It all stems from an already absurd program to force utilities to set aside hundreds of millions of dollars to be awarded to contractors that the state certifies as “gay.”
No, this is not a parody. This is real life.
Now, let’s leave aside the fact that gay men earn the highest income of any group, and that gay households correspondingly are much wealthier and have more buying power than any other demographic group. There is even a Wikipedia on the gay wage gap.
Still, gays are a “protected class,” and are lumped in with other categories of minorities, and we are talking about California after all. Even if you thought set-asides were good policy—they are not, and they are also routinely abused by hiring a front man or woman to get access to a contract—it’s kinda bizarre that gays would be included, given their advantage in income.
Under a series of Democratic governors, the program has expanded to include gay-owned businesses. In September 2014, then-Governor Jerry Brown signed legislation requiring CPUC to recognize “LGBT-owned businesses” as eligible for supplier-diversity benefits. Five years later, Governor Gavin Newsom expanded the program further, “encouraging” other companies involved in the energy sector to award contracts to gay-owned firms.
In the years that followed, CPUC faced activist pressure as it implemented the gay expansion. BuildOUT California, a since-rebranded LGBT building-industry organization, sent a letter to the commission arguing that “homophobia” existed within “the ranks of the utility companies.” The state’s legislative LGBTQ caucus suggested in a 2021 letter that even considering lower gay-procurement targets was “an insult to the LGBTQ+ community.”
By 2022, CPUC had fully implemented the expansion. In practice, this meant establishing a “goal” for utility companies with annual revenues exceeding $25 million to buy things from state-certified LGBT businesses: 0.5 percent of procurement in 2022; 1 percent in 2023; and 1.5 percent in 2024 and beyond. If “large” CPUC-regulated utilities met these “goals” in 2024, they would have sent roughly $633 million to LGBT-owned firms.
This scheme raises an obvious question: How does a business qualify as officially gay? Paperwork. Supplier Clearinghouse, a group that certifies firms for the CPUC program, features a list of qualifications linked on its website. Applicants can secure certification by providing a letter from an “LGBT organization” attesting to their sexual preferences; proof that a newspaper identified them as “LGBT”; or three letters from “personal contacts” written “on company letterhead” attesting to their homosexual orientation. Corporate officials who “falsely represent” their business as gay face up to a year in county jail.
Supplier Clearinghouse also accepts gay-certification letters from the National LGBTQ+ & Allied Chamber of Commerce. The chamber has its own list of accepted documents, including human resources complaints or police records claiming LGBT discrimination. As NGLCC states on its website, “Certification is a journey, not a destination.”
“Gay certification letters.” There is now such a thing, believe it or not.
No word on whether you can use the George Costanza method of proving one’s sexual identity. Not that there is anything wrong with that.
Of course, George wanted to prove he was not gay, but it could work the other way around, you know. And Scott Weiner would probably volunteer as a “gay certifier.”
I suggest that we expand the requirements for other groups getting set-asides. Perhaps do genetic testing for black and indigenous people, awarding people with greater or lesser benefits depending on quanta of different racial characteristics as revealed in their genes. Hispanics could get their benefits based on how much European heritage they have.
Otherwise you get the Elizabeth Warren or Rachel Dolezal problem, right? Genetic tests for all!
I’m not sure how you tell whether a person is a woman anymore, since there is no agreed upon definition. I wonder if there is soon to be a certification process for womanhood, or does checking a box for that characteristic suffice? If you fake being gay, why can’t you fake being a woman?
In any case, I am glad to know that at least one state is working hard to ensure that power is only delivered by the “right” demographic mix of contractors. The fact that many wildfires are started by failing PG&E power lines is a small price to pay for that comfort.
La Reconquista remains a fringe movement, but its activists dream of reclaiming the American Southwest through demographics, politics, and cultural power.
A comprehensive analysis.
La Reconquista is a fringe irredentist ideology promoted by some Chicano and Mexican American activists. It calls for the cultural, demographic, or political “reclamation” of the U.S. Southwest, which Mexico lost after the Mexican-American War.
Proponents view these lands as “stolen” and often invoke the mythical Aztec homeland of Aztlán, advocating non-violent means such as mass immigration, high birth rates, and cultural dominance to achieve de facto control or even separatism.
Emerging from the 1960s Chicano movement, it remains marginal but very active in certain left-wing circles in the U.S.
Let’s explore this political movement in detail.
Origins and History
The word Reconquista historically refers to the medieval Christian reconquest of the Iberian Peninsula from Muslim Moors between the eighth and 15th centuries. In contemporary American political discourse, the term has been repurposed to describe a Mexican and Chicano nationalist strategy to demographically, culturally, and politically reclaim the American Southwest—specifically, the territories ceded to the United States following the Mexican-American War of 1846–48. Those territories encompass present-day California, Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, Utah, Colorado, and Texas.
The ideological foundation rests on the claim that these lands were “stolen” from Mexico and that the descendants of those who held them have a birthright claim to their eventual return—whether through formal secession, political control, or cultural dominance. This idea exists on a broad spectrum, from academic Chicano Studies discourse to explicit radical separatist ideology to what investigative journalists and national security researchers argue is a deliberate strategy by the Mexican government.
The Ideological Core
The organized ideological expression of Reconquista in the United States traces primarily to MEChA (Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán), a Chicano student organization founded in 1969 out of the broader Chicano civil rights movement.
MEChA’s national constitution is explicit about its intent: “The Chicano and Chicana students of Aztlán must take upon themselves the responsibilities to promote Chicanismo within the community, politicizing our Raza with an emphasis on indigenous consciousness to continue the struggle for the self-determination of the Chicano people for the purpose of liberating Aztlán.”
