This school year about 108,000 Pennsylvania students from poor and working-class families received K-12 tuition assistance scholarships to find a non-public school that works — funded entirely by charitable contributions from individuals, small businesses and corporations. About 80,000 more students wanted this tuition assistance, but the funding ran out.
They voted unanimously to destroy this program. Because it works.
If you’re a teachers union boss, you hate all competition. But you have three additional headaches. A Commonwealth Foundation report details Pennsylvania’s shrinking public school student population, and stagnating or falling test scores — deposits historic spending increases. Plus, education choice has never been more popular.
Last week when Democrats were about to vote on the original bill destroying the program, Democrats learned just how popular. Thousands of parents, students, and donors flooded legislators with calls, emails, and personal visits.
Sadly, as dutiful toadies of the teachers union, legislators tried to fool parents. While appearing to remove the language reducing the money for tuition assistance, they kept the other cuts, program reductions and new red-tape crushing the program. Instead of the “death penalty,” they decided “merely” to put on handcuffs and starve the program.
Worse — they’re cowards, and fools — or they think parents and principals are.
House Democrats have spent the last week denying what they did — some angrily — in phone calls to school principals, donors, Catholic bishops and pastors, Jewish Day school leaders, and parents. Some have taken their vitriol to social media with lengthy, arrogant, angry posts — fighting with supporters and parents.
For the benefit of legislators who may not know any better — and to underscore how the Danielle Friel Ottens (D-Chester) and Frank Burnses (D-Cambria) of the House have been lying to parents, donors and clergy, here’s a sample of how they voted to ruin the program serving 108,000 students.
They imposed a tax on the money raised — taking away $15 million in tuition assistance annually. The program has two tiers (one for all students, plus one for the poorest students in the poorest communities): the bill would prohibit poor students from getting the extra aid, effectively forcing them to leave their schools — and putting those lifeline schools in danger of closing.
And they would require the Auditor General to audit every non-profit scholarship organization and every participating school — every single year. That does not happen to one public school district, where taxpayers spent $41 billion this year.
Suppose the issue wasn’t charitable donations for students; but fighting cancer. Imagine if House Democrats changed Pennsylvania laws so the Cancer Society had to start paying taxes on money raised; could only offer poor families medical or rehabilitation support — not both; and told middle-income families they were no longer allowed to be helped. Imagine if every Cancer Society chapter, every hospital, clinic, research facility, doctor and every support center had to undergo costly government audits every year.
Then, imagine telling constituents in calls, emails — and vitriolic posts on social media — that your vote didn’t do anything to “harm” the Cancer Society or patients; rather, your goal was to “strengthen” fighting cancer.
Ask yourself: Are the House Democrats clueless as to what they did? Do they think parents, donors and principals don’t know how the plan works? Or are they so brazen that they think they can get away with lying to us?
Pennsylvania’s Educational Improvement Tax Credit program (EITC) is in its 25th year. Donors have assisted over one million Pennsylvania students. Because of these income-based scholarships, those families have been given the gift of school choice — the gift of being able to find a non-public school that works for their children.
Parents, students and taxpayers all win. In 2001 when the EITC became law, it was overwhelmingly bipartisan legislation — passing the House 135-64. Now, the teachers union wants to stop school choice for many families.
The reality is that families who are economically successful already have school choice: they can afford tuition for non-public schools. Those families can move out of “bad districts” with failing or unsafe schools and move to a “good district.” And the kids of the politically connected get in to good schools.
After all the vitriol, double-speak, and misdirection, the truth is clear.
The success of Pennsylvania’s program — the model for the new federal “education freedom tax credit” — is why the teachers union is so selfishly against it. And they’ve used their outsized influence to pressure Democrats to hurt students and the schools whose mission it is to serve them.
Governor Shapiro has school choice for his kids.
You can put an end to this cruelty, Governor. Or your silence will tell us where you honestly stand.
Guy Ciarrocchi is a Senior Fellow with the Commonwealth Foundation. He writes for Broad + Liberty and RealClear Pennsylvania. Follow Guy at @PhilaFreedomGuy.
In Germany, Nazi leader Adolf Hitler orders a bloody purge of his own political party, assassinating hundreds of Nazis whom he believed had the potential to become political enemies in the future. The event became known as the Night of the Long Knives.
The leadership of the Nazi Storm Troopers (SA), whose four million members had helped bring Hitler to power in the early 1930s, was especially targeted. Hitler feared that some of his followers had taken his early “National Socialism” propaganda too seriously and thus might compromise his plan to suppress workers’ rights in exchange for German industry making the country war-ready.
the early 1920s, the ranks of Hitler’s Nazi Party swelled with resentful Germans who sympathized with the party’s bitter hatred of Germany’s democratic government, leftist politics, and Jews. In November 1923, after the German government resumed the payment of war reparations to Britain and France, the Nazis launched the “Beer Hall Putsch“—their first attempt at seizing the German government by force. Hitler hoped that his nationalist revolution in Bavaria would spread to the dissatisfied German army, which in turn would bring down the government in Berlin. However, the uprising was immediately suppressed, and Hitler was arrested and sentenced to five years in prison for high treason.
Sent to Landsberg jail, he spent his time dictating his autobiography, Mein Kampf, and working on his oratorical skills. After nine months in prison, political pressure from supporters of the Nazi Party forced his release. During the next few years, Hitler and the other leading Nazis reorganized their party as a fanatical mass movement. In 1932, President Paul von Hindenburg defeated a presidential bid by Hitler, but in January 1933 he appointed Hitler chancellor, hoping that the powerful Nazi leader could be brought to heel as a member of the president’s cabinet.
