescheir told RCI. 

Cleaning up the scientific literature, however, is at loggerheads with the exponential growth of papers each year. Busy editors, particularly at less prestigious journals that are most vulnerable to paper mill infiltration, don’t have the time and resources to promptly handle the complexities of figuring out if a paper should be retracted, said Chescheir, who has served as the editor in chief of two biomedical journals. 

Chescheir says publishers do need to devote more resources to protecting integrity, particularly for underfunded journals in the developing world. Wiley, for example, owns journals in China through its acquisition of Hindawi.

“The globalization of research is a wonderful thing, but as for providing resources that are adequate to deal with integrity problems across the globe, we are far away from that,” Chescheir said.

Breaking Away From the Big Five

A small number of journals have decided that the best way to protect their integrity is to break away from commercial publishing. Since the 1980s, the editorial boards of about 38 journals have declared their independence, mostly from the Big Five, and gone on to operate, typically under a new name, says Saskia van Walsum, a Ph.D. student researching this trend at the University of Ottawa. In the recent wave of breakaways, including Stilz’s philosophy journal, the push by publishers for more papers was a major complaint. 

Stilz’s successor journal, Free & Equal, embraces an alternative approach to academic publishing called “diamond open access” that harkens back centuries to a time when scholars were in charge. It’s a growing movement of thousands of small journals based on the principles that scholars shouldn’t pay to publish papers and the public shouldn’t pay to read them. 

The Open Library of Humanities (OLH), a nonprofit that publishes Free & Equal, started in 2013 to address the rising fees of the Big Five. Some 350 libraries, including the Ivies and major public universities in the U.S. and U.K., are backing OLH because they only pay a relatively small fee to the nonprofit, compared to what the Big Five charge, to enable the publication of its 34 titles.

While the economics of nonprofit publishing can work, breakaway journals like Free & Equal, founded in 2024, face a significant reputational challenge. Younger scholars need to publish in prestigious journals to build careers, and it can take several years for new titles like Free & Equal to receive an Impact Factor rating that signals their influence among researchers. Stilz says her new political philosophy journal has started strong, getting almost as many submissions as her former Wiley title.

“You have to trust that your community will come with you when you do a mass resignation,” she said. “You don’t have a brand.” 

Transportation Secretary Sean P. Duffy has launched “The Golden Age of Travel Starts with You” campaign ahead of the upcoming holiday travel season, aimed at triggering conversation nationwide over the return of civility in air travel, the Department of Transportation (DOT) said in a Nov. 19 statement.

Air travel has become more unruly over the years, DOT said. Since 2019, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has seen a 400 percent surge in in-flight outbursts from travelers, ranging from disruptive behaviors to violent actions.

Since 2021, there have been 13,800 unruly passenger incidents, with the 2024 numbers double that of 2019, according to the DOT.

Between 2020 and 2021, unruly passenger reports jumped six times. In 2021, one out of every five flight attendants reported experiencing physical incidents, DOT said.

In “The Golden Age of Travel Starts with You” campaign video, the DOT showed clips of various incidents involving unruly passengers, including physical fights onboard airplanes.

Duffy appears in the video, asking people to bring manners back in air travel.

Naveen Athrappully reports for The Epoch Times that the DOT said the campaign addresses the “record surge” in unruly passengers with potential improvements expected to make the travel experience better for people while ensuring the safety of passengers, pilots, flight attendants, and gate workers.

Duffy also asked potential flyers to think about the way they dress, whether they help pregnant women or the elderly, retain control of their children, and communicate with general courtesy.

“There’s no question we’ve lost sight of what makes travel fun—the excitement, the relaxation, the cordial conversations. Americans already feel divided and stressed. We can all do our part to bring back civility, manners, and common sense. When we can unite around shared values, we can feel more connected as a country,” DOT said.

“Along with building an all-new air traffic control system, surging air traffic control hiring, and making travel more family friendly, the Department of Transportation is committed to ushering [in] a Golden Age of Travel for the American people.”

The DOT campaign comes ahead of the Thanksgiving holiday period, which is expected to see 81.8 million individuals travel at least 50 miles from their homes between Nov. 25 and Dec. 1, according to a Nov. 17 statement from the American Automobile Association (AAA).

Out of this, 6 million are expected to travel via domestic flights, up by 2 percent from last year, said the association.

The number of air travelers over the past several years has remained between 5 million and 6 million, except during the 2020 COVID-19 period.

“A roundtrip domestic flight is averaging $700 which is similar to last year,” AAA said.

“It’s cheaper to fly on Thanksgiving Day itself, but the flight home is what drives up the ticket price since Sunday and Monday are the busiest return days. Some travelers shorten or extend their Thanksgiving trips to avoid flying on peak days.”

During the Thanksgiving season, unruly passengers can become more problematic, given the high traffic during this period.

According to FAA data, there have been 1,431 unruly passenger reports this year, as of Nov. 16, which have resulted in 142 investigations, 125 enforcement actions, and $2.1 million in fines.

