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More States Enact New Laws Curbing Teachers Unions

New organized labor reforms signed into law by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis last week require a majority of members to be present for teachers union certification or recertification votes, increase fines for illegal strikes, and establish merit-based pay for educators.

In Idaho, after July 1, teachers unions will be prohibited from collecting dues directly from members’ paychecks, using paid time off for union activities, or recruiting new members during school hours.

A similar law in Arizona, which also bans teacher strikes and prohibits organized labor members from using any school property—even email addresses—for union activities, will be decided on by voters in the November election.

“They can’t consume taxpayer-funded resources during the school day,” said Rusty Brown, special projects director for the Freedom Foundation policy organization, which assisted state legislators with those measures and helps teachers opt out of union membership.

These ideas are expected to gain ground throughout the nation in the months and years ahead, Brown told The Epoch Times.

Individually, the Freedom Foundation’s Teacher Freedom Alliance has so far helped more than 272,535 teachers opt out of union membership, including more than 50,000 in 2025 alone, according to data provided to The Epoch Times. This includes educators in red and blue states.

At the state level, Oklahoma lawmakers have advanced legislation that would allow teachers to withdraw from a union at any time and would terminate “closed shop” provisions that prevent teachers from accessing alternative labor or professional organizations, such as the Teacher Freedom Alliance.

Brown calls this an “equal access and an end to a monopoly and captive audience bill.” Alternative organizations can offer teacher liability insurance and other benefits at a fraction of the price that traditional unions charge, he said.

Brown said he believes that the legislation could pass before Oklahoma’s session ends later this month, but the member withdrawal proposal probably won’t go through this session.

Alabama state lawmakers will consider legislation similar to Oklahoma’s next session, he said.

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Teen Girl Raped in NYC After Uber Driver Skipped ID Check, Attacker Had Just Completed Soft on Crime ‘Alternative-to-Prison’ Program for Criminals Under 27-Years-Old

A 16-year-old girl from Long Island was allegedly raped, filmed, and terrorized in Brooklyn after an Uber driver picked her up without checking her ID, delivering her straight into the hands of a 26-year-old repeat offender who had just completed a lenient “alternative to incarceration” program designed for criminals under 27.

The horrifying March attack took place in Bushwick after the victim had been communicating with rapist Ralfy Figueroa on Snapchat since at least January.

Figueroa allegedly paid her $35 for a nude photo, to which she sent a fake image from the internet, and later used threats to lure her into meeting him.

On the day of the assault, Figueroa sent chilling Snapchat messages, including, “You have to, I know your address. Confirm your address, if you don’t, I’m gonna hurt you and your family.”

The terrified teen got into an Uber from her Long Island home, which was sent by her attacker.

The driver never asked for identification, in clear violation of Uber’s own policies for unaccompanied minors under 18.

The New York Post reports:

Uber bars strangers from calling for rides for passengers under 18, and youngsters are not supposed to ride alone, unless they have a specific account intended for teenagers, according to the company.

“When picking up riders, if you feel they are underage, you may request they provide a driver’s license or ID card for confirmation. If a rider is underage, please do not start the trip or allow them to ride,” according to the company’s web site.

But instead of ending the ride, the driver brought the victim to Bushwick and dropped her off without making sure she was safe or with a guardian, allegedly breaking another tenet of Uber’s policies regarding youngsters.

There, she met Figueroa, who allegedly forced her into his car and sexually assaulted her.

According to the criminal complaint, he demanded oral sex, offered her $1,000 if she complied, continued the assault until she vomited, filmed the entire act, and threatened to send people to her home while claiming he had guns.

Afterward, Figueroa called another Uber to send her home, but canceled it once she was inside the vehicle, leaving her stranded.

At the time of the attack, Figueroa had just completed a program called Cases ROAR (Reframing Opportunities, Alternatives and Resilience), a court-mandated alternative to incarceration run by the Center for Alternative Sentencing and Employment Services (CASES) for 16 to 27-year-olds facing misdemeanor or felony charges.