However, Hindenburg underestimated Hitler’s political audacity, and one of the new chancellor’s first acts was to use the burning of the Reichstag building as a pretext for calling general elections. The police, under Nazi Hermann Goering, suppressed much of the party’s opposition before the election. The Nazi Party joined forces with the German National People’s Party (DNVP), to gain a bare working majority in the Reichstag. Shortly after, Hitler took on absolute power through the Enabling Acts. In 1934, Hindenburg died, and the last remnants of Germany’s democratic government were dismantled, leaving Hitler the sole master of a nation intent on war and genocide.
From the man who led the evacuation of USS Arizona to the fighter pilot who took to the skies in his pajamas, learn the stories of eight of the many servicemen who distinguished themselves on one of the darkest days in American military history.
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For most Americans, the American Bar Association is merely a professional guild that publishes ethics opinions, hosts conferences, and occasionally weighs in on public policy. But in legal education, the ABA has long occupied a far more consequential role as de facto gatekeeper to the profession.
That status helps explain why the ABA’s recent move to suspend—and purportedly, to eliminate—two of its controversial diversity mandates for law schools represents more than an internal procedural dispute. It signals a potentially significant recalibration in the balance between accreditation authority, constitutional law, and ideological conformity in higher education.
To understand why the fight over ABA Standards 206 and 303(c) matters, one must first understand the extraordinary leverage the ABA possesses. For many law schools, losing ABA approval is tantamount to institutional death.
The ABA has served as the sole federally recognized accreditor of American law schools since 1952. In practical terms, accreditation determines institutional survival. Graduates of non-ABA-accredited schools are often barred from taking state bar examinations or face severe restrictions in licensure mobility. Federal student loan eligibility also hinges on accreditation. For many law schools, losing ABA approval is tantamount to institutional death.
That power has allowed the ABA to shape not merely the quality of legal education, but increasingly the ideological and cultural priorities of law schools themselves. The organization’s standards govern everything from faculty resources to admissions practices to curricular requirements.
For decades, one of the most controversial of those standards was Standard 206: the ABA’s “Diversity and Inclusion” requirement.
The modern version of Standard 206, adopted in 2016 during the height of institutional DEI expansion, required law schools to demonstrate “by concrete action” a commitment to diversity and inclusion in student admissions, faculty hiring, and staff recruitment. More specifically, schools were expected to maintain diversity “with respect to gender, race, and ethnicity.”
The language was notable not simply for its aspirational tone, but for its enforceability. “Concrete action” was not accidental phrasing. ABA site evaluation teams regularly assessed whether schools were satisfying the standard during accreditation reviews. Administrators understood the message clearly: schools were expected to produce measurable diversity outcomes or risk scrutiny of compliance. Schools were expected to produce measurable diversity outcomes or risk scrutiny of compliance.
Critics argued that the standard functioned less as a nondiscrimination policy than as a de facto pressure campaign for race-conscious admissions and hiring practices. Law schools thus devoted enormous resources to DEI bureaucracies, racial preference programs, diversity statements, and faculty initiatives designed to satisfy accrediting expectations. And because the ABA controlled accreditation, schools had powerful incentives to comply—even in the face of contrary state and federal law.
That tension became increasingly untenable after the Supreme Court’s 2023 decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, which held that race-conscious university admissions programs violated the Fourteenth Amendment. The ruling fundamentally altered the legal landscape surrounding affirmative action in higher education.
Suddenly, the ABA’s diversity mandates faced a collision with federal constitutional doctrine.
The pressure intensified after the Trump administration issued executive orders targeting DEI initiatives across higher education and placed accreditors under direct scrutiny. The Department of Education was instructed to review whether accrediting agencies—including the ABA—were imposing unlawful diversity requirements as conditions of institutional approval.
The ABA quickly recognized the danger.
In February 2025, the ABA Council suspended enforcement of Standard 206 and in May 2026, the ABA Council voted to eliminate Standard 206 altogether, sending the repeal to the ABA House of Delegates for final consideration. At the same time, the Council initiated a review of Standard 303(c), a comparatively newer but equally controversial rule requiring law schools to provide education and training on “bias, cross-cultural competency, and racism” to aspiring attorneys at least twice during law school.
If Standard 206 governed institutional behavior, Standard 303(c) reached directly into the classroom itself. Critics saw something quite different: compelled ideological instruction masquerading as professional training.
Adopted in 2022, Standard 303(c) required every ABA-accredited law school to provide students with “substantial opportunities” for instruction related to bias, racism, and cross-cultural competency as part of the professional formation curriculum. The rule was framed by supporters as necessary preparation for modern legal practice in an increasingly diverse society. But critics saw something quite different: compelled ideological instruction masquerading as professional training.
The controversy surrounding 303(c) stemmed not merely from its subject matter, but from its vagueness and practical implementation. The ABA never clearly defined what constituted adequate “cross-cultural competency” instruction, leaving schools to interpret compliance broadly—and often aggressively. In practice, many institutions responded by embedding mandatory DEI seminars, implicit bias workshops, identity-based programming, and race-conscious curricular modules into already crowded academic schedules.
For law students paying six-figure tuition bills to master constitutional law, civil procedure, contracts, evidence, and trial advocacy, the mandate raised obvious concerns. Every hour devoted to compulsory ideological programming was an hour not spent developing substantive legal skills. Critics argued that aspiring attorneys were increasingly being trained less to think rigorously about the law and more to internalize fashionable sociological frameworks about power, privilege, and systemic bias.
That concern was amplified by the inherently subjective nature of “bias” training itself. Many of the programs adopted under Standard 303(c) relied heavily on contested theories of implicit bias and systemic racism—concepts that remain deeply debated within both the social sciences and legal academia. Yet students often had little practical ability to dissent from the premises underlying the instruction, particularly in environments where disagreement could carry reputational or professional consequences.
