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California’s Gender Secrecy Law Suffers Another Setback in Federal Court

A federal appeals court temporarily blocked a California gender secrecy law that allows schools to hide students’ “gender transitions” from parents. 

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit struck another blow to the law on Thursday, siding with the City of Huntington Beach over the State of California. A three-judge panel issued a preliminary injunction blocking the law as litigation continues, specifically citing the Supreme Court’s March ruling against the law in a separate case called Mirabelli v. Bonta. 

“In light of Mirabelli, the Movants are likely to succeed on the merits of their constitutional claim, including the required threshold showing of Article III standing,” the panel wrote.

Nick Barry, senior counsel at America First Legal (AFL) representing the City of Huntington Beach in the case, called the Ninth Circuit’s decision a “powerful vindication of parental rights.”

“California cannot use state law to force schoolteachers and administrators into a conspiracy of silence against parents. California’s law, and similar school policies, use state coercion to intentionally interfere with the parent-child relationship and separate a child from their parent,” Barry said in a statement. “That is wrong and unlawful. The Constitution is clear — parents have the right to know what is happening with their children and make decisions regarding their mental health, and no state law can override that fundamental protection.”

California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) signed the law in July 2024, making California the first state to ban school districts from requiring staff to inform parents if their child changes “gender” identification at school.

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Moreno to Subpoena Newsom Over California Election Failures

Sen. Bernie Moreno (R-Ohio) appeared on Donald Trump Jr.’s podcast Triggered on Monday, and he had a lot to say about Sunday’s election run-off in Colombia. Moreno, who is, of course, a Colombian immigrant, was back in his home country over the weekend as an international election observer. 

What he saw impressed him. 

In case you missed it, the right-wing candidate, Abelardo de la Espriella (aka El Tigre), beat out far-left president Gustavo Petro’s hand-picked successor, Iván Cepeda. Thankfully, El Tigre won. The numbers showed a tight race, a country divided. While it is a country divided, many say it’s not that divided, that there are many other factors at play here, but I’ll save that for another day. Petro is also carrying on about how it’s not a done deal and Israel and something else no one cares about blah blah blah, but it’s pretty much a done deal.

The right-minded world, including Marco Rubio, congratulated El Tigre almost immediately to show that we are watching. Plus, Petro’s hands are a bit tied with OFAC sanctions and other reasons why he doesn’t want to make Donald Trump and Rubio mad, so he doesn’t have much of a leg to stand on. He may make some short-term noise, but he’s gone in August and has his own personal agenda. 

But what struck Moreno and many of us who have been paying close attention to this situation is that despite all of that, the elections in Colombia actually went pretty smoothly. The country was able to have results ready in hours, thanks to its “world-class” system, which includes:  

  • Voter ID and proof of Colombian citizenship 
  • Paper, in-person ballots that are hand-counted. 
  • No widespread mail-in voting (Colombians living in other countries are allowed to vote)
  • Biometrics at some sites for additional security 
  • Transparent, observed elections that result in 99%-plus ballots counted the same night 

It’s the complete opposite of what we’ve seen recently in California, and Moreno wants to put an end to that and show people in the United States that it doesn’t have to be this way.  

“We made the decision, and I’ve talked to [Sens.] Rick Scott, Mike Lee, and Ron Johnson about this, we’re going to bring in the people who ran the Colombian election, we’re going to subpoena Gavin Newsom, and we’re going to have a hearing: California vs. Colombia,” Moreno said. “Why can Colombia run an election at that high level, and California is so incompetent? And I think the American people need to see this, Don — we’re going to put this right in their faces and say, ‘Look, the SAVE AMERICA act says prove you’re an American citizen and show who you are when you vote.’ And we can’t get 60 out of 100 Senators to vote for that? That’s a disgrace.”  

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Thou Shalt Not Kill – Making War No More

An argument the Trump administration is using to justify massive increases in war spending is that the U.S. military is short on munitions. What a surprise! After the Iran War, attacks on Yemen and Somalia, supplying Israel with all sorts of air defense missiles as well as bombs and who knows what else (some of it is classified), the ongoing Russia-Ukraine War, and so on, it’s no wonder munitions are in short supply.

Bottles of nips may be in short supply after an alcoholic raids a hotel minibar. Is it wise to resupply it while the drinker is still there, intoxicated, begging for more?

Fascinating to me are the lack of moral arguments against America’s orgy of murderous weapons. The Bible says “Thou shalt not kill.” Killing is immoral and a crime unless as a last resort in self-defense. When our nation goes to war, it is also supposed to be in self-defense to uphold our Constitution and our highest ideals.

We always hear about a shared Judeo-Christian tradition – there’s a moral imperative here that demands fewer swords and more ploughshares. A God-given mandate to make war no more. To be peacemakers, not warfighters.