Figueroa was placed in the program as part of a plea deal after a July arrest for selling crack cocaine to an undercover officer in Bushwick, a crime that was not bail-eligible.

Figueroa was arrested shortly after the March assault and charged with first-degree rape. He pleaded not guilty and is being held at Rikers Island on $100,000 bail.

The Office of the Special Narcotics Prosecutor has already requested a hearing to revoke his plea deal in the earlier drug case, which could send him to prison for up to nine years.

“We have requested a hearing to determine whether defendant Ralfy Figueroa has violated the terms of his plea to felony and misdemeanor narcotics charges and should immediately be sentenced on those charges,” spokesperson Kati Cornell told the Post.

The victim’s family has filed a lawsuit against Uber, claiming the driver’s failure to follow basic safety protocols directly enabled the assault.

The lawsuit states the girl “did not understand the danger of the situation” and that the company’s lax enforcement left her vulnerable.

“My daughter has told me that, if the videos of the assault were to be made public, she would kill herself,” the mom said in the lawsuit against Uber, according to the New York Post report.

The teen is now receiving mental health treatment at an out-of-state facility.

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Ideological Insanity Has Gotten WAY WAY WORSE In The UK…

A major exam board has now signed off on gender-neutral language in GCSE French, Spanish and German exams – despite the terms being completely alien to how those languages are actually spoken in their home countries.

The move, buried in new specifications for 2026 exams, hands students the green light to ditch standard masculine and feminine forms in favour of made-up “inclusive” pronouns, nouns and adjectives.

Yes, you read that right. They’re letting students make up their own parts of foreign languages in exams.

Staff at Pearson Edexcel have explicitly permitted teens to use “inclusive” pronouns, nouns and adjectives in both written and oral GCSEs. Yet as the article linked above makes clear, “the French do not pander to the same bid for inclusivity, with all their grammatical concepts being strictly categorised into gendered variants.”

Adjectives must match the noun in masculine or feminine endings. Gender-neutral terms simply do not exist in grammatically correct French or Spanish.

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Outrage: According to Liberal NPR, Colleges Flag Black Students For Admission, Continuing Affirmative Action

According to a report at The College Fix, “Admissions offices are sifting through college essays and working to find black students without drawing legal challenges, guests on a recent National Public Radio segment admitted.”

This practice is discrimination, yet some colleges proudly engage in this practice.

There’s even a racial code language, according to this report.

“In college admission, trauma is shorthand for blackness,” National Public Radio reported as part of its “Code Switch” show focused on racial identity issues.”

In this National Public Radio report, “Host Gene Demby interviewed former Georgetown University admissions officer Aya Waller-Bey for the April 25 episode.”

“Waller-Bey recently completed her doctorate in sociology at the University of Michigan, where she studied “how Black students make sense of racialized expectations to narrate trauma in college personal statements,” according to her bio.”

In addition to the coded language used, they admitted to continued affirmative action and racial preference.

“Admissions officers are looking through essays for stories about being “first-gen” or “low-income,” Waller-Bey said. That is because schools are trying to figure out a way around the 2023 Supreme Court ruling that affirmed racial discrimination in higher education is illegal.”

Admissions then “advocates” for particular students based on race.

This is very racist and illegal, but they are boasting about engaging in anti-white and anti-Asian discrimination.

Waller Bey then implied that even that is racist against Black people, asking “black students and other groups to talk about their pain is itself painful.”(As if no other races and ethnic groups have gone through trauma)

She then said this trauma “is often incredibly valuable for organizations and institutions.”

Either way, the Supreme Court has found these racial preference admissions to be unconstitutional. Fairness and colorblind admissions are the opposite of racism.

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An AI Shift You Can’t Ignore Is Already Burying One of Medicine’s Most Promising Treatments

A medical substance most people have never heard of is quietly treating autoimmune disease, nerve injury, and even conditions doctors say are “untreatable.”