The irony, of course, is difficult to ignore. Legal education has traditionally prized adversarial reasoning, skepticism, and analytical rigor. But under mandates like 303(c), law schools increasingly encouraged ideological conformity on some of the most politically charged issues in American life.
Nor was the concern merely theoretical. Some state supreme courts and lawmakers began questioning whether the ABA was exceeding its proper role as an accreditor by imposing politically infused curricular requirements unrelated to minimum competency in legal practice. Others warned that mandatory bias instruction could itself create constitutional problems at public institutions, particularly where students were effectively compelled to affirm contested viewpoints as part of their professional education. Once constitutional scrutiny sharpened and federal pressure mounted, the accrediting regime had to recalculate.
For years, diversity mandates were treated within legal education as morally untouchable and administratively irreversible. Yet the ABA’s abrupt retreat illustrates how dependent DEI enforcement always was on legal permissibility and political insulation. Once constitutional scrutiny sharpened and federal pressure mounted, the accrediting regime had to recalculate.
Importantly, however, the repeal of Standards 206 and potentially 303(c) will not suddenly transform law schools into ideologically neutral institutions.
Most elite law schools remain deeply committed to diversity initiatives as matters of institutional identity and prestige. Many universities have embedded DEI offices, faculty hiring priorities, affinity programming, and admissions philosophies into their broader bureaucratic structures. Our own reporting has revealed as much. Those efforts are unlikely to disappear merely because the ABA no longer requires them.
What may change instead is the coercive dimension.
Without Standard 206, schools that choose not to emphasize race-conscious diversity policies—or that wish to scale back DEI bureaucracies—may enjoy greater institutional flexibility. Without Standard 303(c), law schools may also regain discretion over how precious instructional time is allocated and whether ideological training should be mandatory at all. Public law schools in states hostile to DEI mandates may feel less vulnerable to accreditation pressure. Faculty dissent from prevailing orthodoxy may become marginally less professionally hazardous. And schools seeking viewpoint diversity may find more room to pursue it.
Equally significant is what this episode reveals about the nature of accreditation itself.
Accreditors wield immense power while operating largely outside public accountability. The ABA’s standards shape the legal profession indirectly but profoundly. Through accreditation, ideological preferences can become professional obligations without legislative debate or judicial review.
That reality has increasingly drawn scrutiny from policymakers concerned about the broader role of private accrediting bodies in American higher education. Several Republican-led states, including Texas, Florida, Tennessee, and Ohio, have already explored avenues to reduce the ABA’s monopoly influence over bar eligibility and law school approval.
The fight over Standards 206 and 303(c), then, is not merely about diversity policies. It is about who governs professional education in America—and whether accreditation should serve as a mechanism to enforce contested ideological commitments.
The ABA’s retreat does not end legal education’s culture war. Far from it. But it does represent a rare acknowledgment that even the most entrenched institutional orthodoxies remain vulnerable when they collide with constitutional limits, political accountability, and public skepticism.
For an organization long accustomed to setting the terms of debate, that may be the most consequential development of all.
Sarah Parshall Perry is Vice President and Senior Legal Fellow at Defending Education. Former Senior Counsel at the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights, and former Senior Legal Fellow at the Heritage Foundation, she focuses on parental rights, civil rights, and constitutional law. Perry chairs the Federalist Society’s Education Law executive committee, is a Trustee of Florida Gulf Coast University, and is the mother of 3 children.
Among our “climate leader” jurisdictions, Britain is a serious contender for the top spot. Sure Germany got started earlier than Britain, with the so-called “Energiewende” going back to the 1990s; and upstart American states like California and New York each think that their own hair shirt energy restrictions should qualify them for the number one position.
But Britain’s suite of policies in the aggregate is hard to top: mandatory Net Zero goals set by statute; madcap buildout of wind and solar electricity generation; shuttering of generation from coal and natural gas; refusal to permit drilling in the North Sea; complete ban on fracking. The Energy Minister of the current Labour government — Ed Milliband — is as crazed a climate zealot as you can find anywhere. The British have even dynamited coal-fired power stations to be sure that nobody could ever change their minds about this Net Zero thing and try to re-start the plants.
Here from a post I did back in 2022, is a picture of the former Longannet coal plant in Fife, Scotland, getting dynamited to smithereens in 2021.
The last coal-fired electricity generation station in the UK closed in 2024. Today, the UK claims to get about 45-47% of its electricity from “renewables,” although that includes about 5-7% “biomass,” plus a small amount of hydro. The wind/solar contribution is around 35-40%. Milliband thinks he can further increase that percentage by just building more and more wind turbines and solar farms.
But unfortunately for the British, their wind and solar generation facilities seem to be subject to all going quiet at the same time, often inconveniently at the very hottest or coldest times of the year. Building more and yet more of them does not solve the problem. Some call this Britain’s “looming firm generation capacity crisis.”
So what’s the answer? How about doing the unthinkable — bring back coal!
On June 9, Andrew Montford, Director of Net Zero Watch, addressed this issue with his new Report “Thinking the Unthinkable: Coal Power and National Security.” (Full disclosure: I serve on the Board of the American affiliate of Net Zero Watch.). Here is the basic assumption underlying Andrew’s paper:
[T]he deteriorating state of the UK economy – unsustainably high electricity prices, low growth, deindustrialisation and a declining tax base – means that Net Zero and, along with it, carbon pricing, will be abandoned, no matter which party is in power.
I think that is clearly right. Reality has caught up with them. It is only a question of time until they are forced to abandon the Net Zero fantasy.
