All the shopper wanted was to buy a laptop.

Instead, a routine trip to a Best Buy turned into a bizarre confrontation over gender, pronouns and whether a customer should be compelled to address a biological male employee as “ma’am.”

Video of the encounter shows the Best Buy employee, who presented with a distinctly masculine appearance, objecting after the customer referred to the employee as “sir.”

The employee insisted on being addressed as “ma’am.”

The customer wasn’t having it.

His position was straightforward: the person standing in front of him appeared to be a man, and he wasn’t going to be forced to say something he didn’t believe simply because an employee demanded it.

You can argue that mistakes happen and that most decent people aren’t deliberately looking to insult a stranger.

But that’s not what made this encounter different.

The confrontation represented something much bigger: a “woke” ideology that reached its cultural peak several years ago and somehow transformed ordinary human interactions into ideological minefields.

Today, even progressives have a name for that era: Woke 1.

And apparently Woke 1 “was crazy.”

During a recent ABC News interview, progressive Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez repeated a phrase connected to New York City Councilman Chi Ossé: “Woke 1 was crazy.” The phrase has since exploded.

Woke 1 basically describes the cultural and political environment surrounding the pandemic and the upheaval following George Floyd’s death, an era when ideas previously considered fringe suddenly became fashionable.

Defund the police, abolish the police, cancel culture, you name it. Identity politics seemingly injected into everything. And increasingly complicated rules governing what ordinary Americans were permitted to say about race, gender and sexuality.

But now some liberal politicians who embraced that environment are distancing themselves from their old rhetoric.

For example, Wisconsin progressive Francesca Hong declared in 2020, “I support defunding the police as a first step towards abolishing the police.” She later moved away from those positions. Ocasio-Cortez has likewise said rhetoric from the lockdown era isn’t rhetoric progressives would necessarily use today.

The political winds changed.

Perhaps politicians discovered what millions of Americans already knew: telling people that police departments should disappear, prisons should be abolished or that ordinary language must constantly be reconstructed around someone’s personal identity was never going to work in the real world.

Which brings us back to Best Buy. The employee in that viral confrontation appears to be living in a cultural moment that much of the country — and increasingly even parts of the political left — has already begun leaving behind.

Yet somehow even that became a cultural confrontation.

That apparent retreat from Woke 1 hasn’t escaped the attention of Joe Rogan, who recently challenged politicians who once embraced the “defund the police” movement to explain exactly what changed.

“How far out did you track the consequences of defunding the police?” Rogan asked. “Because I immediately went to… you’re gonna have more crime because no one’s gonna be able to stop the crime.”

Then he posed perhaps the most important question:

“What did you think defund the police meant? Everyone’s gonna, like, eat mushrooms and we’re all gonna, like, be flower children? What did you think? Because there’s no police around, no one’s gonna do crimes?”

Behind Rogan’s sarcasm was a legitimate criticism of the Woke 1 era: what was the actual endgame?

His criticism went further. He questioned whether politicians genuinely reconsidered those policies after examining their consequences or simply abandoned them once public opinion turned against them.

“Or have you changed your opinion?” Rogan asked. “And if you did change your opinion, what were you thinking back then?”

That’s the question politicians who embraced Woke 1 should have to answer.

Changing your mind isn’t necessarily a bad thing. But when the policy involves policing, crime and public safety, Americans deserve more than a catchy phrase acknowledging that things went too far. They deserve an explanation of why those ideas were embraced in the first place.

For several years, Americans who questioned some of these ideas were routinely told they were the unreasonable ones. Now many of the same political circles that entertained those ideas are acknowledging that maybe things went too far.

Woke 1 is dead, but not everyone is up to speed, like the Best Buy employee. But what comes next?

If politicians themselves now acknowledge that Woke 1 went off the rails, what exactly will “Woke 2” look like?

We’ll find out soon enough, but hopefully it won’t include defunding police!

Eddie Molina, Law Enforcement Today

The Islamic School of Irving is being sued for over $1 million by a female claiming she was brutally raped by a 14-year-old male and school officials failed to call police. According to the Dallas County petition, Doe and her mother were working for a contractor hired to clean the school on the evening of Sept. 27, 2024. The school shares a campus with a mosque and is connected to it by doors that the lawsuit says should have been locked after hours. Doe said she saw a 14-year-old boy, identified only as OEA, loitering in a school hallway during a mosque event and told him he should not be there because the school was closed. The petition alleges that OEA then locked himself in a classroom bathroom. As Doe began to leave the room,“ he suddenly ran toward her, grabbed her by the neck, choked her and slammed her body against the door. He then pulled her back into the classroom, turned the light off, and told her that he was going to kill her.” The lawsuit says that despite her pleas, he continued to strangle her, raped her, threatened to kill her if she told anyone, and took her phone.

Doe said she ran to a security guard in the parking lot and asked him to call police. Instead, the petition alleges, the guard yelled at her to stop crying and alerted school officials. Officials took her to an office and said they would “handle it.” ‘

Rather than calling 911, staff allegedly had her show them the room, photographed the scene, pulled up a photo of the boy, and remarked that he had previously been suspended for attempting to rape a female student. Doe identified him as her attacker.

The lawsuit says no one at the school or mosque summoned help. Officials instead asked whether she was a U.S. citizen and offered her money. Doe then found her mother elsewhere in the building; her mother called Doe’s manager, who called police. Officers arrested OEA on the property and took Doe to a hospital for a SANE exam.

The lawsuit also alleges that the school official told the victim he tried raping another female student previously.

