Despite pushback by President Donald Trump, woke programming at US colleges continues to infect young minds, scarring generations — and one particularly sickening example is right here in New York, at Brooklyn College.

As The Post’s Ryan King reports, the school’s psychologist program requires students to take a tellingly titled course, “Multicultural Counseling and Consultation,” which features “collective racial healing activities” and “trauma-informed interventions” to fight injustice.

Course materials unearthed by Defending Education teach that whites are privileged and “weaponize” their whiteness.

A mandatory BuzzFeed “privilege” quiz has them cite factors that make them privileged, such as being white or heterosexual or not having been raped.

The class also focuses on “intersectional” identity gripes, such as “nativist, Eurocentric, individualist, heterosexual, patriarchal, cisgender, ableist, and sizeist” influences.

“It should be of major concern” that “future school psychologists are required to pass a class that promotes such deeply divisive and caustic ideologies,” warns Rhyen Staley, Defending Education’s research director.

Additionally, no student . . . should have to endure discrimination based on immutable characteristics. . . This is blatant ideological indoctrination and needs to stop.”

Staley’s right: This kind of skewed, racist brainwashing feeds division and hostility not just on campuses but at corporations, government, the media and other key institutions.

It’s the kind of depraved curricula that fueled the pro-terrorist, antisemitic encampments after Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on Israel and surely underlies some of the anti-ICE riots today.

It might also explain the radical, uber-left support that paved the way for socialist antisemite Zohran Mamdani and the racists who surround him to rise to power.

Team Trump has made a good start in fighting the scourge — with DEI bans, civil-rights probes and by targeting the accrediting system.

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Yet Brooklyn College is hardly alone in clinging to its perverse agenda: K-12 schools as well as numerous colleges around the country continue to offer similarly race-based courses.

Such as the University of Maryland’s “Decolonizing Medicine: Steps to Actionable Change,” per The College Fix.

And the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities’ “Critical Indigenous Theory,” which offers “content such as critical theories, decolonization, Marxism, Queer theory, and Palestine.”

Meanwhile, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression’s 2026 free-speech rankings showed some small progress recently among colleges in providing campus environments open to diverse viewpoints.

It’s the kind of depraved curricula that fueled the pro-terrorist, antisemitic encampments after Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on Israel and surely underlies some of the anti-ICE riots today.

It might also explain the radical, uber-left support that paved the way for socialist antisemite Zohran Mamdani and the racists who surround him to rise to power.

Team Trump has made a good start in fighting the scourge — with DEI bans, civil-rights probes and by targeting the accrediting system.

But of 257 schools surveyed, more than half (166) scored an “F” grade, while only 11 got better than a “D.”

Clearly, Team Trump has more work to do.

The left — in education and elsewhere — can’t be allowed to stand in the way of Americans reaching their own conclusions based on accurate, unbiased facts.

Anyone who cares about the nation’s future should rush to purge wokeness everywhere it has reared its ugly head.

New York Post

One year into President Donald Trump‘s second term, the political temperature around the country is at an all-time high. This is hardly surprising given our sustained and intense polarization. The Democratic Party is still reeling from its November 2024 loss. But what it offered, a substitute candidate who entered the scene at the eleventh hour, had little appeal. Former Vice President Kamala Harris is far more mentally competent than was the diminished Joe Biden. However, she represented something average Americans reject: extremism. 

There is much to say about the wrong behavior that both parties have displayed in recent years. And one action or incident does not excuse another, as much as blind partisans on both sides of the aisle would like that to be true. But when looking at both parties collectively, it’s clear that leftists prize mob behavior far more than those on the Right. We have seen this with the Black Lives Matter riots, Hamas-supporting protests and intimidation on college campuses, celebrating near-assassination attempts, and now, protesting Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Making politics physical is a feature, not a bug, of the leftist playbook. Somehow, clearly pointing this out is akin to excusing what happened on Jan. 6, 2021, and glossing over the bad actors who exist on the Right. But those who are honest about what’s in front of us can call out all the bad, while also admitting the Left has a problem. 

Kimberly Ross, Washington Examiner

China’s top general, second only to Xi Jinping, the nation’s leader, in the military command, has been put under investigation and accused of “grave violations of discipline and the law,” the Ministry of National Defense said on Saturday, the most stunning escalation yet in Mr. Xi’s purge of the People’s Liberation Army elite.

The general, Zhang Youxia, is a vice chairman of the Central Military Commission, the Communist Party body that controls China’s armed forces. Another member of the commission, Gen. Liu Zhenli, who leads the military’s Joint Staff Department, is also under investigation, the Defense Ministry said. Its announcement did not say what either general was alleged to have done wrong.

General Zhang’s downfall — few if any Chinese officials placed publicly under investigation are later declared innocent — is the most drastic step so far in Mr. Xi’s yearslong campaign to root out what he has described as corruption and disloyalty in the military’s senior ranks. It is all the more astonishing because General Zhang seemed to be a confidante of Mr. Xi, who has known him for decades.

“This move is unprecedented in the history of the Chinese military and represents the total annihilation of the high command,” Christopher K. Johnson, a former Central Intelligence Agency analyst who follows Chinese elite politics, said of the investigation of General Zhang.