America, the shining city on a hill, should celebrate the sanctity of life rather than building more weapons to destroy life. But today’s America is much more akin to a heavily armed garrison-state, bristling with weapons, with satellite garrisons around the world.

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FBI Busts Multimillion Dollar Fraud Schemes Across the Country

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has busted several fraud schemes across the country in recent weeks, FBI Director Kash Patel said in his latest weekly update to the agency.

Patel highlighted some of the results of Operation Riptide, which focuses on “criminal actors and the key services they rely on, their infrastructure, their tools and services, their communications platforms, and their money.”

FBI Cleveland, for instance, disrupted a Chinese phishing platform “linked to the theft of millions of credit card numbers and nearly $1.9 billion dollars in losses worldwide,” Patel revealed.

As a result of the efforts of the FBI in Charlotte, two individuals were convicted for operating a business email compromise scheme that stole $25 million from U.S. companies.

“Thanks to FBI Boston, our Cyber Division, and international partners, we helped dismantle a VPN service used by ransomware groups around the world,” Patel said, later adding, “This is exactly what Operation Riptide is about: targeting the cybercriminal ecosystem at every level. And we’re just getting started.”

Fraudsters have also been targeted by the FBI. In Los Angeles, for instance, an Orange County man was arrested “for carrying out a nearly $100-million-dollar bank fraud scheme,” according to Patel.

“Thanks to FBI Milwaukee, a Wisconsin man pleaded guilty to defrauding nearly 190 investors out of more than $14 million dollars. Out of New Orleans, a Texas man was indicted for running a $4-million-dollar investment fraud scam that victimized more than 20 people,” he said, noting that a Texas couple has also been indicted “for stealing more than $2.5 million dollars from vulnerable victims through a years-long psychic fraud scheme” thanks to the FBI Seattle.

Patel added, “FBI Pittsburgh also announced charges against an Ohio woman accused of embezzling more than $460,000 dollars from a law firm while working as a paralegal.”

Further, seven individuals were arrested in Las Vegas for exploiting coronavirus relief programs, and in Alaska, one individual was sentenced to prison for defrauding those programs.

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Federal Judge Quashes Grand Jury Subpoenas Targeting Tim Walz, Mayor Jacob Frey in DOJ’s Immigration Enforcement Investigation

A federal judge on Monday quashed grand jury subpoenas issued to Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey and other Minnesota officials.

US District Judge Patrick Schiltz, a George W. Bush appointee said the subpoenas were retaliatory.

The Justice Department in January issued subpoenas to Governor Tim Walz, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, Attorney General Keith Ellison, and other far-left Minnesota officials.

The DOJ previously launched a criminal investigation into Minnesota Governor Tim Walz and far-left Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey for interfering with ICE operations.

According to CBS News, the investigation centered around public statements made by Walz and Frey.

Thousands of federal agents were deployed to Minneapolis to arrest illegal alien criminals earlier this year.

Both Governor Walz and Mayor Frey have lashed out at the Trump Administration for dispatching ICE agents to Minnesota.

Mayor Frey demanded that residents and local police fight ICE agents in the street.

The DOJ issued subpoenas to six Minnesota officials.

“From the beginning of his current term in office, President Trump and members of his administration have taken aim at so-called “sanctuary” jurisdictions-that is, jurisdictions “that limit the use of local resources to assist in federal immigration enforcement,”” the judge wrote.

“President Trump has repeatedly insulted Minnesota generally and its Somali population in particular; targeted Democratic-led cities for expanded deportation efforts;3 asserted that Democratic officials who oppose the deployment of National Guard troops for immigration enforcement should be jailed; issued multiple executive orders threatening to cut off federal funding to “sanctuary” jurisdictions;5 and sued Minnesota and some of its political subdivisions seeking to invalidate state and local provisions limiting assistance to federal immigration officials,” the judge said.

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The truth about land acknowledgments — and why it’s time to end them

Land acknowledgments have become one of the most common political rituals in Canada.

They’re recited in government offices, universities, legislative chambers, police press conferences, and even before the national anthem during children’s school performances.

We’re told they’re harmless. We’re told they’re simply about teaching Indigenous history. 

But as I explore in this report, many Canadians see them very differently.

For starters, the history behind many modern land acknowledgments is often oversimplified. Long before European settlement, Indigenous nations fought wars, displaced rivals, expanded territories, controlled trade routes, and, in some cases, even practiced slavery.

The Iroquois Confederacy displaced rival nations during the Beaver Wars. The Tlingit expanded their influence through warfare. The Haida famously took captives from neighbouring peoples as slaves.

Yet no reasonable person would argue that modern Indigenous Canadians should be burdened with inherited guilt, or that their connection to Canada is weakened because of what their ancestors did centuries ago.