Independent Newsroom

I have been traveling a lot lately, and I keep noticing something that would have seemed genuinely strange not very long ago: Grown adults are walking through airports carrying stuffed animals.

Not parents carrying the stuffed animal their toddler dropped. Adult men and women carrying plush animals through the airport as companions and comfort objects. Apparently, this is normal now.

I realize I am in dangerous territory here because I am about to sound like an old person complaining about the younger generation. But I don’t actually want to make fun of people with teddy bears. I want to understand what changed. I also have very little moral high ground when it comes to childhood comfort objects. I sucked my thumb into college.

Throughout my childhood, adults kept predicting the milestone that would finally make me stop. Kindergarten. Elementary school. High school. Surely, when she gets a boyfriend. Nope. Eventually, acrylic fingernails accomplished what adolescence and boyfriends couldn’t. I started wearing them regularly, as was fashionable at the time, and thumb sucking became impractical.

My mother still occasionally sucks her thumb. She is also one of the strongest and most capable women I know. She built a large fashion company, raised children, worked incredibly hard, and eventually retired to Hawaii. Every once in a while, though, falling asleep or driving when she thinks nobody is paying attention, there goes the thumb.

So my argument cannot possibly be that needing comfort makes you weak. But I do think we are becoming weaker, and I wonder whether the stuffed animals are one tiny, furry symptom of something much larger.

One of the most popular columns I have written for The Epoch Times was about another phenomenon I couldn’t stop noticing: people wearing pajamas in public.

Recently, Tuskegee University, a historically Black university, made news for reinforcing standards restricting pajamas, bedroom slippers, bonnets, and durags in certain campus settings. Critics have characterized such rules as “respectability politics.” I find the phrase itself interesting. When did presenting yourself respectably become politics?

There is nothing wrong with pajamas, a bonnet, or a teddy bear. The question is whether every setting needs to accommodate whatever makes us most comfortable. School is partly preparation for entering the world. Sometimes, that means learning that what is appropriate in your bedroom isn’t necessarily appropriate in a classroom or job interview.

We have seen a similar conversation around emotional support animals. For a period, they became so common on airplanes that airlines were dealing not only with dogs and cats but with increasingly unusual animals being presented as necessary for emotional comfort. People with disabilities who rely on trained service animals are in an entirely different category.

But culturally, something interesting had happened: “This makes me feel safer and more comfortable” had become an argument we increasingly expected the world around us to accommodate.

Perhaps what has changed isn’t our need for comfort. My mother and I are proof that previous generations had plenty of comfort habits. Perhaps what has changed is our expectation that adulthood should require us to leave any of them behind.

There is psychological research supporting the idea that manageable discomfort serves a purpose. Researchers sometimes describe “stress inoculation.” Overwhelming or chronic stress can obviously be damaging, but manageable stress, successfully navigated, can help us develop the ability to deal with future stress.

If, every time a child encounters something difficult, we remove the difficulty, how will the child discover, “I can handle difficult things”?

I wonder if my generation inadvertently participated in an enormous parenting experiment. Many of us looked at our childhoods and said: “My parents messed me up. I’m going to be gentler with my children.”

Some correction was undoubtedly needed. Cruelty doesn’t create healthy children. There is enormous value in affection, empathy, and listening. But somewhere along the way, did being gentle begin to mean preventing discomfort?

This extends far beyond parenting because we have constructed a civilization extraordinarily good at removing discomfort. We rarely have to be hungry. We control the temperature. Food appears at our door. Entertainment is available every waking second. We don’t have to navigate without GPS or even stand in line for three minutes with nothing to do.

We reach for our phones, and I certainly do. I am addicted to mine. I sometimes turn my head away from a human being who is speaking to me because something appears on my screen. I know that while I’m doing it, it isn’t appropriate, and sometimes I do it anyway. Maybe the smartphone is just the socially acceptable stuffed animal almost all of us carry.

On a recent flight to North Dakota, something unusual happened. I sat next to a man who worked both as a cattle farmer and in the oil fields. We started talking and kept talking for essentially the entire flight.

We talked regenerative agriculture, watering-trough hacks, repurposing security cameras to watch cattle, stocking density, GPS collars, and everything else two people interested in agriculture could cram into a flight. When I got off the airplane, I realized I couldn’t remember the last time I had talked to a stranger beside me for an entire flight.

Airplanes have changed. We sit down, insert earbuds, open the laptop or phone, and disappear into entertainment individually designed for us. Everyone becomes the center of his own little universe. Of course, each of us is the center of our own universe. We are the narrators of the movie happening inside our own heads. Maturity, I think, is realizing that everyone else is, too.

After employing hundreds of people over decades, I have felt a change in this orientation. I increasingly encounter an expectation that the environment should organize itself around the individual’s experience rather than the individual asking how he or she should show up for everyone else.

People ask me almost every day some version of the same question: “How do you do all of this?” “Do you sleep?” I have four young children. We have a ranch and restaurant. I write and travel for speaking engagements.

I make apothecary products for our farm store and homemade ice cream every week. Written down, it does sound like a lot. And yet I somehow still find a remarkable amount of time to scroll through my phone.

So I wonder what people are really asking. Are they asking, “How could anyone possibly accomplish all of that?” Or is the question underneath sometimes, “Why would you be willing to?”

Why choose a life requiring that much work? Why do something difficult and inconvenient for relatively little money or recognition? Why willingly be uncomfortable?

Maybe I am projecting, but I wonder whether effort itself has begun to look abnormal.

For most of human existence, nobody needed to seek out discomfort. Life delivered plenty of it. I certainly don’t want to return to a world where people routinely went hungry or ordinary infections killed children. Eliminating suffering is a tremendous human achievement. But somewhere along the way, I wonder if we confused suffering with discomfort.