With the two generals effectively out, the Central Military Commission has just two members left: its chairman, Mr. Xi, and General Zhang Shengmin, who has overseen Mr. Xi’s military purges. Mr. Xi has now removed all but one of the six generals he appointed to the commission in 2022.

Mr. Johnson, the president of China Strategies Group, a consulting firm, said Mr. Xi seemed to have concluded that problems in the military ran so deep that he could not trust the top command to cure itself and must look to a new cohort of rising officers.

He appears to have “decided he must cut very deep generationally to find a group not tainted,” Mr. Johnson said. “The purging of even a childhood friend in Zhang Youxia shows there now are no limits to Xi’s anti-graft zeal.”

The speed with which General Zhang’s ouster was announced seemed intended to staunch the potential damage for Mr. Xi, said Su Tzu-yun, an expert on the People’s Liberation Army, or P.L.A., at the Institute for National Defense and Security Research in Taipei, a body funded by Taiwan’s Ministry of National Defense.

“This could be a big blow to morale inside the P.L.A.,” Mr. Su said in an interview, referring to the removal of a seemingly invulnerable commander.

General Zhang and General Liu were also the P.L.A.’s two top commanders for practical operational tasks, and their removal will leave a gap in experience, said Shanshan Mei, a political scientist at RAND, a research organization, who studies China’s armed forces.

“There’s no one right now at the highest level who has operational experience or who is in charge of training and exercises,” Ms. Mei said. “This is going to cut very deep, and there’s more to come, possibly.”

General Zhang, 75, had seemed to be cordoned off from Mr. Xi’s widening purges. The two men’s fathers, both veterans of Mao Zedong’s revolutionary wars, were personally acquainted, and Mr. Xi had kept General Zhang in office beyond the customary retirement age of about 70.

But Mr. Xi’s worries about the trustworthiness of his commanders seemed to finally outweigh whatever attachment he felt to the general, Mr. Su said. “I think this reflects Xi Jinping’s personal sense of insecurity, and that’s a major factor in his purges of the military,” he said.

Since 2023, waves of top commanders, officers and executives for arms manufacturers have been removed from office and placed under investigation — or, in some cases, have disappeared from view without explanation.

The first purges in that wave focused on China’s Rocket Force, which operates most of its nuclear missiles and many of its conventional ones. Ensuing investigations took down admirals, regional military commanders and members of the Central Military Commission.

Many of the targeted officers had been promoted by Mr. Xi since he took power in 2012, vowing to cleanse the armed forces of endemic graft. But after a decade in charge, he seemed to have concluded that some of his own handpicked protégés had been infected by the military’s corruption, which historically has often involved taking bribes for contracts or promotions.

The investigations’ toll on the military was visible at a meeting last year of the Communist Party’s Central Committee, a council of top officials. Of the 44 uniformed officers appointed to the committee in 2022, 29 — roughly two-thirds — had been purged or were missing, according to calculations made by Neil Thomas, a researcher on Chinese politics at the Asia Society.

Xi seems to have calculated that in the longer term, his shake-up of the military will make it less corrupt, more loyal and more effective in pursuing his goals, like putting pressure on Taiwan, the island democracy that rejects China’s claims of sovereignty.

But for now, and potentially for years, the disruptions caused by the purges could leave Mr. Xi less confident that his commanders are ready for combat, analysts have said.

“It’s a dilemma,” said Mr. Su, the Taiwan-based analyst. “He wants to first get rid of these so-called corrupt people, but for the P.L.A., if you clear out these high-level officers, that means a whole lot of experience is gone.”

General Zhang was among the few Chinese commanders with extensive experience in battle. The son of a general, he gained prominence as a frontline officer during China’s last war, a border conflict with Vietnam that began in 1979 and lasted for years. He rose to become head of the General Armaments Department, which is in charge of procuring weapons, and Mr. Xi promoted him to the Central Military Commission in 2017.

“For Zhang Youxia, having combat experience — and being one of the only left who has any — has to add to his luster, at least to Xi Jinping,” John Culver, a former Central Intelligence Agency analyst specializing in the Chinese military, said in an interview.

But analysts speculated that General Zhang’s time in the General Armaments Department — which, because it controls arms contracts, became known as a honey pot of corruption — may have planted the seeds of his downfall. Other generals who rose through that department have also been purged, including Li Shangfu, a former defense minister.

Mr. Xi may need years or more to nurture a new crop of — presumably — trustworthy officers, and he must also fill the depleted ranks of the Central Military Committee.

“To rebuild these chains of command may take him five years or longer,” Mr. Su said. “The chances of an attack on Taiwan in the short term have been lowered.”

A correction was made on

Jan. 24, 2026

: 

An earlier version of this article misstated how many uniformed commanders that Xi Jinping appointed to the Central Military Commission since 2022 have been removed. Five commanders have been removed, not six.

Chris Buckley, the chief China correspondent for The Times, reports on China and Taiwan from Taipei, focused on politics, social change and security and military issues

The uppity rulemakers wanted one-way respect and pretend dialogue; the American president gave them tongue-lashings and promises of future beatings instead.

J.B. Shurk | January 23, 2026

The World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland, resembles a pagan ritual in which wealthy, famous, and powerful people come together to worship themselves. It takes place in a secluded ski resort in the eastern Alps, so that “elites” can indulge themselves far away from the planet’s detestable riffraff (that’s you and me). I’ve always thought that if extraterrestrial visitors from another galaxy or dimension were really here and truly interested in making planet Earth a better place, they could start by using their advanced technology to suck up the mountain of globalists in Davos, jettison the whole rock into deep space, and leave the rest of us to rebuild the world without them. That would be one annual meeting I would pay to see!

