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Tribal Truths And Modern Myths: Why California Is Not ‘Stolen Land’

The slogan is simple, the sentiment sweeping: “No one is illegal on stolen land.” It festoons placards, hashtags, and classroom walls from Sacramento to Santa Cruz. But as with most slogans meant to end debate, this one also seeks to preclude history. It presumes that California was once peaceful, indivisible, and unjustly snatched from its rightful stewards. But history, and a robust respect for indigenous agency, tells a far more complex story, one in which conquest, conflict, diplomacy, and trade all played a part. To claim that the land was “stolen” and never rightfully acquired is not only historically inaccurate, it infantilizes the very indigenous groups it purports to defend.

California, contrary to modern myth, was never a harmonious Eden of united tribes singing songs of peace until the Spanish came ashore. The truth is that for over 12,000 years, more than 500 tribal societies occupied the region, often in brutal competition. These tribes warred incessantly over territory, trade routes, slaves, and honor. The Haida and Tlingit, although northern, share cultural practices that echoed throughout the West: the capture of slaves, the killing of rivals, the assimilation or extermination of the weak. Entire tribes were wiped from existence. Lands changed hands not once but dozens of times, often through bloodshed.

By the time Spanish missionaries arrived in the late 1700s, the number of distinct tribes had already plummeted. Epidemic disease, internecine warfare, and resource exhaustion had reduced the original 500-plus tribal entities to fewer than 100. This attrition wasn’t the result of colonial intervention but of indigenous struggle itself. The myth of the peaceful native collapses under the weight of archeological and ethnographic evidence. Tribal societies in California, like in the East, exhibited the full spectrum of human behavior: noble and cruel, artistic and violent.

Spain held California for 52 years. Mexico claimed it next, for a meager 27. Neither power treated the land as eternally sacred tribal territory. Nor did any surviving tribal leaders challenge their sovereignty in the language of permanent stewardship. When the United States acquired California in 1848 as part of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, it did so not by force but by payment: $15 million in cash and $3.25 million in assumed debt. This was not theft, it was a transaction recognized under international law.

The real moment of moral scrutiny came not with the acquisition, but with the American decision to negotiate directly with the tribes. Between 1851 and 1852, the US signed 18 treaties with the remaining major tribal entities, including the Luiseño, Cahuilla, Serrano, and Diegueño. These tribes voluntarily ceded vast territories in exchange for designated reservation lands, livestock, food, and goods. The Treaty with the Dieguino, for instance, exchanged lands for 1,800 head of beef cattle, blankets, and clothing. Critics call these treaties unjust, but if one argues the tribes were too weak or simple to make such agreements, one strips them of their dignity, their rationality, and their sovereignty.

Were these treaties honored? Some were, some weren’t. The US Senate, bowing to political pressure kept them secret for years. But despite this reality, almost all tribes retained occupancy on designated lands. By the mid-20th century, the federal government attempted to correct these injustices through the Rancheria Act of 1958, which granted property rights to approximately 3,000 California Indians, roughly 15 percent of the state’s indigenous population. These lands were not merely symbolic. They were tangible assets, capable of development, sale, and economic growth.

Today, over 30 California Rancherias operate gaming enterprises on those lands, with revenues surpassing $8 billion annually. The Morongo and San Manuel Bands have built thriving casino resorts, contributing to tribal self-sufficiency and local economies alike. These outcomes are not the fruits of a theft left unremedied but of a dynamic and evolving relationship between tribes and the federal government, one in which rights, property, and recognition have been negotiated over time.

To call California “stolen land” is to deny this history of tribal warfare, to erase the diplomatic agency of native leaders, and to ignore the billions in modern tribal wealth generated from what was once federally distributed land. Far from being a colonial crime scene frozen in amber, California has been a palimpsest of competing sovereignties for millennia. If the passage of land from one sovereign to another is theft, then history itself is a long litany of larceny, one in which every people is both victim and victor, conqueror and conquered.

But perhaps the most insidious error in the “stolen land” narrative is its condescension. It suggests that native peoples were mere pawns, helpless against the cunning of European diplomats or the guns of American soldiers. It denies them the ability to strike bargains, to fight when necessary, and to accept peace when wise. The tribes of California were many things, but they were not children. They were shrewd, adaptable, and as politically calculating as any European power.

In fact, by the time of the US acquisition, only 18 tribal entities held land of any strategic consequence. These were not distant memory-keepers of a vanished culture, they were its stewards, and they chose to parley. They chose to survive. Many have since thrived.

Land changes hands. It always has. And in California it has done so by spear and by signature, by warpath and by wagon. To insist that one particular moment in that sequence constitutes a unique and unforgivable theft is not historical analysis, it is theater. It turns an intricate history of violence, commerce, diplomacy, and adaptation into a morality play in which one side is forever villain, the other forever victim.

This is not only false. It is unjust.

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The Ideological Aim Of Juneteenth Was To Replace The Fourth Of July

Let us begin with a simple proposition: a nation that loses grip on historical truth will soon lose the very liberty it claims to defend. In the case of Juneteenth, the official narrative peddled by government institutions and media organs insists that June 19, 1865, marked the end of slavery in the United States. It did not. The same narrative suggests that slaves in Galveston, Texas, were ignorant of their freedom until Union General Gordon Granger arrived and read General Order No. 3 from a balcony. That too is false.

So, why the deception? Why enshrine a historical inaccuracy into federal law, complete with flags, hashtags, and official observances? The answer lies not in a celebration of liberty, but in its quiet replacement. Juneteenth, far from being a spontaneous commemoration of emancipation, is a politically engineered holiday whose true function is to decenter the Fourth of July, recast the American Founding as a fraud, and promote a new narrative steeped not in liberty, but in grievance. At bottom, Juneteenth is not about celebrating the end of slavery. It is about reinterpreting the American project itself.

To understand why, we must begin by clarifying the two foundational myths upon which Juneteenth rests.

First, it is not true that the enslaved people of Galveston only discovered they were free on June 19, 1865. Historical evidence clearly demonstrates that the Emancipation Proclamation was published widely in Texas newspapers, including the Houston Tri-Weekly Telegraph as early as February 2, 1863. Galveston, a major port city, had direct access to this information. Moreover, slave narratives collected by the Works Progress Administration confirm that news traveled fast among the enslaved. Felix Haywood, a former slave from Texas, remembered vividly, “Oh, we knowed what was goin’ on in it all the time… We had papers in dem days jus’ like now.” Slaves did not live in informational quarantine.

Second, and more damning, is the simple historical fact that slavery did not end on June 19, 1865. That date marks the enforcement of the Emancipation Proclamation in Texas, and only in Texas. Slavery persisted in Union-loyal states such as Delaware and Kentucky for nearly six more months. On June 19, 1865, over 227,000 Americans remained legally enslaved. Not until the ratification of the 13th Amendment on December 6, 1865, were those people truly and legally freed. If one were seeking a holiday to commemorate the end of slavery in America, December 6 would be the logical choice. Yet Juneteenth was chosen. Why?

To answer that question, one must consider the architects of Juneteenth’s national elevation. The push to federalize the holiday accelerated in the wake of the George Floyd riots of 2020, a period marked not by unity but by division, not by historical celebration but by symbolic iconoclasm. Statues of Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln were defaced or toppled. The American flag itself was reimagined by progressive activists as a symbol of systemic oppression. In that context, Juneteenth became useful not as a historical commemoration, but as a cultural replacement, a new moral center.

To be clear, there is nothing inherently wrong with commemorating emancipation. But Juneteenth does not do this honestly. Instead, it inserts a deliberately misleading narrative into the American consciousness, one that suggests slavery ended not through constitutional means, not through war and statesmanship, but through a lone Union general bringing news to an isolated group of ignorant slaves. It recasts emancipation not as the culmination of the American project, but as a necessary correction to its founding. In doing so, it subtly poisons the well of American civic pride.

The mainstream media’s repeated claim that Juneteenth marked the end of slavery in America is not just mistaken, it is irresponsible. Worse, it reveals an underlying ideological motive. If the Fourth of July celebrates the birth of a nation founded on liberty, Juneteenth is fast becoming its foil, a holiday that implies that liberty was a lie, that 1776 was hypocrisy incarnate, and that true justice only arrived by federal bayonet in Galveston. Such framing is not merely revisionist; it is revolutionary.