They aren’t the same thing. Being bored isn’t suffering. Waiting isn’t suffering. Having someone disagree with you isn’t suffering. Dressing appropriately when you’d rather wear pajamas isn’t suffering. Putting your phone away while another person speaks isn’t suffering. Allowing your child to struggle with something he can ultimately overcome isn’t cruelty.

These are tiny repetitions of something human beings desperately need to know: I can be uncomfortable and still be OK.

Maybe the person carrying the teddy bear through the airport is every bit as capable as I am. My own family history makes it impossible for me to conclude otherwise. But I still have the judgment: You’re a grown adult. Why are you carrying a stuffed animal through the airport?

Maybe we’ve simply become less judgmental about harmless comforts. There are certainly worse things a person can do than hug a stuffed bear. But maybe embarrassment once performed a small cultural function, too. Maybe occasionally being told, “You’re getting too old for that,” was one of countless little pressures pushing us toward adulthood.

Not everything our parents did to us needs to be repeated. But not everything they asked us to overcome was trauma either. Maybe resilience isn’t something we simply possess. Maybe it is something we practice.

The teddy bear probably isn’t the problem. I just wonder whether it is trying to tell us something.

Mollie Engelhart, Epoch Times

The Trump administration has proposed a fee of more than $100,000 for most H-1B visas. The usual suspects have come out with the usual reactions. Doug Brand, a senior immigration official in the Biden administration, called the move “catastrophic,” and the libertarian Cato Institute has warned of “devastating” consequences.

In lieu of abolishing the program altogether – my preference, but something only Congress can do – such a fee is long overdue. It’s chump change compared to the added value a truly exceptional foreign worker could generate, and at the same time would make the program less attractive as a means of importing cheap white-collar labor to undercut Americans.

This latest proposed fee is different from the $100,000 fee the administration announced last fall on foreigners arriving in the US on an H-1B visa – that was enjoined by a federal court. The current proposal would apply to all H-1B visas subject to the numerical caps (universities are cap-exempt), not just new arrivals. That’s important because many foreigners who get H-1B visas are already in the US on some other visa, often as foreign students, and so would not have been subject to the earlier proposed fee.

The specific amount of the new fee would be $103,265. (no cents!) Now, I don’t have $103,265 sitting in my checking account, but Amazon, Google, JP Morgan, Apple, and the other top importers of H-1B workers certainly do.

Industry lobbyists have been telling us for years that the H-1B program is essential to enable the “best and brightest” foreign talent to come to America. At a time when tech companies are offering multi-million-dollar signing bonuses to star talent, what’s a measly $103,265 fee to help the government run the immigration system if you’re going to land one of the world’s best and brightest minds?

But that’s assuming the H-1B program is actually for the best and brightest. It certainly isn’t. The US Chamber of Commerce spent years retailing the same “best and brightest” fairy tale as the other pro-immigration lobbyists. But the Chamber – the leading voice for big business in the nation’s capital – in its lawsuit to stop last year’s proposed fee suddenly made an about-face and argued that, no, H-1Bs aren’t the best and brightest after all!

That’s because the real purpose of the H-1B program is to provide firms with lower-cost foreign labor at scale. H-1B workers are paid significantly less than comparable American workers, which is why the visa is so often used to replace American workers with foreigners.

Perhaps the most notorious case of this was when Disney fired its entire (American) IT staff in Orlando and replaced them with H-1Bs – whom the fired workers were required to train as a condition of receiving a severance package. This is legal and has happened hundreds of times across the country.

Congress would have to change the law to prohibit use of the H-1B visa to replace Americans, but the proposed fee would at least make that a less attractive option by making the foreign workers more expensive.

And the fee wouldn’t even necessarily cancel out all the wage discount from employing H-1Bs. If you divide the proposed fee by the usual six-year period of an H-1B visa, it comes out to about $17,000 a year. But the average H-1B salary in “computer-related occupations” a few years ago was more than $30,000 less than the median wage for that occupation. In that case, you’d have to double the proposed fee (to $206,530?) to truly make the H-1B visa less attractive as a means of importing cheap labor.

But even the more modest proposed fee would certainly affect hiring decisions in many cases. Of course, some employers would just turn to other ways to import cheap labor that aren’t covered by the new fee, such as the L-1 visa.

But there’s evidence that concern over higher H-1B costs and stricter enforcement is causing some firms to do more hiring domestically. If the proposed fee goes into effect, it will only accelerate that process, to the benefit of American tech workers.

Mark Krikorian, The Spectator

Owen Matthews, The Spectator

When is extrajudicial killing just war by other means, and when does it become a state-sponsored act of terror?

‘We were not terrorists but fighters for freedom who fought with our eyes open,’ Menachem Begin wrote of Irgun, the irregular group of fighters he led during the 1947-48 civil war in Mandatory Palestine, the tactics of whom included bombings and assassinations. But where does the 1 August bombing of the Balzi Rossi restaurant in central Moscow – which killed at least five people and injured more than 20– stand on the scale?

Some would describe the attack as a legitimate military operation. The bomb targeted the lavish birthday celebrations of Colonel-General Aleksandr Chayko, Commander-in-Chief of Russia’s Aerospace Forces (whose son-in-law died in the blast). Chayko commanded the northern group of Russian forces which advanced to the outskirts of Kyiv in February and March 2022, which pro-Ukrainian bloggers maintain makes him ultimately responsible for the massacres of civilians in Bucha and Irpin.