But those conditions are not untreatable — and DMSO is proving it.

Dr. James Miller says DMSO works so well for so many things that it “seems unbelievable.”

Here’s what it’s helping patients recover from:

• Autoimmune disorders

• Chronic nerve inflammation

• Diabetic neuropathy

• Stroke-related disability

• Debilitating arthritis

• Vaccine injuries

• Chronic pain

• Even cancer

Best of all, it is “extremely safe.”

“It’s like salt—you can hurt someone with too much salt, but it’s really hard. And DMSO is in that category. It’s just very, very safe,” Dr. Miller says.

If you’re wondering, “Why have I never heard of DMSO?” — there’s a reason for that.

The story of DMSO is like ivermectin all over again… except the war against it never stopped.

DMSO occupies a strange and uncomfortable position.

It’s been widely studied, used internationally, and even incorporated into FDA-approved therapies.

Yet in the U.S., it’s largely absent from mainstream medicine—meaning countless patients never even hear about an affordable and potentially effective option that should have been considered.

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Big Finance Might Be Dooming the SPLC — Even Before Its Day in Court

The Southern Poverty Law Center is preparing for the legal fight of its life with the U.S. government — but its most immediate threat is coming from the financial system, rather than the courts.

Fidelity Charitable, Charles Schwab affiliate DAFgiving360, and Vanguard Charitable have begun blocking donor-advised fund, or DAF, donations to the SPLC — effectively cutting off one of the organization’s most important funding pipelines at a critical moment. The decision arrives alongside a politicized and bogus indictment announced late last month by the Trump Department of Justice, which is attempting to paint one of the country’s most prominent watchdogs against hate and racial violence as a promoter of it.

A letter from Democratic Reps. Jamie Raskin and Mary Gay Scanlon notes the House Judiciary Committee has received whistleblower reports that the DOJ “ordered the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Middle District of Alabama to rush through the indictment of the SPLC despite serious concerns about the strength of the case.” As Alabama Reflector editor Brian Lyman wrote, “DOJ has no evidence of SPLC committing a crime. The organization’s real offense, in the eyes of Trump’s toadies, is its lack of obedience.”

But before any courts can assess the merits of the case, the SPLC is already suffering severe financial consequences.

Donor-advised funds have become a key part of American philanthropy. Managed by firms like Fidelity and Vanguard, DAFs allow donors to receive immediate tax benefits while recommending grants to IRS-recognized nonprofits over time. They are one of the primary channels many nonprofits use to connect with donors.

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How a Scientific Cartel Protects Fraudsters and Rakes in Billions of Taxpayer Dollars

I was 22 when my grandmother forgot me.

It took her 12 years to die from Alzheimer’s. It started with little things, like where her glasses were or what day it was. Soon she didn’t know who I was. For a while, she addressed me as her son, but then, as the disease ate away more of her mind, she forgot him too. Then I was the young, handsome version of her husband, until he too faded away. After a while, I was just a nice young man who came to visit her.

The rest of the time, she was afraid: waking up in an unfamiliar world, surrounded by people she’d never met, confused that she wasn’t back home in Minnesota, where she’d grown up. It hit my mom the hardest. She did everything she could to take care of her own mother, watching the brilliant, kind woman she knew rot into a husk of her former self.

My grandmother died on Christmas Eve. As sad as it was, it was a blessing for my mom, who was finally freed from her duty of watching the woman she loved the most waste away.

The Alzheimer’s Researcher Who Became a Poster Child for Academic Fraud

Sylvain Lesné, a neuroscientist at the University of Minnesota, published a paper in Nature in 2006 claiming to identify a specific amyloid beta protein assembly as the direct cause of memory impairment in Alzheimer’s. This reinvigorated the amyloid hypothesis at a moment when skepticism about it was ramping up. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) devoted $1.6 billion to projects that mention amyloids in 2022 alone, nearly half of all federal Alzheimer’s funding that year. Lesné was a star.