Cultural Marxism is often derided as a conspiratorial term, but the essence of the critique is straightforward. In place of economic revolution, it promotes cultural revolution: dismantling Western traditions, symbols, and moral narratives to clear the way for a new social order. Juneteenth fits neatly within this paradigm. It is not an apolitical holiday. It is an ideological tool, useful for reframing American identity around victimhood and systemic injustice.

If this seems harsh, consider the coordinated media campaign surrounding Juneteenth. NPR, PBS, and the New York Times have all run pieces uncritically parroting the falsehood that June 19 marked the end of slavery in the US. School curricula increasingly highlight Juneteenth while diminishing Independence Day. Government offices fly the Juneteenth flag, a symbol that didn’t exist two decades ago, with greater enthusiasm than they display the American flag. Even corporations like Amazon and Nike promote Juneteenth with the kind of vigor once reserved for the Fourth of July. None of this is accidental.

The effect, intentional or not, is to suggest that the real America began not in 1776 with the Declaration of Independence, but in 1865, at the end of slavery. This is the same conceptual pivot that underlies the New York Times’ 1619 Project, which argues that America’s true founding began with the arrival of the first slaves, not the drafting of the Constitution. That project, like Juneteenth, seeks to invert the American story: liberty becomes accidental, oppression becomes essential.

There is a revealing story about how Donald Trump first encountered the push for Juneteenth as a national holiday. In 2020, during the planning of a campaign rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, originally scheduled for June 19, Trump was unaware of the date’s political and cultural significance. A Black Secret Service agent informed him of the controversy, explaining the nature of Juneteenth and why activists were pushing its prominence. Trump promptly rescheduled the rally to June 20, citing respect for the holiday. He later quipped that he had made Juneteenth “very famous” by drawing national attention to it. Far from resisting its elevation, Trump was initially unaware of the ideological momentum behind it, which only underscores how rapidly the holiday was weaponized by political elites to rewrite national symbolism. When Juneteenth became a federal holiday in 2021, it was not because the public demanded it, but because the political class saw its utility in reframing the American narrative.

The irony is that the true story of American emancipation is one of triumph: a brutal war fought to extend the promise of the Declaration to all citizens. Lincoln understood this. So did Frederick Douglass. So did the men who fought and died at Gettysburg. That story deserves honor. But Juneteenth does not tell it. Instead, it substitutes a fable: a handful of slaves in a remote part of Texas learning, belatedly and for the first time, that they were free. It’s a compelling story, but it is not history.

A better holiday might be “December Sixth,” marking the actual legal end of slavery. It would anchor emancipation in the text of the Constitution rather than the dramatic flourish of a Union general’s order. But such a holiday would not serve the ideological purpose Juneteenth now fulfills. It would point us back to the genius of the Founding and the fulfillment of its promises, not away from it.

Juneteenth, as currently framed, is a myth masquerading as a milestone. It deserves scrutiny, not sanctification. For history’s sake, and liberty’s, we must insist on truth.

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What Bluesky Reveals About Progressive Intolerance

The collapse of viewpoint diversity on Bluesky is neither a fluke nor a recent regression. It is, rather, the predictable consequence of importing the cultural logic of elite academia, progressive journalism, and activist politics into a digital commons. What has emerged is not a neutral platform but a curated ideological enclave, a gated garden of enforced agreement. Far from modeling a healthy democratic discourse, Bluesky illustrates what happens when the infrastructure of debate is subordinated to the politics of purity.

Consider the origin story. Bluesky launched as a decentralization project initiated under Jack Dorsey, its purpose ostensibly noble: to build a more open, federated alternative to Twitter. But the timing of its mass adoption tells the real story. Following Elon Musk‘s acquisition of Twitter in late 2022, and the subsequent rollback of opaque censorship mechanisms that had disproportionately silenced conservatives, there was a liberal exodus. The appeal of Bluesky was never just technical. It was ideological. It became the place to be not because it offered better features or user interface, but because it offered a perceived reprieve from heterodoxy.

The stampede began in earnest after Trump’s reelection in November 2024. For many progressives, his return to power signaled not merely a political loss, but an existential crisis. Twitter, now X, had ceased to be the enforcement arm of consensus. What followed was a migration from a newly pluralistic platform to one where progressive assumptions remained unchallenged. Bluesky’s user base exploded from around 10 million in fall 2024 to over 35 million by spring 2025, most of whom, according to Pew and Business Insider, self-identified as left-of-center.

This demographic uniformity seeded the platform’s rapid ideological calcification. The environment quickly began to mimic the echo chambers of elite universities and major newsrooms. These institutions, as numerous studies show, already suffer from significant ideological skew. For instance, a 2023 Harvard survey found that more than 77 percent of its faculty identified as liberal, with just 2 percent identifying as conservative. FIRE’s 2024 national faculty survey revealed that 71 percent of professors believed a liberal colleague would “fit in” well in their department, while only 20 percent thought the same of a conservative one. Within such ecosystems, dissent becomes not only discouraged but pathologized.

Bluesky followed this trajectory with unsettling speed. Moderation policies and cultural norms effectively deputized users to enforce orthodoxy. Moderates were hounded, centrists were ignored, conservatives were banned. According to Newsweek and Politico, even users who aligned with 90 percent of the prevailing progressive views found themselves castigated for voicing a solitary note of dissent. What ensued was not dialogue but ideological inquisition.

Mark Cuban‘s disillusionment captures the dynamic in miniature. The billionaire investor joined Bluesky in November 2024 with the hopeful salutation, “Hello Less Hateful World.” By June 2025, he had reversed course. In a series of withering posts, Cuban described the atmosphere as toxic, dominated by users who weaponized moral language to silence disagreement. “Even if you agree with 95%,” he lamented, “if there is one point you question, they will call you a fascist.”

His criticism was not mere anecdote. It echoed a growing body of observations suggesting that Bluesky had become a “progressive bubble,” as the Washington Post phrased it, in which dissent invited mobbing and orthodoxy earned applause. That Cuban had financially backed a Bluesky-related application made his reversal all the more telling. Investment did not buy insulation from the inquisition.

Even on apolitical fronts, the consequences of this atmosphere were stifling. A Wharton professor researching artificial intelligence publicly announced his retreat from the platform after finding that any deviation from prevailing opinion, even on purely technical issues, elicited disproportionate backlash. The logic of purity had metastasized beyond politics, suffocating any form of nuanced discourse.

The irony is that while Bluesky was degenerating into a speech cartel, X was recovering. Despite breathless predictions of collapse, Elon Musk’s platform saw both advertiser return and user stability. As of early 2025, X boasted roughly 600 million monthly active users, with around 250 million logging in daily. According to Reuters and Finance Yahoo, ad revenue was projected to grow 17.5 percent in the US and 16.5 percent globally this year, reversing the post-boycott slump. The platform, now dominated by a rough parity of liberals and conservatives, had not devolved into chaos. It had become messy, yes, but it was free. And freedom, though often cacophonous, is what sustains democratic legitimacy.

Bluesky is what happens when speech is subordinated to civility. Or rather, when civility is used as a cudgel to enforce ideological conformity. The results mirror what we’ve seen in other progressive-dominated institutions. At The New York Times, dissenting editors like Bari Weiss resigned under pressure from internal cliques that policed language and punished transgression. At MSNBC, overt progressive bias has long eclipsed any pretense of ideological balance. Bluesky, built from the same cultural DNA, could not escape the same fate.

In fact, it amplifies it. For while a university campus is limited by geography and accreditation, and a media outlet by reputation and ratings, a social network like Bluesky can evolve into a micro-totalitarian regime in real time. There are no checks, no institutional constraints, no internal ombudsman. The result is the swift descent into purity spirals. Each user competes to be more righteous than the last. Each deviation, no matter how slight, is met with exaggerated condemnation.