By supporting continued high levels of Mexican immigration to the United States, MEChA hopes to flood the Southwestern U.S. with enough immigrants—legal and illegal—to establish a numerical majority and achieve, by sheer weight of numbers, the repartition of that region. This reconquista, or reconquest, would represent the fulfillment of El Plan de Aztlán’s credo: “Where we are a majority we will control; where we are a minority we will represent a pressure group; nationally, we represent one party: La Familia de Raza.”
MEChA’s motto is “Por La Raza todo. Fuera de La Raza nada” (For our race, everything. For those outside our race, nothing)—and its manifesto reads in part: “With our heart in our hands and our hands in the soil, we declare the independence of our mestizo nation.”
MEChA has an extensive presence as a student organization, with some 300 chapters in high schools and colleges throughout the United States. Underneath this racial agenda is a radical leftist political agenda that shares with socialists and communists the goal of destroying the United States. MEChA presents a version of Marxism with a racist bent.
The territory MEChA and allied groups claim as “Aztlán“—the mythical ancestral homeland of the Aztec people—is described variously. Students in some school programs are taught that Aztlán consisted of the states of parts of Oklahoma, and the entirety of Texas, New Mexico, California, Arizona, Utah, and Nevada.
Some MEChA voices have gone further than secession. The next phase of the La Raza movement would involve the ethnic cleansing, or expulsion, of Americans of European, African, and Asian descent from Aztlán. As Miguel Perez of Cal State-Northridge’s MEChA chapter once put it, after the establishment of Aztlán, non-Chicanos “would have to be expelled” because “you have to keep power.”
It bears emphasis that these are the most extreme voices within MEChA—not the position of mainstream Latino advocacy organizations—but they are documented, not fabricated.
Domestic Activist Organization
National Council of La Raza / UnidosUS
The National Council of La Raza was for decades the largest Latino civil rights organization in the United States. It rebranded as “UnidosUS” in 2017, a move widely interpreted as an effort to shed the “La Raza” label’s association with ethnic nationalist rhetoric. Behind the National Council de La Raza’s respectable veneer, critics point to the organization’s support of secondary “La Raza” organizations such as MEChA, which has spread across the entire U.S., gaining footholds in colleges and universities and promoting racial supremacist La Raza ideologies and the reconquista agenda of the mythical Aztlán.
In practice, NCLR/UnidosUS has functioned primarily as a mainstream civil rights and policy advocacy organization focused on education, housing, health care, and immigration reform. Its connection to the more radical elements of the movement is through funding and institutional support for affiliated organizations, not through explicit endorsement of separatist goals.
CHIRLA (Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles)
CHIRLA is among the most operationally significant immigrant rights organizations in the country, and its ties to the Mexican consular network are directly documented. The administrative officer of the Consulado de Mexico in Los Angeles and his staff participate in “strategy sessions” with the 125-member Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights (CHIRLA). The consulate is listed as a “sponsor” of CHIRLA along with MALDEF and the ACLU.
In recent years, CHIRLA has moved into direct action against federal immigration enforcement. CHIRLA partnered with SEIU and other groups in January 2025 to form the Los Angeles Rapid Response Network, a coalition that deploys activists to track ICE operations on foot. That network was implicated in the Los Angeles riots of June 2025. CHIRLA created an anti-ICE network that led to a union leader’s arrest and encouraged supporters to arrive at a federal building for a rally that turned violent. The chaos spread across central California for days and caused damages totaling somewhere between $32 million and $1 billion, according to local and federal agencies. House and Senate lawmakers responded by announcing investigations into CHIRLA, though these have produced no findings or legislative reforms.
MALDEF (Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund)
MALDEF operates as the primary legal arm of the Latino advocacy movement, deploying litigation as its primary tool. Its recent activities include challenging ICE detentions of U.S. citizens, opposing restrictive immigration enforcement, seeking to intervene in a Missouri-led challenge to the Census on behalf of Latino organizations and voters, and filing civil rights lawsuits on behalf of detained immigrants. Its methods are institutionally conventional—federal courts, amicus briefs, civil rights claims—but its consistent strategic alignment is with the maximally permissive end of immigration policy.
LULAC (League of United Latin American Citizens)
NGOs like the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) serve as advocate groups within the broader movement, supporting political activity and the election of individuals sympathetic to the cause. LULAC is among the oldest Latino civil rights organizations in the U.S., founded in 1929, and while mainstream in orientation, it consistently advocates for immigration liberalization and has been critical of enforcement-focused policy.
Concluding Thoughts
This ends Part I of this two-part series. Part II will cover the following topics: the movement and Mexican consulates in the U.S.; La Reconquista goals and tactics employed; the movement’s ties to the U.S. political left and Democrat Party; foreign support and NGO networks; and a discussion of possible future scenarios and their potential for success.
British tyranny is so repulsive that the British people owe it to themselves to overthrow their government masters. It has been two-hundred-fifty years since America’s Declaration of Independence recognized the Crown system as a threat to Americans’ lives and liberties. English-speaking peoples still suffering under the British yoke should follow suit.
Prime Minister Keir Starmer announced a near-total ban on social media for children under sixteen years old. Ten of the most popular social media platforms are now age-restricted, with the toxic-leftist Bluesky platform a notable exception. The government claims to be “protecting children” from online harm. That’s a lie. If the British government cared about protecting British children, government ministers and police forces would not have covered up Islamic rape gangs targeting children for three-plus decades. The British government would not censor online reporting of foreigners murdering young Brits. The British government has systematically chosen to sacrifice the United Kingdom’s children.