The highest number of unruly passenger reports in this decade was registered in 2021 amid the pandemic, when the number hit 5,973.

“The rate of unruly passenger incidents steadily dropped by over 80 percent since record highs in early 2021, but recent increases show there remains more work to do,” the FAA said.

In November 2021, the FAA and the FBI issued a joint statement informing people that the FAA would refer unruly passenger cases to the FBI to conduct criminal case reviews.

Meanwhile, the recent end of the federal government shutdown has resulted in the FAA lifting all restrictions on commercial flights at major American airports, said a Nov. 20 statement from travel insurance comparison company Squaremouth.

The lifting of restrictions has “helped ease the worries of those who considered canceling or delaying their travel plans,” it said, adding that “operations are normalizing just in time for the busy holiday travel season.”

Authored by Darlene McCormick Sanchez via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

Newly released peer reviews of a federal report rejecting medical interventions for children with gender dysphoria called the government analysis “scientifically sound” and “compelling.”

The reviews were released on Nov. 19 for a government report titled “Treatment for Pediatric Gender Dysphoria: Review of Evidence and Best Practices,” which was commissioned by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and originally released on May 1.

The HHS report was prompted by a January executive order from President Donald Trump on protecting children from chemical and surgical mutilation. In part, the order states that the federal government will not “fund, sponsor, promote, assist, or support the so-called ’transition’ of a child from one sex to another.”

HHS stated in the report that the issue needed to be examined because of an “emphasis on medicalization” in pediatric gender medicine in the United States. The 409-page report emphasized therapy’s benefits instead.

“Psychotherapy is a noninvasive alternative to endocrine and surgical interventions for the treatment of pediatric gender dysphoria,“ it reads. ”Systematic reviews of evidence have found no evidence of adverse effects of psychotherapy in this context.”

In a Nov. 19 statement regarding the updated report, HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. called medical interventions such as hormones and surgery “malpractice.”

“The American Medical Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics peddled the lie that chemical and surgical sex-rejecting procedures could be good for children,” Kennedy said. “They betrayed their oath to first do no harm, and their so-called ‘gender-affirming care’ has inflicted lasting physical and psychological damage on vulnerable young people.”

National Debate

Leor Sapir, an HHS report author and senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, agreed that the report represents an important milestone in how childhood gender dysphoria should be treated.

“At the highest level, this is the closest the United States has ever got, and probably will ever get, to a scientific debate about this topic,” Sapir told The Epoch Times.

National Institutes of Health Director Dr. Jay Bhattacharya said in the Nov. 19 statement that the report’s evidence documents the “risks the profession has imposed on vulnerable children.”

“This report marks a turning point for American medicine,” he said.

Peer reviews from professors, doctors, and researchers were positive overall. The only review from a professional psychiatric group came from the American Psychiatric Association (APA). Two unsolicited negative articles were included, and HHS responded to them as well.

The APA, as the sole professional association to provide a formal peer review, said the report’s underlying methodology lacked “sufficient transparency and clarity for its findings to be taken at face value.”

It also criticized the report for failing to identify potential harm from withholding medical interventions, citing higher rates of depression, anxiety, and suicidal thoughts. Likewise, it condemned the report for not immediately disclosing report authors and any potential conflicts of interest.

In its reply to the APA, HHS responded that it was an established practice in scientific reviews to withhold authors’ names until after peer review so that the focus would be on the research.

The agency pointed out that two Belgian methodologists reviewed the report. Trudy Bekkering and Dr. Patrik Vankrunkelsven both work with the Belgian Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine. Bekkering and Vankrunkelsven found the report’s methodology “robust” without major issues in its methodology or conclusion.

Sapir called the validation of methodology extremely important because major flaws would damage the report’s credibility.

“That’s the beating heart of this review,” he said.

HHS noted that evidence underpinning the alleged benefits of medical interventions is “very uncertain.”

The agency also invited the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Endocrine Society to participate in the review. They criticized the report but did not offer a peer review.

HHS also addressed accusations that the report was biased, used misleading evidence, violated scientific norms, and relied too heavily on the Cass report.

The Cass report, a 2024 report to the UK’s National Health Service, resulted in a shift away from the gender affirmation model for children to a more conservative approach. The National Health Service significantly curtailed the prescribing of puberty blockers because there was insufficient evidence that puberty blockers benefited patients.

Leaders in pediatric gender medicine have criticized the HHS report in two journal commentaries.

The first commentary, “A Critical Scientific Appraisal of the Health and Human Services Report on Pediatric Gender Dysphoria,” appeared in the Journal of Adolescent Health in September. The second, “Scientific Integrity and Pediatric Gender Healthcare: Disputing the HHS Review,” was published in Sexuality Research and Social Policy in October.

The commentaries state, among other complaints, that the report does not name its authors, has factual errors, and misrepresents scientific evidence.

