Europe in Wonderland: Belgium Criminalizes Truth - Drieu Godefridi

 

by Drieu Godefridi

The Conviction of Dries Van Langenhove Outlaws Reality

 

• In a ruling that should send chills down the spine of anyone who still believes in the Enlightenment values of reason, evidence, and open debate, a Belgian court has convicted nationalist activist Dries Van Langenhove for the crime of stating uncomfortable facts.

• This is not merely another skirmish in Europe's war on free speech. It is something far more sinister: the explicit criminalization of observable, verifiable reality itself.

• Van Langenhove warned of "the great replacement," and linked mass migration to housing shortages, strained welfare systems, rising criminality, and cultural erosion. He criticized multiculturalism as incompatible with cohesive societies and mocked certain progressive dogmas on gender.

• None of these points was fabricated. The court itself acknowledged that many of his statements rested on scientific evidence and official statistics.

• This turns justice on its head.

• Since when does presenting verifiable facts about crime rates, IQ distributions, or fertility differentials constitute "criminal intent"? Where is the evidence of incitement to violence? There is none. The "proof" is the speech itself — and the judges' subjective interpretation of its potential emotional effect on special protected groups.

• In liberal democracies worthy of the name, truth has always been a defense against charges of defamation or incitement. In 21st-century Belgium, truth is now aggravating evidence.

• European elites have made him a repeated target precisely because he articulates what growing numbers of citizens observe daily: mass migration from culturally distant regions correlates with parallel societies, higher welfare dependency, and spikes in certain crimes.

• Across Europe — from hate speech laws in the UK and Germany to "disinformation" monitors in the EU — authorities are not merely restricting expression. They are punishing the acknowledgment of reality when it contradicts the multicultural narrative. Facts about integration failures, no-go zones, grooming gangs, or group differences in outcomes are treated as heretical, regardless of their empirical basis.

• While facts concerning Arabs, Africans, or Muslims are thus censored or forbidden, in Belgium, as soon as it concerns Jews, then absolutely everything is permitted.

• When courts declare that even accurate statistics can be criminal if they foster "intolerance," they do not protect minorities — they infantilize them and infantilize the public. They signal that native Europeans have no right to discuss the transformation of their own societies.

• Van Langenhove will appeal his conviction, as he has before. The real verdict, however, is already in: Western Europe's governing class has chosen repression over reality. They would rather punish the messenger than confront the inconvenient data on the real costs of migration.

In a ruling that should send chills down the spine of anyone who still believes in the Enlightenment values of reason, evidence, and open debate, a Belgian court has convicted nationalist activist Dries Van Langenhove for the crime of stating uncomfortable facts. Pictured: Van Langenhove speaks to the media at the Gent Court of Appeal on June 20, 2025. (Photo by James Arthur Gekiere/Belga Mag/AFP via Getty Images)

In a ruling that should send chills down the spine of anyone who still believes in the Enlightenment values of reason, evidence, and open debate, a Belgian court has convicted nationalist activist Dries Van Langenhove for the crime of stating uncomfortable facts.

On May 26, 2026, the Correctional Court of Leuven fined Van Langenhove €4,000 for a February 2024 lecture at KU Leuven University. The offense? Presenting data on mass migration, group differences in intelligence and achievement, crime statistics, and the failures of multiculturalism — in a manner the court deemed to create an "us versus them" atmosphere.

This is not merely another skirmish in Europe's war on free speech. It is something far more sinister: the explicit criminalization of observable, verifiable reality itself.

What Van Langenhove Actually Said

Van Langenhove's lecture, hosted by the Nationalistische Studentenvereniging ("Nationalist Student Association"), was billed as a discussion on regenerative agriculture but quickly became a wide-ranging critique of open-border policies and their consequences. He cited statistics on educational outcomes, crime rates linked to non-Western immigration, declining quality of life in multicultural areas, and differences among groups.

Van Langenhove said, for instance:

"If I say it is normal that there are more Asians and whites — Asian men and white men — who become engineers than African Americans, because African Americans simply do worse at school for a number of reasons... then we are apparently not allowed to say that whites are simply better bridge builders than Africans. Yet go to Africa once and look at the bridges there. Most of the bridges still standing were built during the colonial period or even long before by white engineers. And when bridges need repairing nowadays, it is not the Africans repairing them — it is Asians; the Chinese have taken over everything.... People are not equal, animals are not equal, plants are not equal, there is nothing in nature that is equal."

Van Langenhove warned of "the great replacement," and linked mass migration to housing shortages, strained welfare systems, rising criminality, and cultural erosion. He criticized multiculturalism as incompatible with cohesive societies and mocked certain progressive dogmas on gender.

None of these points was fabricated. The court itself acknowledged that many of his statements rested on scientific evidence and official statistics.

The Court's Damning Admission: Facts Are Irrelevant

Here is the most revealing passage from the judgment, as quoted by Van Langenhove and reported across multiple outlets:

"Even if all of the statements made by Van Langenhove are based on scientific evidence and statistics, it makes no difference to the criminal intent. Van Langenhove is not charged with spreading false information. He is charged with presenting facts in a way that incites hatred against persons on the grounds of one or more of the protected criteria in the Anti-Racism Law."

The judge does not dispute the accuracy of the data. He concedes the statements are factually supported. Yet this veracity is declared "irrelevant." What matters, according to the court, is the intention inferred from creating an "atmosphere of hostility" or an "us versus them" narrative.

This turns justice on its head.

Since when does presenting verifiable facts about crime rates, IQ distributions, or fertility differentials constitute "criminal intent"? Where is the evidence of incitement to violence? There is none. The "proof" is the speech itself — and the judges' subjective interpretation of its potential emotional effect on special protected groups.

In liberal democracies worthy of the name, truth has always been a defense against charges of defamation or incitement. In 21st-century Belgium, truth is now aggravating evidence.

A Symbol of Broader Repression

This case is Van Langenhove's second conviction. It follows earlier proceedings against him and his Schild & Vrienden ("Shield & Friends") movement for private chats and memes. European elites have made him a repeated target precisely because he articulates what growing numbers of citizens observe daily: mass migration from culturally distant regions correlates with parallel societies, higher welfare dependency, and spikes in certain crimes.

The deeper meaning is clear. Across Europe — from hate speech laws in the UK and Germany to "disinformation" monitors in the EU — authorities are not merely restricting expression. They are punishing the acknowledgment of reality when it contradicts the multicultural narrative. Facts about integration failures, no-go zones, grooming gangs, or group differences in outcomes are treated as heretical, regardless of their empirical basis.

This Wonderlandian Inquisition is enabled by what philosopher Curtis Yarvin has termed "the Cathedral": the decentralized yet ideologically unified complex of media, academia, NGOs, and judicial bureaucracies that enforces progressive orthodoxy. Judges, feeling shielded by this moral and institutional consensus, act with impunity. They believe themselves not mere arbiters of law, but guardians of the faith — a faith in which biological realities, cultural incompatibilities, and demographic arithmetic must be denied lest they undermine the sacred project of diversity.