This online “safety” measure must be understood, then, as a ruse meant to expand the government’s control over online information. Australia, New Zealand, and Canada have similar surveillance systems in place — all ostensibly erected to “protect the children” but designed, in reality, to control the speech of citizens. In these countries, the only way to communicate with other citizens on social media platforms is to prove your age by proving your identity. Mandatory digital identification systems are disguised as child welfare checks. The Brits and their Commonwealth vassals have built a surveillance system to monitor citizens’ thoughts, censor unapproved speech, and promote official propaganda.
Tyrant Starmer is pushing this online surveillance infrastructure while citizens in the U.K. are protesting and rioting against the British government’s murderous mass immigration policies — which have invited foreign rapists and killers to overrun the kingdom and slaughter citizens.
Just as the unelected European Commission ruling the continent continues to cover up immigrant crimes and censor citizens’ online discussion of these ongoing threats, the British government is more concerned about punishing native Brits for noticing that they are under attack than repelling violent invaders from Britain’s shores. (If Keir Starmer had been in Winston Churchill’s shoes during the Nazi Blitz, the British government would have surely helped the Germans cover up the bombings while blaming all the destruction on British citizens!)
Starmer’s government spies run a propaganda outfit that controls all public “narratives” regarding immigrant crime against native Brits. The group of spies write and release misleading statements, presented as coming from the families of victims, that are designed to downplay rapes, murders, and other violent incidents. While these spies use propaganda and censorship to cover up serious crimes committed by immigrants, they simultaneously engage in information warfare against British citizens by branding legitimate public concerns over safety as “disinformation,” “far-right racism,” “violence,” and “hate speech.” This spy group in charge of monitoring and shaping the public’s thoughts has flagged “reading Shakespeare, Chaucer or Milton, or books documenting grooming gang scandals as potential indicators of far-Right susceptibility.” The British spies — a veritable Gestapo fabricating public “truth” — plant media stories, steer online discussions, and deploy operatives to disrupt or direct public protests.
The British government claims the power to block “false information” that is “legal but harmful.” On its website, the British government defines “extreme right-wing terrorist ideology” to include the belief that “‘Western culture’ is under threat from mass migration and a lack of integration by certain ethnic and cultural groups.” British Technology Secretary Liz Kendall claims that it is “illegal” to promote “disorder” on social media. Meanwhile, Starmer’s government tyrants are instructing journalists how to report immigrant attacks on British citizens. These are the actions of dictators who do not care about “protecting the children.”
Surveying the daily violent crime by immigrants and the British government’s ongoing cover-ups, former Prime Minister Liz Truss says there is a government campaign to “undermine the family” and the “nation state.” She says that forced diversity has corrupted the institutions and that government ministers suppress information and attack citizens while protecting barbarians. She concludes that mass migration and government control over information are being used as weapons to destroy Western civilization.
For years, we Americans have watched the evils of globalism expand both at home and abroad in the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and most of continental Europe. Branded by its international supporters as some kind of final, utopian stage of human governance, globalism is just another Frankensteinian beast — created from all the worst parts of Marxist-communism, Leninism, Maoism, fascism, Nazism, authoritarianism, oligarchy, corporatism, elitism, and central bank hegemony. Globalism is totalitarianism. Its god is government, although it has created special liturgical rituals regarding an imaginary “climate change” apocalypse meant to scare the world’s peasants into accepting the supremacy of government authority and bureaucrats’ (globalism’s “priests”) centralized power over all economic transactions.
Globalist governments seek total control over the people, and every policy that globalist governments shove down our throats is meant to advance this goal of total control. COVID was not a health emergency. It was a government excuse to roll out digital identifications, mandatory pharmaceutical injections, “vaccine” passports capable of monitoring real-time citizen movements, and online censorship. It was a government program meant to condition citizens to accept that government bureaucrats should be empowered with limitless authorities — including the discretion to regulate church services, close and bankrupt businesses, lockdown citizens in their homes, separate family members from dying loved ones, and quarantine citizens for non-compliance. The “global warming/cooling/climate change/extreme weather” hobgoblin is a government-designed scare tactic identical to the COVID “emergency.” The only difference is that the “global warming” fearmongers have been telling us that we have twelve years left to live for the last century, while the COVID fearmongers told us that we had twelve days to live unless we complied. Manufacturing compliance was and remains globalist governments’ only strategic objective.
Do you believe that marriage is an institution recognizing the sacred union between one man and one woman? Do you believe that men and women are biologically different? Do you believe that mass immigration is a threat to national security? Do you believe “multiculturalism” and forced “diversity” destroy excellence, discount merit, and weaken the naturally salubrious bonds of common cultural heritage? Do you believe that every human has a God-given right to self-defense? Do you believe that Christians should remain faithful to their beliefs in both their public and private lives? If so, globalist governments see you as an “extremist,” “right-winger,” “religious fanatic,” “terrorist,” and “enemy of the State.” Your thoughts will be condemned. Your speech will be censored. You will be fined and prosecuted. You will go to prison for your beliefs.
Globalism’s ruling elites lust for wealth, power, and total control over the public. Their lust will never be sated. They wish for a small collection of government and economic masters to subjugate as much of the planet’s population as possible as serfs. Globalism is a conquering empire. Its oligarchy of central bank popes, chosen political governors, corporate monarchs, and techno-fascist-brownshirt-bureaucrats are modern-day slavers and colonizers. Instead of putting us in chains and whipping us when we “misbehave,” they put us in a lifetime of debt and prosecute us for expressing opinions contrary to official government orthodoxy.