HHS noted that none of the government report’s contributors was employed by the agency and that its conclusions were reproducible and in line with scholarly norms.

The agency also stated that the Cass report has been accepted by both major political parties in the UK but noted that criticism was expected.

“It is not surprising that gender clinicians and the professional associations that represent them would disparage a review that upended their favored treatment model in the [UK],” HHS stated.

The Trevor Project, a nonprofit that describes itself as a suicide prevention group for the LGBT community, said in a Facebook post that the report “dismisses the validity of transgender health care.”

Positive Peer Reviews

However, most peer reviewers found that the government analysis met professional standards and had no major flaws.

“This is an important and timely work. It is well written, methodologically rigorous, and makes a significant contribution to the discussion on this topic,” Johan C. Bester, professor of family and community medicine and health care ethics at Saint Louis University School of Medicine, wrote in his peer review.

“What the Cass review did in the UK, the [HHS] review does in the United States.”

Several European nations, including the UK, have restricted or banned pharmaceutical and medical interventions for gender dysphoric children, citing concerns over effectiveness and long-term effects. Similarly, 27 U.S. states have enacted laws limiting so-called gender-affirming care for minors, according to KFF, a health policy research and news outlet.

Bester went on to write that the current practice of offering medical intervention to help youths with gender dysphoria “ought not continue.” He stated that much research is still needed on the causes of gender dysphoria, its natural course, and treatments.

Others, such as Dr. Richard Santen, professor emeritus of endocrinology at the University of Virginia School of Medicine, said the overall assessment of the studies in the report “was scientifically sound.”

Karleen Gribble, professor at the School of Nursing and Midwifery at Western Sydney University, applauded the report’s commitment to using scientifically accurate, neutral terminology. She said that rejecting terminology such as “sex assigned at birth” was “well-argued.”

HHS said the goal of the report was to provide accurate and current information on the treatment of children distressed over their biological sex.

“Our duty is to protect our nation’s children—not expose them to unproven and irreversible medical interventions,” Bhattacharya said when the report was published in May.

“We must follow the gold standard of science, not activist agendas.”

Zachary Stieber contributed to this report.

U.S. Attorney Pamela Bondi has filed a federal court complaint challenging laws in the Golden State that provide in-state tuition rates, scholarships, and subsidized loans to illegal immigrants, she said on Thursday.

Those laws are unconstitutional and discriminate against American citizens who are not afforded the same benefits to attend colleges and universities, she said in a Nov. 20 statement.

“This marks our third lawsuit against California in one week,” she said.

“We will continue bringing litigation against California until the state ceases its flagrant disregard for federal law.”

As Aaron Gifford reports for The Epoch Times, the lawsuit, filed in the Eastern District of California federal court, names California Gov. Gavin Newsom and other agencies that oversee the state’s public university system.

The lawsuit said the “California Dream Act,” which exclusively provides scholarships and subsidized loans, is illegal and unconstitutional.

It cites two executive orders signed by President Donald Trump earlier in 2025 that prohibit illegal immigrants from obtaining taxpayer benefits or preferential treatment.

The Epoch Times has reached out to Newsom’s press office.

Under a 1996 law passed under President Bill Clinton, the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act, public universities cannot charge U.S. citizens out-of-state tuition rates if they are providing in-state discounts to illegal immigrants.

The DOJ previously filed similar lawsuits against five states. Texas, Oklahoma, and Kentucky complied with the federal agency’s request and no longer offer discounted tuition to illegal immigrants, while cases are pending against Illinois and Minnesota.

In-state tuition at most of California’s public colleges and universities is less than $10,000 annually, but out-of-state tuition exceeds $30,000, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.

About 62 percent of the nation’s foreign-born population lives in states with “tuition-equity” laws, according to an Aug. 6 report from the National Immigration Law Center.

More than 500,000 illegal immigrants are enrolled at U.S. colleges and universities, both public and private.

California leads with 103,000, followed by Texas with 73,000, and Florida with 49,000, according to the Higher Ed Immigration Portal.

The California State University system website notes that its Dream Center offers benefits exclusively for students who are the children of illegal immigrants or are illegal immigrants themselves.

This includes grants, loans, scholarships, legal assistance, and various campus support services.

“We seek support for our Dreamers and DACA recipients—and those across the country—to honor their humanity, to remove inequitable and unfair barriers that stand between them and the fulfillment of their personal and professional dreams,” Mildred García, the state university system chancellor, says in a statement on the website.

“That’s what the CSU stands for—that’s what we do—and at a scale greater than any other university system in the world.”

Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention now says that it’s possible vaccines cause autism, in a reversal of its previous stance.

“The claim ‘vaccines do not cause autism’ is not an evidence-based claim because studies have not ruled out the possibility that infant vaccines cause autism,” the CDC said in a Nov. 19 update to its website. “Studies supporting a link have been ignored by health authorities.”