Double Standards

While facts concerning Arabs, Africans, or Muslims are thus censored or forbidden, in Belgium, as soon as it concerns Jews, then absolutely everything is permitted. In August 2024, in a column published in the magazine Humo, the Flemish Belgian novelist and columnist Herman Brusselmans wrote about Gaza: "I become so furious that I want to ram a sharp knife through the throat of every Jew I meet," while also calling Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a "short, fat, bald Jew." This incitement to murder, this open admission of pogromist appetite — which would be condemned in any civilized country — was deemed by the Belgian judge handling Brusselmans' case to be nothing more than an expression of freedom of speech, and that this hatred of Jews does not constitute a call to murder.

The Death of Freedom — and Sanity

Europe is rapidly becoming a continent where certain truths are unsayable, and therefore, presumably unthinkable. When courts declare that even accurate statistics can be criminal if they foster "intolerance," they do not protect minorities — they infantilize them and infantilize the public. They signal that native Europeans have no right to discuss the transformation of their own societies.

Van Langenhove will appeal his conviction, as he has before. The real verdict, however, is already in: Western Europe's governing class has chosen repression over reality. They would rather punish the messenger than confront the inconvenient data on the real costs of migration.

If this trend of "painting the roses red" continues, the choice for Europeans will not be between "hate speech" and silence, but between submission to a "managed decline" and a long-overdue reclamation of the right to name reality — before it is too late.

Drieu Godefridi is a jurist (University Saint-Louis, University of Louvain), philosopher (University Saint-Louis, University of Louvain) and PhD in legal theory (Paris IV-Sorbonne). He is an entrepreneur, CEO of a European private education group and director of PAN Medias Group. He is the author of The Green Reich (2020).

Source: https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/22595/belgium-criminalizes-truth

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Poll spells disaster for Republicans in 2026 midterms - Thérèse Boudreaux

 

by Thérèse Boudreaux

Democrats’ lead has widened by five percentage points since the Voters’ Voice Poll in March, when support for Democratic versus Republican congressional candidates was split 44%-43%.

 

(The Center Square) -

Five months out from the 2026 midterm elections, Republicans’ chances of maintaining control of Congress appear grim, new polling shows.

The Center Square’s newest Voters’ Voice Poll revealed that 47% of U.S. registered voters surveyed would vote for a Democratic candidate if elections were held today, while only 41% would vote for a Republican. Nine percent of voters haven’t made up their minds yet.

The poll was conducted by Noble Predictive Insights from June 1-4, 2026, surveying 2,585 registered U.S. voters. The sample was comprised of 915 Republicans, 1013 Democrats, and 297 True Independents, the latter of whom chose neither major party when asked about their political leanings.

Democrats’ lead has widened by five percentage points since the Voters’ Voice Poll in March, when support for Democratic versus Republican congressional candidates was split 44%-43%.

“Democrats are widening their lead on the congressional generic ballot because they're not the party in power – I’m not saying the Democrats are doing spectacular here, and they’re really not, it’s really that people are just so dissatisfied, and there's really not another option,” Mike Noble, founder and CEO of Noble Predictive Insights, told The Center Square.

While the leanings of members in either of the two major political parties remain relatively stable, swing voters’ choices pose a growing threat to Republicans. A dismal 19% of Independents chose a Republican candidate, while 39% chose a Democratic candidate.

Although nearly a third of total Independents remain undecided, True Independents have shifted toward Democrats since March, with 20% now supporting a Democratic candidate and 10% supporting a Republican.

A whopping 49% of Independents are currently undecided, raising the stakes for Republicans as midterms draw closer.

Critical bipartisan legislation funding farmers and road infrastructure has lagged in Congress, and Republicans in both chambers initially blocked War Powers Resolutions to halt military hostilities in Iran that are driving up gas and food prices.

“Republicans have a problem on their hands. If these economic pain points continue or get worse, the worse it's going to be for them for the midterms,” Noble said.

“What it's doing is just pushing voters towards the Democrats. People are not happy, they're feeling the economic pinch, and because of that, Republicans are hurting, and it's benefiting Democrats," he added. "So Republicans [will] want to get a handle on this sooner rather than later as we get closer to these November elections coming up.”

Notably, groups particularly sensitive to the rising costs of living are turning to Democrats, who have criticized recent price increases due to the Iran conflict, President Donald Trump’s tariff policies, and Republican infighting or inaction in Congress over cost-of-living issues like healthcare and housing.

The median annual household income in the U.S. was $83,730 in 2024, according to the United States Census Bureau.

The July Voters’ Voice Poll showed that Americans earning under $50,000 per year favored Democrats over Republicans, 49% to 39%.

The median income for Black households was about $32,000 less than that, while the median income for Hispanic voters was approximately $18,000 less than the overall median income.

Only 13% of Black voters and 38% of Hispanic voters said in the Voters’ Voice Poll that they would choose a Republican candidate.

Younger voters aged 18-29, who typically have the lowest salaries of any nonretired age group, also leaned left, with 55% supporting a Democrat and only 33% supporting a Republican. All age groups, however, favored Democrats at least slightly over Republicans.

Female voters, whose median income in 2024 was about $14,000 less than males’, supported a Democratic candidate by 52% and a Republican candidate by 35% in the poll, with 11% remaining unsure.

By contrast, 48% male voters surveyed supported Republicans, while 43% supported Democrats.

“What this tells us is that basically this cost of living [issue] is a dominant pressure point, and so until they can get this fixed, it's just going to be a problem,” Noble said. “This is top of mind for folks, it's impacting them, and again, it's likely going to impact voting. I think also it impacts mostly those toss-up congressional seats, because those are the battlegrounds, that's more where the persuadables outsize the partisans.”

Even without Republicans’ political woes, political parties in power generally perform poorly during midterm elections. In the current political climate, Noble added, Democrats’ best chance of regaining control of Congress is to focus on pocketbook issues rather than President Trump’s controversial actions.

“So I'm non-partisan, but if I was advising Democrats, they literally have the stupidest, simplest task ahead of them if they want to win,” Noble said. “It blows my mind, [because] Democrats still, to this day, haven't figured out that attacking Trump does nothing for them. Trump is defined – people have their opinion of them. Just focus on the economy and costs, affordability. That's all you’ve got to do.”

The poll’s margin of error is +/- 1.93%. 

Thérèse Boudreaux 

Source: https://justthenews.com/nation/states/center-square/poll-spells-disaster-republicans-2026-midterms

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Remigration and the Save Europe Act - Eugyppius

 

by Eugyppius

How certain social media schemes to improve the European condition are unlikely to succeed.

 

Gregory Bovino, ex-Customs and Border Patrol Chief, appears with (from left) Eva Vlaardingerbroek, Martin Sellner, and Alfonso Gonçalves at the second Remigration Summit in Portugal last week.

In 2024, the Austrian Identitarian activist Martin Sellner began serious efforts to push his concept of remigration into the political mainstream, and since then the German state and its civil society collaborators have extended him every assistance.