To be clear, the problem is not that Bluesky is full of liberals. The problem is that it institutionalizes liberalism as an orthodoxy and punishes deviation, particularly deviation from within its own ranks. The right is not merely excluded, it is dehumanized, rendered so beyond the pale that any conservative presence is swiftly purged without ceremony. Yet the irony is that the most brutal penalties are reserved not for the outsider, but for the insufficiently orthodox insider. This is the slippery slope of ideological purity: disagreement from the right is unthinkable, while dissent from the left is treated as betrayal. In a healthy liberal democracy, disagreement is a feature, not a flaw. But Bluesky’s culture treats disagreement, even among liberals themselves, as an existential threat. That is the mark not of an open society but of an ideological sect.

One might argue that users self-select into platforms and that like-minded communities are inevitable. But this misses the deeper point. What Bluesky reveals is not merely digital tribalism, but a creeping authoritarianism within the cultural left. When faced with pluralism, this faction prefers segregation. When exposed to disagreement, it demands removal. This same instinct has crept into institutional politics, where Democrats have increasingly abandoned democratic norms in the name of saving democracy itself. They changed party rules to retroactively invalidate David Hogg’s election as Vice Chair of the DNC after realizing he might challenge the status quo. They denied Democratic delegates any choice by mandating a vote for Kamala Harris alone, with no write-ins or alternatives permitted. And they cheered on state-level efforts to keep Donald Trump off the ballot entirely, not through electoral means but by weaponizing bureaucratic technicalities. Bluesky, in this light, is not an outlier but a symptom. It does not want to compete in the marketplace of ideas; it wants to monopolize it.

This explains why, paradoxically, Bluesky’s rapid growth has not translated into cultural relevance. Despite an initial ballooning user base, its influence wanes because its ecosystem is self-limiting. The platform has begun shedding active users, and those who remain are posting with diminishing frequency. What is there left to talk about? You either agree or you are kicked out. There is no room for disagreement, so there is no reason for discussion. Echo chambers do not produce innovation. They produce repetition. And repetition, even when loud, cannot compete with the chaotic energy of a truly open forum.

Bluesky is the canary in the coal mine, signaling what digital speech looks like under progressive orthodoxy: aesthetically sleek, rhetorically inclusive, and intellectually inert. It functions not as a public square, but as a chapel of ideological conformity, complete with rituals of cancellation and catechisms of belief. Its growth is not a testament to its health, but to the deep yearning among many on the left to avoid disagreement at any cost.

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Free Speech On Trial: X Corp. Vs. Letitia James

The recent lawsuit filed by X Corp against New York‘s Stop Hiding Hate Act is not merely a corporate tantrum over regulatory friction. It is, rather, a constitutional litmus test: Can the state compel a private media platform to speak? And more precisely, can it compel that speech in a format and on topics it deems urgent, namely, hate speech, misinformation, extremism, and other politically volatile categories, without violating the First Amendment?

The answer, both doctrinally and philosophically, is no. Not if we take our constitutional commitments seriously. Not if we believe in a press that is free not merely to report, but to decline to report. Not if we recall that a regime which mandates orthodoxy is functionally indistinguishable from one that punishes dissent. To compel speech is to conscript conscience, and in the digital agora of social media, the stakes for freedom of editorial judgment could hardly be higher.

The First Amendment, robustly construed, protects not only the right to speak, but the right not to speak. That protection is no less vital for corporate speakers than for individuals. In West Virginia v. Barnette, the Court affirmed this principle unambiguously: The state cannot compel an individual to salute the flag or recite its creed. Why? Because the very act of compulsion transforms opinion into obedience, conscience into compliance. What applies to schoolchildren surely applies to modern publishers.

New York’s Stop Hiding Hate Act runs afoul of this principle by requiring large social media platforms to disclose their content moderation policies and practices, specifically regarding “hate speech,” “misinformation,” and similar categories. The state’s rationale is couched in noble rhetoric: transparency, accountability, democracy. But the effect, and indeed the intent, is to conscript editorial judgment. It commands platforms to articulate their policies in state-approved terms, to issue periodic reports on state-specified topics, and to do so under the threat of $15,000-per-day penalties.

That is compelled speech, and compelled speech on matters of contested opinion. What counts as “misinformation” today may be conventional wisdom tomorrow. What is labeled “hate speech” often reflects the moral intuitions of cultural elites rather than objective legal categories. To force a platform like X to define, report on, and implicitly denounce such categories is to force a particular viewpoint, to transform a speaker into a conduit for the state’s ideological agenda.

The Supreme Court has been consistently wary of such state overreach. In Miami Herald v. Tornillo, the Court struck down a Florida law requiring newspapers to give equal space to political candidates they criticized. Even though the law aimed at fairness, the Court recognized it for what it was: a form of compelled speech that intruded on editorial discretion. The choice of what to publish, and what to withhold, is part of what makes a speaker free.

The same logic animates more recent decisions. In National Institute of Family & Life Advocates v. Becerra, the Court invalidated California’s attempt to force pro-life pregnancy centers to advertise abortion services. The law was struck down not because the information was false, but because it compelled speakers to convey messages they found objectionable.

New York’s law suffers from the same defect. It does not merely ask platforms to be clear about their terms of service. It demands that they speak in a particular voice, about particular topics, in a state-sanctioned format. That is not regulation of conduct; it is regulation of speech. And it is presumptively unconstitutional.

The Ninth Circuit reached precisely this conclusion in X Corp v. Bonta, a case challenging California’s nearly identical transparency law, AB 587. That court found the law unconstitutional on its face, noting that the compelled disclosures were non-commercial speech on deeply controversial topics, triggering strict scrutiny. The state failed that scrutiny because there were less intrusive means to achieve its goals, and because the law’s real aim appeared to be ideological enforcement, not mere transparency.

The Stop Hiding Hate Act is, if anything, worse. Where California’s law was relatively restrained, New York’s law comes armed with sharper teeth: higher penalties, broader categories, and a clear animus against X Corp’s editorial philosophy. Governor Kathy Hochul and Attorney General Letitia James have publicly criticized Elon Musk‘s management of X, decrying what they see as an irresponsible tolerance for hate and extremism. But if that is the state’s concern, its remedy must be speech of its own, not coercion of others.

Viewpoint neutrality is a bedrock requirement of any law that touches expression. In R.A.V. v. City of St. Paul, the Court struck down a hate speech ordinance because it punished speech based on viewpoint. The government may not pick sides in the marketplace of ideas, nor may it burden one side of a debate because it finds its views distasteful. Yet that is precisely what the Stop Hiding Hate Act does. By mandating reporting only on negative categories of speech, hate, extremism, misinformation, it sends a clear message: Platforms must account for their failure to suppress ideas the state disfavors.

This is not a hypothetical concern. Judicial analysis of New York’s earlier Hateful Conduct Law found the same flaw. In Volokh v. James, Judge Andrew Carter enjoined enforcement of that law, finding that it compelled speech and chilled protected expression. The parallels to the current statute are striking, and the constitutional defects just as fatal.

Defenders of the law argue that social media companies are different. They are not publishers, they say, but infrastructure. Carriers. Utilities. That argument fails both as a matter of law and logic. The Supreme Court has repeatedly held that platforms exercise editorial discretion, and are thus speakers. In Reno v. ACLU, the Court treated the internet as a medium deserving of full First Amendment protection. And in NetChoice v. Moody, the Eleventh Circuit recognized that content moderation decisions are expressive acts, entitled to constitutional safeguards.

Moreover, the compelled disclosures in question are not neutral. They do not merely report numerical data or objective facts. They require platforms to explain how they define “hate,” how they identify “misinformation,” and what policies they have to remove or mitigate such content. These are ideological questions, not technical ones. To answer them is to express a worldview.

The editorial freedom of platforms is also essential to the integrity of the digital public square. Just as newspapers decide which op-eds to publish and which letters to discard, platforms decide which voices to elevate and which to suppress. Their choices shape public discourse, for better or worse. But those choices must remain theirs. If the government can dictate how they define controversial categories of speech, it can eventually dictate whom they must ban, what they must delete, and what they must feature.