The CDC cited a 2006 paper that analyzed surveys of parents with children who have autism and found many parents believed vaccines caused the disorder, which has symptoms including difficulty communicating.

It also said that the rise in the prevalence of autism in the United States correlates with an increase in the number of vaccines given to young children.

“Though the cause of autism is likely to be multi-factorial, the scientific foundation to rule out one potential contributor entirely has not been established,” the CDC said. “For example, one study found that aluminum adjuvants in vaccines had the highest statistical correlation with the rise in autism prevalence among numerous suspected environmental causes. Correlation does not prove causation, but it does merit further study.”

A small number of studies have found an association between certain vaccines and autism. Others have identified no increased risk in autism following receipt of the measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine, including two papers that cited the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), the CDC’s parent agency, in a 2021 report, which said there is no evidence that the vaccine causes autism.

An earlier report from the agency said evidence was insufficient to rule on an association between vaccines against diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis, and hepatitis B and autism.

“In fact, there are still no studies that support the claim that any of the 20 doses of the seven infant vaccines recommended for American children before the first year of life do not cause autism,” the CDC said in the update to its site.

It said that there are issues with the studies on autism and the measles vaccine, including that they are retrospective rather than prospective.

HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said at a Nov. 17 event, responding to a college student who said that vaccines do not cause autism, that “the people who told you that have been lying to you.” He said the studies on the matter should, but do not, compare health outcomes in a vaccinated group and an unvaccinated group, and that HHS is conducting those studies.

HHS is currently engaged in an investigation into the causes of autism, which includes evaluating “plausible biologic mechanisms between early childhood vaccinations and autism,” the CDC said on Nov. 19. The evaluation will include aluminum salts, which are used as adjuvants in many childhood vaccines.

The CDC had previously said on the site that “studies have shown that there is no link between receiving vaccines and developing autism spectrum disorder” and that no links have been found between any vaccine ingredients and the disorder.

The updated page maintains the sentence “vaccines do not cause autism” under an agreement between health officials and Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.), chairman of the Senate Health Committee. A spokesperson for Cassidy, who said during Kennedy’s confirmation hearing that vaccines do not cause autism, did not return a request for comment.

A separate CDC page, last updated in 2024, says that studies show vaccines are not associated with autism.

Children’s Health Defense, a nonprofit that says it wants to end childhood health epidemics by eliminating exposure to toxins and which was previously chaired by Kennedy, welcomed the CDC update.

“Finally, the CDC is beginning to acknowledge the truth about this condition that affects millions, disavowing the bold, long-running lie that ‘vaccines do not cause autism,’” Mary Holland, CEO and president of the group, told The Epoch Times in an email. “No studies have ever proved this irresponsible claim; on the contrary, many studies point to vaccines as the plausible primary cause of autism.”

Katelyn Jetelina, an epidemiologist, wrote on BlueSky that “for the first time in my career, I can’t tell people to trust what the CDC website says.”

Dr. Jake Scott, an infectious disease physician at Stanford University, said on her blog that the updated page “contradicts what we’ve learned from tracking millions of children over decades” and expressed concern that the new language would lead to parents delaying or skipping recommended vaccines for children.

Armed men attacked a Catholic boarding school in northcentral Nigeria’s Niger state in the early hours on Friday, abducting 215 students and 12 teachers, according to Daniel Atori, a spokesperson to the Niger state chapter of the Christian Association of Nigeria.

“I have just got back to the village this night after I visited the school where I also met with parents of the children to assure them that we are working with the government and Security agencies to see that our children are rescued and brought back safely,” Atori said in a statement. 

The attack and abductions took place at St. Mary’s School, a Catholic institution in the Agwara local government’s Papiri community, said Abubakar Usman, the secretary to the Niger state government. He neither disclosed the number of students and staff abducted, nor who might be responsible for the attack. -AP

“We don’t know what is happening now, because we have not heard anything since this morning,” said Dauda Chekula, 62, whose four grandchildren were among the abductees. “The children who were able to escape have scattered, some of them ran back to their houses and the only information we are getting is that the attackers are still moving with the remaining children into the bush.”

The abduction is the latest in a spate of attacks on Christians in Africa’s most populous country, and happened just days after 25 schoolgirls were abducted in a neighboring state. 

While no description has been given for the attackers, the schoolgirls are suspected to have been taken by ‘gangs of bandits.’

As Susan Crabtree of RealClearPolitics writes:  

The timing and nature of the attack placed the fate of Nigerian Christians in stark relief. On Monday, in the early hours of the morning, a group of gunmen attacked a girl’s boarding school in northwestern Nigeria, kidnapping 25 girls, many of them Christian. The attack killed the school’s vice principal, Malam Hassan Makaku, who tried to block the door to the girl’s dormitory with his body.

The gunmen’s assault on the school took more than 20 minutes and failed to prompt any intervention from government security forces located at a checkpoint not far from the school.