Andrew’s Report also focuses on the national security implications of unreliable electricity, with its inherent need for insecure backup from imports:
[I]mports and offshore production are both vulnerable to the actions of hostile powers, as the sabotage of the Nordstream pipeline in 2022 made clear. In this regard, the UK is horribly exposed. Nearly half of our gas supply comes from Norway. Sabotage of the Langeled pipeline, which alone brings around 20%, would be catastrophic for the UK, and would quickly lead to a civil emergency.
Is it even possible to raise the subject of coal power generation today in the UK, where that fuel has been subject to a decades-long campaign of vilification? Montford:
While such a step [i.e., reviving coal generation] was unthinkable just 12 months ago, the political landscape is moving quickly. Polling by More in Common has found that that ever-rising energy bills are causing political volatility and fragmentation. Italy and Germany have both recently announced the extension of the lives of their coal-fired power stations. As a result, new voices are being listened to. As a hint of just how far the Overton window has already moved, the Reform party’s manifesto for the Scottish elections featured a pledge to allow coal mining once again. It clear that the looming geopolitical threats to the country now mean that the time is ripe to reconsider the consensus against coal that has taken hold in the last two decades.
So all that is needed is a sufficiently imminent crisis to force the issue of coal generation back into the public conversation. The two short weeks since issuance of Andrew’s Report have brought to Britain some indicators of the dire corner it has backed itself into. Readers here probably know about the recent record-setting heat wave that has covered much of Europe, including Britain. Paul Homewood, of the Not a Lot of People Know That website, has a post on June 25, titled “No Wind? No Sun? What Could Possibly Go Wrong?” Homewood’s post includes extensive excerpts from a piece in the Telegraph from June 24 (behind paywall). The gist is that on June 23 the UK’s National Energy System Operator (NESO) had issued an emergency power supply warning, which was then withdrawn after NESO secured emergency supplies from the continent. However, obtaining the emergency imported supplies required getting a special waiver of EU export restrictions. From the Telegraph piece:
The National Energy System Operator (Neso), which manages the grid, issued a rare emergency power supply warning on Tuesday after soaring temperatures triggered a slump in solar energy, with panels struggling to work in the hot conditions. It was subsequently withdrawn after Neso secured emergency supplies from the Continent on Wednesday. Kathryn Porter, an industry consultant, said Neso had “begged the EU” to lift import trading limits which would have capped the amount of energy Britain could import. Ms Porter said the sudden easing of restrictions had allowed the UK to obtain 2.3 gigawatts (GW) of imports versus a 1.5 GW limit introduced in May, helping Britain avoid power shortages.
OK, crisis averted, for now. But Homewood reports on a few other aspects of this solution to Britain’s crunch. First, they had to buy the power from the Netherlands on a day-ahead market that was already at a high level due to the heat wave and lack of dispatchable capacity. Homewood links a Tweet from a firm called Montel Analytics as to the price: “[T]hey are paying up to €1600 per MWh for it.” €1600/MWh is equivalent to more than $2000/MWh, or more than $2.00/kWh. That will translate to a retail price of around $2.50/kWh, compared to average U.S. retail electricity prices of under $0.20/kWh.
Oh, and almost all of the imported power was generated from either natural gas or coal.
In other words, the only effect of the wind/solar generation obsession has been to drive up the cost of electricity to consumers and businesses to ridiculous levels. And, next time around, when the next wind/sun drought comes along on a hot evening, the imported power may not be available at all, and widespread blackouts could follow.
Thank you, Andrew, for getting the subject of coal-fired electricity generation back into the conversation. It’s only a question of time before this will happen.
The twin earthquakes that struck Venezuela this week were not merely acts of nature—they laid bare decades of deliberate neglect and ideological folly. A magnitude 7.2 quake followed seconds later by a 7.5 temblor devastated the northern coast near Caracas, particularly La Guaira state, collapsing buildings and claiming at least 1,430 lives as of the latest reports, with tens of thousands still missing.
Rescue workers sifting through the rubble made a grim discovery: entire apartment complexes, many erected under Hugo Chávez’s “Grand Housing Mission,” were little more than facades held together by Styrofoam and thin concrete shells.
Video from the scene shows rescuers pulling apart walls with their bare hands, the interior material crumbling like packing foam. “No wonder everything crumbled like cardboard,” one rescuer remarked, as colleagues openly criticized the regime’s failures.
VIDEOS AT LINK…………..
👀😳The images coming out of Venezuela are raising serious questions.😳👀
Collapsed buildings appear to reveal large amounts of EPS (Styrofoam) inside structural elements. EPS can be safely used in construction—but only when properly engineered with reinforced concrete and… pic.twitter.com/AT5JvKr5iU— 🇺🇸 𝓐𝓟𝓡𝓘𝓛 𝓢𝓟𝓐𝓡𝓚𝓢 🇺🇸 (@AprilSpark1890) June 28, 2026
This catastrophe was foreseeable. Engineers and even some within the Chávez government had long warned that rushed socialist housing projects ignored seismic codes and basic engineering standards. Construction accelerated under Nicolás Maduro to meet political quotas, prioritizing propaganda over safety. The result? Pancaked high-rises and neighborhoods reduced to dust, burying families who trusted the state to provide.
Venezuela’s tragedy stands as a stark warning against centralized power that promises utopia while delivering death. The “Bolivarian Revolution” gutted the private sector, invited corruption, and left the nation ill-equipped for even routine governance, let alone disaster response.
Years of mismanagement, compounded by the regime’s isolation, meant scant heavy equipment and bureaucratic hurdles for aid workers. Interim leadership under Delcy Rodríguez declared disaster zones and restricted access, even as the 72-hour golden window for rescues closed.
