Prostitution is openly proliferating in New York City thanks to socialist Mayor Zohran Mamdani.

It’s all part of the plan.

The New York Post reported on Sunday that “prostitution-related arrests have plunged by 60%” this year in the city.

That’s not cause for celebration.

Decline in arrests doesn’t mean there has been a decline in crime, which is always something to think about when considering crime statistics. Instead, the decline in prostitution arrests is clearly the result of New York deprioritizing this kind of law enforcement, both at the city and state level.

Prostitution continues, but now with fewer guardrails.

“Clusters of New York City have been inundated with hookers and pimps brazenly operating on public streets since a state statute prohibiting loitering for the purpose of prostitution was repealed by far-left Albany pols in February 2021,” the New York Post reported. “The change in the law has allowed hookers to operate more freely, with cops turning their attention to traffickers, pimps, and johns.”

Former New York City Mayor Eric Adams responded to the increase in prostitution by launching an initiative in 2024 to aggressively police problematic areas like Roosevelt Avenue in Queens.

The crime crackdown seemed to be working, quickly.

According to city statistics released about the Roosevelt Avenue area by the Adams administration in June of 2025, “complaints of petit larceny are down by 28 percent, and reported sex crimes have plummeted by 52.5 percent. At the same time, prostitution-related arrests have risen nearly fivefold—an increase of 477.8 percent compared to the same period last year—reflecting intensified enforcement against illegal activity and sex trafficking.”

Then Adams was jettisoned for a socialist.

You’d think the incoming Mamdani administration would want to keep that success going.

Nope.

The socialist jettisoned responsible, practical law enforcement for theory. What a surprise.

What was working for the decent, law-abiding people of New York isn’t a top priority for your typical leftist activist or prison abolitionist college professor.

They think cracking down on prostitution is an attack on social justice. Sex work is work they would say.

If you think that sounds nutty and implausible you don’t have to take my word for it. The Democratic Socialists of America website proudly explained why they endorse full decriminalization of “sex work.”

“Sex-worker-led movements all over the world are engaged in an existential struggle to win basic human and labor rights for one of the most criminalized, stigmatized, and persecuted workforces in history,” the DSA website explained in a statement in 2020. This means, the website said, “eliminating prostitution, loitering, solicitation, and vagrancy related laws.”

This was Mamdani’s agenda, too, which he proudly defended when he was running for mayor. He said in a debate that prosecuting prostitutes leads to “less safety”—which isn’t true, by the way—and that he wanted to “provide an economy of opportunity.”

While Mamdani has been careful about the ways he undermines law enforcement, don’t think his ultimate goals are much different than those of the DSA or other socialists. He really does want to stop enforcing anti-prostitution laws. He really does believe in abolishing prisons. He really is a socialist, just like he said he was.

He just wants to do all those things while staying in power.

But true believers like Mamdani don’t want to just pull the string on a few important law enforcement measures. They want full political and social revolution. That goal hasn’t changed at all even if the methods of getting there sometimes evolve.

And it isn’t just a fringe goal either. The Democratic Party is moving very much in the direction of the DSA on the prostitution issue as they have on many others. Democrats in Colorado tried to decriminalize prostitution in that state earlier in 2026 and were only narrowly thwarted.

Now you may be thinking, do these socialists and assorted leftists actually care what happens to the women, the prostitutes they call “sex workers,” in practice?

After all, most places that have legalized prostitution tend to be seedy, for lack of a better word. They are havens for pimps, gangsters, and other assorted criminals. Some on the feminist Left seem to at least partially understand the problem.

But most socialists don’t see things the same way. After all, everything is material to them. There is nothing bad about prostitution—for individuals or society—that can’t be solved by labor organizing, housing, healthcare, fair wages, etc., etc., they would say.

That very much runs counter to the experience of even the most “functional” places that have legalized prostitution where there have been serious negative consequences. The Netherlands—famed for its libertine tolerance of prostitution—has recently put more restrictions on its red-light districts in Amsterdam and elsewhere due to their association with abuse, crime, and addiction.

Don’t think that history and experience count for much with socialists though. They have such wonderful, idyllic theories about our beautiful, equalitarian future.

Only the billionaires and dour meanies annoyingly referring to history and human nature could possibly be against their transformative social goals that will surely solve all the troubles in human relations once the revolution is complete.

Here in the real world, more women will be abused, vice and exploitation will proliferate, and excuses will be made for why bad policies turned out badly once again.

Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s video from Daily Signal senior contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to see more of his videos.

Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for the Daily Signal.  

Sometimes when you’re in the middle of revolutionary times, it’s sort of like being in the eye of the hurricane. You can’t really detect or fathom what’s going on, even though the changes are tumultuous. That’s what’s happening in the world today. 

The world is radically changing, and we don’t even feel it, or we don’t appreciate what’s happening. All we’re hearing in this midterm cycle are three things: affordability, affordability, affordability. And we’ve talked on earlier occasions that affordability is a result, the worry over affordability, of a 21% inflation just a year and a half ago after the Biden administration finished its four-year tenure, and a 30% inflation rise in things that matter: cars, insurance, fuel, power, health care, housing. 

So we don’t really hear much. We hear the Iran war, the Iran war, the Iran war, the Iran war, and we hear, thirdly, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump. But take a deep breath before the midterms and look at the world as it is now versus what it was, say, five years ago. Russia has been fighting since Feb. 28, 2022. 

Its invasion, even if it does annex some of the Ukrainian territory, has been a colossal disaster. Its economy is in shambles. It’s under drone attacks. Its oil and natural gas have been embargoed. It has suffered 1.5 million dead and wounded. Its political leadership is in disarray. 

It’s lost its proxies in Venezuela, in Syria, and Iran.  

China’s not much better. It just fired its entire top echelon of its military. Its economy is stagnant. Its fertility is 1.0. It’s a shrinking, aging population. About 400,000 Chinese have been completely shut out of the 1.4 billion population who is supposedly in a capitalist, proto-capitalist, quasi-capitalist, revolution, but they’re not feeling it. 

In other words, China has enormous problems. When you look elsewhere, as I said so often before, Latin America is not in a pink tide. Don’t listen to the old words of John Kerry that the Monroe Doctrine is dead. It is not flipping toward the left. Maybe Brazil and maybe Cuba, and there are those governments on their last legs, and maybe a few countries like Nicaragua and one or two in the Caribbean. 

Otherwise, you have about 28, 27 of the 32 Latin-speaking countries, Spanish-speaking countries, and some in the Caribbean have completely flipped through free and fair elections with the aid and help of the United States. USAID that was propping up left-wing movements is over with. 

The Chinese controlling the exits and entry of the Panama Canal is over with. [Nicolas] Maduro sending drugs and millions of people northward who were criminals is over with. And people in Latin America see the American economy, and they want to be a part of it. That is a completely radical change in the status quo.

People have been screaming about Greenland, Greenland, Greenland. 

Yes, it’s unfortunate that Donald Trump is hyperbolic. Yes, he says things that are crazy on Truth Social. That’s the art of the deal. But the aim of the United States, as it was during World War II vis-à-vis Greenland, was to preserve this continental-size North American island, so to speak, in Western hands with it to be defensible and protected from hostile powers who want to use it as a base in the North Atlantic or to infringe on Western claims to the Arctic Circle and Arctic Ocean. 

And that can’t be handled alone by the 50,000 people of Greenland nor tiny little Denmark. World War II proved that when the Nazis overran Denmark, noble as it was, in three days and Greenland was lost and the United States stepped in, put bases there, protected it from the Axis incursions. After the war was over, it handed it back over to Denmark, and it protected it from the Russians for Denmark. 

All Trump was trying to say is with new missiles and new technologies, the shortest route to the United States is over the Arctic from our hostile powers in China and Russia, and we’re not going to leave Greenland ripe to be picked by these powers. And so now we have a new agreement, and the Danes have been wonderful. 

Trump has been wonderful. The Greenlanders have been wonderful. Everybody says, let the Americans build bases and protect NATO’s interest and the Western Alliance’s interest in Greenland. The Greenlanders will see prosperity from these bases. Denmark will retain sovereignty. It’ll still have Greenland on its coat of arms. 

It’ll still brag that it has this huge continental colony, so to speak. Fine. All we need to do is make sure that this is a Western entity, and it serves Western interest, and that’s happened. The same thing is going on in the Middle East very quickly. We are one country away from flipping the entire Middle East. 

This is not the world in which the Soviets were running Egypt or Saddam Hussein was in Iraq, or there was a crazy lunatic Russian Assad dynasty in Syria. It’s just Iran. The Gulf States have divorced themselves from Al-Qaeda and ISIS. No more subsidies. They wanna become wealthy and prosperous and secure. 

And they’re talking more with Israel than they are with other Muslim countries. They see Israel as not an existential threat, but the enemy of their enemy, which is Iran. 