So far, aliens have yet to rid us of the globalist “elites.” On the other hand, President Trump just gave a speech that did give them a pretty good spanking. Feeling a disturbance in the globalist force and anticipating friction, anxiety, and self-medication among the attendees dreading the return of the American T-Rex to the world scene, WEF’s narrative-engineers chose to convene this year’s me-me-me-fest under the theme, “A Spirit of Dialogue.” That was their subtle way of begging President Trump not to lampoon their naked emperors or roast their globalist master plans. Trump ignored the WEF-lords’ pleas to play nice. He called them idiots and wannabe-tyrants right to their faces. The uppity rulemakers wanted one-way respect and pretend dialogue; the American president gave them tongue-lashings and promises of future beatings instead.

Watching the president take on the world’s worst people is pretty hilarious. He gets off a helicopter, walks into their globalist temple with the swagger of a man ready to brawl, and just starts flipping off everyone in the place.

“The green new scam” is “the greatest hoax in history,” Trump told a packed room of globalist grifters who have been telling the same lies that their parents and grandparents have told for the last half-century — that the planet will be destroyed in the next few years unless the middle class pays more in taxes to the uber-elites who profit by micromanaging humanity and regulating the free market out of existence. The president then accused the United Kingdom of betraying its own citizens by buying expensive windmills from China and forcing everyone to pay more for electricity. “I haven’t seen a single wind farm in China,” Trump noted before pointing out how Chinese communists have outsmarted the U.K.: “They make a fortune selling windmills. Stupid people buy them.” Somewhere in not-so-Great Britain, a gaggle of green-energy-worshiping aristocrats dropped their teacups while making the same how-dare-he? face.

In between descriptions of snatching Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro in his underwear and castrating Iran’s Islamic tyrants with big, beautiful bombs, President Trump explained how silly it is for the Kingdom of Denmark and the unelected feudal lords of the European Commission to pretend that Greenland “belongs” to the Danes and Euro-villains. Reminding the Eurocentric audience that Greenland is part of North America and in the Western Hemisphere, T-Rex roared, “That’s our territory.” Arguing that Denmark had failed to defend Greenland during WWII, failed to defend it for the last eighty years, and done nothing to develop the territory, President Trump offered a refresher course in the Monroe Doctrine: “It has been our policy for hundreds of years to prevent outside interests from entering our hemispheres.”

The American president then reminded members of NATO that the United States armed forces have protected them all for many decades and that Greenland (an island the U.S. already singlehandedly defends) is a small price to pay for that protection. With a tilt of his head and a serious stare, Trump summed up the Greenland issue efficiently: “You can say ‘yes’ and we will be very appreciative, or you can say ‘no’ and we will remember.”

Taking a shot at Canadian prime minister Mark Carney (who recently cuddled up to communist China while promising to militarily defend Greenland from American annexation), the president reminded the globalist central banker running things up north that Canada depends entirely upon American military muscle: “Canada lives because of the United States.” If there are any Vikings left in Denmark or Canada, Trump took their hammers and slapped them silly during his speech.

President Trump went on for about ninety minutes — about twice as long as expected. During that time, he beat up on everybody. While speaking in Switzerland, he lambasted the Swiss for profiting from one-sided trade deals with the United States. He called Federal Reserve chair Jerome “Too Late” Powell a moron. He accused central bankers and the CEOs of multinational corporations of stealing wealth from middle-class families. He made the point that inflation is not economic growth; it’s just a scheme for the wealthy to take from the poor. He made fun of little Mark Carney, self-important Emmanuel Macron, and even the Patrick Bateman-looking Gavin Newsom. He called 2020 a “rigged election.” He talked about blowing up Somali pirates and narcoterrorists at sea and wanting to throw criminal illegal aliens out of the United States. He discussed a bit of his vision for the Board of Peace and threatened to annihilate Hamas if the terrorists choose war. And President Trump forcefully defended Western civilization from the globalists: “The West cannot mass import foreign cultures that have never been successful.”

Trump hit this last point over and over while asking Europe what the hell it was doing by destroying its own culture with mass migration and misguided devotion to a suicidal fantasy that “diversity” somehow constitutes national strength. The president looked as if he wanted to shake the Europeans by their neckties and repeatedly asked them, are you not Westerners? “Multiculturalists” are not capable of defending the shared civilization of Europe and North America, Trump assured them. Only Westerners can defend the West, because those who wish to turn the West into something else cannot be trusted. That, in a nutshell, was a running theme of Trump’s speech.

Amusingly, after brutally mocking the political, cultural, and economic shibboleths that globalist “elites” hold dear, President Trump took the opportunity to thank Secretary of State Marco Rubio for “teaching” him how to be “diplomatic.” It was a funny moment in which the president managed to praise Rubio and poke fun at himself. The American delegation at WEF is working as a well-oiled machine. Trump owned the room. It wouldn’t have been surprising to hear him say that he had plans to buy the ski resort and rename the Swiss luxury hamlet “Trumptown.” He did make sure to end on an exclamatory note: “The United States is back — bigger, stronger, and better than ever before.”