But there were rumblings. Numerous amyloid drugs made it to trials with billions invested by pharmaceutical companies. They failed repeatedly. A question arose in the pharmaceutical community: How can this be right? How can the trials keep failing if the underlying research is correct? 

In 2022, the Vanderbilt neuroscientist Matthew Schrag uncovered evidence that images in Lesné’s paper had been manipulated. Science magazine found more than 20 suspect papers by Lesné, with over 70 instances of possible image tampering. Nature retracted the paper in June 2024. Every author except Lesné signed the retraction. Lesné himself resigned from his tenured position at the University of Minnesota on March 1, 2025, three years after his fraud was exposed.

More news and details trickled out over time. Charles Piller’s 2025 book Doctored talks about the Amyloid Mafia, a nickname for a network that had prioritized novelty over replication and marginalized dissenters for decades. Anyone questioning the amyloid gospel was pushed out and watched their funding vanish.

When I first picked up that Science article, I hadn’t considered academic fraud as something that was real and widespread. As I thought about it more, I was filled with a deep, bitter hatred. For his own pride, greed, and acclaim, this man had doomed millions of people like my grandmother to slow, horrible deaths and millions more like my mom to agonizing years as caregivers.

Lesné resigned, but was still rich. None of his grant money was clawed back. The system that was supposed to catch this—peer review, university compliance, journal editorial boards—failed repeatedly for years.

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Cash for crowds scandal as lobbyist ‘offered hundreds of dollars to recruit attendees for JD Vance speech’

Vice President JD Vance‘s appearance in a state critical to the 2028 Republican presidential nomination is raising eyebrows due to a lobbyist’s bid to entice attendees.

Ahead of a rally Vance headlined in Des Moines with Iowa Congressman Zach Nunn that took place last Tuesday, a text message was sent by an Iowa ethanol lobbyist recruiting spectators to attend. The messages contained an offer of payment.

The text, obtained and published by Iowa Starting Line read:

‘Gentlemen, Jake Swanson here. I wanted to invite you to join me in seeing Vice President JD Vance this afternoon in Des Moines. I do some work for an ethanol company and so if you’re able to join, I will give you $100, and for anyone that you recruit, an additional $25. No limit on referrals, so if someone recruits a group of 20 to show up, that’s $500.’

Swanson is a lobbyist and a former policy adviser to Iowa’s Republican governor, Kim Reynolds.

In a statement to Iowa Starting Line, Swanson defended the move: ‘I love ethanol and what it does for our state. 

‘So I was happy to bring some Iowa State kids to the rally to celebrate all the things Trump-Vance have done for biofuels and I think there’s opportunity for so much more. This is what I like to do in my own personal spare time,’ Swanson noted.

The Daily Mail reached out for comment to the Vice President’s office, which did not respond in time for publication. There is no suggestion that Vance or his team were aware of Swanson’s actions. Swanson was also contacted for additional comment.

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A Pointless War: How Iran Hawks Finally Got Their Way

The Strait of Hormuz is straight out of a storybook. Named for an ancient Persian god, the 24-mile-wide waterway flows between jagged cliffs, inlets that look like a desert version of Scandinavian fjords, and multicolored salt formations. Centuries-old Portuguese castles dot both sides of the straits, and traditional sailboats called dhows still ply the waters, carrying tourists and small wares.

Hormuz, the only connection between the oil-rich Persian Gulf and the wider ocean, is also the artery of the modern industrial economy that is most vulnerable to war. On February 28, 2026, shortly after Israel and the United States attacked Iran, the Iranian military broadcast on the radio that the strait was closed for shipping. Two days later, a (presumably Iranian) weapon smashed into an oil tanker, killing two crew members. Iran began charging multimillion-dollar ransoms for the few ships that continue to pass.