AThird-world barbarism is exploding across Europe. Official Eurostat numbers show that sexual violence offenses in the European Union have doubled over the last decade. Rapes skyrocketed 150%. Knife crimes and murders are off the charts. Foreign nationals who have immigrated into Europe are responsible for roughly fifty percent of violent crime.
The best way for Americans to fight encroaching globalism over here is to support British patriots in their fight against globalism over there. As Benjamin Franklin persuasively argued, “We must all hang together, or we shall all hang separately.”
These “stars” live in rarefied neighborhoods and have full-time security when they venture out. And yet because they subscribe to the New York Times, they think they are our benefactors.
The once-revered and talented actor Robert DeNiro lost his humanity years ago now, during President Trump’s first term.
He transformed himself from a beloved actor, a great actor, into a hateful, whiny, disturbed man who, by now, no one but the most Trump-deranged wants to hear speak, act or blather on and on about how he can’t love this country as long as Trump is our president.
The same is true of Jane Fonda, Julia Roberts, Bette Midler, etc., all the moonbat celebrities who think we care what they think about anything.
They spend their lives entertaining us by acting in fictional roles as fictional people. They are good at their jobs, most of them. But that talent they have, whether God-given or learned does not qualify them to tell us what to think or for whom to vote. They live in bubbles of wealth. They often endure the fawning admiration of crowds of people they do not know but who derive joy by sharing their lives vicariously.
Jane Fonda has a long and storied record of hating America; her activities would have shocked and embarrassed her father who was indeed a great actor. He was a Democrat who enlisted to fight in WWII and served in the Navy for three years. If he were alive today, he would surely be a Republican.
The Democrat party of today loathes the military and considers the people who volunteer to be a part of it to be tools of the right.
Nothing could be further from the truth. These young people who join any branch of the military today are heroes, far braver than any of the leftist cowards who love to malign them.
Our Democrat party has devolved into something Henry Fonda would not recognize today but for their communist tendencies. His daughter Jane was and remains a good actress but, like DeNiro, she is intellectually devoid of any gratitude for her success, fame and wealth. People like DeNiro, Jane Fonda, George Clooney (he’s especially dumb), and Bette Midler have not an iota of an idea of how regular Americans live, work, raise their families, to say the least. These “stars” live in rarefied neighborhoods, have full-time security at their homes and when they venture out. And yet because they subscribe to The Nation and the New York Times, they think they are our benefactors. They’re not. They are fools.
Any sentient American paying attention knows that our Democrat party has morphed into a Marxist/communist organization intent upon destroying America as founded and, like all wanna-be oligarchs, control the rest of us since they, their children and grandchildren are financially secure for generations. Trump is the only president in decades, perhaps since Lincoln, who actually cared about the American people, especially working people. The left, on the other hand, cares so little for our native citizens, they import millions of migrants to take their jobs because they can pay them less. As in the U.K., migrants are elevated to some kind of preferential status and American citizens are expendable, deemed racist if they complain.
DeNiro, Fonda, et. al. are nothing but rich, pretend know-nothings who want to be relevant in their dotage. They are not relevant. Not many people showed up at their “event” in opposition to the MMA show at the White House which was a resounding, patriotic success.
Oh, how the lefties hated that! It was everything they hate about the Americans they despise, mock and condemn. Wrestling! OMG! How banal, how repugnant. How beneath “us,” the blessed elites of this blighted nation say. Such is the story of the once-great, now pathetic DeNiro and his angry pals.
No American citizen can deny the problems we live with and endure – massive homelessness, for example. In California, billions of dollars have been allocated to alleviate that disaster and the money has disappeared into parts unknown, perhaps Newsom’s offshore accounts?
Our once-great system of education has been hijacked by the left for at least three generations now, so there are three generations who know nothing but anti-Americanism. The country has been wracked by anti-family nonsense, a climate change hoax of the first order, the horrors of gender ideology that has destroyed thousands of lives, a fake pandemic with its toxic vaccines, a deep state that is determined to take over the country via censorious and deceptive means no matter who is elected president.
Our cabal of deluded actors who think they are relevant are not. They are just sad and pathetic. Perhaps they should all stay home in their gated mansions and be thankful for their lot in life and not tell the rest of us what a terrible country this is. Despite our many and serious problems, the U.S, is still the greatest nation on the planet. Just ask the visiting World Cup players and fans.
Back in November, I wrote “Is Texas About to Fall to Islam?,” raising concerns about Sharia-influenced projects, parallel societies, and the gradual erosion of Texas culture. Things looked worrying then. But by mid-2026, the situation has changed. Texas isn’t falling; it’s fighting back. With strong Republican leadership, active grassroots groups, and clear signals from primary voters, the state has moved from defense to offense. What began as anxiety has led to real policy wins, election results, and organized resistance. The Lone Star State is showing the rest of the country how to respond to theocratic overreach. Governor Greg Abbott acted quickly. Last September, he signed House Bill 4211, which targets what it calls “Sharia compounds”—residential setups built around religious law. The bill affected proposals like the East Plano Islamic Center’s large EPIC City plan north of Dallas, where critics were concerned about exclusionary housing rules based on faith and separate community norms that might conflict with Texas and U.S. law. The legislation requires clear disclosures about how these developments are managed, ensures disputes are handled in state courts, and prevents large-scale religious restrictions on sales. Abbott described it as a balance: protecting genuine religious freedom without allowing Sharia to be imposed on anyone.
In addition, Abbott’s team labeled CAIR and the Muslim Brotherhood as foreign terrorist organizations at the state level. This decision limits land deals and gives Attorney General Ken Paxton more tools for oversight. Paxton’s office has responded by investigating possible informal Sharia enforcement and providing guidance to sheriffs and prosecutors. Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick also introduced interim charges focused on keeping Sharia out of Texas.