The attack also took place amid new scrutiny and calls to action by President Trump. The president in late October vowed to stop the slaughter of Nigerian Christians, whom Muslim terrorist groups, including Boko Haram and Faluni militants, the Islamic State of West Africa Province, as well as armed bandits, have targeted and slaughtered by the thousands in recent years.

The abduction of the girls served as a reminder of former first lady Michelle Obama’s failed hashtag campaign to rescue 276 mostly Christian girls kidnapped by Boko Haram from a school in Chibok, Nigeria, in 2014. A decade later, 82 of the girls remain missing, and a United Nations investigation found that only 37% of schools across Nigeria have any warning system to detect threats of violence and armed attacks.

The deadly attack on the school also came the same week U.S. officials planned to highlight the plight of persecuted Christians in Nigeria at the United Nations and in Congress.

Ambassador to the United Nations Mike Waltz, singer Nicki Minaj, and religious freedom advocates gathered in New York Tuesday and joined a panel hosted by Fox News anchor Harris Faulkner. Rev. Gabriel Makan, a pastor from northern Nigeria, and Sarah Makin, former senior advisor on religious freedom in President Trump’s first administration, joined the panel to call for renewed diplomatic engagement and stepped-up actions from the Nigerian government.

Waltz, Minaj, and the other witnesses chronicled the loss of girls into what they fear is a life of sex slavery, the burning of churches, and beheadings of pastors. Entire villages, Waltz said, wake to gunfire because “they dare to commit the crime of calling Jesus their Lord, [and] people go to jail under blasphemy laws for simply wearing a cross.”

For years, religious freedom advocates have called on the U.S. government to address the slaughter of Christians in Nigeria. Trump, in his first term, designated Nigeria a “Country of Particular Concern,” but President Biden reversed that decision. In late October, Trump once again redesignated Nigeria as a CPC and vowed to do everything in his power, including have the U.S. military come in “guns blazin’,” to stop the violence.

“Protecting Christians is not about politics – it is a moral duty,” Waltz said Tuesday. “We need voices that pierce the silence we have heard from the international community, that humanize the statistics we keep hearing, and demand accountability.”

“Religious freedom means we can all can sing our faith regardless of who we are, where we live, and what we believe,” Minaj told the panel. “But today, faith is under attack in way too many places. In Nigeria, Christians are being targeted, driven from their homes and killed. Churches have been burned, families have been torn apart, and entire communities live in fear constantly, simply because of how they pray.”

New Jersey GOP Rep. Chris Smith in previous Congresses introduced bipartisan legislation calling for more action to stop what he considers a Christian genocide in Nigeria. On Thursday, Smith will lead a House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing on Trump’s renewed call for action.

Christians make up nearly half of Nigeria’s population of 200 million, but they are the victims of the vast majority of the attacks. Today, Nigeria is the most dangerous place in the world to be a Christian, according to leading religious freedom advocates.

The World Index of Christian Persecution states that Nigeria is where 89% of Christian killings throughout the world took place over the last several years. According to a report by Open Doors, a watchdog that tracks Christian persecution, attacks against Christians in Nigeria are on the rise, with 7,000 Christians dying in the first eight months of this year, up roughly 2,000 from recent years.

The Biden administration attributed the slaughter of Christians in Nigeria, which make up nearly half the population, not to religious persecution but to a conflict over resources exacerbated by climate change. Open Doors and other advocates ardently disagree about the main motivation, although most groups involved believe the conflict isn’t just religious in nature but also involves conflicts over power and control over land and resources because Christians own most of the farming areas.

Kidnapping, which helps fund Islamist terrorist groups, is big business for abductors in the lawless areas of northern Nigeria. More than 20,000 people have been abducted in Nigeria from 2019 to 2023, according to Open Doors. Roaming bandits target people wo will pay ransoms, and they’ve learned that Christians and religious leaders will respond with higher payments than others.

For these reasons, some groups, including the Vatican, have pushed back on the narrative that the slaughter of Christians is primarily religious persecution. According to Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the Vatican’s secretary of state, the root causes are “social” in nature rather than fully religious. The Trump administration rejects that assessment, arguing it’s a war on Christians by mainly Muslim extremist groups.

Regardless of the cause, the impact is alarming. Nigeria remains the world leader when it comes to the killing of Christians. The question now: What can the Trump administration do about it?

Trump, in his late October Truth Social post, vowed U.S. military action if the Nigerian government fails to take immediate action. Such a development, if it involved sending U.S. troops into Nigeria, would likely not only anger Trump’s isolationist MAGA base but could prove ineffective against roving bands of militants and terrorists in such lawless regions.

Nigerian President Bola Tinubu, who is Muslim, pushed back against Trump’s threat of military action, instead calling for non-military assistance from the U.S. and interested parties “to deepen cooperation and protection of communities of all faiths.”