And yet non-Indigenous Canadians are increasingly expected to sit through, repeat, or affirm statements suggesting they occupy “stolen” land and possess a lesser claim to the country they call home. Some are even being punished for speaking out against such compulsion.

Lara Yates, a B.C. mother of four, was banned from her child’s school after speaking out against a land acknowledgment before a school performance. Catherine Kronas, an Ontario parent council member, was suspended from her duties for refusing to participate in one. And four UBC professors have gone so far as to take legal action against the publicly funded university’s sweeping use of land acknowledgments, arguing that the rituals force faculty and students to conform to the institution’s political views.

The concerns don’t end there. Some Canadians oppose land acknowledgments because they believe they promote a form of racism, one that assigns moral guilt, victimhood, legitimacy, or authority based not on individual character, but on ancestry. And with elected officials such as BC NDP MLA Rohini Aroura, using legislature time to label the majority of her constituents “settlers” and “colonizers,” it’s no surprise that many Canadians feel that land acknowledgments have become about racial division rather than reconciliation.

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House Republicans Threaten Democrat Fundraising Machine ActBlue with Contempt amid Foreign Donor Probe

House Republicans are pressuring the CEO of Democrat fundraising machine ActBlue to comply with subpoenas regarding documents important to the investigation into possible foreign donations.

In a press release Monday, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH), House Administration Committee Chairman Bryan Steil (R-WI), and House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman James Comer (R-KY) announced they sent a letter to ActBlue’s CEO Regina Wallace-Jones “threatening to hold ActBlue in contempt of Congress for its inadequate compliance with the Committees’ subpoenas.”

The committees have been probing the platform’s “fundamentally unserious approach to fraud prevention, which may allow foreign nationals and bad actors to make large-scale fraudulent donations on Democrats’ top fundraising platform,” the release said, noting the fundraising behemoth was obstructing the inquiry by trying to shield documents important to the lawmakers’ efforts:

The release detailed:

On July 22, 2025, following ActBlue’s suspension of voluntary cooperation with the Committees’ oversight, the Committees issued subpoenas for all documents and communications referring or relating to misconduct at ActBlue, whistleblower retaliation, and mass departures on ActBlue’s legal team. After the Committees raised concerns that ActBlue’s response to the subpoena was insufficient, ActBlue represented on October 27, 2025, that it had produced “all non-privileged documents with responsive, relevant information.

However, on April 2, 2026, the New York Times reported on ActBlue’s alleged acceptance of foreign donations and  Ms. Wallace-Jones’s misstatements to Congress and quoted from documents that ActBlue did not produce to the Committees. The documents, which included former Interim General Counsel Aaron Ting’s resignation letter and an internal message in which former Legal Counsel Zain Ahmad alleged that he was retaliated against for blowing the whistle on internal misconduct at ActBlue, are clearly responsive to the Committees’ subpoenas and unprotected by any reasonable assertion of the attorney-client privilege.

Wallace-Jones agreed in May to testify on June 10 before the House Administration Committee, per Breitbart News.

At the time, Steil said, “Ms. Wallace-Jones allegedly misled our committee at the outset of our investigation into ActBlue’s fraud prevention standards. It’s past time we set the record straight and got answers for the American people. I look forward to hearing her testify.”

During the hearing, she dodged questions from Jordan and repeatedly invoked her Fifth Amendment rights when he asked how many foreign contributions the organization accepted and why its legal team quit.

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Nadella’s Hedge: Microsoft Wants To Make AI Models Cheap – Then Own The Rails They Run On

The entire AI capital cycle – roughly $700 billion in hyperscaler capex this year, an estimated $2 trillion-plus through 2028 – is collateralized by one belief: that intelligence is scarce, and therefore priceable. That belief is already under strain. Per-token inference prices have fallen on the order of 200× in a year, and the only thing holding revenue up is volume; the cost of intelligence is dropping even as the cost of deploying it climbs. Hyperscaler free cash flow is rolling over. The Fed has named AI capital spending a systemic risk. 

And after falling behind in the race to build the best AI, Microsoft is setting up for a massive hedge. The company is on track to spend north of $120 billion this fiscal year – most of it on GPUs and the data centers that house them, $37.5 billion in a single quarter alone, pushing free cash flow negative for the first time in a generation. That is a company betting intelligence is scarce. Yet to the Wall Street Journal last week, Nadella argued the opposite is coming – that intelligence is about to get cheap. The tell isn’t a contradiction. It’s a hedge: if you can’t win the race to build the best model, you make the model worthless and own the road it runs on.

Microsoft is already executing on the hedge. In the weeks surrounding the interview, the company rolled out a new wave of lower-cost models and made Copilot Cowork generally available worldwide – an autonomous agent designed for long-running tasks that lets users (or the system) dynamically route work across multiple models, explicitly including cheaper options. Axios reported that Microsoft is also actively weighing whether to host a version of DeepSeek, the ultralow-cost Chinese model, directly inside Azure for Copilot customers. The model would be optional for users, fully hosted on Microsoft’s infrastructure, and wrapped in the company’s enterprise security, compliance, and data-residency controls.