Voters made their position clear. In the March 2026 Republican primary, Proposition 10, which calls for Texas to ban Sharia law, passed with almost 95% support. While it’s non-binding, this landslide result sends a strong message for the 2027 session: constitutional rules come first, with no exceptions for incompatible ideologies.
The campaigns took up this issue in earnest. Anti-Islamisation became a major theme in the primaries. For example, Bo French, the former Tarrant County GOP chair, is now heading to the Railroad Commission after his May runoff win. At CPAC Texas, he spoke on the “Don’t Sharia My Texas” panel and was direct, arguing that the problem goes beyond Sharia and includes Islam as a governmental system that does not fit the Constitution. French’s straightforward comments about the “Islamic invasion” and his plans to use his office to resist it clearly resonated with voters, even if it upset some in the establishment.
Other Texas candidates also spoke out. Aaron Reitz, running for Attorney General, focused on blocking the “invasion” of ideas he believes do not belong in Texas. State Senator Mayes Middleton and experienced politicians like Ken Paxton included warnings about no-go zones and parallel societies in their messages. These themes connected directly to border security and preserving Texas identity, energizing their supporters.
There is also the Sharia Free Texas Caucus, launched in early March by State Representatives Brent Money of Greenville and Brian Harrison of Midlothian. Modeled after a federal group that includes Texas congressmen like Keith Self and Chip Roy, it grew quickly from about 16 members to 38 Republican state representatives. This is a significant bloc in the House. Members include Daniel Alders, Janis Holt, Andy Hopper, Carrie Isaac, Mitch Little, Shelley Luther, Katrina Pierson, and Steve Toth. Their focus is clear: to educate people on why Sharia conflicts with the Constitution, to push for bans in housing and schools, and to strengthen Texas’s Judeo-Christian roots, while welcoming immigrants who want to become Texans.
This aligns with groups like True Texas Project and their “Don’t Sharia My Texas” campaign, as well as efforts to review school standards and emphasize American values. Court challenges against questionable projects also help maintain pressure.
Of course, there are challenges such as ongoing lawsuits, demographic changes, and critics who are quick to call out “Islamophobia.” But the direction is clear: from stopping EPIC City to the Proposition 10 landslide, Texas is choosing sovereignty, women’s safety, and basic liberty over quiet accommodation. My years tracking grooming gangs and parallel societies in the UK make this issue feel personal. Texas is showing that early, firm action can be effective. With the November midterms and the 2027 session approaching, staying vigilant will determine how far this momentum continues.
Texas is no longer on the defensive. It is starting to win, and it is a model worth watching.
Same-sex marriage is not on the rocks — yet. But the LGBT triumphalism of a few years ago is receding. Support for same-sex relationships is dropping, businesses are less inclined to pay for “pride” festivities, and Republican leaders are reclaiming June from the rainbow.
This wasn’t supposed to happen. The issue was supposed to be settled, with the rainbow triumphant and opposition receding to a few marginalized religious weirdos. But in the years since the Supreme Court invented a right to same-sex marriage in the Obergefell decision, the effects have become clear, and they aren’t what we were promised.
Same-sex marriage was sold to the public as loving and harmless. We were told that “love is love” and that “marriage equality” would have no negative effects on the rest of us. But the slope was slippery, and assurances of “live and let live” proved to be a lie.
There are two main causes why slippery slope warnings proved more prophetic than fallacious. First, there is the premise of same-sex marriage, which is that male and female don’t matter in marriage except for subjective preference. Objections to this are dismissed as bigotry. These ideas have consequences, and they have since been made manifest. The second (and related) cause of the slippery slope is that LGBT groups and their allies wanted far more than same-sex marriage. They weren’t going to put a ring on it and then declare victory and go home. Rather, everyone and everything, from schools to sports, had to bow to the rainbow flag.
The convergence of these factors was clear in the trans revolution that immediately followed Obergefell. Ideologically, transgender ideology is an obvious extension of the logic of same-sex marriage; if male and female don’t matter in marriage and parenthood, they don’t matter anywhere. And organizationally, the gay-rights movement had already spent years preparing to pivot to transgenderism after same-sex marriage.
So Americans learned that same-sex marriage was a bait and switch. It was promoted as a way to include same-sex couples in normal life, but instead, it unleashed radicalism into normal life. Democrats were, and still are, all in, from the topless trans activist shaking his fake breasts at the Biden White House, to putting men in women’s prisons, to advancing legislation that erases the words mother and father and replace them with “gestating parent” and “non-gestating parent.”
Likewise, polygamy, rebranded as polyamory, is not only promoted in left-wing media, but it is now being legally recognized in some deep-blue jurisdictions. Opponents of same-sex marriage were denounced as alarmist bigots for predicting this would happen; now The New York Times is reporting favorably as it happens.
As the radicalism intensified, so did efforts to punish dissent. They weren’t just going after the baker who didn’t want to do custom work for a same-sex wedding but after spas that wanted to keep naked men out of the women’s area. Rainbow woke made a lot of enemies out of normal people who are now determined that it must not regain power. And so some Republicans are starting to find their spines.
But it is not just post-Obergefell weirdness and wokeness that is turning Americans against same-sex marriage. Americans have also gained clarity about the ordinary evils of same-sex marriage, such as male homosexual couples buying babies via commercial surrogacy and intentionally depriving them of their mothers forever.
Pretending babies do not have mothers exemplifies the rejection of reality inherent in same-sex marriage. The basis for marriage as a social and legal institution is not adult sexual and romantic desires but the complementarity of male and female, a complementarity that gave each of us life. That is fundamental human reality, not irrational bigotry.