And so Iran, with 93 million people and a history of civilization, high technology, high learning, has been hijacked for 50 years by a terrorist theocratic regime that has done all it can to hurt the interest of Europe and the United States and the world economy at large, and was seeking a nuclear weapon to deter any retaliation against it. 

And now, after about 200 days, that regime’s military, industrial, and nuclear complex is in shambles. Its economy is broke. Its currency is worthless. And we have accomplished that for about $40 billion. That’s about the size of the current here-in-California fraud that was perpetrated on us state and you federal taxpayers by crooked politicians and shysters who were hijacking programs for the poor, the homeless, hospices, and various welfare entities, and they stole $40 billion. 

That’s what we’ve spent so far to free Iran and change the Middle East without putting one ground soldier there. We tragically lost 19 soldiers in seven months. That’s unheard of in military operations of this scale and ambition. In other words, every single day on average, one person tragically dies by accident in the U.S. military. 

From the time we first hit Iran to the present day when I’m speaking now, the number of people, American soldiers who have died in Iran are a fraction of the daily accident rate. In other words, 11 times greater have been the accidents each day of people being killed in the military cumulative over this 210-day period, 11 times more than have been lost in combat against Iran. 

That is unimaginable. 

And we’re right at the point where if we continue this anaconda strangulation of this wicked regime without putting ground troops in, without upping the military tempo unless they retaliate with the Strait of Hormuz opening up and oil prices now starting slowly to recede, this regime will crack. 

And if it should crack, it will be the most calamitous, major, significant change in world political affairs since the fall of the Berlin Wall.  

All of these things are happening as I speak around the world, and it’s all a result of a suddenly dynamic U.S. economy, a suddenly changed position of the U.S. that is not only going to advance American interests, but also collective Western interests. And its subtext is we are going to stop the influence of China and Russia, communist governments in Latin America, in the Western Hemisphere, and in Asia and Africa, and we are going to preserve Western civilization and the United States’ preeminence. 

Why? Because we feel that if the world is consensual, we’re not nation builders. We don’t want to go in and change people’s hearts and minds. We are just saying, “Don’t tread on us. There’s no better friend and no worse enemy.” But when you threaten us, if people threaten us, our allies, our interests, we are in Jacksonian fashion gonna strike back, and we have.

And the world is far better off for it. 

We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of the Daily Signal.

The White House returned over half a billion dollars previously appropriated by Congress for programs serving illegal immigrants. While conservatives praised the return of federal funds, the rare action by President Donald Trump has lawmakers scrambling, with some members calling it an illegal check on Congress’ power of the purse.

On Friday, the White House Office of Management and Budget returned $810 million of taxpayer funds appropriated by Congress that were soon to expire on Sept. 30. The move, known as a pocket rescission, is a rare check on legislative power provided by the Impoundment Control Act.

“[Trump] is continuing his commitment to the American taxpayer by utilizing a pocket rescission for another nearly $1 billion of the most harmful government spending,” the White House said in its announcement.

“These funds previously went to pro-illegal immigration programs and nongovernmental organizations that provided services to refugees, asylees, and other noncitizens and put unaccompanied children in harm’s way,” the White House continued, stating that the funds are no longer needed, “thanks to President Trump’s successful border policies.”

The funds will be considered expired budget authority and will no longer be available for their previously authorized use. Listed programs included open-border NGOs, grants to illegal immigrants for affordable housing, LGBTQ+ services for noncitizens, and business benefits for minorities.

Last August, for the first time in 50 years, Trump sent back $5 billion in foreign aid. Earlier this month, Office of Management and Budget Director Russel Vought told the Daily Signal it was a move the administration may be considering again. “We don’t know yet,” he said. “All options are on the table.”

Conservatives Celebrate the Return

The House Freedom Caucus, a group of conservative lawmakers who often push to reduce federal spending, celebrated the return of taxpayer funds.

“With a $40 trillion national debt, we cannot afford to waste almost a billion dollars on illegal aliens and DEI programs,” Rep. Josh Brecheen said in a statement to the Daily Signal. “Congress must stop spending money on projects that do not specifically relate to the 18 enumerated powers found in Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution!”

“President Trump and OMB Director Russ Vought deserve tremendous credit for going after the pipeline that sends taxpayer dollars from Washington to NGOs and programs that put noncitizens and left-wing priorities ahead of Americans,” Rep. Eric Burlison, R-Mo., said in a statement to the Daily Signal.

“Too many people in this town are drunk on spending other people’s money, and they lose their minds the second someone tries to turn off the spigot. I’m glad this administration is willing to do it,” Burlison continued.