The Human Cost of Ideological Hubris
Entire blocks in La Guaira vanished. A four-building complex saw three structures leveled, destroying hundreds of apartments. Survivors and volunteers clawed through debris for days before international teams arrived. Foreign rescuers, including from the United States, now labor alongside locals amid aftershocks, but the scale overwhelms. Over 3,000 injured and thousands in shelters paint a picture of a nation on its knees.
Non-government groups tracked nearly 50,000 unaccounted for, a figure that underscores the regime’s opacity. US Geological Survey models suggest the toll could climb far higher, potentially ranking among Latin America’s worst in a century. Yet the deeper failure lies not in the earth’s movement, but in leaders who built on sand—literally and figuratively.
Socialism’s track record in Venezuela offers no surprises. What began as grand promises of housing for the masses devolved into shoddy structures that could not withstand the shaking ground. Private construction withered under state control, leaving citizens vulnerable. This is the predictable fruit of a system that values loyalty over competence and central planning over reality.
Lessons in Stewardship and Truth As the world watches, the contrast with nations that value property rights, accountability, and sound governance could not be clearer. Free societies build with durability because they answer to the people, not party dictates. Venezuela’s rulers, by contrast, rushed projects for optics, ignoring warnings from their own experts.
In the rubble lies a call to discernment. Scripture reminds us of the peril of building without foundation: “And every one that heareth these sayings of mine, and doeth them not, shall be likened unto a foolish man, which built his house upon the sand: And the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew, and beat upon that house; and it fell: and great was the fall of it” (Matthew 7:26-27).
Venezuela’s leaders built upon the shifting sands of ideology, and the fall has been catastrophic.
American aid and global response offer immediate relief, but the long-term path forward requires Venezuelans to reject the lies that brought them here. True security flows from honest governance, respect for human life, and structures—both physical and moral—that endure. The Styrofoam walls stand as a monument to failure, a warning for any society tempted by similar delusions.
May the victims rest, the survivors find strength, and the world learn before the next preventable disaster strikes.
Other than self-loathsome, what would you call Chuck Schumer who coddles Ilhan Omar and courts Zohran Mamdami while both call for the eradication of Israel? The contempt that the youth wing of the Democrat party and the whole of the DSA show for Israel is no longer hidden. It is out in the open—huge and hideous. Yet Schumer and others in his party think that they can ignore, or even co-opt the beast. Of all the Democrats, only Fetterman is willing to state the obvious, that feeding the crocodile has not made it go away. In fact, appeasement has emboldened it.
A good example of that is what happened to Congressman Dan Goldman recently. I am not referring to him losing his congressional primary election to DSA commie, Brad Lander. I am referring to Goldman being savaged by Parviz Mukhamadkulov, the owner of the Poetica coffee shops in Brooklyn, after he stopped into Poetica so his 7-yr-old daughter could use the bathroom. In a tweet subsequently removed, Parviz wrote, “[W]e don’t serve racists, fascists, homophobes, genocide enablers. or anyone in between.. Too bad we didn’t recognize you right away, or we would have turned you away.”
The Poetica website proudly speaks of the Uzbek tradition of its founder that carries obligations. The website states, “When a guest arrives, the entire neighborhood organizes. Tea and bread before questions. A seat before an invitation. The guest is sacred because the act of welcoming is how a community keeps itself intact.” Apparently that Uzbek tradition of showing hospitality toward a guest is trumped by a more deeply rooted Muslim tradition of hating the Jew.
But like Schumer, Goldman is not challenging the rising tide of antisemitism that has infected his party, New York, and the rest of the Western world. It is being left to others like Harmeet Dhillon, the Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights at the U.S. Department of Justice, who said that her office was investigating the incident. “Federal law prohibits public accommodations such as coffee shops from discriminating against patrons based on their race, religion, or national origin. These actions are not only reprehensible, but they’re also potentially illegal,” Dhillon wrote.
Standing up for Western civilization means supporting Israel against the anti-civilizational forces arrayed against it. Schumer and the remaining Old Guard Democrats should understand that the forces that they have paired with seek their destruction too.
Everyday life has become a pressure cooker. The question is when that pressure cooker is going to blow up, and what forms that explosion will take.
Two dangerous trends are coalescing in Germany: the deterioration of private life and the tyrannization of politics. The latter comes to light in the persecution of any political opinion marginally different from that of the government.
Private life deteriorates under pressure from a stagnant economy with its withering welfare state. Unending tax hikes are coupled with the erosion and increasing unreliability of social benefits.
There is another aspect of the regress of private life in Germany. In a rare tour behind the official German media façade, journalist Liv von Boetticher tells of a police force in deep moral decline, of runaway crime, and of law enforcement institutions more concerned with suppressing political viewpoints than stopping crime.
The report by von Boetticher, low-key as it is, offers a frightening example of the forces behind European societal disintegration. Originally published in Die Welt on June 19th (where it appears to be inaccessible from the U.S.), this story is comprehensively covered by U.S. news site Breitbart:
The journalist said she was prompted to come forwards [sic] with what she’d learnt after noticing … officers told a very different and unvarnished account of Germany after official interviews had finished and the cameras stopped rolling.
Let us stop and think about this for a moment. Germany is now a society where police officers feel a need to put watertight walls between what they say in public and what they really think and believe. In a free, open society, with a thriving democracy where people live in peace and harmony, police officers do not feel the need to dichotomize between their official and unofficial views on work and life in general.
If a police officer in a democracy is dissatisfied with something, he knows he can go to his superiors and—without fear of retribution—express his opinions. He also knows that if he ever felt a need to discuss the state of his profession in public, he could do so, and his opinions would be met with respect and responsibility.
This is no longer the case in Germany. Liv von Boetticher uncovers a frightening suppression of opinion within the police force—and a precariously tone-deafGerman government. The most loyal state servants, the ones who are saddled with the duty to uphold law and order, have had their professional and personal lives so curtailed that they can no longer point to the grim, even sickening reality in which these police officers work.