At the end, the WEFers looked as if Trump had stolen their lunch money. Globalism, Inc. just doesn’t work as well when the American president calls the Davos “elites” fools and scam-artists to their faces. In the “spirit of dialogue,” Trump shattered their spirits.

J. B. Shurk, American Thinker

Socialists are fascinating creatures. They produce nothing. They assume no responsibility for anything. They preach a morality of duty and self-sacrifice. Yet they offer to the world no marketable skills. They require government salaries, stipends or subsidies to survive. They demand the end of profit and private property. Yet they simultaneously demand that people — always others, never themselves– produce the loot in the multiple billions to be distributed solely to those whom they, the Socialists, deem deserving. On top of it, they call for censorship of all ideas, books, or forms of entertainment they dislike. They call any and all dissenters unspeakable monsters, horrible “white supremacists,” while demanding and getting everything they want.

Socialists are like the 30 year old son or daughter who won’t move out of the parents’ house, and who lectures the supporting parent on the evil of his or her ways. The great irony? Only capitalism and freedom of speech could have spawned the socialist, because without the luxury and comfort of a free society, the socialist could not survive five minutes. The even greater irony? Socialism will destroy the good life of capitalism and return humans to a state of Nature. The glowering, pedantic, mean-spirited Socialists will be the first to perish. There is justice in nature, even if not in socialism.

Michael J. Hurd, Daily Dose of Reason

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The “Mindfulness” Degree

What happens when colleges encourage students not to think?

Jan 16, 2026 Christopher L. Schilling

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Do American colleges still teach students how to think? Or have whole programs been built on fashionable but unexamined assumptions? Increasingly, one wonders whether parts of the curriculum are outright harmful. For years, it has felt as though American higher education were approaching rock bottom. One of the newest degrees on offer suggests we may finally have arrived.

As a religious practice within Buddhism—particularly in its Theravada and Zen traditions—so-called mindfulness meditation aims to cultivate an awareness of the present moment, calm the mind, and help one avoid being carried away by thoughts. The term often overlaps with self-help trends and spa treatments these days, especially on American campuses.

Mindfulness programs on campus have moved well beyond weekend retreats and self-help courses.At Bucknell University, for instance, students are offered a “mindfulness menu” featuring instructions for DIY body scrubs, eye masks, lotions, and similar indulgences. At Yale, students can enroll in a four-week Koru mindfulness course that promises to help them to become “kinder” to themselves (is there anyone else?) or to craft their “very own meditation bracelet with a variety of beautiful beads.”

They have emerged as an academic field that encourages students to calm what ought to be active minds.But mindfulness programs on campus have moved well beyond weekend retreats and self-help courses. They have now embedded themselves within higher education itself, emerging as an academic field that, paradoxically, encourages students to calm what ought to be active minds and to think as little as possible.

Lesley University, for example, offers both an M.A. and a graduate certificate in mindfulness studies, while Atlantic University markets an M.A. in the same subject. At Brown, the School of Public Health houses the Brown Mindfulness Center, which offers not only a master of public health concentration in mindfulness but a certificate track in mindfulness-based stress-reduction teacher training.

This is puzzling, given the fact that Brown is also home to a clinical and affective neuroscience laboratory that has provided extensive research on the adverse effects associated with the mindfulness fad. Its director, Willoughby Britton—who runs a support group for people who have experienced psychological and physical harm from meditation—has described potential side effects in stark terms: “People describe a loss of emotion beyond what they wanted, and loss of motivation or enjoyment of things.”

In one project, Britton and her research team documented accounts of severe adverse outcomes among nearly 40 individuals, noting that many were “fairly out of commission, fairly impaired for between six months [and] more than 20 years.” The research team found participants through established meditation teachers such as Jack Kornfeld—one of the key figures to introduce Buddhist mindfulness to the West—and Joseph Goldstein, who has spoken of “instances during past meditation retreats where students became psychologically incapacitated.”

Another study interviewing 60 meditation teachers and practitioners—an equal number of men and women across the traditions of Zen, Theravada, and Tibetan Buddhism—identified a range of common adverse effects such as hyper-arousal and increases in anxiety, fear, panic, insomnia, trauma flashbacks, and emotional instability. Participants also reported sensory hypersensitivity, including heightened sensitivity to light and sound. Such hypersensitivity might be pleasant at first when colors get brighter, and one might indeed start to notice more. But when that doesn’t stop, sounds may become irritating and distracting. Others might experience a loss of motivation or enjoyment of things—as if campuses weren’t experiencing enough of that already.

Regardless of these downsides, the academic mindfulness trend continues to spread worldwide. In Ireland, the master of science in mindfulness-based wellbeing at University College Cork promises to train graduates to teach mindfulness in schools, workplaces, and everyday life. City College Dublin offers a professional diploma in mindfulness and wellbeing. In Wales, Bangor University maintains an M.A. in mindfulness-based approaches, while Monash University in Australia describes itself as “a world leader in the integration of mindfulness into the workplace and tertiary education.” Scotland has joined in, as well: The University of Aberdeen now awards a master of science in studies in mindfulness, and the University of the West of Scotland advertises a master of science in mindfulness and compassion.