Domestic intelligence agents and activist journalists at Correctiv collaborated to convict Sellner and Alternative für Deutschland of planning the mass deportation of naturalized Germans in a late 2023 meeting in Potsdam. They called this small private meeting a “Secret Plan against Germany” and drew not-so-subtle comparisons to the notorious Wannsee Conference. Ensuing anti-AfD protests lasted months, even as litigation succeeded in deconstructing much of the slander Correctiv had propagated. The hysteria cost AfD some support ahead of the European elections, but it also succeeded in making “remigration” a household word throughout the Federal Republic—something that Sellner and his Identitarians could never have achieved on their own. Unbelievably, the Correctiv reporting was turned into a theater piece, and the actual Wannsee Villa where Nazi government officials and SS leaders met to plan the Final Solution in 1942 received a sign advising visitors of Sellner’s Potsdam meeting and “the . . . obvious . . . link between today’s ethno-nationalist fantasies of deportation and the historic Wannsee Conference.”

For their next act, authorities toyed with legally doubtful schemes to ban Sellner from Germany, while police devised pretenses to disrupt the speaking events Sellner had scheduled in the Federal Republic to present his book on Remigration. All this meant more press and more eyeballs for Sellner’s cause. When Sellner co-organized the inaugural “Remigration Summit” last spring in Italy, authorities tried to prevent the attendance of several German Identitarian activists by temporarily banning them from leaving the country, and they did the same again when the second “Remigration Summit” convened in Portugal last week. In each case, their restrictions ensured that small conferences held in other countries and attended by no more than a few hundred people could remain the subject of reporting and controversy here at home.

I don’t know to what degree the German approach to Sellner’s remigration program reflects a calculated strategy, and to what degree it’s just all the pinched head girls in the state bureaucratic apparatus having a collective aneurysm over the latest politically naughty thing to come across their desks. Either way, the unique German system of “defensive democracy” requires an enemy against which to array its defenses, and in the decades since the Berlin Wall fell this enemy has become “the extreme Right”—concentrated like the old Communist foe in the eastern states of the former DDR, embodied by Alternative für Deutschland rather than the SED, and constructed as an equal if not greater threat to Our Democracy. Because, unlike the Communists, this enemy does not really exist, it requires regime propagandists to engage in heavy revisionism—for example, by casting as an NSDAP successor a populist-Right party with politics broadly equivalent to the 1980s-era CDU, and by building up and deploring particular villains like Sellner.

Now, political dissidents and activists of all stripes have a curious relationship with establishment discourse. The one is like oil and the other is like water; they cannot occupy the same space. In the past years, the myth that Diversity Is Our Strength and that mass migration might fix our pension plans, alleviate our cultural ennui, and improve our culinary offerings has collapsed. Anti-migrationism has gone mainstream in many circles, driving right-populists to seize upon remigration as the new cause. I would imagine that a similar process unfolded from the establishment perspective; as major politicians and journalists decided the time had come to put the brakes on the steady stream of younger males streaming into our country from the Global South, they needed to draw a new line in the sand to differentiate themselves from the populist rabble-rousers.

Thus, with the help of literally everybody from Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s benighted traffic light government to the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution to Alternative für Deutschland to Martin Sellner and his Identitarians, remigration became the new anti-migration. Which is fine, as far as it goes; people should support the causes they want, and nobody would dispute that, particularly in the last ten years, a great many people have forced their way into Europe, where they have proceeded to abuse our social welfare systems, violate the law at disproportionate rates, and substantially degrade the quality of life. If I could push a button and make these people leave, I would.

Unfortunately, this problem does not come packaged with any easy solutions, and I am less and less certain (1) how remigration is supposed to work and (2) whether the newly ascendant and highly dogmatic remigrationists on the Right have any path toward realizing their vision. While remigrationists preach the manifold benefits of putting migrants on airplanes back to the Global South, the migrants’ native countries in many cases refuse to accept them, mass migration continues, if at a somewhat slower pace, the AfD remains firewalled out of German politics, our elaborate NGO machinery continues to push migrationist humanitarianism, a broad elite consensus resists even efforts to deport many of those who are here illegally, and primary EU law confounds remigrationist proposals at numerous points. Remigration would prove a tall order if 85 percent of Germans reversed their stance on the idea tomorrow. Sellner’s full, heavily technocratic vision, meanwhile, would require broad institutional buy-in and support from all major parties, including large parts of the Left, over a period of decades. We are talking about a new social consensus to compel or encourage the mass resettlement of entire populations, as deep and broad as the consensus that until recently existed behind climatism. That probably can’t happen without serious generational turnover or some kind of serious political upheaval.

I do not write this as a condemnatory political ninny or an incurable contrarian. I consider Sellner a friend, and I am even his translator. Yet personal considerations like these aren’t enough to blunt my skepticism.

The most recent initiative in remigration land is something called the Save Europe Act, rolled out by Sellner and Dutch political activist Eva Vlaardingerbroek at the Remigration Summit 2026 in Portugal. Basically, there’s an EU procedural mechanism known as the European Citizens’ Initiative (ECI), whereby ordinary people can bring a legal proposal for consideration directly before the European Commission. To do this, they need only gather a million signatures in support and meet a few other requirements. Among other things, the Save Europe Act demands “legislative and policy measures” to impose a “moratorium” on non-European migration, to deport “illegally staying migrants, rejected asylum seekers,” and criminals, to “establish a harmonized EU-wide framework for broader remigration” and to “remove social welfare incentives and benefits that function as pull factors for migration.”

All of that sounds great, as does the fact that Sellner and Vlaardingerbroek claim to have gathered well over 200,000 “signatures” so far. Unfortunately, reality tends generally to be less great. To begin with, Sellner and Vlaardingerbroek have yet to register the Save Europe Act with the European Commission at all. The signatures they are collecting—really, just email addresses—are part of an internet publicity campaign and have no wider significance. According to me, chances that the Commission agrees to register the Save Europe Act as a formal ECI are quite low, for the Commission may reject any proposal that “is . . . manifestly contrary to the values of the Union.” If Sellner and Vlaardingerbroek do manage to squeeze their initiative through registration and the Save Europe Act becomes more than a buggy website, then they’ll still need to collect a million signatures—not from random internet people, but from verified citizens of EU member states. And if they meet that hurdle, they’ll compel a response from the Commission and a hearing in the European Parliament. Even in this best-case scenario, there is no chance that the Save Europe Act becomes law, inspires any laws, or changes anything at the EU level at all.

Defenders of the Save Europe Act who have bothered to read the fine print accept that they are not on the path to making Remigration official EU policy. They argue instead that publicity surrounding the Save Europe Act will “move the Overton Window” and normalize remigration as a concept. These arguments neglect the fact that remigration has already been normalized; as I wrote above, since 2024, it has become almost a household word in Germany, if one denoting a very bad and fascistic concept approximately on par with outright genocidal fascism. Otherwise, I have learned to be wary of intangible, immeasurable ends in the world of political activism. Western politics abounds with activists who are changing perceptions, challenging conventions, deconstructing myths, complicating assumptions, correcting prejudices, deepening understandings, and now moving Overton Windows, and the only thing these projects and their goals have in common is that nobody can work out what any of them mean in concrete terms.