Following that logic, the attempted assassination of Chayko stands alongside heroic partisan killings of war criminals – for instance the shooting of Reinhard Heydrich, Reichsprotektor of Bohemia and Moravia, gunned down on a Prague street by British-trained Czech agents in May 1942.

But if you believe that the Balzi Rossi bomb was justifiable, what then is the difference between that attack and the Irish Republican Army’s 1981 nail bombing of British soldiers at London’s Chelsea Barracks, or bomb attacks on Household Cavalry troopers and an army band in Hyde Park and Regent’s Park the following year? All were assaults on military personnel in a civilian setting in the cause of overturning a colonial occupation.

Our answer obviously depends on how we feel about the righteousness of the perpetrators’ cause. The US and UK have been taking out al-Qaeda and Isis members in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan by drone attack for years, accepting collateral damage to unlucky civilians as part of the butcher’s bill. Few would shed tears for Mohammed Emwazi – ‘Jihadi John’ – killed in a US-UK drone strike in Raqqa in November 2015 or ‘White Widow’ Sally-Anne Jones, terminated by a Predator drone in 2017. Israel’s Mossad, with its arsenal of exploding pagers and pinpoint hotel-room strikes, is a world leader in taking out enemies en masse wherever they find them.

Nevertheless, approving of extrajudicial execution opens a moral can of worms. We can say that it’s fine when Barack Obama smites his enemies but bad when Vladimir Putin does it because we approve of one but not the other. But that argument quickly slides into a dangerous moral ambivalence, a whataboutism of the kind that the Kremlin loves to exploit.

Kremlin-controlled Russian media have blamed Ukraine for organising the latest Moscow bombing. Officials in Kyiv, meanwhile, have remained silent. But the Balzi Rossi explosion is the latest in a long string of bombings targeting Russian officers, occupation officials and propagandists. In August 2022, Darya Dugina, a 29-year-old pro-war commentator and daughter of the nationalist ideologue Aleksandr Dugin, died in a car bomb blast presumably aimed at her father. In April the following year Maxim Fomin, a pro-war military blogger known as Vladlen Tatarsky, was killed by a bomb concealed inside a statuette presented to him as a gift during an event in St Petersburg. Zakhar Prilepin, a nationalist novelist and commander of pro-Russian forces in the Donbas, was badly injured by another car bomb.

Similar devices have, since 2022, killed three Russian lieutenant generals, a deputy mayor of Stavropol and the founder of a pro-Russian battalion in Ukraine. Ukraine’s SBU security service has either denied responsibility or said nothing about bombings on Russian territory. But it has claimed several identical bombings inside occupied Ukraine, including two lawmakers in the Russian-installed assembly in Luhansk, an official at the Russian-controlled Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant and the former head of the Olenivka prison in Donetsk, all blown up by improvised explosive devices. Occupiers were ‘a completely legitimate target’, SBU sources told Ukrainian media.

Ukraine has also claimed responsibility for at least 15 assassinations or attempted assassinations by handgun that killed or wounded, among others, a Russian submarine commander, a cruise missile software engineer and the deputy head of GRU Russian military intelligence. Russia, for its part, has also organised at least six shooting assassinations inside Ukraine.

What makes some of these bombings especially morally complex is the apparent use of unwitting suicide bombers to deliver the devices. Darya Trepova, an anti-war Russian, maintained that she did not know the statuette that killed Vladlen Tatarsky contained explosives (she was nonetheless sentenced to 27 years in jail for murder). Zaur Gurtsiev, deputy mayor of Stavropol, and Armen Sarkisyan, founder of the pro-Russian ‘Arbat Battalion’, were killed by suicide bombers who were both apparently unwitting pawns with no known patriotic links to Ukraine and no observed desire to die for Kyiv’s cause. In October 2022 delivery truck driver Makhir Yusubov picked up a load of goods destined for Crimea after accepting an order on a logistics website. Halfway across the Kerch Bridge the truck detonated, killing Yusubov and damaging the bridge. Vasyl Maliuk, then chief of Ukraine’s SBU security service, publicly acknowledged the operation and admitted that Ukrainian services deliberately ‘used people in the dark’. It’s not known if the woman who delivered the bomb to the Balzi Rossi – reportedly wrapped as a present – volunteered for a suicide mission or whether she was just another expendable human carrier.

Is there a difference between killing a Russian commander on the battlefield and blowing him up at his own birthday party? You can argue that all’s fair in love and war, that the horror inflicted by Russia on Ukraine justifies killing enemy officers even when they’re unarmed and off-duty. But that moral choice comes with an uncomfortable trail of logical contingencies. As Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote, every man who commits evil does it for reasons he considers good.

In the wake of the Hyde Park bombing the IRA put out a statement justifying killing British servicemen because ‘the Irish people have sovereign and national rights which no occupational force can put down’. The Kremlin liquidators sent to murder KGB and GRU defectors Alexander Litvinenko and Sergei Skripal undoubtedly saw their victims as traitors who had betrayed their country – and themselves as righteous executioners. Menachem Begin, in his memoir The Revolt, claimed that US president Harry Truman ‘said that he would have joined the “terrorists” had he been in Eretz Israel during the rule of the British’.

Yes, that’s a list of very different cases – bombing as an act of war vs poisoning as an act of state revenge, post-colonial independence movements vs sovereign warring states. But that’s the point. Circumstances matter.

Motivation matters. And here’s the nub of the problem. We can easily agree that our ends sometimes justify extrajudicial means, but not the ends of those with whom we disagree. Ultimately we judge the actions of our heroes and villains by who they are, not by the things they do.