The modern American rebranding of mindfulness as some kind of ancient psychotherapy is mistaken.As absurd as it is to award degrees in compassion (as though it were something universities could certify), compassion is not even something that follows from mindfulness practice—at least not in the sentimental sense in which the term is now understood. Some scholars of Buddhism note that “compassion is generally understood in Buddhism as having a magical power to protect” one from vicious animals, assassins, or the weather. Instead of praying for good weather, you meditate for it. The modern American rebranding of mindfulness as some kind of ancient psychotherapy or wellness treatment is, thus, mistaken. It is more accurate to understand “compassion” in early Buddhist contexts as a form of capital—much like the way we speak today of political capital or moral bankruptcy—rather than as an emotional disposition. It is the dharma, the teachings of the Buddha, that instruct a Buddhist to be an ethical person. Both Buddhism and the academic study of it rest on scripture and doctrine, not on meditation.

The scientific literature identifies a wide range of negative effects associated with mindfulness meditation.It is puzzling that there is so little pushback from scholars of Buddhism against these programs that, at best, offer a thin, romanticized account of Buddhism and often function as an academic veneer for spa treatments. The course “Mindfulness, Meaning, and Resilience” at Harvard, for example, declares, “Mindfulness is a way of attending to the experience of the present moment with full awareness and without judgment or reactivity. […] This introductory course explores the origins of mindfulness in Buddhist philosophy and how it can promote these states.”

The historical record of Buddhist traditions shows something very different. Sources often refer to troubling effects from the practice. As Jared R. Lindahl and colleagues note in a paper, “The term nyams refers to a wide range of ‘meditation experiences’—from bliss and visions to intense body pain, physiological disorders, paranoia, sadness, anger and fear.” Zen lineages have long recognized a related condition, sometimes described as “Zen sickness” or “meditation sickness,” in which practice leads to prolonged psychological or physical distress. There is even a sutta—a canonical discourse attributed to the Buddha—in which a group of monks go insane and commit mass suicide after meditating. A part of the history of the method is also how well it was received by Nazis and terrorists.

The scientific literature identifies a wide range of other negative effects associated with mindfulness meditation. Studies have documented adverse psychological, physical, and spiritual side effects, including depersonalization, psychosis, hallucinations, anxiety, increased seizure risk, disorganized speech, loss of appetite, and insomnia. One study led by Brent M. Wilson at the University of California San Diego found that participants exhibited increased susceptibility to false memories following mindfulness meditation—a result that, on its own, should give universities more than enough reason to question the practice’s place in higher education.

A study by Pablo Briñol and colleagues found that when participants were encouraged to objectify their thoughts, they subsequently relied on those thoughts less in their evaluations and decisionmaking, a result that raises obvious concerns for education, during which deliberation is essential. Mindfulness practice may also foster an avoidance of difficult thinking and tasks. One study found that mindfulness meditation reduced future-oriented focus and lowered arousal levels, which in turn diminished participants’ motivation to undertake challenging activities. In other words, the practice can make students calmer but also less inclined to think hard, plan ahead, or engage in demanding work.

One study found that 62.9 percent of participants experienced negative effects such as anxiety, panic, less motivation in life, depression, a feeling of addiction to meditation, pain, confusion, disorientation, or feeling “spaced out” during and after meditation. Notably, 7.4 percent suffered profoundly adverse effects, regardless of whether they had practiced for 16 months or more than 100 months.

The effect of mindfulness meditation is often a reduction in emotional activity, which can indeed be helpful for students prone to overwhelming reactivity, making them calmer and less susceptible to stressful situations. Yet, for some, this dampening becomes excessive. As Britton puts it, “People in our research complain of not having any emotions, even positive ones, not feeling any kind of love or affection for their families.” These adverse effects are not limited to vulnerable individuals; they have appeared in experienced meditation teachers and in practitioners with no psychiatric history.

One study found that 62.9 percent of participants experienced negative effects such as anxiety, panic, and less motivation in life.Yet, in 2023, Harvard opened the Thich Nhat Hanh Center for Mindfulness in Public Health in the T.H. Chan School of Public Health. In his New York Times bestseller The Art of Power, Thich Nhat Hanh writes, “To be beautiful means to be yourself. You don’t need to be accepted by others. You need to accept yourself.” While these lines might be calming as poetry, they are most obviously destructive as self-help. Who would want to live in a world where everybody—the insane, the fanatical, the rude—simply accepts himself the way he is? One could even argue that such advice runs counter to the very purpose of education. But it must feel good for people at Harvard to hear such a message while they harass Jewish students on their way to class or rise to the university presidency without ever having written a book or an original paper. Just accept yourself!

The spillover effect of mindfulness into other fields is also concerning.The spillover effect of mindfulness into other fields is also concerning. Caroline C. Kaufman, an instructor in the Department of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, advocates incorporating meditation practices into psychotherapy with Jewish clients—a position that suggests a troubling lack of awareness of the potential negative side effects. Incorporating religious practices into therapy is also unethical unless they are clearly identified as such by the therapist; otherwise, the healthcare treatment risks becoming missionary in nature.

Moreover, mindfulness meditation is not a component of Judaism, nor does Kaufman’s approach indicate that this is something to be addressed with Jewish clients. Her approach assumes spirituality is universal and standardized rather than culturally specific or personal. In her research at Harvard, she even attempts to empirically measure spirituality. The very idea reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of the limitations of scientific inquiry: It presupposes that a subjective, experiential, and culturally contingent phenomenon can be objectively quantified using standardized tools. For the same reason—the hopelessness of the attempt to quantify subjective inner states—mindfulness studies fails.