And what of Section 230? Though not directly at issue in this case, the spirit of that provision underscores a broader point: Congress has long understood that platforms need leeway to moderate content without fear of liability. New York’s law, while framed as a disclosure regime, indirectly penalizes moderation choices by turning them into targets for state scrutiny. That functionally contradicts the federal policy of encouraging free and diverse platforms.

This is not to say that platforms bear no responsibility. X Corp, like any publisher, is accountable to its users, its advertisers, and the public. But that accountability must be exercised through the voluntary mechanisms of the market, not the coercive arm of the state. The state can speak, advocate, and condemn. It can encourage platforms to do better. But it cannot force them to explain their decisions in its own preferred terms.

We must also attend to the dangers of precedent. Today, New York compels speech about hate and disinformation. Tomorrow, a different state may compel speech about patriotism, election integrity, or gender ideology. Once we allow government to mandate ideological reporting, the slope becomes not only slippery but unavoidable. The protection of editorial discretion, even for unpopular or eccentric platforms, is the bulwark against state orthodoxy.

In sum, the Stop Hiding Hate Act violates the First Amendment by compelling speech, intruding on editorial discretion, and discriminating based on viewpoint. It is neither narrowly tailored nor supported by a compelling interest that cannot be pursued through less invasive means. The law’s defects are legal, philosophical, and practical.

X Corp’s challenge to the Act, then, is not merely defensible, it is necessary. If we value the principle that the government cannot dictate what private speakers say, or how they say it, we must defend it when it is tested. That principle, like speech itself, must be protected not only in easy cases, but especially in hard ones.

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The National Injunction Crisis Is Threatening Global Stability

Washington did not freeze at Valley Forge, nor did Lincoln bleed the Union at Gettysburg, so that two and a half centuries later, federal judges could rewrite American foreign policy from a bench in Boston. Yet here we are: unelected district court judges issuing orders with global repercussions, shackling the executive branch, endangering diplomacy, and destabilizing entire regions.

The case of D.V.D. v. DHS, now immortalized in Secretary of State Marco Rubio‘s sworn declaration, is the most vivid and alarming example yet. A single judge, Brian E. Murphy, appointed by President Joe Biden, has upended delicate international arrangements, disrupted military coordination in a counter-terrorism hotspot, and jeopardized humanitarian efforts across the Horn of Africa, all with a flourish of his gavel.

This is not justice, it is judicial imperialism. And if it is not stopped, it will unravel the fabric of constitutional government.

Let us begin with the basics. The Constitution vests foreign policy authority in the executive branch. Article II is unambiguous. The President “shall receive Ambassadors and other public Ministers,” and, with the advice and consent of the Senate, “make Treaties.” In practice, the president, through the Secretary of State, negotiates with foreign powers, calibrates the tone and tenor of our international presence, and oversees the strategic deployment of both soft power and military muscle.

The judiciary, by contrast, was never intended to function as a foreign policy apparatus. The Federalist Papers make this clear. As Alexander Hamilton wrote in Federalist No. 78, the judiciary “has no influence over either the sword or the purse.” Its power “may truly be said to have neither FORCE nor WILL, but merely judgment.” Yet what we see today is the inverse: a judiciary with the will of a legislature and the force of an executive.

Consider the chaos Judge Murphy has sown. Secretary Rubio’s declaration outlines how the judge’s May 20 injunction halted the removal of eight foreign nationals, including convicted felons, who were en route to South Sudan, rerouting them into Djibouti instead. This was not a harmless detour. It required US diplomats to scramble and re-explain our shifting commitments to a key regional partner. It delayed counter-terrorism operations headquartered at the Combined Joint Task Force–Horn of Africa. It chilled humanitarian coordination efforts in famine-stricken zones. It even postponed a major energy deal in Libya, costing American enterprise and reducing our leverage in a country already teetering on civil war.

What gives one man sitting in a courthouse on the East Coast the authority to rewrite US policy in Tripoli, Juba, and Djibouti? What constitutional principle justifies such reach?

None. But the vehicle of this judicial arrogance is the nationwide injunction, a tool so radical, so constitutionally suspect, and so corrosive to governance that even liberal legal scholars have begun to question its proliferation. Justice Clarence Thomas, prescient as ever, warned in Trump v. Hawaii (2018) that nationwide injunctions “have a tendency to encourage forum shopping, politicize the judiciary, and deprive other courts of the ability to weigh in on legal questions.”

Indeed, if one sympathetic judge can block an executive action across all 50 states, then the presidency is no longer unitary, it is hostage. Foreign leaders are not engaging with the United States government, but with whichever district judge last issued a ruling. Our diplomacy becomes erratic, our word less reliable, our authority diluted.

This distortion of power is not theoretical. It is real, and it is recurring. Remember when a district court blocked President Trump’s ban on travel from terrorism-prone countries in 2017? That nationwide injunction, issued by Judge James Robart in Washington, not only overruled the president’s national security judgment but also forced foreign governments to reevaluate their cooperation with US intelligence, uncertain if the courts or the White House were truly in charge.

The incentive structure is equally perverse. Activist groups now scour the country for friendly judges, ideological allies with a record of lawfare activism, then file lawsuits not to win narrow relief for plaintiffs, but to engineer sweeping political victories that Congress never authorized and voters never endorsed. These are not lawsuits, they are stealth coups.

One need not be a strict textualist to grasp the danger here. Imagine if a single judge could halt a military deployment, override a treaty, or block a Secretary of State from evacuating embassy personnel. We are sliding into precisely that paradigm. The judiciary, far from checking the executive, is usurping its powers outright. The result is paralysis, confusion, and an erosion of the separation of powers upon which our constitutional order depends.

The problem is compounded when the judiciary aligns itself with globalist NGOs and open-borders ideologues. In D.V.D., the class members whose deportations were halted include not just migrants with questionable asylum claims but convicted criminals. By granting them judicial sanctuary, the court effectively overrides the State Department’s security assessments, replacing sovereign discretion with ideological dogma. Is the court prepared to vet these individuals itself? Is Judge Murphy better informed on regional conflicts in the Horn of Africa than the National Security Council? Or is this just another example of a liberal judge indulging his priors at the expense of the republic?

The stakes are high. With the return of President Trump to office and the reshaping of America’s global posture, the courts must not become a backdoor veto. We are witnessing a transition away from the apologetic diplomacy of the Obama-Biden years toward a policy of strength, reciprocity, and unapologetic national interest. That pivot cannot be sabotaged by judges still committed to the prior regime.

What is to be done? First, the Supreme Court must act on the opportunity already before it. The Court has heard oral arguments in a pending case involving birthright citizenship that includes critical questions about the legitimacy and scope of nationwide injunctions. All that remains is a decision. The Court should use this case to strike down the practice as inconsistent with Article III limitations on judicial power. Such rulings should be confined to the parties before the court, not the entire country. Injunctions should bind defendants only to the extent necessary to provide relief to plaintiffs, not to reshape executive policy for 330 million Americans.

Second, Congress should act. A statute should clarify that nationwide injunctions exceed the judicial power under the Constitution. This would restore balance, eliminate forum shopping, and return the courts to their proper role: arbiters of disputes, not architects of foreign policy.

Finally, the executive must resist. The State Department and DHS should not preemptively concede to every nationwide injunction as a fait accompli. Where there is ambiguity or statutory discretion, the administration should assert its prerogatives. The president is elected. The judge is not. Accountability matters.

History offers little comfort to those who allow unelected tribunals to dictate the terms of sovereignty. Empires have collapsed under the weight of judicial excess. Rome, after all, did not fall to barbarians alone, but to internal legal sclerosis and a metastasized bureaucracy. If we do not rein in our courts, we will cede our republic to the whims of the courts and socialist courts at that.

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SFFAS 56: The Secret Loophole Hiding Billions In Fraud, Waste & Abuse Discovered By DOGE

Imagine a vast ledger, chronicling the transactions of a mighty republic, now riddled with deliberate gaps and omissions, gaps no auditor may probe, no citizen may question. This is no fanciful dystopia, but the present reality, quietly authorized by what is known as Statement of Federal Financial Accounting Standards 56 (SFFAS 56). While initially crafted, perhaps, with honorable intentions to shield ‘classified’ operations from hostile eyes, SFFAS 56 now threatens the very transparency and public accountability that sustain a free government. Federal agencies are allowed to use SFFAS 56 to hide spending they desire to be ‘classified’ from the American people, Congress, and even the President of the United States.