To return to the original question: where does the Moscow bomb attack lie on the scale? Operationally, ordering this kind of suicide bombing is an outlier by the standards of any western army or security service – including the Israelis. Accurate targeting, as well as minimising civilian casualties, is an important part of the moral equation for any democracy. Even if drones inadvertently blow up whole wedding parties in Afghanistan the civilian chiefs who ultimately authorise such operations can be told it was a genuine accident. A 1kg bomb full of ball-bearings brought to a crowded restaurant, as the Balzi Rossi bomb was reported to be, is not by any stretch of the imagination a targeted means of assassination.

To be clear, there is no direct evidence that this attack was the work of the Ukrainian government. Indeed I honestly hope that neither the SBU nor the HUR was involved. Because whoever ordered the bombing is treading a dangerous path. First, being found responsible for an indiscriminate attack of this kind would erode the moral superiority that Ukraine undoubtedly holds as the injured party in this conflict. But more dangerously, it opens the door for a new tit-for tat front in an already supremely vicious war, fought not by guns and missiles but improvised explosive devices in restaurants. Is there a difference between these two methods of dealing death to innocent civilians? For many people the answer depends who’s doing the killing and who’s doing the dying.

U.S. forces attacked two Iranian launchers on Larak Island on Sunday, carrying out the first publicly known American strikes inside Iran since late July, Reuters reported.

A U.S. official said Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps personnel appeared to be preparing the launchers to fire rockets carrying sea mines into the Strait of Hormuz. The official said U.S. forces targeted both launchers before they could be used.

Iran’s Revolutionary Guards said the attack killed and wounded several military personnel and civilians, according to state media. Tehran threatened retaliation. The semi-official Tasnim news agency described the operation as a U.S. drone strike.

For investors, the renewed military action raises the risk of another escalation around the Strait of Hormuz, a critical route for global energy shipments. Any further disruption could push oil and shipping costs higher, benefiting some energy producers while increasing inflationary pressure and weighing on airlines, manufacturers and other fuel-sensitive industries.

President Donald Trump said last week that mines had been cleared or detonated in the strait’s international waters. He also warned that vessels attempting to deploy additional mines would be destroyed.

The strike follows several weeks of relative military stalemate. Washington has increasingly emphasized the possible use of sanctions against countries supporting Iran since the previous known U.S. attacks in late July.

The conflict began with U.S. and Israeli strikes on Iran on Feb. 28. Tehran responded by attacking Israel and Gulf countries that host American military bases.

The six-month war, which has also included Israeli operations in Lebanon, has killed thousands and displaced millions. Eighteen U.S. service members have died in the conflict.

Fighting has also resulted in a blockade of the Strait of Hormuz. Before the war, the waterway handled roughly one-fifth of the oil consumed worldwide.

Rob Williams

We can all do something in the lead-up to the November election. What is your something?

Robin M. Itzler

Patriots don’t have to open their wallets to contribute to a candidate’s campaign, although money is always welcome. You can contact your local county Republican Party or directly reach out to the candidate and/or organization promoting a proposition. Everyone can do something to save our nation from a growing communist takeover.

Local candidates (school boards, city councils, aldermen, boards of supervisors, commissioners, etc.) often run on shoestring budgets. Anything you can do is appreciated.

For instance, Maureen “Quinn” Flaherty ran for the Long Beach, California, school board in the June primary. A special ed teacher at a charter school, Flaherty was making strong inroads in her school board district during the campaign, which explains why teachers’ union members started showing up to protest at her events. She shared her story with me:

I ran for Long Beach Unified School District Board Member in the June 2, 2026, primary. I have been a community leader in Long Beach, CA, hosting events to teach the public about their constitutional rights since 2020. My goal in running was to do more for my community since these days there are many agendas that are unhealthy for children attending public schools. For more background visit Protect Our Kids website.

Throughout my campaign, I endured much harassment and abuse such as disparaging signs about me throughout Long Beach and in my own neighborhood, attack ads on YouTube, teacher union members and Antifa showing up at my events trying to shut down my voice, and more. Despite all the negatives, I came in second place with 33 percent of the vote, out of three candidates. The incumbent had 55 percent. She won outright in the primary election because of the 50 + 1% rule in primaries for local elections.

My efforts threatened the teachers’ union. According to the Long Beach Post the Teachers Association of Long Beach (TALB) spent more than $200,000 to defeat me who they called the “Conservative Challenger.” They also claimed that I was “too MAGA for Long Beach” when those words just mean make America great again. In my opinion, a great slogan for a city in desperate need of conservative leadership.

As a local candidate lacking the same financial cushion that TALB had, I received amazing support from those that opposed their leftist agendas. This included local Long Beach churches such as Calvary Chapel Long Beach. People volunteered in so many ways such as making phone calls, knocking on doors, putting out lawn signs, creating flyers and attending my campaign events. During the campaign, I made new friends who ‘get it’ and I will consider running again when the opportunity arises because it’s just that important!