Meanwhile, Oxford is more upfront about incorporating a religious practice into healthcare with its master of science in mindfulness-based cognitive therapy. Beyond the supposed benefits for clients, the program also trains therapists themselves to be mindful during treatment. One might expect a “mindful” therapist to be especially attentive and capable of caring for clients. Yet one study suggested that “higher levels of therapist mindfulness predicted less reduction in client symptom severity at termination.” Mindfulness therapy, in this sense, seems oxymoronic. At most, one might argue that the practice helps therapists remain present while tracking themes. But that’s just another way of saying, “Therapists, pay attention and don’t drift off.” In which case, it should be a reminder, not a university degree.

Christopher L. Schilling is a lawyer and political scientist and the author of The Japanese Talmud: Antisemitism in East Asia (Hurst) and The Therapized Antisemite: The Myth of Psychology and the Evasion of Responsibility (De Gruyter). 

President Donald Trump said Thursday that he’s putting Secretary of State Marco Rubio in charge of the U.S. bid to bring the 2035 World Expo to Miami, stacking a new assignment onto the former Florida senator’s already-high-profile role running America’s top diplomatic shop.

Trump said Florida wants the Expo and that he backs Miami as the host city, according to an Associated Press report that cited his social media post.

“The Great State of Florida has expressed strong interest in hosting the Expo in Miami, which I fully support,” Trump wrote. “Miami Expo 2035 can be the next big milestone in our new Golden Age of America. I am appointing Miami native Secretary of State Marco Rubio to Chair the efforts of coordinating and advancing this exciting opportunity to convene the World.”

Rubio’s expanding portfolio has become a running joke online — and even Trump has leaned into it — as the White House increasingly taps the secretary for high-visibility political and policy tasks beyond traditional State Department work.

On Feb. 3, 2025, the State Department announced he’d been appointed the acting administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development. Trump followed on Feb. 16, naming Rubio acting archivist of the United States in a Truth Social post about installing Jim Byron to run the National Archives day to day. On May 1, Trump said Rubio would also serve as national security advisor “in the interim” while continuing to lead the State Department. And now Trump is adding another line to the résumé — tapping Rubio to chair the effort to land the 2035 World Expo in Miami.

Rubio became secretary of state after leaving the Senate, triggering Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis to appoint then-state Attorney General Ashley Moody to fill the seat, The Associated Press reported.

At his first appearance at the World Economic Forum, Elon Musk predicted artificial intelligence will soon be smarter than any human alive.

“AI might be smarter than any human by the end of 2026,” Musk said, adding “no later than 2027.” Five years out, he went further: “AI will be smarter than all of humanity, collectively.”

Musk also warned that robots are coming fast — and in massive numbers. “There will be far more robots than people,” he told the globalist audience, describing an automation boom that will upend labour, economics and power structures far sooner than regulators are ready for.

Asked what drives him, Musk didn’t cite climate targets or social engineering schemes. Instead, he pointed to science fiction and turning it into reality. “I want to make science fiction not fiction forever — at some point science fiction to science fact,” he said.

Musk spoke of “giant spaceships traveling through space,” visiting other planets and star systems, adding with a shrug: “Are there aliens? Maybe there are aliens.”

Ever since Nick Shirley uploaded a YouTube video, produced with assistance from Minnesota House Republicans, claiming that Somali immigrants in Minneapolis take taxpayer money to run phony daycares, the state’s child care industry — one not exactly known before for fanning the flames of political conflict — has been in survival mode.

“Over the last few weeks, we have been so demonized,” said Dawn Uribe, who runs four Spanish immersion preschools under the name Mis Amigos. “It’s been heartbreaking.”

Here is a breakdown of the immediate and long-term obstacles for Minnesota’s child care centers and the families that use them. 

What is it like now to run a child care facility in Minnesota?

It was a week ago, Uribe said, that Immigration and Customs Enforcement grabbed a Mis Amigos’ facilities and maintenance specialist from a suburban Home Depot and tossed him into a van.

According to Uribe, the employee, whom she declined to name for publication, was flown to Texas and awaits a bond hearing. Uribe said that the employee has legal working papers. A message left with Immigrations and Customs Enforcement about the arrest was not returned. 

Other day care centers reported that employees are scared to show up for work and parents do not want to drop off their children because of ICE agents.

“People are terrified,” said Clare Sanford, chair of government relations for the Minnesota Child Care Association.

ICE, of course, has hit many areas of Minnesota’s economy. But day care centers face added challenges. 

Shirley, an independent content creator and self-described citizen journalist, purported to show nine different day care centers that collected public money without providing child care. 

But the Department of Children Youth and Families, the state agency that administers taxpayer money toward child care programs, responded that the daycare centers Shirley profiled are, in fact, caring for children. 

Nonetheless, child care operators have faced bomb threats and copycat videographers in front of their facilities. 

One operator claimed that a car circled their clinic, a man jumped out of the vehicle, defecated on the sidewalk in front of the entrance, and drove away. 