Mass migration has been an absolute curse. People want the migrants to stop coming, and they want the ones who are already here to go back home. They feel impotent to change the situation, and it’s natural that they should support social media campaigns promising at the very least to give them a voice. That’s fine, and most of this is probably harmless, but the truth is that we’re not going to petition the migrants away. I’ve read so many appeals to the Overton Window at this point that the concept has become quite threadbare for me, but if anything has shifted mass media discourse these past years, it is not activist campaigns but the manifold and quite serious problems caused by mass migration itself. As in so many other areas—from COVID to climatism—retarded elite policies are failing and unwinding themselves, but we’re not yet winning.

* * *

Eugyppius  is the pseudonym of a former German academic who lived and taught for most of his career in the United States. He now blogs about topics in German domestic politics and other matters at his Substack, where this article was originally published. You can also follow him at The Daily Sceptic.

Source: https://amgreatness.com/2026/06/14/remigration-and-the-save-europe-act/

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More than 475k children trafficked to US under Biden, 300k unaccounted for, DOJ says - Bethany Blankley

 

by Bethany Blankley

Once UACs arrive in the U.S., federal law requires that their oversight and care be administered by the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Administration for Children and Families

 

(The Center Square) -

Acting U.S. Attorney General Todd Blanche dropped a bombshell of data on Thursday describing Trump administration efforts to find hundreds of thousands of missing unaccompanied alien children (UACs). UACs are minors trafficked to the U.S. border and smuggled into the U.S. under the guise of reuniting with family. In reality, many have been trafficked through a complex network run by transnational criminal organizations.

More than 475,000 UACs were trafficked to the U.S. during the Biden administration. More than 300,000 were unaccounted as of the end of 2024, Blanche said at a press conference in Washington, D.C.

“The way that this happened is criminals trafficked these children to the border usually committing fraud to do so,” he said. “Oftentimes the children were abused, assaulted and certainly exploited.”

Once UACs arrive in the U.S., federal law requires that their oversight and care be administered by the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Administration for Children and Families. The ORR has historically sent the majority of children to live with so-called sponsors.

Under the Biden administration, ORR often placed UACs with unvetted sponsors, background checks weren’t performed, UACs were released to alleged gang members, human traffickers, non-family members and sent to non-residential addresses, federal inspector general audits and a Florida grand jury found, The Center Square reported.

“In some cases, individuals would sponsor multiple children, which required them to lie to government personnel and on government forms claiming they were close relatives when in fact they were not,” Blanche said. “They would use fake or stolen identities and make other false claims during the application process in order to obtain custody of the children.”

The crimes committed against hundreds of thousands of children are a direct result of the federal government failing “to protect our borders,” Blanche said. As a result, “it is the most vulnerable who suffer.”

Last fall, the Trump administration launched a welfare check initiative with multiple federal agencies attempting to locate the UACs, The Center Square reported. The Trump administration is also still releasing UACs to sponsors.

U.S. attorneys nationwide are prosecuting human traffickers and smugglers, including of UACs, as well as those who put UACs into forced labor and sex trafficking schemes.

There are more than 15,500 super-sponsor cases the DOJ has identified along with the Department of Homeland Security, Blanche said. Super-sponsor cases involve individuals who sponsor more than three unrelated UACs. The cases involve sexual assault of children, “the stuff of nightmares,” he said.

Secretary of Homeland Security Markwayne Mullin said, “When we started digging into these cases, we started hearing the absolute horrific things that took place under the Biden administration. It was true neglect, at best, and criminal, at worst, to allow 450,000 kids to go missing throughout this country.”

Thanks to Congress fulling funding federal immigration enforcement over the next three years, he said, “We're able to push and go find these kids.”

So far, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, DHS, the DOJ and other agencies have found 146,000 UACs, Mullin said. “We still have nearly 300,000 missing.”

“We're investigating reports” in response to children claiming “they've been raped 600 to 700 times,” he said.

“I don't care who you are. I don't care if you have kids, you don't have kids. I don't care if you're a liberal, you're an Independent, you're a Democrat, you're a Republican. If you can't stand for law enforcement to go find these kids, who are you?”

Mullin also said federal agents have found the majority of UACs in so-called sanctuary cities run by Democrats. He criticized New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who’s opposed ICE operations. “He knows what's happening in the streets. He knows who he's harboring, and at this point, abetting, by saying that we can't go operate,” Mullin said.

“We're going to go find the worst of the worst” in New York City, he said. “We're going to rescue as many kids as we possibly can. We're going to enforce our nation's laws and we're going to right the wrongs that the Biden administration turned a blind eye to.”

“Four years of a blind eye allowed unvetted sponsors to come pick up 450,000 kids on our borders knowing … it was reported that over a third of the females regardless of age were sexually assaulted before they made it to the border,” he said. The Biden administration “knew it was human traffickers who were trafficking these young kids to the border. Then they didn’t vet the so-called sponsors. There were zero wellness checks.”

ICE officers are finding the children, “the same individuals that the Democrats want to demonize. Every single day it is our law enforcement out there doing that job,” Mullin said.

To missing children, he said, “we're going to find you.”

To their abusers, he said, “we're going to bring you to justice.” 

Bethany Blankley

Source: https://justthenews.com/nation/states/center-square/doj-more-475k-children-trafficked-us-under-biden-300k-unaccounted

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The Face of Modern Britain: Jihad’s Triumph - Roger Kimball

 

by Roger Kimball

Britain’s leaders celebrate multiculturalism even as the ideology reshaping the nation grows increasingly hostile to the civilization that welcomed it.

 

 

It turns out that I have found something to agree with Keir Starmer about. During Ramadan this year, the prime minister described Muslims as “the face of modern Britain.” I think that is correct. Whether it is also something to be happy about is another question. The PM, for his part, couldn’t be more pleased. Muslims in Britain, he went on to say, are “a success story when it comes to diversity.” Was that qualification—“when it comes to diversity”—a nod to reality? Or was it merely his capitulation to some sort of self-imposed linguistic quota according to which he must punctuate two out of three pronouncements with the word “diversity” or go without his pudding?

The jury is still out on that. But it is clear that the prime minister is very concerned about linguistic rectitude. For the last couple of years he has been trying to come up with a definition of “Islamophobia” that he could get past the troublesome partisans of free speech and enroll on the statute books as a hate crime. To date, he has had to compromise and substitute “anti-Muslim hostility” for the crisper-sounding “Islamophobia.”

Longtime readers will know that I have often poked fun at the term “Islamophobia.” Although you can find instances of the word from a century or more ago, the term was popularized in its current sense by the Runnymede Trust, a left-wing British think tank, in 1997. In some ways, the use of “Islamophobia” as a term of abuse was a brilliant move, both psychologically and politically. What a coup to have been able to paint one’s ideological opponents as by definition mentally disturbed. After all, a “phobia” is a species of mental illness, an irrational fear or hatred of something. But the question arises: is it irrational to fear or hate partisans of a religion that explicitly wishes to compass your death or destruction? I ask for the parents of Daniel Pearl, the 3,000 victims of 9/11, and the many thousands of now-deceased people who found themselves on the receiving end of “the religion of peace.”

Of course, many Muslims denounce the violence that has made their religion a near synonym for terrorism. This is true. Still, the philosopher Roger Scruton was right (in his book The West and the Rest: Globalization and the Terrorist Threat) to say that wherever Islamists have gained power—Iran, Afghanistan, Paris, Minnesota, Birmingham—the result is “not the reign of peace and prosperity promised by the Prophet, but murder and persecution on a scale matched in our time only by the Nazis and the Communists.”