• Plant yard signs—Your neighbors know you follow politics and trust your judgment. The signs are seen throughout the day, reinforcing your support for candidates and/or propositions. If you know like-minded neighbors, ask them to display signs, too.
• Make phone calls or send text messages—You can go to headquarters or make calls from the convenience of your home. When so much is automated today, a human call or text can increase voter turnout. The candidate or county GOP would provide the list of people to call or text.
• Address postcards—Gather friends and have a writing party to address postcards provided by the campaign.
• Knock on doors—Think about how much it helps a candidate when you knock on a door and say, “Hi, I’m Mary Smith, who lives two blocks over on Green Street. I want to talk to you about _____.”
• Distribute literature—Ask your pastor, priest, or rabbi if you can set up a table with material in the parking lot. Anyone who is interested can talk to you. If not, they just keep walking. If your religious clergy doesn’t want to get politically involved in this indirect manner, just remind him or her that if communists take control of Congress, they are the first group that would be verbally and/or physically attacked.
• Register voters—Should your house of worship be against your offering information about candidates and/or propositions, offer to set up a voter registration table. Let them know that you would be registering voters of all parties—be they Republican, Democrat, or third-party.
• Letters to the editor—Those letters are very important because they tell an editor there is a lot of interest in a candidate or ballot proposition. Even if your letter isn’t published, it helps get other letters with the same position into the newspaper.
• Write news releases—Even if you aren’t a professional writer, there are templates online for releases about candidates and upcoming events.
• Create flyers—If you are creative, offer to make flyers for upcoming events.
• Social media comments—On a regular basis, include a comment about why you support certain candidates and/or propositions. People who follow you want to hear what you have to say.
• Social media photos—If you go to an event for a proposition or attend an event for a candidate, take photos and post them on your social media accounts. Include a link to their websites so people can obtain more information.
• Distribute material at a supermarket or coffee shop—Set up a table near, but not blocking, the entrance to distribute material. (Check with the city about the rules, as the store manager might tell you to disperse when legally you have the right to be there.)
• Register voters at a rally by a busy intersection—Even a handful of people waving American flags and holding signs will get drivers’ attention. Bring materials for those who walk by. If your city has a popular location, that is the perfect place. Otherwise, find a busy intersection near a shopping center. Register voters—be they Republican, Democrat, or third-party.
• Host a meet-and-greet in your backyard—Set up some chairs, put out water and cookies, and have the candidate(s) speak to your neighbors about their campaigns. You can increase attendance by also addressing propositions on the ballot.
• Community calendar—Find out about community events that will be held in September and October where you could have a booth to answer questions, distribute material, and register voters. If organizers don’t want a political booth at the event, you can:
  • Place material on nearby parked cars.
  • Walk around the event handing out material.
  • Walk around wearing a hat and T-shirt promoting your candidate and/or proposition.
• Be a poll watcher—Volunteering at the polls and at the registrar of voters’ office is extremely important, especially if you have concerns about election integrity.

Whether you work with your county GOP or go directly to the candidate’s campaign or the organization behind a proposition, everyone can do something. What is your something?

Robin M. Itzler is a regular contributor to American Thinker. She is the founder and editor of Patriot Neighbors, a free weekly national newsletter. Robin can be reached at RobinItzler@yahoo.com.

Result: ‘Race-obsessed thinking reduces America to intersectional classifications of oppressed and oppressor’

By Kenin M. Spivak, Real Clear Wire

Although the 14^th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and civil rights laws dating back to 1866 prohibit nearly all racial preferences, most Americans oppose these preferences, and Donald Trump was elected vowing to eliminate DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) – progressives won’t give up.

Their race-obsessed thinking reduces America to intersectional classifications of oppressed and oppressor. This addled concept is a self-defeating dialectic in which no amount of progress on race relations is ever enough – or even acknowledged. Despite enormous advances, with the possible exception of Palestinians and transgender people, no group is seen as more oppressed and deserving of preferences than African Americans.

In 2025, President Trump issued executive orders that revoked President Biden’s whole-of-government mandates interweaving DEI into all facets of the federal government. Since then, the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department under Harmeet Dhillon has filed numerous administrative actions and lawsuits to end racial preferences that disadvantage whites, and some universities, corporations, and charities have limited their DEI programs. Conversely, many universities have defied the Supreme Court’s 2023 holding in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard by renaming or reformulating their DEI programs. Some are using a loophole in the SFFA decision that acknowledged colleges may consider how an applicant’s race affected his life.

In just the last three months, the Justice Department announced at least 25 investigations, lawsuits, and settlements involving allegedly unlawful racial preferences by the College of William & Mary, Duke University, a Jersey City college prep course, City University of New York (CUNY), the state of Minnesota, the city of Evanston, Illinois, Arizona State University, UC Davis Medical School, UC San Diego Medical School, and 15 other medical schools.

A State Department internal review announced last week found that the Biden administration required foreign service officers to read materials on critical race theory, slavery reparations, anti-racism, and so-called “white fragility.” To be eligible for promotion, they had to discuss DEI with foreign counterparts to demonstrate “allyship.” They were trained on how to talk about “Black Lives Matter” and “systemic racism” in foreign languages, and to use progressive-approved terminology. The State Department claims that it has finally “put an end” to these practices.

Then, last month, a federal judge in California ruled that the Departments of Homeland Security, Justice and Interior exceeded their authority by imposing conditions ending DEI in grants to California cities. Defending Education, an education watchdog, found that America’s two leading teachers’ unions, the National Education Association and American Federation of Teachers are embedding DEI principles into policies for classroom use of AI. Numerous companies, such as Apple, Microsoft, Costco, Delta, and Cisco, openly continue their DEI programs, and the pace of litigation shows that many other companies and institutions covertly do so.

In 1996, California stunned the nation when 55% of voters approved Proposition 209, which amended the state’s constitution to prohibit public institutions from considering race, sex, or ethnicity in employment, contracting, and education. In 2020, Democrats unsuccessfully sought to repeal Prop 209. California next tried to require public companies to include blacks and other “underrepresented” minorities on their boards. The California courts struck that down. Now, California is moving toward authorizing reparations for its black residents.

A decade after ratification of the 14^th Amendment, the Supreme Court declared that the purpose of the Equal Protection Clause is that “the law in the States shall be the same for the black as for the white; that all persons, whether colored or white, shall stand equal before the laws of the States.” Progressives don’t care.