Global crude oil prices nearly doubled in the first few weeks of war—and oil isn’t the whole story. Many critical manufacturing processes around the world rely on inputs from the gulf’s petrochemical industry, which Iran has also bombed directly and which will take months to restart once the coast is clear. Electronics manufacturers in South Korea and Taiwan are suddenly short on helium, which they need to produce semiconductors. So ends the age of uninterrupted artificial intelligence growth. The plastic, metal, and pharmaceutical industries are running into similar shortages of raw materials. And the world is staring down a food crisis next year as farmers struggle to find fertilizer for the current planting season.

President Donald Trump has made reopening the strait a major goal of the war and the negotiations to end it during the mid-April 2026 ceasefire. In other words, Trump’s struggle is now to reverse the consequences of choosing to start the war.

Starting this war was indeed a choice. The Trump administration spent months building up military forces in the Middle East while issuing constantly shifting demands. Iran had agreed to negotiate; the U.S. attacked on a weekend between two scheduled rounds of talks.

Although the war came out of the blue for most Americans, the Iran hawks spent decades working to put the United States in this position. They made it politically easier to go to war than not go to war. Politicians took it for granted that Israel and the Arab monarchies’ problems with Iran were also America’s problems. But hawkish factions from both parties also shot down any attempt to solve those problems through compromise or even containment of Iran. They pushed the U.S. to take greater and greater risks while avoiding a public debate on war.

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REVEALED: Swalwell Sent His Young Sexual Assault Victims Intimidating Snapchat Messages AFTER CNN’s Bombshell Report

Former Democrat Rep. Eric Swalwell sent messages to his young sexual assault victims on Snapchat on the night CNN released its bombshell report.

The San Francisco Chronicle recently published a story about a woman who claimed that Democrat Eric Swalwell sexually assaulted her twice.

The woman, who worked as a staffer in Swalwell’s office for two years, told the San Francisco Chronicle that Swalwell began pursuing her just weeks after she was hired at the age of 21 in 2019.

After the San Francisco Chronicle dropped its bombshell report on Swalwell, three additional women spoke to CNN and provided evidence about alleged additional misconduct by the California Democrat.

The Swalwell staffer said she was sexually assaulted by Swalwell in 2019

The staffer also said Swalwell raped her years later in 2024 after she left his employment.

The unidentified former female staffer sat down with CNN and recounted some of the horrific details about the alleged rape that occurred in 2024.

“I went to the bathroom, and I don’t remember anything after that,” she said, adding that she “remembered the next day.”

“I can see flashes of that evening of him on top of me, me pushing him off, him grabbing me. It was a lot more aggressive. It was aggressive,” she said about the 2024 assault.

“He didn’t stop. He didn’t stop. I woke up the next morning naked, alone in his hotel. I, for a moment, didn’t even know that I was in his hotel room. That’s how intoxicated I was,” she said.

CNN said they corroborated the woman’s claims by speaking with friends and family that she confided in. CNN also reviewed photos and screenshots of contemporaneous text messages. The outlet reviewed a message from her medical provider the week after she received the pregnancy and STD test calling her a “survivor.”

Now this…

Swalwell sent his young sexual assault victims intimidating Snapchat messages after CNN’s bombshell report.

It was previously reported that Swalwell was sending pervy videos to young women on Snapchat.

Now CNN is reporting that Swalwell sent midnight Snapchats to his young victims asking them why they screenshotted his messages.

“According to CNN the night after they spoke with Swalwell’s attorney about their reporting, Swalwell initiated Snapchats with some of the very women in their report at 1:57 am,” Kayleigh McEnany reported.

“Swalwell messaged one woman asking why she had screen shotted his chats and including screen caps of text between the two of them,” she said.

“And CNN says just prior to that at 140 a.m. Eastern time he sent a similar message to another woman who received that text and said this: ‘my whole chest got tight,’ and she immediately started crying,” she added.

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