Some child care clinics have chafed at the use of Bureau of Criminal Apprehension site investigators, which they say has led to the spectacle of state agents brandishing firearms in a daycare as they comb through invoices and children’s attendance records. 

Mike Ernster, a spokesperson for the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, said “that agents are armed as per BCA policy as a regular part of their duty as licensed police officers in Minnesota. However, our agents were there to interact with the business owners and staff supporting DCYF administrative inspections, not to interact with the children.”

What about the federal payment freeze?

Let’s first explain how this funding normally works. 

Minnesota gets a total of $467 million in yearly federal assistance toward child care, according to figures provided by DCYF.

The child care programs stemmed from President Bill Clinton and Congressional Republicans wanting to “end welfare as we know it” in the 1990s. The programs are meant to reward parents who demonstrate that they work or are in job training.

“Many of the families are experiencing significant hardships and challenges like fleeing domestic violence or facing eviction,” said Diana Azevedo-McCaffrey, senior policy analyst at the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, a liberal leaning think tank in Washington D.C. 

In Minnesota, DCYF and the state’s 87 counties run two child care assistance programs — family investment and sliding fee.

Families earning less than 67% of the state’s median income qualify for family investment, which is coupled with working with a job counselor on an employment plan. As of 2025, over 9,000 children and 4,800 families are enrolled in Minnesota family investment.

Families who make less than 47% of state median income can get a sliding fee, which may involve a co-payment. In 2025, a bit over 14,000 children and 7,000 families get assistance through sliding fee – with around 2,300 families on the waiting list. 

“We have a child care shortage,” Sanford said. “Infant and toddler spots are always hardest to find.”

Fifty-one percent of Minnesota families accessing these programs identify as Black, according to state figures, with 25% White and 6% Hispanic. 

Child care providers get more money from a parent paying out of pocket than from a parent enrolled in child care assistance. Still, over 4,000 child care providers across Minnesota are licensed to accept at least one family on assistance. 

For some, like Olu’s Beginnings in north Minneapolis, families on assistance reflect the day care’s surrounding community. Other providers, such as Mis Amigos, see setting aside a few slots for low-income parents part of their mission.

“We have always chosen to serve families who receive public support because we believe high-quality education should be accessible to all,” Uribe said. 

freezing affecting Minnesota child care right now?

Except for anticipation of what comes next, it is not. 

Minnesota, California, Colorado, Illinois and New York sued Jan. 8, right after the Trump administration announced it was shutting off child care funds. The states argue that the executive branch cannot cancel payments already appropriated by Congress. 

The New York federal judge on the case, Arun Subramanian, granted a stay until this Friday, which means states can draw down from the federal funds it has until then. Subramanian will hear arguments from both sides on Friday, at which point the judge may make a more lasting ruling or issue another temporary stay.

In the “vast majority” of Trump administration funding freeze cases, courts have ruled against the administration, said Peter Larsen, an assistant professor at Mitchell Hamline School of Law.

However, Larsen added, the Trump administration could defy the court order as it has in cases involving National Institutes of Health grants and Consumer Finance Protection Bureau funding, among other subjects. 

If the court ruled for the Trump administration, Minnesota would surely appeal the decision, Larsen said, but the state would probably be out of federal child care funds in the interim. 

DCYF informed providers Jan. 9 that it can finance child care assistance for “several months” without additional federal funding. But DCYF has not answered weeks worth of questions from providers (and reporters) about when it last drew down from federal funds and how much reserves it has on hand. 

“We are just getting told to sit tight,” Herod said. 

Surprise medical bills have bludgeoned most Americans. In fact, about half of insured Americans face unexpected charges every year. In 2020, Congress passed the No Surprises Act, which banned out-of-network billing rates for some services. It also entitled patients who aren’t using health insurance to a “good faith estimate” of out-of-pocket costs before receiving care. But there’s a catch that stacks the deck against patients and taxpayers: final bills within $400 of the original estimate are legally collectible.

After stinging GOP losses in November, health care “affordability” is all the rage. Voters are frustrated that every other medical appointment brings another unexpected charge and an inevitable battle of wills and wits with the billing department. Christopher Jacobs recently opined in these pages that “Republicans should stop playing into Democrats’ hands and start … reducing the underlying cost of health care.” In that spirit, President Donald Trump should ensure that hospitals do not profit from “errors” with executive action.

In February, Trump issued an executive order building on a first-term order that required hospitals to post public prices for common, standardized procedures like CTs, MRIs, mammograms, etc. If hospitals must post prices rather than bill insurers and patients later, patients will price-shop and save money for themselves and their insurers (which, if they are on Medicare and Medicaid, is you, the taxpayer!). But the $400 wiggle room embedded in the No Surprises Act eliminates much of the intended benefit.

Imagine that two competing hospitals offer CTs. Hospital A knows its real cost to provide a CT is $400. Hospital B knows its real cost is $300. If both post prices and provide estimates that reflect real charges, Hospital B will have an advantage. But with a $400 allowed error, why wouldn’t Hospital A estimate its CT at $150 to undercut Hospital B, knowing the patient will pay more than double that in the end? Hospital A can attract more patients without any cost to itself. If the patient goes to Hospital A, he pays $400 instead of Hospital B’s $300, and his insurance company probably loses more. Hospital A wins and everyone else loses.