What is SFFAS 56? At its core, it is an administrative rule issued by the Federal Accounting Standards Advisory Board (FASAB) in 2018, not a statute passed by Congress. It allows any federal agency to modify its financial statements in order to obscure sensitive national security information. This authority extends beyond the obvious domains of intelligence or defense, touching every department that produces General Purpose Federal Financial Reports, from USAID to the Department of Energy. In theory, this safeguard exists to prevent enemies from exploiting financial disclosures to learn state secrets. In practice, it creates a black hole into which billions of taxpayer dollars vanish without a trace.

To understand the peril, one must first grasp the astonishing breadth of the rule. Under SFFAS 56, agencies may alter financial reports by removing, aggregating or fabricating information, provided these adjustments do not “materially” affect the reported net results. Further, agencies can exclude entire sub-entities from reports or consolidate them elsewhere, masking not merely amounts but organizational structures themselves. Crucially, neither the public nor Congress is afforded any right to know when these modifications occur, how often they happen or the underlying reasons. A general, but nonspecific, disclaimer suffices, buried in the back pages of thick agency reports: “Accounting standards allow certain presentations and disclosures to be modified to prevent the disclosure of classified information.”

Even Congress itself can be kept in the dark unless an agency, by its own volition, deigns to disclose the concealment. Thus, SFFAS 56 effectively removes the legislature’s constitutional power of the purse from critical oversight. It conjures a legal purgatory where funds can be appropriated for one purpose, redirected for another and hidden altogether from elected representatives. The theoretical protections against abuse, internal controls, audits, classified oversight, are weak reeds indeed when the very financial data needed to detect mischief has been sanitized.

Proponents of SFFAS 56 argue that, without such protections, enemies could piece together vital intelligence from innocent-looking financial entries. Yet the ingenuity of our foes cannot justify the abandonment of self-government. If secrecy is to be justified, it must be rare, tightly controlled and explicitly authorized by the people’s elected representatives. Instead, SFFAS 56 inverts the burden: concealment becomes the default, accountability the exception. One might as well argue that because a handful of bank robbers lurk at large, all citizens must henceforth veil their account balances from scrutiny.

History offers sobering lessons when governments assume powers of secret spending. The clandestine financing of “black ops” during the Cold War, sometimes used for noble ends, sometimes for ignoble, occurred under conditions of limited and direct congressional oversight. Even then, abuses proliferated. The Iran-Contra affair revealed how easily noble motives could give way to clandestine mischief when oversight was thwarted. Now, SFFAS 56 institutionalizes a structure far broader and more opaque than anything Colonel Oliver North could have dreamed.

Under SFFAS 56, the Department of Defense could award lucrative contracts to politically connected firms and conceal both the recipient and the amount from public view. USAID could fund controversial NGOs both here and abroad without alerting Congress or the public. Worse still, agencies could funnel money to the family members of political figures or even, under a perverse interpretation, fund hostile entities abroad, all behind the iron curtain of “classified activities.”

Consider a hypothetical yet disturbingly plausible example. Suppose USAID wished to grant a billion dollars to the Clinton Foundation or the Open Society Foundation, ostensibly to support development projects in unstable regions. Concerned that public knowledge of such a grant might spark political controversy and, by some stretch, be construed as harmful to national security, the head of USAID could invoke SFFAS 56 to hide the transaction. No notification to the president would be required. Congress would remain unaware. The public, journalists and watchdog groups would find themselves stonewalled. Even if the agency head believed sincerely that the money would be wisely spent for a legitimate purpose, no one outside his immediate circle could help him ensure that actually happened. Oversight by the press, vigilant members of Congress or curious citizens would be thoroughly stymied.

Some may protest that the President retains control of the executive branch, and thus can police such abuses internally. But the president’s power is not omniscient. Unless agency heads choose to disclose their use of SFFAS 56, even the president may remain unaware of the specific expenditures being hidden. In effect, FASAB, a mere advisory board, has created a tool so potent that it outstrips the constitutional balance of powers itself.

The irony is sharp. Conservatives, rightly skeptical of administrative overreach, have long warned against the quiet accretion of unaccountable power by regulatory boards. Yet here lies one of the gravest examples: a board that issues “standards” more consequential than many laws, without democratic debate or meaningful constraint.

President Trump must act decisively. First, he should formally direct every agency head to audit the use of SFFAS 56 within their departments since 2018. For every instance, they must privately report to the president the recipient, the amount, the date and the justification for concealment. Such a review need not, and should not, compromise national security, but the chief executive must know whether public funds have been lawfully spent.

Second, the President should demand that the leaders of FASAB, particularly the current chair, George B. Scott, and Executive Director Monica R. Valentine, rescind or at least reform SFFAS 56. If they refuse, legislation must follow. Congress, spurred by the White House, must reassert its constitutional authority and mandate that no funds shall be expended without public disclosure unless specifically authorized by statute and subjected to classified presidential and congressional oversight.

It strains credulity that an executive board not directly answerable to voters or even the president should wield the power to dissolve financial transparency across the entire federal government. Even among classified programs, there are means of maintaining oversight without sacrificing security. Classified briefings, secure audits, special oversight committees, all these mechanisms exist and function in sensitive areas of defense and intelligence. What SFFAS 56 does is more radical: it banishes oversight by design.

In Federalist 51, Madison observed that “if men were angels, no government would be necessary.” A corollary is clear: if governments were composed entirely of angels, perhaps SFFAS 56 would pose no danger. But human beings, tempted by self-interest, ambition and error, cannot be trusted with unchecked authority. Transparency and oversight are the sinews of a free republic. Without them, the Constitution is a parchment barrier.

Critics may claim that rolling back SFFAS 56 will impair national security. This is a false dilemma. It is possible to protect legitimate secrets while maintaining financial accountability. It is not necessary, indeed, it is dangerous, to dismantle the public’s right to know how its money is spent in the name of security.

SFFAS 56, well-intentioned or not, is an invitation to abuse. It is a standing temptation to the unscrupulous. It is a blindfold upon the eyes of the republic. It must be reformed, and if reform proves impossible, it must be repealed.

The ledger of a free people must be open and not riddled with secret ink. President Trump must insist that the light of public scrutiny shines once more upon the accounts of the United States. The integrity of the American experiment depends on it.

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FBI Reports: Teen Killed Parents as Part of Satanic Plot to Assassinate President Trump. Absolutely Frigging Chilling!

FBI Reports: Teen Killed Parents as Part of Satanic Plot to Assassinate President Trump

There’s a growing unease spreading across the heartland, a sense that the values holding our nation together are fraying at the edges. You’ve felt it too, right? That quiet disturbance beneath the surface of daily life, suggesting the foundations we once took for granted might be cracking. It whispers of challenges not just from distant shores, but from within our own communities, festering quietly.

This isn’t mere political disagreement; it feels deeper, more fundamental. It’s that unsettling feeling that bedrock principles – faith, family, respect for authority, the very fabric of Western civilization – are being steadily chipped away by forces that seem to prefer darkness to light, chaos to order. Makes you wonder where this is all headed, doesn’t it? What happens when the guardrails ensuring basic decency start to buckle under the strain?

We see the symptoms pop up, often dismissed by the mainstream as just isolated incidents, nothing to worry about. But thoughtful conservatives understand that sometimes these acts of depravity signal a more profound cultural sickness, a rot spreading unseen until it breaks through in the most shocking ways imaginable. Are we really paying attention or just hoping it goes away?

And then, bam, you get news like this out of Waukesha, Wisconsin, confirming those very fears. In a crime that chills the soul, investigators allege that a 17-year-old high school student, Nikita Casap, brutally murdered his own parents, Tatiana Casap and Donald Mayer, in their home back in February. The details paint a picture of calculated violence against the very people who gave him life and raised him. Just when you think the depths have been plumbed…

But the horror didn’t stop there. Indeed, it intensified dramatically when the FBI revealed the why behind the parricide. Court documents indicate this wasn’t just some tragic, albeit horrific, domestic dispute. Nope. Investigators state the teen killed his parents to gain the “financial means and autonomy” necessary for a far more sinister plot: the assassination of President Donald Trump.