“This is America First in action,” Rep. Lauren Boebert, R-Colo., said in a statement to the Daily Signal. “The Trump Administration is cutting wasteful spending that does not benefit American citizens. Hardworking taxpayers should not be forced to bankroll health and social services for people who broke our laws.”

Weakening Appropriators

However, the decision might cause more of a headache for Senate Appropriations Chairwoman Susan Collins, who quickly criticized the administration’s use of executive power.

“Without warning or consultation, Congress just received an $810 million package of pocket rescissions from the Administration. This is the most recent attempt by this Office of Management and Budget (OMB) to undermine Congress’s constitutional power of the purse,” she wrote on social media soon after the announcement.

Collins called it a usurpation of Congress’ appropriations powers and cited the independent Government Accountability Office, which ruled the political move illegal.

General Counsel for the Office of Management and Budget Mark Paoletta took to social media defending the move.

“The text of the Impoundment Control Act (ICA) specifically allows for pocket rescissions and GAO previously agreed with this view for 43 years-until 2018 (during Trump 45 Administration) when it abruptly reversed its position,” he wrote.

“This Administration will continue to use its lawful authorities to get wins for the American people,” Paoletta concluded.

Democrat Sen. Jeff Merkley of Oregon, a member of the Appropriations Committee, also called it an “illegal line-item veto” and claimed the president is “canceling the lines of spending he doesn’t like.”

The argument could be taken to the Supreme Court. However, last year the high court sided with the White House in ruling that the president was allowed to withhold the funds in a similar timeline.

On Friday, Senate Majority Leader John Thune joined Rep. Mike Collins for a press conference in Atlanta to discuss the “No Tax on Tips” measure that previously passed Congress and to explain how Collins’ opponent for U.S. Senate represents the “[Democratic Socialists of America] wing” of the Democratic Party.

Discussing the prior presidential administration under President Joe Biden, Collins told reporters about the “historic inflation that went through and has been crushing … middle-class Americans out there.”

Collins explained that passing the “No Tax on Tips” measure allows families to provide for themselves. Sen. Jon Ossoff voted against this measure, Collins said, “because he doesn’t know anything about business.”

Thune told reporters that the “contrast here in Georgia couldn’t be more clear” between Collins and Ossoff and then proceeded to explain how Ossoff “voted with Joe Biden 98% of the time [and] he votes with [Senate Minority Leader] Chuck Schumer 97% of the time.”

The majority leader then said that the problem before Georgia voters is whether they truly want someone with a voice like Ossoff’s “representing them in the United States Senate.”

Thune continued, “When he [Ossoff] had an opportunity to vote not to tax overtime, he voted to tax overtime.”

“Elections fundamentally are about differences,” he said, “Jon Ossoff represents the far-left wing of the Democrat Party in this country, the DSA wing, and is using Georgia to set up a platform to run for national office.”

Thune also told reporters that “it [the race] continues to tighten, this is a margin-of-error race. It’s gonna come down to who gets out to vote on Election Day.”

“We believe that Mike Collins can win here, and we think over time, in the next five weeks … people [will] get a chance to get to know him and get a chance to get familiar with his opponent’s record, that the choice would be very clear.”

The Daily Signal asked Collins what it means to have support from Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp and other Republican organizations pouring into the campaign. “This is the number one race in the country to flip,” he said.

“You’ve got two people [in this race]. You’ve got a small businessman, you’ve got a trust fund kid that’s never had a job in his life.”

“I vote for [the] free market, less federal government, less tax, less regulation. He votes so that they can have total control over your life. He’s using this as a platform. He’s running as the DSA candidate for president.”

“They don’t even try to hide it. Why else would DSA open an office in Atlanta, Georgia?”

GOP Chairman Josh McKoon on Senate Race

Following the press conference with Thune and Collins, Georgia GOP Chairman Josh McKoon spoke with reporters, giving them a state-of-the-race update.

McKoon opened the conversation by telling reporters, “It doesn’t get any better than having the Senate majority leader in your state, in this city, letting people know he’s 100% in support of Mike Collins.”

After noting that the race is getting closer and closer, he commented on the “internal polling” that “captured this momentum that we then saw in the Quantus poll that has Congressman Collins in the margin of error.”

He then transitioned into a discussion of Ossoff, saying, “People know how far left his record is now. They saw how he abandoned Israel shortly after October 7th, teaming up with [Sen.] Bernie Sanders to try to turn America’s back on one of our most staunch allies in the country.”