Marriage is rooted in human nature, and trying to have its benefits while denying that nature is harmful, individually and socially. Marriage is about the two halves of humanity coming together in committed relationships that continue the human species. It is both foundational to the good order and flourishing of society, and a source of some of the highest joys and greatest fulfillments possible in this life. And for Christians, it is also an image of our fulfilment with Christ in heaven.
Marriage encompasses everything from basic biological truths to the mysteries of the divine. But our culture has reduced it to a subjective expression of sexual and romantic partnership, dissolvable at will; marriage is just a contract — and not the hardest to get out of. This reductive view of marriage dispenses with both commitment and complementarity, which is to say, with the point of marriage.
The invention of same-sex marriage was not the primary, let alone only, cause of the decline in marriage. But it did make matters worse, and it is now an obstacle to getting back on track. We cannot restore a right understanding of marriage while pretending that sex, in every sense, is irrelevant to it.
Nathanael Blake is a senior contributor to The Federalist and a fellow in the Life and Family Initiative at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. He is the author of “Victims of the Revolution: How Sexual Liberation Hurts Us All” (Ignatius, 2025). children’s rights Law LGBT marriage
Concern is mounting that taxpayers could be left holding the bag if the Obama Presidential Center runs into financial trouble, as the foundation behind it has yet to establish a promised $470 million safety net to guard against a public bailout.
The scrutiny comes as a Fox News Digital investigation found multiple contractors and subcontractors claiming losses ranging from hundreds of thousands of dollars to millions on the project, with some alleging they remain locked in payment disputes and face financial ruin just days before the center’s grand opening.
Under its agreement with the city, the Obama Foundation pledged to create the fund, known as an endowment, as part of its 99-year deal to take control of the publicly owned 19.3-acre section of Jackson Park for a one-time payment of just $10.
So if they don’t create the fund, the city should rightfully get the wrecking ball out and get rid of the ugly monolith, because it’s nakedly violating its contract.
But that won’t happen so long as the city is run by Democrats.
That’s allowed the Obama team to conclude that there’s nothing they can’t get away with, including running out on their tab from contractors.
It has a million-dollar endowment on paper, and presumably still there if there’s no funny bookkeeping.
It pays Valerie Jarrett a minimum $740,000 per year salary. Its other former Obama administration staffers clock in at $400,000 to $600,000-plus salaries. It’s got money in the bank, plus big-dollar ticket fees for admission to the monolith.
Salaries and benefits soared from $18.5 million in 2018 to $43.7 million in 2024, as staffing expanded to 337 employees and annual revenue reached nearly $210 million.
But the little guy who smooths the cement or does the gardening or catering or windows and floors gets nothing, and as the video report notes, some of these small businesses are going bankrupt for not getting paid.
And the Obama center says nothing, effectively rendering these black contractors’ delivered work slavery, work for nothing. Work for ‘the honor’ of paying obeisance to The Won.
Something about that is just so … Democrat. Democrats expect others to do things for them for free, and like doing it. They have a special contempt for the little guy; the guys Obama has oleaginously praised with his forked tongue, with ‘work hard,’ and all that.
Somehow, he can’t be bothered to pay the help, unless a media spotlight is on them, and even then, not necessarily so. They just don’t value the work these people have done, nor do they value the work America has done. They pay themselves first and let the rest of the contributors twist in the wind.
It’s outrageous and this story ought to be better known.
California shows what happens when one party gains total control: soaring costs, shrinking opportunity, and a government that no longer serves its citizens.
By any measure, California is a failed state—and a national embarrassment.
Taxes? It has the highest income and gas taxes in the nation.
Roads? A Reason Foundation survey ranks it 49th among the states.
Mass flight? Between 250,000 and 350,000 more Californians leave the state than move in each year. Housing, gas, insurance, and electricity prices? The highest in the continental U.S.
Illegal aliens, the poor, the homeless, the foreign-born, and welfare recipients? The largest numbers in the U.S.
Public K–12 schools? Test scores in the bottom quartile.
Poverty? Twenty percent live below the poverty line.
So, what happened to the nation’s most richly naturally endowed—and once best governed—state?
The Left took total control—after millions of the embattled middle class fled. Millions more impoverished immigrants, legal and illegal, took their place. Left-wing Silicon Valley spawned some of the wealthiest elite liberal enclaves in the world.
The result was a neo-feudal society that was hardly democratic.
Millions of subsidized poor compose the bottom. A beleaguered middle continues to shrink. An ultra-rich apparat of left-wing coastal professionals and investors rules from the top.
As upper-bracket taxpayers fled, taxes rose on those who remained to fund expanding entitlements for newly arrived poor would-be residents. In turn, even more of the middle class left.
The remaining pyramidal economic structure ensured a Democratic monopoly—further entrenched by changing balloting laws, gerrymandering voting districts, vote harvesting, fueling public employee unions, and ignoring or undermining popular referenda.
In 2014, Californians voted for Proposition 1, a $7.5 billion water bond designed to solve the state’s chronic water storage deficit.
Included was $2.7 billion specifically designated for new reservoirs, as the last major reservoir had been built in 1980, when California had roughly half its current population.
Despite the people’s vote, bureaucracies, elected officials, and green activists blocked all new reservoir construction.
Adding insult to injury, Governor Gavin Newsom instead used $250 million from the Proposition 1 fund to blow up four dams on the Klamath River. They had once provided storage, electrical generation, recreation, and flood control.
Californians have twice voted in referenda (for Proposition 209 and against Proposition 16) to bar the use of racial preferences for contracting, admissions, and promotion in public institutions.