On Real America’s “Get Real,” RealClear publisher David DesRosiers seeks common ground across the political spectrum. One progressive panelist recently explained that blacks require preferences because it’s not “what you know” but “who you know.” Whites know all the right people, but blacks do not. What a dated perspective. How patronizing of blacks. How wrong.

More than half of all blacks in major metropolitan areas live in the suburbs, and their children are educated in suburban schools. About 12% of the students in Ivy League colleges are black, even after SFFA. There are 61 black members in the House (14%), five black senators (5%), two Supreme Court justices (22%), and about 184 black federal judges (8%). Blacks comprise about 10% of first year medical school students, 8% of law school students, 2% of Fortune 500 corporate CEOs, and 13% of all Americans.

I am confident that most of these people know someone who can help them and their families, as do black professional athletes, artists, and actors, as well as more than 1,000 African-American mayors, 1,000 state legislators, 14 billionaires and about 1.4 million black millionaires.

While listening to the panelist, I thought about the middle-class neighborhood in Brooklyn where I grew up. My neighbors were policemen, firemen, teachers, and plumbers. Good people. Not one of them was in a position to help me in my career, or introduce me to someone who did. I made my way with hard work and some luck, but never with help from anyone I knew growing up. Of course, I received support from people I met along the way at Columbia University and during my career, as did my black colleagues. It’s called “networking,” not racism.

More than half of all blacks in major metropolitan areas live in the suburbs, and their children are educated in suburban schools. About 12% of the students in Ivy League colleges are black, even after SFFA. There are 61 black members in the House (14%), five black senators (5%), two Supreme Court justices (22%), and about 184 black federal judges (8%). Blacks comprise about 10% of first year medical school students, 8% of law school students, 2% of Fortune 500 corporate CEOs, and 13% of all Americans.

I am confident that most of these people know someone who can help them and their families, as do black professional athletes, artists, and actors, as well as more than 1,000 African-American mayors, 1,000 state legislators, 14 billionaires and about 1.4 million black millionaires.

While listening to the panelist, I thought about the middle-class neighborhood in Brooklyn where I grew up. My neighbors were policemen, firemen, teachers, and plumbers. Good people. Not one of them was in a position to help me in my career, or introduce me to someone who did. I made my way with hard work and some luck, but never with help from anyone I knew growing up. Of course, I received support from people I met along the way at Columbia University and during my career, as did my black colleagues. It’s called “networking,” not racism.

Yes, affluent people know more of the “right people” than poor people, and have other advantages as well. Children from poor and low-income families typically face many obstacles due to their socioeconomic status. They often attend inferior K-12 schools, and have less time for homework because of jobs or chores. They are less likely to benefit from two actively involved parents and receive, on average, less guidance and assistance.

Students from families in the bottom 25% income bracket comprise only 3% of enrollment in our most competitive colleges, while those from the top 25% comprise 72%. Studies show that high-achieving, low-income children who have lower GPAs and SAT scores than affluent children achieve college grades and graduation rates at the same level as affluent students. Their scores can be “normed” for these differences, even without special programs.

Blacks are more likely to be poor than whites, and consequently, would disproportionately benefit from this approach. That’s fine with me – and, more importantly, with the Constitution. Racial preferences are unconstitutional, illegal and immoral; helping low-income Americans is not.

I defy any children of Michelle Obama, Eric Holder, Jeh Johnson, Beyonce, or Ibram X. Kendi to deny that they have every advantage, including a terrific education and a network of contacts that millions of white Americans lack.

More than once, the U.S. Supreme Court has observed that “distinctions between citizens solely because of their ancestry are by their very nature odious to a free people. As Chief Justice John Roberts declared, “the way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”

When the Constitution, federal laws and opinion align, progressives should respect our values. Here, that would mean restoring equality and the dignity of blacks by ending the disgrace of DEI.

World Net Daily

This article was originally published by RealClearPolitics and made available via RealClearWire.

A GHOST WRITER is haunting the English language. The linguistic spectre can turn its hand to prose, poetry, journalese and corporate jargon. It is frightfully versatile: you can get it to mimic Shakespeare’s sonnets or a schlocky beach read; Ernest Hemingway’s taut prose or the office-printer manual. It is frightfully fast, churning out thousands of words a minute. (Hemingway rarely produced as many in a day, and required much more booze.) Wordsmiths are spooked.

AI writing is everywhere. It is in your inbox and on your LinkedIn feed. It is all over the internet, drafting more than a third of new websites by one count. Large language models (LLMs) are helping students write essays and probably helping scientists write papers. Some allege AI-generated prose won the Commonwealth Short Story prize this year, with judges praising its “quiet authority”. (The Commonwealth Foundation denied the claim.)

LLMs have stylistic quirks. They are thought to maximise the use of long em-dashes—and the use of words like “maximise”. They like to “deep dive” (and, better yet, “delve”) into the “rich tapestry” of the world. AI writing is not about a single word or phrase, but a rich tapestry of things.

Spotting AI texts can be tricky. This is in part because you need evidence beyond a few words or dashes: claiming that a text is by an LLM because it uses the word “delve” is like claiming one is by Jane Austen because it uses “imprudence”. Bots also write in slightly different ways.

There is no single style of AI writing, explains Karolina Rudnicka, a linguist at the University of Gdansk in Poland, just as there is no single style of human writing. Writers have idiosyncrasies—Emily Dickinson, for instance, loved em-dashes—and bots may do, too. But there are a few ways to identify LLM-generated text.