Yes, you read that correctly.

Unmasking the Hate

So, what kind of poison could drive a kid to this? According to the FBI, the teenager was swimming in a venomous cocktail of extremist ideologies. He was allegedly part of a “satanic cult” harboring “strong anti-Judaism anti-Christian and anti-western ideologies.” Further investigation has uncovered links to a neo-Nazi group called the Order of Nine Angles, praise for Adolf Hitler, and deeply antisemitic writings. Get this: Satanists and Nazis, apparently now swapping notes? You couldn’t script this stuff up, but it seems they found common ground in hating everything foundational and good to America and Judeo-Christian values.

The teen’s own manifesto, found by investigators, laid bare the chillingly blunt objective. It wasn’t just about some personal vendetta against President Trump; it was about deliberately destabilizing the nation itself. The goal was explicit: pure anarchy. His own words tell the chilling, if predictable, story:

“As to why, specifically Trump, most believe it’s pretty obvious. By getting rid of the president and perhaps the vice president, that would have guaranteed bringing in chaos.”

Supposedly points for honesty it would appear.

A Deeper Conspiracy?

Now, was this twisted plot conceived entirely in a teenager’s head? The court documents allege Casap aimed not just to kill the President but ultimately sought to overthrow the U.S. government. And naturally, there are whispers of outside contact. Investigators found evidence suggesting he was communicating with individuals in Russia about his plans and even plotting an escape to Ukraine. It certainly raises disturbing questions about who else might be involved, pulling strings or fanning flames.

Make no mistake, this wasn’t just some basement fantasy. Authorities stated the teen had purchased a drone and explosives for a potential attack – taking concrete steps. Casap’s later arrest in Kansas while driving his murdered stepfather’s car containing a handgun, stolen valuables, a pried-open safe, and $14,000 in cash, practically screaming premeditation and flight. He now faces a raft of felony counts, including first-degree intentional homicide, and potential federal charges for the assassination plot. Casap is being held on a $1 million bond. It should be no bond.

This entire horrifying episode serves as a brutal, flashing red light. It’s a reminder of the serious internal threats we face. The ideologies fueling such hatred – whether they call themselves Satanists, Nazis, or wave some other anti-American banner – feast on cultural decay and the rejection of traditional morality. They target not just individuals like President Trump, but the very stability, fabric and soul of our nation.

The fight against this darkness requires more than just hoping law enforcement catches them all. This isn’t just some news story; it demands a reaffirmation from us of the values that actually built this country: faith, strong families, respect for life, and unwavering patriotism. Are we just going to shrug this off or will we remain vigilant, recognize the signs of this rot, and stand firm in defending the principles that stand in stark opposition to the chaos these extremists crave?

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Lawmakers: CCPs influence on American investment must be stopped

As the U.S. and China escalate their tariff rates in an all-out trade war, two congressional committees held a joint hearing Wednesday on the problem of the Chinese Communist Party’s influence on American investment and possible solutions.

The Chinese Communist Party is embedded in Chinese business to the extent that the assets of any American who has tried to do business in China, invests in the stock market, international index funds or mutual funds, or who has a 401K or pension invested in international index funds is at risk, according to TV personality and businessman Kevin O’Leary. O’Leary was called as an expert witness at the hearing.

The hearing was hosted by a House select committee that focuses on “strategic competition” between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party and the Senate Special Committee on Aging, as the party’s involvement in the Chinese economy and financial scams stands to disproportionately impact older Americans, according to committee members.

“The [Chinese] government has chosen to be America’s enemy. Unfortunately, that’s not a problem that only our military intelligence community has to worry about,” said Sen. Rick Scott, R-FL, chairman of the aging committee. “ If you have your retirement invested in anything that is controlled by or under the jurisdiction of the Chinese Communist Party, you are at risk of losing every dollar, and this could happen overnight.”

The senator went on to say that “there is no real private industry in China,” a point that was emphasized multiple times throughout the hearing by both committee members and the called witnesses.

O’Leary, an investor on the business reality TV show Shark Tank and the U.K.’s Dragon’s Den, said that China allows something called a “golden share,” which essentially de-privatizes private businesses. Any entity that purchases a golden share in a Chinese business – a small share, typically 1% – acquires disproportionate control of that company. A golden share can secure its owner a position on the company’s board or a certain level of authority over company decisions. The Chinese government buys these shares in companies it wants to influence, so that the Chinese Communist Party is deeply involved in companies that may appear private “on paper,” according to O’Leary.

In addition, the Chinese government doesn’t “play by the rules” of the World Trade Organization, even though it has been a member since 2001, according to O’Leary. This poses a real risk to Americans’ savings, according to Rep. John Moolenaar, R-MI.

“The CCP’s opaque regulatory regime, its disregard for the rule of law and its willingness to use financial tools for political gain present ongoing and significant dangers to American savings,” Moolenaar said.

O’Leary said that the Chinese Communist Party implements policies that disadvantage other countries in the Chinese economy but uses other countries’ legal systems against them to gain the upper hand in economic competition.

The party has passed “various laws in the realm of cyber security, espionage, intelligence and beyond and other mechanisms to control its corporations, industries and business partnerships, all to the detriment of U.S. investors,” O’Leary said.

The Chinese government doesn’t allow other countries to own shares of Chinese companies, for instance, while the U.S. “has given China preferential treatment for over a decade through its own special memorandum of understanding that governs accounting standards and oversight,” according to O’Leary.

“If we can’t own stocks in their country, they should not be allowed to own stocks in the U.S. Unless businesses can operate in China with the same freedoms that Chinese businesses have here, we should not let their businesses operate in the U.S.,” O’Leary said.

“Make no mistake, I want to do business in China, as do millions of other investors and companies, but we want a reciprocal ecosystem in place that is transparent,” he continued, saying the U.S. should leave China’s marketplace until its government implements significant reforms.

President and CEO of the American Securities Association Chris Iacovella said that even though China seemingly transitioned from a state-run to a free market economy decades ago, that’s not really what happened. Instead, China has “penetrated [American] capital markets” to build wealth and power. As a partial remedy, Iacovella said Congress should enact a ban against Chinese companies that engage in unlawful behavior from American markets.

“We have companies on the commerce list, on the DOD list, on the human rights list. These companies should not have access to our capital markets. They should not have access to anybody to be able to do business in this country,” Iacovella said.

A third expert witness called by the committee members was Brady Finta, founder of the National Elder Fraud Justice Coordination Center.

“I believe the scale of fraud against America’s elders has grown to epidemic proportions, and it’s time that we as a country treat it as such,” Finta told the committee members.

Finta worked to combat elder fraud in a previous position with the FBI but said the scale of the problem was so great, he and his team were able to address less than 1% of scams reported to them, even though only a fraction of people report the crimes committed against them.

Some committee members believed the CCP was either directly involved with international crime rings that perpetuate such scams, or at minimum, doesn’t actively deter them.

Finta suggested now is the time for a “whole of society response.” Separately, neither local, state nor federal law enforcement has the bandwidth to sustain a response that matches the magnitude of the problem. But if they joined together in elder justice task forces across the country and even partnered with the private sector, which has access to much of the data that is exploited, they could wage a much stronger fight, according to Finta.

“[Where] local and state resources can be used to support larger federal and international investigations, the effect of that is much greater than the individual investigations by local law enforcement,” Finta said.

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Restoration of Second Amendment Rights After They Are Lost

There has long been a provision of federal law that allows Americans to petition the U.S. attorney general (AG) for relief from firearm disabilities on a case-by-case basis, a little-known piece of information due to the function lying dormant since 1991. You see, it’s easier to lose the right to purchase or possess firearms than one might think, and many of the offenses and the conditions surrounding them point to the fact that the prohibited individual does not pose any enhanced risk of physical harm to themselves or the public. So why, then, and how have Americans lost this fundamental access to the restoration of a constitutionally enumerated liberty?