The financial incentives encourage all hospitals to consistently provide underestimates. While fraudulently botching an estimate is illegal, it would probably take a whistleblower to prove an estimate was not in “good faith,” since it would require proving “intent.” Potentially defrauded patients have no access to other patients’ records to ascertain whether a pattern exists. Current law shelters deceptive, anti-competitive behavior.

Of course, error by itself is not a sign of purposeful deception. But consistent errors in the same direction — errors that do not roughly average to zero over time — suggest the estimator is missing on purpose. In my industry (banking), we don’t fire a teller who’s off $10 on his daily count. A teller could have many small errors over the course of a year, but if his errors roughly average to zero, it’s almost certainly inadvertent. But if the teller’s drawer is consistently wrong in his favor, he is fired. Applying the same concept to health care estimates is straightforward and imposes minimal regulatory burden while protecting patients.

Hospitals should be required to record every estimate they give in a single document (probably a spreadsheet), along with the actual amount billed, and subtract the two to obtain an error amount.

For example: you get an estimate of $200 for a procedure and pay $275. The error is $75. The hospital tracks this for every patient, and provides the spreadsheet tracking their aggregate error to the Department of Health and Human Services at the end of the fiscal year. However much the hospital billed more than estimated amounts is then repaid to patients who were charged more than estimated amount (or taken off their bill if they have not yet paid), in proportion to their overpayments. The smaller the hospital’s overall error rate, the smaller the refunds owed.

This system would not punish honest errors. The average of honest errors is zero over time. If the hospital’s overestimates and underestimates cancel each other out, it doesn’t owe anything back to anyone. But if there is an aggregate error, it is refunded to the harmed patients. A hospital’s incentive to low-ball people to get them in the door is replaced by a powerful incentive to provide the most reliable estimates possible. This new rule could reduce overall administrative burden, lessening the need for time-consuming arbitration over individual estimate discrepancies.

This market-based approach does not require proving intent to deceive. A hospital that is bad at estimation but not doing it on purpose would be punished not for willful violation, but for incompetence and inefficiency. The burden of proof is taken off of individual patients to prove wrongdoing in this scheme. Such a rule, especially if framed as an executive order to buttress the price transparency action already taken in February, would prove much harder to challenge or evade than statutes requiring proof of intent.

President Trump is on the right track with pursuing greater price transparency in health care. His administration must continue to help lower health care costs and end the recurring nightmare of unexpected medical bills. American taxpayers now spend nearly $1 trillion on Medicare, and health care gobbles up 18 percent of GDP. Reducing inefficiencies is a national imperative, not a wonky side project — and eliminating hospitals’ incentive to provide incorrect estimates is a necessary part of this reform.

Nathan Richendollar, The Federalisst

Landlord who tipped off ICE about illegal alien gang members faces investigation.

The ‘sanctuary’ for illegal alien criminals movement began with radical activists harboring them in ‘churches’. That escalated to ordering law enforcement not to cooperate with immigration authorities. And from there sanctuary states like California began to penalize any law enforcement personnel who cooperated with ICE.

Then came the riots, systemic harassment of immigration law enforcement personnel being coordinated from the top down, and now, in the next step, legal threats against American citizens who cooperate with ICE.

Remember this massive raid on a hive of TdA gang members in Chicago?

Hundreds of federal agents carried out a “targeted immigration enforcement operation” early Tuesday in Chicago, Illinois, against suspected Tren de Aragua gang members.

The FBI confirmed the operation to FOX32 Chicago, noting that its agents assisted the U.S. Border Patrol in the city’s South Shore neighborhood. The operation — which involved almost 300 agents — targeted six people associated with the Venezuelan gang, according to Fox News senior correspondent Mike Tobin.

Footage captured overnight showed agents converging on an apartment building in the area. At one point, a helicopter dropped snipers down onto the building’s roof.

Two dozen people were taken into custody.

Here comes the payback.

The Illinois Department of Human Rights announced late Wednesday that it filed a formal housing discrimination charge and opened an investigation into the owners and managers of the building: 7500 Shore A LLC, Trinity Flood, and Strength in Management LLC.

In a statement, the agency said it is looking into claims the landlords let federal agents know of Venezuelan immigrants living in the building as part of an attempt to “intimidate and coerce the building’s Black and Hispanic tenants into leaving the building.”

Gov. JB Pritzker, in a statement, said the allegations “raise serious concerns for people struggling to maintain housing — and the communities that have been profiled and relentlessly targeted by the federal government during its violent immigration enforcement operations. State law prohibits discrimination, and that includes aiding or abetting conduct intended to interfere with housing and civil rights. Illinois will not tolerate conduct that puts anyone in Illinois at risk of discrimination or harm.”

To be clear about what’s going on here, the Pritzker regime in Illinois has decided to define cooperation with federal law enforcement as a form of illegal discriminatory conduct that it can penalize.

After demonstrating that landlords can be penalized for tipping off ICE, then it’ll be the turn of other small businesses, and then finally cooperating with ICE will be deemed a ‘hate crime’.

We can’t have sanctuary states and cities. We can’t have legal systems at war with each other in this way. States cannot criminalize cooperation with federal law enforcement. That was always in the treason and sedition range. We’re now blowing past that into a slow motion civil war in which states try to intimidate their citizens into refusing to cooperate with the federal government.

Daniel Greenfield, Front Page Magazine