Tinubu, who was elected in 2023 and faces reelection in 2027, is viewed as a far more honest broker than his predecessor, Muhammadu Buhari, a Muslim who shared his heritage with the Faluni ethnic group responsible for most of the attacks on Nigerian Christians. Tinubu’s wife is a Christian, which likely has tempered his approach.

A senior State Department official told RealClearPolitics that Trump is keeping all options on the table but noted that there is a “whole suite of options” the administration is considering, including serious economic sanctions. The official also noted the geographic complexity of the problem because in the northeastern area of the country the bad actors are Boko Haram and ISIS, while in the Middle Belt it’s Fulani militants.

The key to Tinubu’s reelection is managing “this delicate religious balance,” the official added.

“This is an opportunity for the Nigerians to show that they share this principle [of religious freedom], and they’re willing to take action on this for the benefit of our people,” the official said, noting that it requires the Nigerian government to increase its “prioritization of this issue” and “allocate resources appropriately.” 

While Tinubu appears open to Western assistance to crack down on the attacks, the real problem lies with the flow of firearms to different lawless regions and corrupt funds to the local governors of the different states, several of whom are in league with the extremist groups responsible for the violence, according to a source on the ground in Nigeria. Many of those firearms, the source said, are flowing into Nigeria from Arab states, including Saudi Arabia.

Trump this week gave Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman a lavish welcome at the White House and even defended him over the 2018 killing of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi by Saudi agents, which U.S. intelligence agencies have concluded the crown prince approved. The White House’s renewed U.S. -Saudi partnership brings new hope to ending regional tensions with Iran and cementing the Israeli-Hamas peace deal.

But any talks of U.S. weapons sales to Saudi Arabia should also include pledges to lead an effort to stop the sales of firearms to Nigerian terrorists and militants, critics argue.

U.S. officials are planning to host a senior Nigerian delegation in Washington at the end of this week to get a better idea of short- and long-term goals and any sticking points.

“The flow of illicit weapons is just magnifying the problem there, so it’s one of the key factors that we’re going to look at, especially in the Middle Belt piece of this when we’re talking about ISIS and Boko Haram,” the State Department official said. “How these Fulani ethnic militias, which the Nigerians claim are just farmers – how they end up with heavy artillery to conduct these raids is a fundamental question.”

The State Department is in the process of conducting a review of all U.S. aid to Nigeria, including security cooperation and humanitarian and economic assistance.

“Our preferred option for them is to recognize the seriousness of the situation and act accordingly, in good faith with us, so we can all see results, and we don’t need to discuss any of these punitive aspects,” the official said. 

Authored by John Tillman via RealClearPolitics,

Is a culture change coming to the news media?

So it might seem, now that Bari Weiss has been appointed editor-in-chief of CBS News. Another sign is Jeff Bezos’s decision to reorient the Washington Post’s opinion page. The hope is that both outlets will move away from their blatant far-left coverage, not only bringing in some right-leaning voices, but restoring some measure of objective journalism. Other outlets are wondering if they should follow suit.

Spoiler alert: It won’t work.

That’s not the kind of culture change the media needs. Instead of fighting bias, media outlets should admit their bias, and frankly, they should own their bias. That’s the only way to make the media honest – and it’s what Americans actually want.

Make no mistake: The media landscape in this country is broken. A miniscule 8% of Americans have strong trust in the media, according to Gallup. People can’t abandon legacy outlets fast enough. But they’re not fleeing because so many outlets are biased. Everyone knows they are, and for the record, they always have been. Most outlets are strongly biased toward to the left. A few are strongly biased toward the right. What Americans don’t like is that all these bias outlets pretend to be unbiased and objective.

Americans are reacting to the media’s hypocrisy. And notice where they’re heading. It’s not to some up-and-coming or diamond-in-the-rough “objective” news sites – those don’t exist. No, Americans are rushing to outlets that are brutally honest about their political biases.

In a sense, the media landscape is reverting to the mean. The whole concept of “objective journalism” was created in the 1920s and 30s, but before then, newspapers were proud of their biases and very public about it. They were explicitly affiliated with political parties, movements, ideologies, or even individual leaders. Virtually every media outlet advanced a party line – and Americans loved it. For the record, it also strengthened America, by contributing to the vigorous clash of ideas that defines our pluralistic experiment in self-government.

By contrast, supposedly “objective” media is a historical anomaly, and it makes a mockery of our vibrant democracy. It pretends like a small group of well-educated journalists have a corner on the truth – and the wisdom to tell truth from lies. Ultimately, it says that journalists can put aside their biases. But none of this is true. Journalists are human, and humans have opinions. We should test those opinions by clashing them against each other, not give the false impression that some opinions are really objective truth.

Alas, the legacy media is too bought in to the idea of objective journalism, even as journalists report in profoundly biased ways. It’s killing them. So, on Nov. 19, I’m launching a project that will tell Americans exactly how biased reporters are – and I believe it will help the media.