These aren’t side-quests, they are the product-level proof of the thesis: make intelligence abundant and interchangeable while keeping the customer, the data, and the workflow inside Microsoft’s perimeter.

Nadella believes intelligence is about to become abundant, interchangeable, and cheap, as a wave of agents routes work to the lowest bidder. And as the cost per unit of intelligence plummets, he wants Microsoft to own the rails it runs on.

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REPORT: Trump Admin Threatens to Withhold DHS Grant Funding to States Opposing Election Integrity Measures

The White House is reportedly threatening to withhold federal funding from states that do not comply with proposed election and vote-counting rules.

The new rules that the Trump Administration seeks to implement nationwide include manual audits of election systems, requiring documentary proof of citizenship for voters, and phasing out voting systems that don’t use hand-marked paper ballots, CNN reports, citing unnamed sources and internal documents.

Per CNN:

Under new rules governing several homeland security grant programs, states must take a number of steps, including phasing out certain electronic voting systems and moving to hand-marked paper ballots. They must also run their voter rolls through a controversial Department of Homeland Security citizenship verification database.

If not, states would lose out on some funding from DHS. These grants, expected to total more than $1 billion in the current fiscal year, are one of Washington’s main vehicles for helping state and local governments prevent terrorism, protect infrastructure and prepare for major disasters.

For years, the DHS grants, which states apply for, have required that at least 3% of the funds be spent broadly on election security. But the new guidelines, which CNN obtained and are expected to go out to states later this month, impose a set of mandatory reforms and steep penalties for noncompliance. States that refuse would lose 20% of the grant money — potentially millions of dollars in security funds.

“No changes to grant requirements or funding distributions are official until they are formally announced and published through proper, authorized agency channels,” a DHS spokesperson said in a statement, adding that the administration considers election security to be a core national security priority.

“Any recipient of federal funding should expect accountability for how taxpayer dollars are spent,” the spokesperson said.

In March 2025, Trump signed the “Preserving and Protecting the Integrity of American Elections” executive order, which directs the Election Assistance Commission (EAC) to require proof of citizenship and voter ID on its national mail voter registration form.

The order directs the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to “review each State’s publicly available voter registration list and available records concerning voter list maintenance activities.”

Further, DHS and the EAC were directed to “review and report on the security of all electronic systems used in the voter registration and voting process,” and “assess the security of all such systems to the extent they are connected to, or integrated into, the Internet and report on the risk of such systems being compromised through malicious software and unauthorized intrusions into the system.”

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Elon Musk’s SpaceX IPO Spurs Momentum for Orbital AI Data Centers

The concept of building AI data centers in orbit has gained renewed momentum following SpaceX’s record-breaking IPO that raised over $85 billion and valued the company in the trillions. Elon Musk’s success and the massive pushback against AI data centers in rural and suburban communities has spurred competitors including Jeff Bezos to develop their own plans for space-based data centers

CNBC reports that the successful public debut of SpaceX, which raised $85 billion and made Elon Musk the world’s first trillionaire, has brought the once far-fetched idea of space-based AI data centers into the realm of plausibility. While significant skepticism remains about the economic viability of the concept, industry experts and investors suggest the massive capital infusion could accelerate development of orbital computing infrastructure.

SpaceX now possesses several key components necessary for space-based data centers, including reliable reusable Falcon rockets, plans for more powerful launch vehicles, its xAI division with substantial computing needs, and the upgradeable Starlink satellite network. The company’s interconnected operations now have billions in new capital to potentially integrate these elements and serve both internal AI operations and commercial customers such as Anthropic.

Breitbart News previously reported that Musk unveiled his plans for orbital AI data centers shortly before the SpaceX IPO:

The AI data center satellite, which Musk characterized as a preliminary version of the final design, will stand 20 meters tall with an expansive wingspan of 70 meters. These dimensions make it the largest satellite SpaceX has ever attempted to launch. The structure features a rack of AI chips flanked by extensive solar panels and liquid radiators for thermal management.

Musk described the current design as a draft iteration of what will become the operational version. He noted that the satellite is considerably less complex than SpaceX’s Starlink satellites, which the company has been deploying since 2019. Much of the technology draws from systems already developed for the satellite internet service.

“We don’t think this is a super hard problem, compared to things we already do,” said Musk.

Duncan Davidson, a partner at Bullpen Capital, stated on CNBC’s The Exchange that “The company comes down to data centers in space. That is the big, long-term play.” Davidson noted that while engineering and technical challenges are being addressed, the economics remain marginal at present. However, he expressed optimism about the long-term business case as launch costs decrease while terrestrial data center expenses continue rising.

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