Some 70 percent of the world’s refugees are Muslims fleeing from Muslim states. Where are they going? To the West, of course. The alarming irony, Scruton points out, is that “having arrived in the West, many of these Muslim refugees begin to conceive a hatred of the society by which they find themselves surrounded and aspire to take revenge against it for some fault so heinous that they can conceive nothing less than final destruction as the fitting punishment.” A further and no less alarming irony: by providing welfare benefits without social membership for Muslim refugees, European states have conspired to create within their borders “a breeding ground for Islamic terrorists.”

Keir Starmer would probably accuse me of “Islamophobia” or at least “anti-Muslim hostility” for pointing out these unpalatable truths. But truths they are, and Roger Scruton was hardly the first person to articulate them. I will offer a little chrestomathy of earlier warnings about the nature of Islam in a moment. First, by way of a palate cleanser, let me share a short list of recent terrorist incidents, along with the religion of their perpetrators, that I came across on X.

1. Munich Olympics massacre (1972)—Islam
2. Beirut barracks bombing (1983)—Islam
3. TWA Flight 847 (1985)—Islam
4. Rome & Vienna airport attacks (1985)—Islam
5. Pan Am Flight 103 (1988)—Islam
6. World Trade Center bombing (1993)—Islam
7. Paris Metro bombings (1998)—Islam
8. U.S. Embassy bombings Kenya and Tanzania (1998)—Islam
9. USS Cole bombing (2000)—Islam
10. 9/11 attacks (2001)—Islam
11. Bali bombings (2002)—Islam
12. Istanbul bombings (2003)—Islam
13. Madrid train bombings (2004)—Islam
14. London 7/7 bombings (2005)—Islam
15. Fort Hood shooting (2009)—Islam
16. Toulouse/Montauban shootings (2012)—Islam
17. Boston Marathon bombing (2013)—Islam
18. Brussels Jewish Museum shooting (2014)—Islam
19. Ottawa Parliament attack (2014)—Islam
20. Charlie Hebdo / Hyper Cacher attacks (2015)—Islam
21. Paris November attacks (2015)—Islam
22. San Bernardino shooting (2015)—Islam
23. Brussels airport/metro bombings (2016)—Islam
24. Nice truck attack (2016)—Islam
25. Berlin Christmas Market attack (2016)—Islam
26. Orlando Pulse nightclub shooting (2016)—Islam
27. Westminster Bridge attack (2017)—Islam
28. Manchester Arena bombing (2017)—Islam
29. London Bridge/Borough Market attack (2017)—Islam
30. Barcelona/Cambrils attacks (2017)—Islam
31. Strasbourg Christmas market attack (2018)—Islam
32. London Bridge stabbing (2019)—Islam
33. Samuel [Paty] beheading (2020)—Islam
34. Vienna shooting (2020)—Islam
35. October 7 Hamas-led attacks (2023)—Islam
36. Arras school stabbing (2023)—Islam
37. Solingen knife attack (2024)—Islam
38. New Orleans Bourbon Street attack (2025)—Islam
39. Bondi Beach Hanukkah attack (2025)—Islam
40. Winterthur train-station stabbing (2026)—Islam

Add up the number of victims, and we’re talking about thousands upon thousands of people. Was this some sort of perversion of Islam? Not according to the Qur’an, which repeatedly enjoins Muslims to kill and terrorize non-Muslims and anyone who leaves Islam (apostasy is a capital offense in Islam). What we might call the kinetic side of Islam is not a secret. Many commentators have underscored its intolerance and penchant for violence. Alexis de Tocqueville, writing to a correspondent, noted that he had “studied the Quran a great deal.”

I came away from that study with the conviction that by and large there have been few religions in the world as deadly to men as that of Muhammad. As far as I can see, it is the principal cause of the decadence so visible today in the Muslim world and, though less absurd than the polytheism of old, its social and political tendencies are in my opinion more to be feared, and I therefore regard it as a form of decadence rather than a form of progress in relation to paganism itself.

In the second volume of The World as Will and Representation, Arthur Schopenhauer pauses to consider the Qur’an. “This wretched book. Schopenhauer writes, “was sufficient to start a world religion, to satisfy the metaphysical needs of countless millions for twelve hundred years, to become the basis of their morality and of a remarkable contempt for death, and also to inspire them to bloody wars and the most extensive conquests. Much may be lost in translation, but I have not been able to discover in it one single idea of value.”

Winston Churchill provided a first-hand survey in his 1899 book The River War: An Historical Account of the Reconquest of the Soudan. 

How dreadful are the curses which Mohammedanism lays on its votaries! Besides the fanatical frenzy, which is as dangerous in a man as hydrophobia in a dog, there is this fearful fatalistic apathy. The effects are apparent in many countries. Improvident habits, slovenly systems of agriculture, sluggish methods of commerce, and insecurity of property exist wherever the followers of the Prophet rule or live. A degraded sensualism deprives this life of its grace and refinement; the next of its dignity and sanctity. The fact that in Mohammedan law every woman must belong to some man as his absolute property—either as a child, a wife, or a concubine—must delay the final extinction of slavery until the faith of Islam has ceased to be a great power among men. Individual Moslems may show splendid qualities. Thousands become the brave and loyal soldiers of the Queen: all know how to die: but the influence of the religion paralyses the social development of those who follow it. No stronger retrograde force exists in the world. Far from being moribund, Mohammedanism is a militant and proselytizing faith. It has already spread throughout Central Africa, raising fearless warriors at every step; and were it not that Christianity is sheltered in the strong arms of science, the science against which it had vainly struggled, the civilisation of modern Europe might fall, as fell the civilisation of ancient Rome.

The critical role of a martially equipped Christianity in reversing the colonizing force of Islam was also something that Teddy Roosevelt stressed. In Fear God and Take Your Own Part, a collection of essays from 1916, Roosevelt noted that “If the peoples of Europe had not possessed a military equality with, and gradually a growing superiority over, the Mohammedans who invaded Europe, Europe would at this moment be Mohammedan and the Christian religion would be exterminated.”

Wherever the Mohammedans have had complete sway, wherever the Christians have been unable to resist them by the sword, Christianity has ultimately disappeared. From the hammer of Charles Martel to the sword of Sobieski, Christianity owed its safety in Europe to the fact that it was able to show that it could and would fight as well as the Mohammedan aggressor.

The civilization of Europe, America, and Australia exists today at all only because of the victories of civilized man over the enemies of civilization.

“The victories of civilized man over the enemies of civilization.” Those are terms that people like Keir Starmer find unintelligible. “Civilized men,” forsooth! Who are they? And how rude—how “Islamophobic”—to speak of “enemies of civilization.” We have seen time and again where that rancid timorousness leads. Warnings aplenty have been ringing in our ears. Lord D’Abernon once said that “an Englishman’s mind works best when it is almost too late.” Let us hope that we still enjoy the dispensation afforded by that adverb. 