It’s called MediaPedia, and its centerpiece is a bias rating system for American journalists. We developed an artificial intelligence model that ranks how liberal or conservative reporters are, based on their coverage. The AI system looks at eight criteria, from the sources they use to the tone they take, then gives them a score. A score between 0 and -50 means a reporter is liberal. A score between 0 and  +50 is conservative. For the record, my team is resisting our own biases by using an AI model. Unlike other ranking systems, we don’t want biased humans making biased calls.

MediaPedia will start by ranking journalists at five major legacy outlets: the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Associated Press, and Reuters. We have plans to add more outlets, including broadcast media and podcasts. Ultimately, we want to give Americans a window on as many journalists as possible, so they know exactly what angle the media’s coming from.

No doubt, some journalists will view MediaPedia as an attack, but it’s really an attempt to help them. Journalists should be honest about their biases, and it’s the only way to regain Americans’ trust. As counterintuitive as it seems, people are more willing to trust an openly biased reporter than a journalist who covers his bias under a cloak of objectivity.

At the end of the day, trust depends on honesty, and honesty is the real culture change that media needs. It’s not simply a matter of moving outlets in a different direction. What matters far more is admitting that every media outlet already has a direction – because America moves forward when the media is honest.

*  *  * Meanwhile, you can support ZeroHedge here

Federal officers from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) began conducting large-scale raids across the Charlotte metropolitan area last weekend as part of Operation Charlotte’s Web. The objective is to arrest and deport criminal illegal aliens.

Operation Charlotte’s Web has given a partial understanding of just how many migrants have poured into the metro area since the Biden-Harris regime’s nation-killing open border policy.

Footage from X shows construction sites of residential homes, commercial projects, and even stores empty this week as illegals flee and go into hiding to avoid being deported.

🚨#BREAKING: Hundreds of constructions sites are sitting completely empty in Charlotte NC today.

HUNDREDS of them. pic.twitter.com/KqU0umYZ7g

— Matt Van Swol (@mattvanswol) November 19, 2025

One of many construction sites in Charlotte that is completely empty. pic.twitter.com/qsFMrLJXVM

— Joe Bruno (@JoeBrunoWSOC9) November 19, 2025

Report of hundreds of Charlotte construction sites now quiet amid Border Patrol operation.

This particular site had from 50 to 100 workers everyday and only 2 showed up yesterday.

That means thousands of construction jobs are being filled by illegal immigrants who are paid… pic.twitter.com/kDyUQiaQmt

— I Meme Therefore I Am 🇺🇸 (@ImMeme0) November 20, 2025

Uptown Charlotte North Carolina job sites reported empty due to ICE raids

Not a single worker is there, all workers were illegal

This is happening in all 50 states. Every time we see ICE raids come to a city, we see empty job sites

American jobs stolen for cheap illegal labor pic.twitter.com/uQolEQpWzd

— Wall Street Apes (@WallStreetApes) November 20, 2025

Two women who work in Charlotte, North Carolina, say there are no customers ever since ICE surged in the area.

If businesses can only survive by having customers who are illegals then those businesses shouldn’t be in business.

(thecharlotteobserver on TT) pic.twitter.com/imZ47sRKqF

— Paul A. Szypula 🇺🇸 (@Bubblebathgirl) November 19, 2025

Charlotte, North Carolina ice cream shop says they are forced to close due to the ICE raids

He says as many as 90% of his customers are Latino and they’re hiding from ICE

He can’t risk his employees being detained so they’re choosing to be closed

If his employees or his… pic.twitter.com/OyDRC3r954

— Wall Street Apes (@WallStreetApes) November 19, 2025

Tacos El Nevado, frequently voted as one of Charlotte’s best places to get a taco, has decided to close due to the CBP operation pic.twitter.com/TO9XoRlV5n

— Joe Bruno (@JoeBrunoWSOC9) November 19, 2025

1/6 of Charlotte’s population is foreign-born, not counting illegals.

It’s not a “political awakening,” it’s a foreign population with no loyalty to our country, heritage, or laws. https://t.co/EUZidiVW6R

— Harrison H. Smith ✞ (@HarrisonHSmith) November 20, 2025

We reported earlier this week:

• ICE & Border Patrol Begin Sweeping Deportation Raids On Criminal Illegals In Charlotte
• NGO-Backed Groups Train To Obstruct Immigration Arrests In North Carolina

Data from the Carolina Migrant Network nonprofit estimates that there are 58,000 illegals are living in Mecklenburg County, and an estimated 325,000 in North Carolina. 

What’s increasingly clear is that we may never fully grasp how many illegals crossed into the U.S. under the Biden-Harris’ open-border policies. But we get a sense of the scale when ICE sweeps turn parts of a major metro area into a ghost town overnight as illegals go into hiding. 

The deeper issue is that this illegal population has become a net drain on public resources. Americans never voted for a nation-killing illegal alien invasion – yet when voters give Trump a mandate to restore national security and deport criminal illegals, Democrats and their corrupt globalist judicial allies move to obstruct the will of the people. 