Back to Breitbart:
Having given the official line their jobs may depend on to be taped, afterward they related what [von Boetticher] called “stories of fear and anger, violence, loss of control, and failed migration policies, and the feeling among law enforcement officers of often being abandoned by politics and society.
In what she describes as a “pretty much unanimous opinion” among police officers in every state in Germany, the nation’s thin line of law enforcement believes that Germany “is disappearing,” that the government has created “open season” for serious criminals to go about their business, and that—according to many of them—Germany as a country is “lost” or “finished.”
Ihave no reason to doubt their account of how crime runs rampant in Germany. It is a clockwork-reliable consequence of a society where politics is dominated by Marxist conflict theory; since police officers are deemed by said theory to represent power, law enforcement needs to be suppressed for the ‘liberation’ of the ‘oppressed’—the criminals.
To that point, is not this dissatisfaction with high crime just the usual complaints from politically right-wing police officers?
It is not. As von Boetticher explains, these are the views of police officers who have survived “a decade-long effort” by the German government to eliminate national conservatives and patriots from the ranks of law enforcement. Suppression of speech and of privately held political views includes an open ban on anyone sympathetic to conservative-nationalist AfD from being a police officer.
In other words, with AfD trending to become the biggest party in Germany, the men and women who have survived the political purge within the ranks of police are politically more leftist than Germany’s voters are. Despite this, they hold opinions that—if even hinted at officially—would cost them their jobs and possibly a lot more.
It takes a lot for people with leftist political views to concede that they were wrong. Therefore, when these viewpoints seep out of Germany’s politically sanitized police force, the deterioration of society has already gone beyond the point where normal police work would be effective—even without its politically correct restrictions.
What we have here, plain and simple, is a country where the government is nullifying its own law-and-order system. It is a country where freedom of speech is increasingly curtailed and where the practice of Berufsverbot—a ban from the workforce—from last century’s anti-terrorist campaigns has been revived.
This is the same country where Nazis and communists aggressively oppressed anyone with a dissenting view.
To put it bluntly, German history is fertile soil for seeds of totalitarianism to set roots and grow—and to do so with the blessing of those who claim to be fighting that very same totalitarian ideology.
All this political suppression is taking place over the heads of a population whose ability to feed themselves is being continuously eroded by Germany’s stagnant economy. The ongoing deindustrialization of the country gradually robs growing segments of the working class of well-paying jobs.
At the same time, unchecked criminal activity creeps increasingly closer to the coveted privacy of a family’s home and everyday life.
The compounding effects of persistently deteriorating economic conditions and increasingly invasive crime call for an outlet, a reaction, a strong and stern expression of public opinion. It calls for fundamental change to a political system that is failing its own people—one that would permit the very opinions that are banned, persecuted, and criminalized by the German government.
In short, everyday life in Germany has become a pressure cooker. The question is when that pressure cooker is going to blow up, and what forms that explosion will take. So far, the nation’s political elite has shown absolutely no interest in relenting: if anything, increasingly hardline political persecution will continue to lead Germany into the dark realm of tyranny.
What we can expect, in other words, is for the German government to ignore the formation of a perfect storm of societal decline. Instead of recognizing the real threats to Germany’s future, the government in Berlin will continue to fight the symptoms of that decline: growing support for AfD, declining morale in police, and perennial budget deficits.
The German elite’s methods of suppression will become harsher and more unforgiving. A government that transitions from democracy and freedom to totalitarianism and suppression of dissent will sooner or later, with eerie predictability, try to dictate the nation’s economy in the same way it dictates politics and public opinion.
At that point, Germany’s political decline will escalate to an economic implosion. At this point, even governments around Europe who are sympathetic to the German persecution of free speech will suffer the consequences of such policies.
Like clockwork, it gets hot in summer in western Europe. And like clockwork, the morons in the European ministries blame climate change for their own failure to face reality and make proper provisions for adapting to it.
We all know the myth – to boil frogs, slowly increase the temperature so they won’t realize it until it’s too late to jump out of the pot and save themselves. This summer, it appears the frogs are starting to feel the heat. Along with the anger at open borders, this may finally presage the end of the green nonsense and the politicians who are destroying their countries by promoting this hogswallop.
Like clockwork, it gets hot in Western Europe during the summer. And like clockwork, the morons in the European ministries and media blame climate change for their own failure to face reality and make proper provisions for adapting to it. Living in the UK, Germany, and France seems to be like living in a giant HOA run by scientific idiots who exempt themselves from the draconian measures they apply to others as they set about recreating pre-industrial feudal states.
The reports from there stand in sharp contrast to the experience of FIFA visitors, who saw air conditioning everywhere in the U.S., even in Houston’s very large stadium, so the FIFA visitors’ American experiences might be even more damaging to the governments involved.
France
Monique Barbut, Minister for Ecological Transition (yes, there is such a thing there), works in an air-conditioned office. She holds stock in a number of large energy-consuming companies like Airbus. She swatted away questions relating to her failure to ensure air conditioning where it’s most needed with this non-sequitur deflection:
I’m horrified by the people who tell me that all we need to do is put air conditioning everywhere (…) Do you think that’s going to prevent forest fires, the death of animals? That’s not adaptation, it’s an emergency measure.”
French electricity is largely nuclear-generated, so greens are deprived of the economy-killing excuse offered by the UK and German functionaries that they must reduce carbon emissions. (As if air conditioning offered much, if any, increase in carbon emissions. It is far less significant — even if you believed it affected the weather to any meaningful degree — than the output in China. China, by contrast, air conditions most of its urban facilities and its public transportation, and even water mists outside large buildings to cool the ambient air.)