Roger Kimball is editor and publisher of The New Criterion and the president and publisher of Encounter Books. He is the author and editor of many books, including The Fortunes of Permanence: Culture and Anarchy in an Age of Amnesia (St. Augustine's Press), The Rape of the Masters (Encounter), Lives of the Mind: The Use and Abuse of Intelligence from Hegel to Wodehouse (Ivan R. Dee), and Art's Prospect: The Challenge of Tradition in an Age of Celebrity (Ivan R. Dee). Most recently, he edited and contributed to Where Next? Western Civilization at the Crossroads (Encounter) and contributed to Against the Great Reset: Eighteen Theses Contra the New World Order (Bombardier).

Source: https://amgreatness.com/2026/06/14/the-face-of-modern-britain-jihads-triumph/

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The Lancet publishes call to suspend Israeli Medical Association from global medical body - Mathilda Heller

 

by Mathilda Heller

The World Medical Association however told The Lancet that it stands against exclusion of any of its members, pointing out that the IMA is a "strong advocate for WMA ethics and policies."

 

Israeli doctors perform cardiac catheterizations at Hadassah Ein Kerem Hospital, in Jerusalem, January 20, 2020

(photo credit: HADAS PARUSH/FLASH90)

 

Renowned medical journal The Lancet has published a petition calling for the suspension of the Israeli Medical Association (IMA) from from the World Medical Association (WMA).

On Saturday, The Lancet published a petition by health organizations such as the People's Health Movement (PHM), Artsen voor Gaza (Doctors for Gaza), and Health Advisory Council of the Jewish Voice for Peace calling for the IMA to be suspended from the WMA over "its failure to speak out against the genocide of Palestinians, the destruction of health-care infrastructure, and the torture and killing of health-care workers in Gaza."

The WMA Congress will now meet in Rotterdam in October to consider the petition.

Leslie London, Emeritus Professor of Public Health at the University of Cape Town and a member of PHM South Africa, told The Lancet that the IMA has "colluded in the unspeakable treatment of Palestinians during this war."

The British Medical Association already suspended ties with the IMA in June, 2025.

Website of the Lancet, a weekly peer-reviewed general medical journal and one of the oldest of its kind, is seen on a laptop computer (illustrative) (credit: SHUTTERSTOCK)

WMA distances itself from calls to suspend Israel

The WMA however told The Lancet that it stands against exclusion of any of its members for the actions of their governments as "doing so diminishes our ability to call out injustices, and threatens shrinking the dialogue among physicians at this critical time when consensus in support of our medical ethics is so needed”.
 
It also pointed out that the IMA is one of the founding members of the WMA and is a "strong advocate for WMA ethics and policies."

Following the publication of the petition, Iranian-Jewish cardiologist Dr Afshine Emrani wrote an open letter to The Lancet.

"I'm a cardiologist. I'm an Iranian Jew who grew up under a regime where medicine was subjugated to the state. What The Lancet just did is a disgrace to my profession," he said.

He listed things that the boycott would actually destroy, including PillCam (revolutionized GI diagnosis), ReWalk (robotic exoskeletons for paralyzed patients) and breakthrough AI diagnostics for cardiac imaging and cancer detection, all of which are developed in Israel.

"Israel has among the highest per-capita rates of medical innovation on earth. These technologies save lives in London, Johannesburg, São Paulo, and New York. Suspending the IMA doesn't punish a government. It severs research collaborations and training partnerships."

Votes for Israel to be kicked out while Iran, Russia, and North Korea remain

Emrani also highlighted the double standards of singling out the IMA when the medical associations of Iran, North Korea and Russia do not face similar boycotts.

"The [Iranian] regime has executed physicians. Imprisoned doctors for treating protesters. Denied healthcare to political prisoners as policy. No petition. No Lancet article. No campaign."

"The moment we expel medical bodies based on political litmus tests is the moment we destroy the neutrality that makes global medicine possible," he said.

Emrani also noted that the WMA was established in 1947 mainly as a response to the atrocities committed by doctors in Nazi Germany during World War II.

This is not the first time that The Lancet has come under fire for its publication of articles relating to Israel.

Notably, in July 2024, The Lancet published a piece authored by doctors Rasha Khatib, Martin McKee and Salim Yusuf, which claimed that “it is not implausible to estimate that up to 186,000 or even more deaths could be attributable to the current conflict in Gaza.”

Despite the fact it was designated as a “correspondence” or a letter to the editor rather than a peer-reviewed academic article, the article was disseminated on mass, and shared by figures such as UN rapporteur Francesca Albanese.

Three days after the publication, one of the writers, Professor Martin McKee, retracted from the digits he co-provided in his piece, claiming that they were “purely illustrative” and that “our piece has been greatly misquoted and misinterpreted.”

Mathilda Heller

Source: https://www.jpost.com/diaspora/antisemitism/article-899346

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Trump and Tehran's Foolish Dream - Amir Taheri

 

by Amir Taheri

Tehran's illusion is that by waiting until US midterm elections, which they think Trump will lose, they could claim victory.

 

• Trump was the only US president to make a serious attempt to mend relations with Iran.

• Tehran misinterpreted that [the June 2025 ceasefire] as American weakness and reignited the fires by resuming its campaign against Israel through proxies.

• [T]he fact is that so far at least Trump is the winner of this war.

• Tehran's illusion is that by waiting until US midterm elections, which they think Trump will lose, they could claim victory.

• That is a foolish dream.

• The longer they wait before they accept a truce, the heavier Iran's losses shall be.

• In my opinion, the wars involving Iran will not end without regime change in Tehran....

President Donald J. Trump was the only US president to make a serious attempt to mend relations with Iran. Pictured: Trump addresses the nation from the White House in Washington, DC on June 21, 2025, following the announcement that the US bombed nuclear sites in Iran. (Photo by Carlos Barria/Pool/AFP via Getty Images)

Who is playing with whom? This is the question posed by the behavior of President Donald Trump and whoever is still running Iran from Tehran in the current phase of a war that started more than 100 days ago.

Both Trump and his Iranian co-authors of this war appear as if they are prepared for this war to last 100 years. At the same time, both pretend that an accord leading to a sine die [without a day cited] truce is one step away.

According to CNN, Trump has trumpeted that elusive accord 38 times in two months.

According to IRGC's news agency, Tasnim, Tehran's authorized or self-authorized spokesmen have a more modest record by announcing an imminent accord only 22 times.

What is certain is that neither side wishes to return to the early phase of the conflict that saw Iran suffer the heaviest air attacks the world had witnessed since World War II.

The coming weekend will witness anti-Trump demos in France as he arrives to join the June 15 G7 summit in the spa town of Evian.

The "Hate-America" coalition of extreme left and ultra-right weirdos who organize the demo designate Trump as a "warmonger" and as a "loser."

Do such labels fit Trump?

Trump was the only US president to make a serious attempt to mend relations with Iran.

One of his first moves was to withdraw from the neo-colonial accord imposed by President Barack Obama under which Iran would be put under the tutelage of the 5 veto-holding powers of the UN Security Council plus Germany in the name of preventing Iran from acquiring a hypothetical nuclear arsenal.