It began in 1991 when a Bolshevik anti-Second Amendment group, the Violence Policy Center, released a report that claimed occasions upon which some citizens who were granted relief would later go on to re-offend. It is important to note that although the AG oversees the provision, the administration process for the petitions had been handed down to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF). Politicians, in their ever-knee-jerking zeal to strip Americans of their right to bear arms, responded to the report in Congress by passing language in ATF funding bills that prohibited the use of any funds for this purpose.

Now, if you’re thinking that Congress is passing bills contradictory to the law and circumventing both the rights of Americans and the authority of the AG, then you are right on track, but this is nothing new. Look at all the existing gun control laws, both on the federal and state side, that already circumvent Constitutional law and the politicians and activist judges that have ushered them into existence and protected them from legal challenges. It is easy, then, to determine that all branches of the government have long since been in cahoots to some extent and that the tyrannical ship sailed on the American people years ago.

Last week, The Washington Post published an editorial in its opinion section by two law professors who argued that the government should resume funding the rights restoration provision on the grounds that categories of prohibited individuals include people who would not be demonstrably dangerous and whose Second Amendment prohibitions would likely not survive U.S. Supreme Court caselaw scrutiny. The professors also stipulate that the ability to seek relief itself may shield the overly broad categories of prohibition from further Constitutional challenges, which could perhaps lead to the Supreme Court striking down possession prohibitions entirely, two issues that I do not find mutually exclusive. However, I am not sure the High Court, even in its current perceived configuration, is capable of such Constitutional reverence.

The issue of rights restoration recently reemerged as the Department of Justice (DOJ) under President Trump has started reviewing petitions through the Office of the Pardon Attorney, a very clever workaround to the illegal ATF funding rider issued by the Politburo, AKA Congress, which deprives Americans of not only their Second Amendment liberty but also their right to due process. Legal precedent requires the government to carry the burden of proof that an individual poses an enhanced risk of harm to self or others before prohibiting them from purchasing or possessing firearms.

Those of us who live in reality understand that criminals intent on violent crime and murder do not give pause to their actions in order to follow legal protocol and procedure when obtaining firearms. Instead, they see those laws as a means to make law-abiding citizens more vulnerable to their objectives and, in that sense, make great partners to the left and any lawmakers who follow the subversive path of the gun control agenda. Leaving Americans unprotected in this manner invites violence, which creates the opportunity for further infringements upon our rights under the guise of protecting our safety, and that cycle is designed to continue until all freedom is lost. Guess what happens next.

When I hear remarks about America being a beacon of freedom, I think to myself, sure, maybe relatively speaking, depending on what state you live in, but not in any general understanding. I’m sure it was at one time, long before I was a twinkle in the eyes of my parents. I wish I could have seen it back then. But individual liberty has not survived the scrutiny of disingenuous agendas and their narratives that claim to know better what Americans need than Americans themselves. The idea that politicians and the government need to strip our freedoms to protect us is insulting and is not even original, as the same tired scheme has been used ad nauseam historically to subjugate populations around the world.

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A Government Held Hostage: Why The Supreme Court Must Rein In Rogue Federal Judges

In a case that would read like satire were its consequences not so severe, a single district judge has attempted to substitute his judgment for that of the president of the United States, his Cabinet and the entire machinery of the executive branch. On the shaky foundation of delayed bathroom openings and speculative FOIA frustrations, the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California ordered six federal agencies to reinstate over 16,000 probationary employees whom the executive had lawfully terminated. That is no way to run a government. It is, however, an efficient way to cripple one.

This unprecedented judicial intrusion warrants urgent reversal by the Supreme Court. It implicates not only the structural integrity of the constitutional order but also the basic operability of the executive branch. If allowed to stand, this injunction would green-light a new era of governance—by district court decree—where plaintiffs need not even be the employees affected, but merely individuals inconvenienced by the possibility of less-than-optimal service from the federal leviathan.

Let us be clear: the terminated employees were probationary. That term is not decorative. It denotes a class of individuals whom the federal government, acting through agency discretion, has not yet deemed fit for permanent service. The very purpose of probationary status, long recognized in civil service jurisprudence, is to afford the government the flexibility to assess aptitude before conferring permanence. To strip the executive of this discretion at the whim of a district court is to invert the hierarchy of constitutional authority.

Even more astonishing is the identity of the plaintiffs. Not the employees themselves—who, under the Civil Service Reform Act, must pursue redress through specific administrative channels—but organizations that claim their members were adversely affected by reductions in services. The theoretical chain from dismissal to harm proceeds thus: an agency terminated an employee, which may have led to a slower FOIA response or a delayed bathroom opening at a national park, which may have annoyed a citizen who belongs to a nonprofit, which nonprofit now claims standing to challenge the Executive’s staffing decisions. This is not law; it is farce.

The doctrine of standing, which limits federal courts to adjudicating actual cases and controversies, is designed to prevent such misadventures. As the Supreme Court affirmed in TransUnion LLC v. Ramirez, federal courts do not exist to conduct general oversight of the Executive Branch. They are not roving commissions to improve customer service. Yet the district court in AFGE v. OPM embraced a theory of injury so attenuated it makes the proverbial butterfly effect look rigorous.

Even assuming arguendo that the court could entertain such a theory, its remedy is legally indefensible. Reinstatement of employees is a drastic and rarely granted measure, especially where, as here, the employees themselves are not before the court. As the Court recognized in Sampson v. Murray, judicially compelled reinstatement of a single employee represents a significant intrusion on executive discretion. Imposing that remedy on a mass scale, without statutory warrant and without a showing of irreparable harm, is more than judicial activism; it is judicial usurpation.

Moreover, the district court’s order tramples Congress’ deliberate scheme for federal personnel disputes. The Civil Service Reform Act provides a comprehensive and exclusive avenue for terminated employees to challenge their dismissals. End-runs through district court by third-party organizations are not just unauthorized; they are antithetical to the statute’s purpose. As the Supreme Court held in United States v. Fausto, permitting such circumvention would upend the structure Congress enacted and invite a chaotic patchwork of judicial micromanagement.

The executive has not stood idle. Following the court’s temporary restraining order, the Office of Personnel Management clarified its guidance, emphasizing that it did not and could not direct agencies to terminate specific employees. Agencies, in turn, independently affirmed their staffing decisions. Some even rescinded terminations. Others, in line with the president’s directive to optimize the federal workforce, maintained course. This reflects exactly what the Constitution envisions: agency discretion under the aegis of a politically accountable executive.

Yet the court was not satisfied. It doubled down, ordering full reinstatement to active duty—no administrative leave permitted—and demanding agencies report their progress to the bench. In effect, the judge transformed himself into a personnel director for the federal government, supervising onboarding procedures and issuing dictates about work assignments. This is not judicial review; it is receivership.

The administrative burden imposed by the order is staggering. Agencies have been forced to contact, rehire and reassign thousands of individuals in a matter of days. The government must pay salaries, issue credentials and allocate workspace—all under the threat of contempt. And should the injunction be reversed—as it almost certainly will be—the agencies will be forced to terminate these employees again, compounding the cost and confusion.

Meanwhile, the constitutional damage mounts. This case is not an outlier; it is part of a growing trend. As the government notes, more than 40 injunctions or temporary restraining orders have been issued against the executive branch in just two months—more than during the first three years of the previous administration. The judiciary is not merely overstepping its bounds; it is sprinting past them.

This Court has the tools to restore order. The standards for issuing a stay are well established: likelihood of success on the merits, irreparable harm, and the balance of equities. Each factor weighs heavily in favor of the government. The constitutional structure demands a course correction. Judicial modesty is not a quaint ideal—it is a constitutional imperative.

If one district judge can effectively seize control of six executive agencies based on speculative harms and attenuated theories of standing, then no executive action is safe from pretextual interference. The line between judicial oversight and judicial governance has been crossed. It is the task of the Supreme Court to redraw it—and to redraw it firmly.

For the sake of the separation of powers, for the integrity of the executive and for the rule of law itself, the Court must act. The injunction must be stayed. The machinery of government must be permitted to function. And the Constitution must, once again, be obeyed.