Authored by James Howard Kunstler,

“…the Democrat Party is no longer a political party. It is an insurrectionist crime syndicate that will torch the Constitution to stay in power.”

– Stephen Miller

The old joke goes: A-list actor is having lunch with studio chief. Studio chief says, Didya hear so-and-so (well-known Hollywood agent) dropped dead this morning. His heart. A-list actor says, Gee, I didn’t know he had one.

Kind of brings to mind the late Veep Dick Cheney, who actually did have a heart, but one so grotesquely diseased that he had his first near-fatal infarction at age thirty-seven, followed by surgeries galore, and finally, at age 71, a heart transplant that, quite remarkably, kept him going another thirteen years — long enough to function behind-the-scenes as a senior Deep State cheerleader and strategist through the Trump years. Daughter Liz Cheney, of course, did the political dirty-work, most notably on Nancy Pelosi’s sketchy J-6 Committee, prior to being voted out of office in the 2022 Republican primary for Wyoming’s at-large U.S. House seat with 28.9 percent of the vote to Harriet Hageman’s 66.3 percent.

And so, yesterday, Dick Cheney’s funeral took place at Washington’s National Cathedral, the greatest assemblage of bloodsuckers since the Hammer Film Studio went out of business in 1979.

Joe Biden was there, perky as all get-out for somebody with stage-four prostate cancer, shaking hands with Mike Pence, who pulled him over the finish line in 2021. John Brennan, coupster superbus was there. Ditto John Bolton (awaiting trial). Most cheekily of all, Dr. Fauci, the father of Covid-19 and its little helper, the Covid vaxx, was seated next to MSNBC’s loss-leader, Rachel Maddow, who famously declared in 2021, “The virus stops with every vaccinated person!” (Not.)

Also on hand, former president “W,” Mitch McConnell, Al Gore, Nancy P, Adam Schiff, Chief Justice Roberts, Veep-of-all-Veeps, Kamala Harris, and many more.

Mysteriously absent: both Clintons and both Obamas — though Bill’s office explained that he had “a scheduling conflict.”

Notably uninvited: President Donald Trump and Veep JD Vance, a downright snub, let’s be plain about it.

And with it, perhaps a message: Behold the whole gang that has labored tirelessly for a whole decade to run you out of office and stuff you into a prison cell is here to gossip and plot against you some more! Nyah, nyah. . . .”

The contrast was pretty stark: MAGA against everybody else inside the DC Beltway. Mr. Trump was certainly at the funeral as a sort of spectral presence, since you can be sure that the only thing they were chattering about was how they were finally going to get him. . . somehow! (After years of spectacular failure and astonishing reversal-of-fortune.) You might also sense what desperation lurks behind their elitist bravado. Some of these birds are headed into court themselves, perhaps to prison. The prospect must seem acutely unreal to them.

Meanwhile, Mr. Trump has become the Scarlet Pimpernel of US political history, brave, intrepid, and resourceful, driven by a chivalric hatred of tyranny and injustice while seeming to be a comedian, mocking his persecutors as he escapes one plot after another. Don’t you wish you’d been a fly-on-the-wall at the funeral, and whatever after-party they were all at? The odor of fear must have been eye-watering.

The whole wicked business appears to be lurching toward crisis now as Mr. Trump works implacably to disassemble the treasonous scaffold they operate off of. At midweek, a claque of Democratic Party Senators and Congresspersons, led by former CIA-employee, Michigan Sen. Elissa Slotkin, released a social media video appearing to prompt mutiny in America’s armed forces. Their script implied that Mr. Trump was issuing illegal orders, which officers could (and should) refuse to carry out. They offered no examples of such illegal orders.

It’s probably safe to say that they want Americans to think that any order issued by Mr. Trump as Commander-in-chief is ipso facto illegal because. . . because. . . well, because Trump! And it is all of a piece with their former rallying cry “our democracy,” flaunted by the worst gang of ballot fraudsters, free speech squashers, and lawfare lizards ever seen in this land.

Mr. Trump responded a bit intemperately on his Truth Social platform, telling the claque that their seemingly seditious act could be answered with the death penalty. He was in error on that. That is the penalty for treason outright. The law on “seditious conspiracy,” US Code Title 18 § 2384, calls for a fine of not more than $250,000 ((adjusted for inflation under 18 US Code § 3571), and a maximum prison sentence up to twenty years.

Anyway, that stunt was not exactly a win for Party of Chaos, but it does make you wonder what their next move is going to be. A Seven Days in May style military coup, perhaps? More likely this was a lame rearguard action by a party in retreat and disarray. The angels of justice are coming for them and they know it, despite the machinations of their allied judges to gum up every earnest Article II effort attempted since 1/20/25 to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States. Even while the people try to settle into the cradle of Thanksgiving hearth and harvest, the wicked creep around setting their traps.