Trump's next move in his first term was to write a 5-page letter to the then Supreme Guide, Ali Khamenei, proposing negotiations aimed at a "new beginning" between two nations that had no objective reasons for mutual hostility. The letter was planned to be hand-delivered in Tehran by Shinzo Abe, the first Japanese prime minister to visit Iran since the mullahs seized power in 1979.

Khamenei in effect insulted Abe and refused to receive Trump's letter. The contents of the letter have not been revealed, but Abe told Iranian officials that Trump had made a generous offer and was seeking a genuine restart with Tehran.

Even when Trump was drawn into the recent two wars in June and February, it was clear that he was a reluctant warrior persuaded by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that a short and sharp bombing campaign coupled with the assassination of senior leaders in Tehran would bring Tehran to its senses.

When that didn't happen in June, Trump imposed a ceasefire after three days of bombing.

Tehran misinterpreted that as American weakness and reignited the fires by resuming its campaign against Israel through proxies.

In the second phase of the war, Trump understood that bombing, no matter how intense, wouldn't persuade an adversary to capitulate. He might not have known about the early phase of World War II when Nazi Germany carpet-bombed London and several other English cities, among them Coventry, in the hope of forcing the British to throw in the towel.

Coventry was so shattered that it gave birth to a new English verb, "to coventrize," meaning to turn a large city into a pile of smoking rubble. Yet the British didn't surrender and continued to fight alone for another 18 months until the US and the USSR joined the anti-Axis alliance.

Trump understood that air war alone wouldn't produce victory.

At the same time, however, he didn't make the error some of his predecessors made by starting a boots-on-the-ground adventure against a foe that couldn't pose an existential threat to the US.

President John F. Kennedy made that mistake by getting the US involved in the Vietnam War that later spread to Cambodia and Laos and ended in the last helicopter from Saigon.

Many observers see Trump's management of this war as chaotic, which in appearance it certainly is. However, he has stuck to several objectives.

The first is to keep American human losses as low as possible. This is the first time the US is engaged in a war of that length with such low casualties, 16 by the latest count, in 100 days.

In 1993, US forces under President Bill Clinton, and assisted by Malaysian and Pakistani troops, fought a 48-hour battle with Somali forces in Mogadishu. In that brief encounter, 18 US soldiers were killed and 84 more were wounded.

Trump's next objective is not to box in the wounded Persian cat in a way as to leave it no option but to make a final suicidal surge. That explains the patience with which Trump has participated in the negotiations tango that started before the first shots were fired.

By dangling a juicy carrot that every faction in Tehran wants but only for itself, he has succeeded in deepening the split that has been the hallmark of regime rule from 1979.

Trump's other objective has been to keep Tehran's feet on fire without burning them. His blockade of Iranian ports is hurting both the regime and the Iranian people. But it is applied in a measured way not to choke the Iranian economy.

Tehran announces that more than 1.6 million tons of "essential goods" have reached 5 Iranian ports in the past 10 days. In exchange, Tehran has chosen not to see the increasing number of ships crossing the Strait of Hormuz.

A good part of war, some experts believe all of it, is about psychology, which includes illusions of victory and/or defeat. Some, like the desperados in Tehran, feel their mouths sweeten by saying "helluva."

But the fact is that so far at least Trump is the winner of this war. Iran's human losses are put at over 7,000, including at least 3,000 military personnel, among them dozens of ranking officers.

The damage done to Iranian military and industrial infrastructure is estimated at over $400 billion. Some key assets, including several offshore oilfields, may have been lost forever. The damage done to some cultural heritage edifices may never be repaired.

The US has the economic and military power to continue low-intensity war forever, or at least as long as Trump is there and prepared to keep the game going.

Once he has celebrated his birthday, seen the football World Cup through, and presided over the 250th shindig of American independence, he could raise the temperature again.

Tehran's illusion is that by waiting until US midterm elections, which they think Trump will lose, they could claim victory.

That is a foolish dream.

The longer they wait before they accept a truce, the heavier Iran's losses shall be.

In my opinion, the wars involving Iran will not end without regime change in Tehran, which can only be realized by the Iranian people and the internal political dynamics of a complex society that has passed through half a century of crises.

Gatestone Institute would like to thank the author for his kind permission to reprint this article in slightly different form from Asharq Al-Awsat.

 

Amir Taheri was the executive editor-in-chief of the daily Kayhan in Iran from 1972 to 1979. He has worked at or written for innumerable publications, published eleven books, and has been a columnist for Asharq Al-Awsat since 1987. He graciously serves as Chairman of Gatestone Europe.

Source: https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/22601/trump-iran-foolish-dream

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Supreme Court nears end of term with several high-profile cases still pending - Just the News

 

by Just the News

Perhaps no case this term has attracted more public attention than the challenge to Trump’s executive order purporting to deny birthright citizenship to children born in the U.S. to parents who are unlawfully present or on temporary visas.

 

The Supreme Court has been busy this term, issuing dozens of opinions, but it appears the justices are saving the best for last. 

The court’s most closely watched cases remain undecided as the term draws to a close, with 20 outstanding opinions still to come on some of the most consequential issues of the day: presidential removal authority, campaign finance regulations, immigration policy, election law, and transgender participation in school sports.

Trump v. Slaughter: Presidential Removal Authority

One of the remaining cases, Trump v. Slaughter, concerns whether the president may remove members of certain independent federal agencies without cause.

The dispute arose after President Trump removed Rebecca Slaughter, a Democratic commissioner of the Federal Trade Commission. Slaughter argues that federal law permits removal of FTC commissioners only for specified causes, while the administration contends that such restrictions unconstitutionally limit the president’s executive authority.

The stakes extend well beyond the FTC. If the high court sides with the administration, it could effectively gut the independence of numerous independent agencies including the National Labor Relations Board and the Federal Trade and Securities and Exchange commissions.

Trump v. Cook: Federal Reserve Board Member Removal

In a similar case, Trump v. Cook, the Court is considering whether the president lawfully removed Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook.

The Federal Reserve Act provides that members of the Board of Governors may be removed only “for cause.” Trump fired Cook in August 2025, with the administration pointing to allegations – disputed by Cook – that she had misrepresented her residency on a mortgage application years before her appointment. Lower courts blocked the removal, and the Supreme Court took up the case on an expedited basis. 

During oral arguments, the court appeared skeptical of Cook’s position, with several justices questioning whether courts could even review the president’s removal decisions in this context. 

NRSC v. FEC: Campaign Finance Limits

Legal scholars have described NRSC v. FEC as potentially the most significant campaign finance ruling since Citizens United v. FEC in 2010. 

The case, brought by the National Republican Senatorial Committee along with its House counterpart and originally championed by then-Sen. JD Vance, challenges Federal Election Commission regulations that cap the amount political parties can spend in coordination with their own candidates.

The plaintiffs argue that the restrictions violate the First Amendment by limiting political parties’ ability to support their candidates. The Federal Election Commission maintains that the limits help prevent circumvention of contribution restrictions and reduce the risk of corruption.

The case has attracted significant attention because of its potential implications for federal campaign finance law.

Watson v. Republican National Committee: When Votes Count

With the midterm elections approaching in November, Watson v. Republican National Committee carries immediate significance. 