In 2003, thousands died in Paris due to a lack of air conditioning. And because of the nature of most living quarters sans air conditioning, numerous premature deaths occur every time the temperature rises in the summer.
Without widespread air conditioning, perishable food will spoil in grocery stores, computers will not work, and public transport will be unendurably hot. Kids are fainting in schools. In one city in southern France, parents got together to pay for some air conditioners. The communist mayor ordered them ripped out because not every school in the city had them. Égalité
Public transport in France generally lacks air conditioning, and the TGV (fast train) from Paris to Nice broke down in a tunnel, resulting in a five-hour delay. Babies fainted in the 122-degree heat aboard the train. The level of bureaucratic idiocy that results in so much death and economic disruption is impossible to
Public transport in France generally lacks air conditioning, and the TGV (fast train) from Paris to Nice broke down in a tunnel, resulting in a five-hour delay. Babies fainted in the 122-degree heat aboard the train. The level of bureaucratic idiocy that results in so much death and economic disruption is impossible to
Public transport in France generally lacks air conditioning, and the TGV (fast train) from Paris to Nice broke down in a tunnel, resulting in a five-hour delay. Babies fainted in the 122-degree heat aboard the train. The level of bureaucratic idiocy that results in so much death and economic disruption is impossible to ignore.
Council planning officers ordered residents to remove air-con units over fears they produce too much carbon dioxide, stating they should only be used as a “last resort”.
The net zero clampdown is part of building regulations that state “active cooling” should only ever be allowed when all other means of “passive cooling”, such as opening windows or using fans, have been exhausted.[snip] Meanwhile, temperatures are forecast to reach as high as 40C this week, with Britain sweltering under a record heatwave that has forced schools to close, brought trains to a halt and led to the Met Office issuing a red “risk-to-life” warning.
Apparently, the busybody council meddlers require people to justify their need for active cooling. “Air-con engineers told The Telegraph that they had been called out to remove perfectly operational units worth thousands of pounds across London.”
Now, what makes all this even crazier is that all new housing in the UK is required to have heat pumps. As far as I can tell, heat pumps and air conditioners are technically the same — they use the same compression cycle — the heat pump extracts heat from outside and brings it inside, while the air conditioner brings the heat from inside to the outside.
The nitwit energy policies of the UK., including shutting down their North Sea oil production and mandating irregular and insufficient energy sources, meant the country was forced to pay about 17 times normal prices to obtain emergency energy supplies.
Rupert Lowe, who heads the Restore movement in the UK, speaks for me:
With such a debate raging about whether residential air con is a ‘climate responsible’ purchase or not, I want to outline the official Restore Britain position. WE DO NOT CARE.
Germany
For ideological reasons, Germany (and Belgium) stupidly destroyed their nuclear power plants, which it is claimed could have powered air conditioners at full blast all summer with fewer CO2 emissions. Even facilities where common sense demands air conditioning — like hospitals — are deprived of them because placing them in new buildings would create envy in owners of older buildings where there are none.
The most shocking story of this green “crab pot” philosophy is the relatively new hospital in Düsseldorf, which provides care for the most vulnerable heart attack victims who are suffering and probably perishing in this heated, closed atmosphere after builders were denied the right to install cooling systems.
To every criticism for mandating stupid policies, Germany has chosen to flat-out lie to its citizens.
German government to its citizens: portable A/C is “not effective” because the pressure drop sucks hot air into the room, “which heats the room even more”. 🤯 “Here we see the midwit condescension of the European managerial elite in its purest form. First of all, this is all disingenuous. The environment ministry knows full-well that air-conditioners work, they just don’t want people using them because it would strain the German electricity infrastructure — which the environment ministry itself has done a good deal to weaken. Also, if portable AC units don’t work, why have Germans bought 75% more of these machines in the last five years? Why are there literally millions of reviews on Amazon and elsewhere saying “This thing works great! Finally I can sleep through the night!” Why has pretty much nobody ever returned an AC unit, saying “It just made the room hotter!” How stupid do these bureaucrats think Germans are?”
In nearby Austria, the Viennese are replaying the 1940s as informers against those deemed enemies of the state. This time, the “enemies” are those who installed air conditioners.
In the back of many minds is the thought that the leaders of these European states understand full well that the most vulnerable — the elderly poor — are most likely to die from these policies, and that will free up social welfare funds for the hordes of third-world criminals and layabouts they prefer as constituents.
The European Union
Perhaps my favorite example of the feudal structure underlying European energy policies is this from Politico:
The European Commission’s headquarters was forced to shut down its air-conditioning system on Friday due to the heat wave.
Staff working at the Berlaymont building received a text at midday, reading: “BERL — URGENT — Due to extreme weather conditions, forced shut down of air cooling system from floor 1 to 7 for the rest of the day.”
The 13-story building is home to Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, her 26 commissioners and about 3,000 staff. Von der Leyen works on the 13th floor, and most of her commissioners’ offices are housed on floors eight or above.
It reminds me of the many laws in feudal Europe that limited the peasants to poor housing, harsh labor, inadequate low-protein nutrition, ragged clothing, and made it illegal for them to escape.
Some Brits predict it’s only a matter of time before the U.S. military airdrops air conditioners over there
Hezbollah supporters rioted in Beirut over the weekend following the signing of an agreement between Israel and Lebanon on Friday that aims to secure an Israeli withdrawal from Lebanese territory and the disarmament of the Iran-backed terrorist group, according to Lebanese media reports and footage of the unrest.
What began as motorcycles driving through Beirut with Hezbollah and Iranian flags eventually turned into tire burnings, blocking off main roads, including those leading to Beirut’s airport, and the burning of signs calling on the prioritization of Lebanese sovereignty.