Most public universities simply ignored the law. They continued their “diversity” quotas under new names, relying on left-wing elected officials and judges to ignore again the will of the people.
Preferential admissions, along with racially segregated dorms and graduation ceremonies, continued under euphemisms and denials. “Theme” houses, “affinity” graduations, and “safe spaces” practice “affirmative” discrimination.
California voters in 2008 passed Proposition 11 to stop political gerrymandering by creating a supposedly nonpartisan state redistricting commission of five Democrats, five Republicans, and four Independents. Two years later, the commission took over redrawing congressional districts as well.
But Democratic lobbyists and lawyers sabotaged the goal of disinterested redistricting according to population and geography. Instead, racial preferences and the interests of the Democratic majority of incumbents prevailed to warp the intent of the voters.
Although Republicans usually achieved nearly 40 percent of the California vote in national elections, two decades later there were only seven Republicans in the 52-person congressional delegation, or a mere 13 percent of the state’s representatives.
But even that tiny contingent was considered too generous by the Left. Thus, in 2026, it will likely be further redistricted down to four or five seats.
The balloting mess in the recent Los Angeles mayoral race further reminds the nation and the world just how dysfunctional and anti-democratic California has become.
Democrats warp elections without the need for the old Chicago way of outright ballot theft or destruction. Instead, they do so in a “legal” manner by passing insane laws that ensure fraud and Democratic victories.
The winners in the strange jungle primaries—usually both Democrats—were not announced until a week after the polls closed. One of the eventual winners in mayoral race, the socialist Nithya Raman, had already given her teary concession speech after coming in well back at third on election night.
The Republican Spencer Pratt was comfortably ahead of her in second place on Election Day—only to lose, as expected, when large numbers of late ballots that broke roughly 90 percent Democratic were counted.
Remember, every registered voter is sent a mail-in ballot. If it is postmarked on election day, it can arrive at vote centers up to seven days after the election.
No one really knows whether the ballots are mailed to the dead, to former or nonexistent addresses, or to legally eligible voters—by design. In 2024, when losing presidential candidate Kamala Harris won the state by 20 points, only 0.09 percent of all ballots cast were rejected.
Anyone can register and receive a provisional ballot on the same day.
Ballot harvesting and ballot curing are legal.
Campaign operatives can round up voters, gather their ballots, and deliver them en masse to a voting center.
They can register anyone to vote, provide a ballot, and then deposit it immediately afterwards.
There is no requirement to provide proof of U.S. citizenship to get a driver’s license. Yet a license is not even needed to register. Any credit card without a picture suffices.
And it gets worse still.
If the potential voter has no license, no Social Security number, no proof of U.S. citizenship, and no credit cards, he still will be registered—once harvesters provide him with a “unique identifier” number.
He can then vote that very day without any ID at all.
If, in California, you claim you are illiterate and cannot write your name—no problem.
You simply make a mark—anything from an X to a happy face. No one asks whether an illiterate can read the names on the ballot.
Then your handler serves as a “witness” and signs his name. Such witnesses are almost always vote harvesters, and they can sign as many ballots as they wish.
If all that doesn’t work, ballot “curers” can be called in help remedy rejected partisan ballots post facto.
Democrats now rely on the system to ensure supermajorities in both houses of the state legislature, no statewide Republican officeholders, a tiny vestigial Republican congressional contingent, and almost exclusively Democratic-appointed liberal judges.
The more Democrats control the state, the more socialist, anti-democratic—and autocratic—California becomes.
Their gift to the nation is a third-world failed state, now in danger of societal collapse.
Fires rage—given ideologically driven prohibitions on brush and forest management, cuts in fire departments, and sheer bureaucratic incompetence.
Billions of welfare dollars are stolen with impunity. Illegal aliens who cannot speak or read English are given passes to obtain commercial trucking licenses—as if California’s critical road signs are written in some language other than English.
A quarter of residents can’t pay their sky-high power bills on time—and correctly assume that the state and the utility companies will mostly foot their delinquent bills.
Since 2020, over 100,000 criminals have been released early from state prisons—and most have little fear that their present and future crimes will earn them another prison sentence.
Half the state’s births are paid for through state-supplied welfare coverage.
And now the homeless without addresses or IDs can determine elections.
In sum, import poverty; romanticize illegal immigration; demonize the middle class; drive out private-sector capital; and exempt elites from the consequences of their own ideology—and you’re left with a state where democracy dies, along with everything else.
Federal investigators executed search warrants at the headquarters of a Soros-aligned voter mobilization organization in Ohio as part of what sources described as an ongoing fraud investigation.
FBI agents searched the offices of the Ohio Organizing Collaborative on June 11 and conducted interviews with members of the organization across the state, according to reports. Some agents reportedly served subpoenas or sought to seize electronic devices during the operation.
Multiple sources familiar with the matter later told CBS News that the federal action was tied to a fraud-related investigation.
The Department of Justice declined to discuss the specifics of the case.
“Search warrants are authorized by a judge and anything said by any organization or others in the media is unfounded speculation, as the target of any investigation is not privy to the search warrant affidavit until after indictment,” a DOJ official told Fox News Digital.
The Ohio Organizing Collaborative is a nonprofit group involved in voter registration and voter mobilization efforts and works closely with Democrats in Ohio. The organization has also played a prominent role in statewide ballot campaigns and referendum efforts.
The investigation is part of the Trump administration’s effort to increase enforcement of election-related laws and allegations of voter fraud.
Tax records show the organization reported more than $10 million in revenue during 2024. Funding for the group has come from several major Democratic-aligned organizations and labor unions, including entities connected to the Soros family, the New Venture Fund, the Tides Foundation, the American Federation of Teachers and the Service Employees International Union.