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Green Card-Holding Palestinian Trump’s Deporting Gets Even Worse News as Justice Finds Him

Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil is pictured during an April protest at Columbia University campus in New York. (Ted Shaffrey / AP)

Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian activist and former Columbia University graduate student detained by immigration authorities over the weekend, appears to have violated explicit federal immigration laws.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents arrested Khalil, a permanent resident with a green card, on Saturday.

The agents originally told Khalil his student visa was being revoked, according to The Associated Press, which quoted Khalil’s attorney, Amy Greer.

Greer told the AP she spoke on the phone with the agents during the arrest and said her client had a green card. The agent then told her the green card was being revoked instead, Greer said, according to the AP.

On Sunday, in a post on the social media platform X, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced that the federal government will be “revoking the visas and/or green cards of Hamas supporters in America so they can be deported.”

A spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security said Khalil was arrested “in support of President Trump’s executive orders prohibiting anti-Semitism” because he “led activities aligned to Hamas, a designated terrorist organization,” according to the AP.

On Monday, however, a federal judge in New York blocked Khalil’s deportation. Judge Jesse M. Furman said that Khalil must remain in the United States “to preserve the court’s jurisdiction” as the court considers his case, according to NBC News.

A hearing for the case is scheduled in federal court for Wednesday.

Other protesters have assembled in New York City to demand the release of Khalil.

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Pennsylvania Democratic U.S. Rep. Summer Lee also came to his defense, asserting on social media that “Mahmoud Khalil should be at home with his 8-month pregnant wife.”

But it appears that federal law is rather clear about support of a terrorist organization serving as grounds for removal from the country — and that is likely worse news for Khalil.

When discussing “inadmissible aliens,” the law specifically includes any foreigner who “endorses or espouses terrorist activity or persuades others to endorse or espouse terrorist activity or support a terrorist organization.”

The U.S. government has designated Hamas as a “foreign terrorist organization” for nearly 30 years, according to a webpage from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

The group uses a variety of weaponry to “to advance attacks against Israeli military forces and civilians.”

Hamas also “engages in cyber espionage, computer network exploitation, and kidnapping operations.”

No matter how much leftist protesters and lawmakers may complain, Khalil does not belong in the United States if he is going to align himself with terrorist organizations.

For non-citizens, being in the United States is a privilege, not a right.

Wasting the incredible opportunity of attending an Ivy League school and building a better life after graduation is incredibly foolish.

The last thing the United States needs is the importation and continued presence of foreigners trying to drag us into their conflicts.

This deportation should send a crystal clear message to the rest of the country that coming here for such activities, especially in support of clearly designated terrorist organizations, is not allowed.

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Overclassification: Washington’s Favorite Cover-Up

America’s promise of accountability, once the clarion call of our Founding Fathers, now finds itself muffled beneath a wall of excessive secrecy. The so-called fourth branch of government—the unelected bureaucratic state—has weaponized overclassification to limit transparency and accountability. Also called the Deep State, these entrenched bureaucrats use secrecy to enshrine their power, preventing congressional oversight and even hindering a sitting president from implementing meaningful reforms. The byzantine rules and regulations cloaked in classified information make it nearly impossible for the president, his administration or journalists to understand what is really happening within the federal agencies. The recent case of USAID blocking the Trump administration‘s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) from auditing its humanitarian aid programs is just the latest example of how secrecy is wielded to protect the bureaucratic class from accountability. If Trump is to dismantle the Deep State, he must first break its stranglehold on classified information.

The Bureaucratic Black Hole of Classification

The march toward unchecked classification is neither recent nor accidental. From the modest safeguards envisioned by our early republic to the expansive, often nebulous standards codified in Obama’s Executive Order 13526, the Deep State has systematically entrenched secrecy as a mechanism of self-preservation. The Brennan Center for Justice’s estimate—that up to 90 percent of classified documents could be safely disclosed—should alarm every citizen who cherishes a government that is answerable to its people. When transparency is sacrificed on the altar of “sensitive information,” the democratic process is undermined; accountability is traded for convenience.

Historical Parallels

Alexander Hamilton, in Federalist No. 84, warned against a government that operated behind closed doors, recognizing that secrecy was the lifeblood of tyranny. The modern overclassification problem mirrors the suppression of the Pentagon Papers, where government officials classified documents not to protect national security, but to hide the failures of the Vietnam War. The same tactics persist today, as bureaucrats wield secrecy like a shield, deflecting public oversight and preserving their power.

Consider the curious case of USAID, an agency whose humanitarian mission is paradoxically shrouded in the same secrecy reserved for covert operations. During Trump’s first term, senior USAID security officials obstructed his team’s efforts to audit the agency. Initially, Trump did not fully grasp the extent of this obstruction; now, armed with experience and his DOGE team, he is confronting and dismantling these overclassification schemes. When USAID officials blocked his DOGE team this time around, they were placed on leave—a move that allowed the audit to commence. The scandal surrounding USAID thus reveals that excessive secrecy serves not to protect national security but to stifle meaningful reform and insulate power from both the executive and legislative branches.

When Secrecy Kills

The implications of overclassification extend well beyond mere opacity. The tragic lessons of September 11, as chronicled in the eponymous Commission Report, illustrate that the labyrinthine nature of modern classification hindered the timely sharing of crucial intelligence—a failure that contributed to one of the gravest security breaches in American history. The same dynamic played out during the COVID-19 pandemic when essential information on the virus’ origins and early spread was locked behind classified barriers, leaving the public and policymakers scrambling in the dark. Today, as agencies continue to guard their files with a zeal that borders on paranoia, the resulting fragmentation and internal rivalry sap our collective national defense. When agencies operate in silos, a fragmented picture of potential threats emerges, weakening the nation’s ability to preempt danger.

The Hidden Cost of Secrecy

Financially, the hidden costs are staggering. Taxpayers shoulder an $18 billion annual burden to sustain these classified systems—a sum that could instead fortify more productive public endeavors. Meanwhile, scholars, journalists and even elected officials are forced to navigate an overgrown thicket of red tape in pursuit of records that, by all rights, should be part of the public domain. The Public Interest Declassification Board’s stark characterization of our system as “outmoded, unsustainable, and fundamentally at odds with the principles of a free society” is not hyperbole; it is an urgent diagnosis of a bureaucratic malaise that must be cured.

Trump’s War on the Classification Cartel

President Trump, now in his second term, has a unique opportunity to dismantle this excessive secrecy. Unlike his predecessors, he has no allegiance to the entrenched bureaucratic class that thrives on classification as a means of self-preservation. With Elon Musk leading the newly established Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), a sweeping overhaul of declassification is within reach. This effort should include:

Mandatory Declassification Reviews: All classified materials older than 15 years should be automatically reviewed for declassification, with only the most sensitive exceptions allowed.
Severe Penalties for Overclassification: Bureaucrats who misuse classification to conceal incompetence or wrongdoing should face strict penalties, including termination.
Protection for Whistleblowers: Those who expose abusive classification practices should be shielded from retaliation and offered legal avenues for challenging improper secrecy.
Public Access Portals: A streamlined system should be implemented to allow journalists and citizens to request declassification more efficiently, modeled after the Freedom of Information Act but with fewer loopholes.

By dismantling the excessive secrecy that has long shrouded the inner workings of government, we can reestablish a system where transparency and accountability are not sacrificed at the altar of expedience. Reagan famously declared, “Trust, but verify.” Yet modern bureaucrats have rewritten that to read, “Trust us, and don’t ask questions.” George Orwell’s 1984 warned of an all-powerful government that buries inconvenient truths; we are perilously close to living out that warning.

Jefferson warned that government without oversight becomes despotic; Reagan championed the notion that the more a government controls information, the less it serves its people. The Deep State’s unchecked power, fortified by overclassification, has allowed it to operate as an unelected fourth branch of government, immune to both congressional oversight and executive authority.

If Trump is to truly gut the Deep State, he must first dismantle its classification fortress. A government that dares to reveal its operations is a government that earns the trust of its citizens, ensuring that power remains checked and that democratic ideals are not consigned to the shadows. The path forward is clear: restore openness, rein in bureaucratic discretion and renew the covenant between the state and the governed.

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