One is to use detection algorithms that are trained to spot the texture of human or AI prose. Pangram, a leading firm, claims to have 99.98% accuracy. (It has partnered with Substack, a blogging platform, on such a tool.)

Detectors, however, are black-box algorithms that can give false positives. They do not give reasons for why they reach their conclusions.

Researchers have also tried scouring texts for suspicious words or comparing papers from before and after LLMs were made available to the public. But these approaches have drawbacks too, not least because it is hard to disentangle AI quirks from other language trends.

You can discover AI’s hallmarks by comparing the writing of man and machine. To do this you need a baseline that is distinctive and familiar. The Economist turned to prose that we’re sure is human and that readers will recognise: our own. We designed a study to ask top LLMs—OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude, Google’s Gemini and xAI’s Grok—to write versions of our articles without consulting the web. (As a prompt, we gave them the AI-generated summaries that we have experimentally added to some of our articles.)

This gave us a corpus of human and AI creations and we compared them across 55,940 sentences and 1.2m words. To make sure we were detecting AI quirks rather than our own, we also checked the AI texts against journalism from CNN, the New York Times and the Washington Post. Excerpts from hit novels published between 1950 and 2022 offered another test.

Our findings are surprising. AI prose is distinguishable by word and punctuation choice as well as sentence and paragraph structure. But its hallmarks are not what you might expect, partly because its writing style has changed with software updates. That does not mean that LLMs are great writers: their prose lacks lucidity and elegance and is often formulaic. So those aspiring to be impressive (human) storytellers should avoid the following peculiarities in their own prose.

The Economist

Sweden is putting books, handwriting, and human attention back at the center of education—and reminding the rest of us that technology should serve children, not master them.

For years, parents were told the future of education was digital. Out went textbooks. In came tablets. Out went handwriting. In came keyboards. Children barely old enough to tie their shoes were handed screens and told this was progress. Sweden embraced that revolution more enthusiastically than most countries. Now Sweden is hitting the brakes.

Not, as some viral posts claim, by “banning digital classrooms.” The truth is actually more interesting. Sweden is deliberately restoring books, handwriting, and traditional learning while reducing unnecessary screen exposure. The government has invested hundreds of millions of kronor in textbooks and literature and says digital learning tools should be introduced only when they help rather than hinder learning.

Why?

Because after years of digitizing childhood, Sweden started asking the question we should have asked before we began: Is all this technology actually helping children learn? The research suggests the answer is not always.

Multiple meta-analyses have found a measurable advantage to reading on paper. A 2019 systematic review by Virginia Clinton examined 33 experimental studies involving 2,799 participants and found that reading from screens negatively affected comprehension compared with reading on paper, particularly for informational texts. Readers also judged their own understanding more accurately when reading from paper.

Another 2018 meta-analysis examining 17 studies similarly concluded that reading comprehension was better on paper than on screens.

That does not mean digital learning cannot work. Research also finds that thoughtfully designed digital books and student-centered technology can improve learning. The issue is not technology versus no technology. It is whether we are using technology because it genuinely teaches better or simply because we can.

And then there is attention.

According to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) analysis of the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2022, 36.9 percent of Swedish students reported that they were distracted by digital resources in most or every mathematics lesson, compared with an OECD average of 30.5 percent.

Nearly 30 percent reported distraction caused by other students’ devices.

Swedish students who reported frequent distraction from classmates’ digital use scored 16 points lower in mathematics, 15 points lower even after socioeconomic differences were taken into account. The OECD cautions that this is an association, not proof of causation, but the relationship is significant.

Sweden’s own education authorities have reached a similarly nuanced conclusion: moderate educational use can coexist with strong performance, while extensive non-learning digital use is associated with poorer results.

Then there is handwriting.

We have treated handwriting almost like an obsolete mechanical skill—a quaint predecessor to the keyboard. The brain appears to disagree.

Research comparing handwriting and typing has found differences in the neural networks involved in learning, memory, and letter recognition. Writing requires us to process information differently than simply tapping keys.

And perhaps that points to the larger issue. We are not simply teaching children information. We are building brains. We are teaching human beings how to concentrate, wrestle with an idea, remember something, imagine something, sit quietly with difficulty and remain there long enough for a thought to become their own.

Those things require something our digital world is increasingly designed to interrupt: attention.

A book does not flash. A pencil does not send a notification. A piece of paper does not offer another video when the work becomes difficult. There is no algorithm waiting on the next page to discover what will keep a child clicking. There is simply the child and the words. The child and the thought. The child and that extraordinary developing mind learning how to stay with something.

That isn’t antiquated. That is education.

Perhaps Sweden has stumbled onto something much larger than a debate over tablets in classrooms. For two decades, we have behaved as though every technological advancement must automatically represent human progress. We asked what technology could give our children without spending nearly enough time asking what it might take away. Because childhood contains only so many hours.

An hour staring at a screen is an hour not necessarily spent turning pages, writing, drawing, building, talking, exploring, staring out a window, inventing a game, or being gloriously bored enough to discover an imagination.

Technology absolutely belongs in education. Computers belong there. AI will belong there too. But they should be tools. They should never become the environment in which childhood itself is lived.

There are some things civilization should be very careful about surrendering in the name of progress: books, handwriting, conversation, imagination, silence, and boredom—and the magnificent human ability to concentrate deeply enough to learn something, create something, or discover something no one has thought of before.

Sweden is putting books back into children’s hands. Maybe the rest of us should pay attention. Because the greatest danger was never that our children would fail to master technology.

They will. The danger is that somewhere along the way, technology will master them first.

Maureen Steele, American Greatness