The case challenges a Mississippi law that allows mail-in ballots to be counted if they are postmarked by Election Day and received within five business days afterward. Republican leaders argue this so-called “grace period” violates federal statutes establishing a single national Election Day.

The ruling could set a de facto national standard for mail-in voting, potentially invalidating similar grace-period laws in multiple states. Since 2020, debates over mail ballot deadlines have become a flashpoint in election litigation, and a decision here could reshape the rules of the road for the November elections, with almost no time for states to adjust.

Little v. Hecox and West Virginia v. B.P.J.: Transgender Athletes 

The court is also poised to decide a pair of landmark Title IX cases involving transgender girls and women in school sports. 

Little v. Hecox involves an Idaho law banning transgender athletes from competing on women’s sports teams, while West Virginia v. B.P.J. raises similar questions from that state. The cases present the court with a direct question about Title IX: Do state laws categorically excluding transgender females from women’s sports violate the federal statute?

The cases have drawn intense advocacy from both sides, with dozens of states filing amicus briefs. A ruling is expected to have sweeping national implications, potentially determining whether transgender athletes across all 50 states can participate in school sports consistent with their gender identity, or whether states have broad latitude to set their own rules.

Trump v. Barbara: Birthright Citizenship at the Crossroads

Perhaps no case before the court this term has attracted more public attention than Trump v. Barbara, the challenge to Trump’s executive order purporting to deny birthright citizenship to children born in the United States to parents who are unlawfully present or on temporary visas. The order, signed on Inauguration Day 2025, targeted a right that the 14th Amendment has been widely understood to guarantee since the 1898 decision in United States v. Wong Kim Ark.

The case was argued on April 1, 2026, and the president himself attended. 

Several justices pressed Solicitor General D. John Sauer on how the executive branch could unilaterally reinterpret a constitutional provision that courts have consistently applied for more than a century. 

The phrase at issue – “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” – has long been understood to cover virtually all children born on U.S. soil, and a majority appeared skeptical of the administration’s effort to narrow it. But in an era of legal surprises, few are willing to count the government out entirely.

Mullin v. Miot: The Fate of Hundreds of Thousands

Argued in late April, the consolidated cases Mullin v. Dahlia Doe and Trump v. Miot will determine whether the administration lawfully revoked Temporary Protected Status for roughly 350,000 Haitian nationals and 6,100 Syrian nationals currently living in the United States. 

Such protection is granted to individuals from countries experiencing armed conflict, natural disasters or other extraordinary conditions that make return unsafe. Former Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem terminated both designations, concluding that conditions had changed sufficiently to justify removal.

During oral arguments, several conservative justices focused on whether federal courts have any power to review TPS termination decisions at all, a position that, if adopted, would effectively bar judicial oversight of future decisions affecting more than a million immigrants currently living under the program.

Mullin v. Al Otro Lado: The Right to Seek Asylum

In Mullin v. Al Otro Lado, the court is weighing a challenge to the government's now-defunct “metering” policy, under which Customs and Border Protection officers physically turned away asylum seekers at ports of entry, requiring them to wait, sometimes indefinitely, on the Mexican side of the border before being permitted to present themselves for inspection. 

The policy was declared unlawful by the Ninth Circuit, but the Trump administration asked the Supreme Court to reverse that ruling.

The question is whether asylum seekers who have reached a port of entry but have not yet physically crossed onto U.S. soil have “arrived in the United States” within the meaning of the Immigration and Nationality Act – and therefore cannot be turned away without processing. The ruling could shape the legal architecture of border enforcement for years to come.

The Retirement Question Hanging Over Everything

As if the opinions themselves were not enough, the term may conclude with an even larger bombshell: a retirement announcement from one or more sitting justices.

Speculation has swirled for months around Justices Samuel Alito, 76, and Clarence Thomas, who turns 78 later this month – the court's two oldest conservatives. 

Each has served for decades, and with a Republican president and a GOP-controlled Senate in place, some Republicans have publicly urged both men to step down while a sympathetic administration can confirm their replacements. Trump has indicated that he is prepared to fill vacancies if they arise. 

Yet the retirement picture remains murky. Sources described as close to Alito have told reporters he is not planning to step down. And Alito’s forthcoming memoir – due out in October, around the start of the next term – has been read by some observers as a sign he intends to stay. Thomas, for his part, has indicated in various settings that he has no plans to retire.

A retirement announcement before the November elections, which could result in Democrats take control of the Senate from Republicans, would set off one of the most consequential confirmation battles in modern history.

Looking Ahead

The court has a busy month ahead, with sweeping decisions on executive power, election administration, campaign finance, immigration, and civil rights all still to come. The end of the 2025–26 term is sure to leave a deep mark on federal law. 

Just the News

Source: https://justthenews.com/government/courts-law/supreme-court-nears-end-term-several-high-profile-cases-still-pending

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HHS takes a bite out of surging tick crisis, tests results-driven plan to reduce Lyme disease - Amanda Head

 

by Amanda Head

Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is managing a new multi-million-dollar tick control pilot program directed by the CDC (Centers for Disease Control) in partnership with prominent vector-borne disease researchers.

 

Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced an innovative plan to combat the tick population, closely connected to Lyme disease and other illnesses through the administration's Make America Healthy Again initiative.

Kennedy unveiled the initiatives late last month in Lyme-hard-hit New Hampshire during the administration's "Take Back Your Health" tour, calling it one of the most significant federal efforts yet to tackle the surging threat that sent emergency room visits for tick bites to their highest April levels since 2017.

Plans to suppress tick populations on key wildlife hosts, principally deer and mice

The centerpiece of the announcement is a new multi-million-dollar tick control pilot program directed by the CDC (Centers for Disease Control) in partnership with prominent vector-borne disease researchers.

Instead of depending primarily on personal repellents or residential treatments, the initiative redirects efforts upstream. It develops and implements targeted strategies to suppress tick populations on key wildlife hosts, principally deer and mice, prior to human exposure and pathogen transmission. 

By interrupting tick reproduction cycles and infection prevalence within animal reservoirs, the program could substantially reduce disease incidence at the ecosystem level.

The pilot commences in collaboration with the New England Center of Excellence in Vector-Borne Diseases, an established research hub housed at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. 

The Lone Star tick

The initiative isn't solely governmental. It incorporates community-based partnerships, including coordination with the Indian Health Service and the Wampanoag Tribe in Massachusetts, where Alpha-gal syndrome has received particular attention. According to the CDC, Alpha-gal is a serious, potentially life-threatening food and tickborne allergy. It develops when a bite from certain ticks—most notably the Lone Star tick—transfers a sugar molecule called alpha-gal into the body.

This prevention-oriented strategy supports MAHA’s focus on root causes of chronic illness rather than treating symptoms, which is oftentimes a life-long burden. 

According to the administration, anticipated outcomes include scalable interventions for states with elevated burdens, furthering the national objective of a 25% reduction in Lyme disease cases by 2035. 

Specific methods and implementation timelines will be detailed in the coming months, marking a transition from reactive care to systematic source reduction.  

Amanda Head

Source: https://justthenews.com/government/white-house/trumps-hhs-takes-bite-out-surging-tick-crisis-lyme-disease

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