According to the report, the Soros family’s Foundation to Promote Open Society provided approximately $1.9 million to the organization between 2019 and 2020. The Open Society Action Fund later contributed an additional $1 million to a related organization in 2021 and another $1 million in 2023.
The organization has been active in recent Ohio political battles. It spent $250,000 in 2023 opposing a Republican-backed effort related to abortion policy and another $300,000 the following year opposing a Republican redistricting proposal.
Organization leaders criticized the federal investigation and suggested it was politically motivated.
“How can they distract and intimidate civil rights leaders and voters and community leaders who are helping people get registered to vote, and create a national spectacle about it?” OOC board member Prentiss Haney told MS Now. “That is the only reason why they would choose to do that, do it now, in the middle of a contested political election in the state. There’s no other reason. They have no evidence of that.”
The group has previously faced scrutiny related to voter registration activities. In 2017, a paid canvasser working with the organization pleaded guilty in connection with a fraudulent voter registration operation.
“We used to say that we don’t know what 2050 will look like. Now it’s more like we don’t know what 2030 will look like.” —Jesus Enrique Rosas
You must be thinking that reality is pushing its luck with the president bringing this Iran business — a war, actually, let’s face it — to a favorable conclusion around dinner time Sunday evening (yawn) and then Mr. DJT sliding directly into his seat on the White House lawn to enjoy the special 80th birthday edition of Testosterone Gone Wild, that is, a full card of tattoo-bedizend savages beating the crap out of each other UFC style, like it was a Hooters parking lot on wife-swap night. . . why, it just doesn’t get more surreal than that.
Imagine what Victoria Nuland, Robert Reich, George Stephanopoulis, Elizabeth Warren, and other good folks of that ilk must be thinking. The. . . (Sputter sputter) indelicacy of it all! A freaking peace deal, and now this low-rent spectacle of ultra-violence! Like their whole world had turned out to be the meanest, lowest, most sordid backwater of the Marvel Comics universe where no one has ever heard of chardonney. The ape-men slugging, kicking, gouging, and head-butting each other half to death is one thing. . . but to let the slip the opportunity to continue the Iran War with its downstream emoluments for another nineteen years. . . well, now that is an affront to all that is holy in the sub-basements of Foggy Bottom and the broom closets of Langley. As you read this on Monday morning the cries for impeachment will be ringing across the District of Columbia like calls to prayer in Mamdani’s Caliphate on the Hudson.
Surely, you’ll get more details on the Iran deal as Monday spins out, but the terms look not bad at all for Western Civ in the news media’s early shorthand reports: Teheran pledges no nukes, ever, no how, no way. They will allow their cache of super-enriched uranium to be destroyed. The Strait of Hormuz will reopen promptly, free to international shipping, no tolls, no piratical monkey-business. No more Iran funding terrorist proxy groups. That means you Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis, and sundry cadres of jihadi maniacs ‘out there’ in the world’s hotspots.
Speaking of which, Mr. Netanyahu felt the president’s wrath earlier on Sunday (once again) when he replied to a Hezbollah rocket salvo out of Lebanon with air strikes. But, hey, everybody knows that Israel always and ever answers every attack against it no matter what, because Never Again. Even Mr. Trump knows that, so the whole flap was a sort of mummery. Obviously, Hezbollah must be anxious to wreck the peace deal, since without Iran’s ongoing largess they will not know where their next meal is coming from, not to mention their next shipment of missiles. If Iran actually complies with the deal, Hezbollah can have no more support. There may soon be no more Hezbollah. (Boo-hoo.)
Which raises the next obvious concern, namely, Iran is not known for keeping its word with The Great Satan (us). There is every reason to believe that the vaunted deal is just another sorry episode of them stringing the USA along, playing us. But Mr. Trump has made it clear he reserves the option to rev up the bombers and “do a number on” the Islamic Republic if they pull a fast one on this.
For its part, Iran is crowing in its own state-controlled press that it has won the war. Iran can say whatever it wants to — world opinion will probably not be fooled — if it makes the people running the joint feel good about themselves losing a war. It’ll be Iran’s actions that matter. There’s a chance, perhaps a low-percentage chance, but a chance nonetheless, that Iran has been persuaded to stop being insane.
They do have an opportunity to put jihad aside, sell oil and pistachios to the world, and try being a normal nation for a change. It’s asking a lot, I’m sure, but there’s a lot in it for them. If they actually showed a serious attitude adjustment, you can bet that Mr. Trump would offer help setting up bigly capital investments there, enabling new trade relations, and easing them back into a world of non-insane, sovereign polities with reality-based interests. He already invited them to join the Abraham Accords, to establish full diplomatic relations with the other signers, embassies, direct flights, trade, tourism, and security cooperation.
So, let’s stand by and see if the Memorandum of Understanding gets signed later this week. The president is winging to Geneva for the G-7 as I write. The other parties to the deal are on their way there, too. The face to face meet-up between the American President and whoever Iran sends to the ceremony will be more thrillingly momentous than any pairing of UFC cage fighters on the White House lawn.
In fact, I’m awfully glad that over-the-top extravaganza is done with. The triumphalism is disconcerting. We still have a very serious cold civil war to deal with here in the Homeyland, and a national mental health crisis that turns US daily life into a real time horror movie from sea to shining sea. The party of “our democracy” still works avidly to overthrow the republic, and extravagant sports entertainments will not avail to make that stop. We need perp walks and trials. . .sober business. . .a cold reckoning with our own monsters.
THE ARTFUL DILETTANTE 