Posters leading to the airport, which previously read “Thank you Iran” but were changed to “Lebanon first” last week, were set alight.
While the agreement has been celebrated by several regional powers, including Jordan and the United Arab Emirates, Hezbollah has firmly rejected the deal as “null.”
Hezbollah chief Naim Qassem said on Saturday that the US-brokered agreement was a humiliating concession that undermined Lebanese sovereignty.
“We did not leave the battlefield in the most difficult circumstances, and we will not leave it,” he said, asserting that the terrorist group would not abide by the agreement and continue its attacks in violation of Lebanon’s domestic laws.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the agreement allows Israeli forces to remain in southern Lebanon if Hezbollah fails to disarm, in line with a Lebanese law enacted in March prohibiting non-state actors from bearing arms.
Fadlallah: Agreement unenforceable without ‘civil war’
The issue of Lebanese sovereignty has become increasingly contentious in recent months after Hezbollah renewed hostilities with Israel following the killing of Iran’s former supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, a decision that drew criticism from Lebanon’s political leadership.
Hezbollah lawmaker Hassan Fadlallah said Lebanese authorities would not be able to enforce the agreement unless “they go to civil war,” repeating similar threats made by Qassem in May.
Lt.-Col. (res.) Sarit Zehavi, founder and president of the Alma Research and Education Center, previously told The Jerusalem Post that despite significant gains by Israel, the group and its supporters still have the power to destabilize Lebanon
Hezbollah would confront any measure taken by Lebanese authorities and would hold on to its weapons even more, adding that the group’s opposition was “serious” and would not allow authorities to implement their commitments on the ground, Fadlallah said, according to Hezbollah-affiliated media site Al Mayadeen.
The issue of Lebanese sovereignty
The attacks from Hezbollah led to a renewed Israeli presence in Lebanon, forcing the displacement of around 20% of the country’s population, according to UN figures.
Iran’s attempts to include Lebanon in its Memorandum of Understanding with the United States were also broadly painted as further Iranian interference in Lebanese affairs.
For years, Democrats have told America they are the ones defending democracy, norms, and institutions.
Then the Supreme Court hands President Trump a few major wins, and suddenly they want to change the size of the Court.
Rep. Pramila Jayapal went on Newsmax and said Democrats are “absolutely” talking about expanding the Supreme Court.
That is the tell.
The timing is impossible to miss.
The Court just handed President Trump key immigration victories, and the response from the left is already shifting from legal argument to institutional redesign.
When you cannot win the ruling, change the scoreboard.
Breitbart reported the Newsmax exchange and laid out the political context around Jayapal’s admission, including the timing after the Court’s immigration rulings.
The report centered on her answer after those decisions, when she said Democrats are “absolutely” discussing expansion of the Court as part of their response to the conservative majority.
That matters because court expansion is far more than a routine policy tweak. It would change the number of justices on the nation’s highest court because the current Court keeps handing down decisions the left hates.
The old pitch was judicial reform. The current political reality looks much more like adding seats until immigration, executive-power, and constitutional rulings come out differently for Democratic priorities.
Jayapal did not stop with the television hit.
She put the demand in writing on her own official X account.
Expand the court. Enact term limits. Implement serious ethics and transparency standards. That’s what we need to do to reform this right-wing Supreme Court. pic.twitter.com/4p8oQkT1CL
— Rep. Pramila Jayapal (@RepJayapal) June 25, 2026
Expand the Court.
Term limits.
New ethics and transparency standards.
That is the package she is selling after the Court refused to give the left the immigration outcomes it wanted.
In Jayapal’s official statement, she tied her criticism to two Supreme Court cases: Mullin v. Doe and Mullin v. Al Otro Lado.
Her statement accused the Court of limiting legal immigration, narrowing judicial review, and helping advance President Trump’s immigration agenda through emergency rulings affecting protected-status and parole policies across multiple immigrant communities nationwide.
That is Jayapal’s framing, and readers should know it accurately before judging the politics around it. She sees the Court’s immigration rulings as a direct threat to the policies she supports.
That is exactly why the expansion talk is so revealing. The objection now reaches the Court’s current composition and its willingness to rule against the left’s priorities in immigration fights.
And Jayapal is not the only Democrat moving in that direction.
Breitbart separately reported that Rep. Seth Moulton also said Democrats should talk about court packing after the Haitian TPS ruling.
Moulton’s comments came in the same post-ruling atmosphere, with Democrats furious over immigration decisions and searching for a way to answer a conservative-majority Court during a volatile term full of legal immigration flashpoints.
He connected the debate to Haitian protected-status recipients and argued Democrats should discuss expansion, term limits, ethics reform, and ways to push back against MAGA Republicans after the ruling.
That is the piece voters should notice. The public message is reform, while the practical effect would be adding new seats when the existing Court will not deliver the left’s preferred immigration rulings.
House Republicans have already warned exactly where this goes.
The House Judiciary Committee held a hearing titled “Court Packing: A Threat to the Supreme Court’s Legitimacy” before this latest round of Democratic comments.
The hearing framed Court expansion as a threat to judicial independence, separation of powers, and public trust in the Supreme Court after years of progressive pressure campaigns against conservative justices and unpopular constitutional rulings.
That institutional warning is the heart of the fight, because the size of the Court becomes a partisan weapon once it is treated as negotiable after bad rulings.
If one party can resize the Court whenever it loses enough cases, the Court becomes a political prize instead of a constitutional check on Congress and the White House.
President Trump won at the Supreme Court under the rules everyone has been living under.
Now Democrats are openly discussing whether those rules need to be changed.
That is a campaign to capture one.
Read the full Supreme Court ruling here: Mullin v. Doe. The related official ruling in Mullin v. Al Otro Lado is here too.
THE ARTFUL DILETTANTE 