He said that the stances Ossoff has taken have been “extreme” and said that “Georgia’s a center-right state.”

McKoon also added that when it comes to a strategy to sway moderate voters, “I think we’ve got to do what we did in 2024, which was to get a lot of people off the couch and into the voting booth.”

“We were very successful in 2024 in taking voters that had not voted in eight years, but they were for President [Donald] Trump, and we got them out to go vote in historic numbers,” he said.

“It’s the same battle plan, really.”

A parent’s first duty is not complicated. It is to love a child, form a child’s character, and prepare that child to be a productive member of society. 

Schools exist to help with that work by teaching children. They do not exist to replace it.

That distinction is now under pressure. In some academic circles, a new language has taken hold. Adults are recast as “oppressors.” Children are recast as “the oppressed.” Ordinary parental guidance—to wait for mature intimacy, dress with dignity, respect the rules of the house—is treated as a kind of tyranny called “adultism.” Once that frame is accepted, the family is no longer the first school. It becomes the problem schools seek to correct.

This is not an argument against teaching history, culture, or justice. Children should learn the full American story: its sins along with its astonishing capacity for self-correction. They should learn about other peoples—without being taught to sort the world into permanent camps of victims and villains.

Studies of non-Western cultures, at their best, can widen a student’s knowledge. At their worst, though, they are used as a ready-made story of grievance in which individualism is suspect, parents are obstacles, and the state becomes the guardian of the child.

Materials now circulating in teacher networks make this danger concrete. Tool kits offer plug-and-play lessons. Unions supply packets that fold current politics into the school day. Publishers follow the demand.

None of this requires secret meetings. It requires only a closed loop: activists write the framework, unions distribute it, publishers profit from it, and busy teachers are handed the path of least resistance. The child, meanwhile, is taught to see authority at home as something to be interrogated rather than trusted.

A free society cannot survive if that lesson is internalized. Children need parents who set limits. They need to learn to control themselves before someone teaches them to control the world. Healthy limits are not cruel; in reality, they help children grow into virtuous adults.

When a school implies that a good mother is an oppressor, it is not liberating the child. It is isolating children from relationship most likely to protect them.

Parents remain the primary educators. That is a fact older than any department of education. Government may compel attendance, fund buildings, and set academic standards, but none of those acts give it the right to reeducate a child’s loyalties. Teachers are professionals. They are not co-parents, and they are not moral substitutes for the family. When public institutions forget that, they invite the very conflict they claim to prevent.

Accountability, then, supports citizenship. Parents should speak up and ask for the actual documents: the lesson plans, the recommended titles, the training slide decks, the union packets. Summaries on television are not enough—primary sources are necessary.

Ask simple questions. Who approved this unit? What is the learning objective besides political sentiment? How does this lesson treat parental authority? Can a family opt out without penalty? If officials cannot answer clearly, that is an answer.

Speaking up does not imply any kind of resentment toward teachers. Most teachers entered the classroom to teach real subjects like reading, mathematics, science, and history, not to referee a child’s relationship with home. Many are as uneasy as parents when ideology arrives prepackaged and labeled as compassion. They deserve colleagues and administrators who protect the craft of teaching instead of turning it into activism.

The encouraging truth is that parents are no longer isolated. Technology has created alternatives. Homeschooling, hybrid schools, charters, tutors, and high-quality independent materials exist in a way they did not even a generation ago.

The existence of these alternatives does not mean everyone should simply abandon public schools. But it is competition, which encourages public schools to regain the public’s trust.

Do not wait for a perfect national consensus. Start where you live. Read what your child is assigned. Attend the meeting. Speak in a calm voice and ask for specifics. Vote. Recruit neighbors who may not share every political opinion but share this one: that a child should not be trained to see his parents as the enemy.

The work is tiring. It is also the most natural work there is. You know your children’s fears, gifts, and the looks on their faces when they test boundaries. No toolkit knows that. No publisher does. No union packet does.

Raise your children. Teach them to think. Teach them to be just without becoming bitter, proud of their country without being blind to its faults, and loyal to their family without being closed to the world. Then hold every public office to a standard worthy of those children.

The future will not be saved by the loudest slogan. It will be saved by parents who refuse to surrender the first classroom, which has always been the home.

We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of the Daily Signal.

No state should get to decide what type of car or lawn mower Americans across the country can buy. Yet that is the result of an arrangement under the Clean Air Act that allows California to seek federal waivers to impose more stringent vehicle emissions standards than those adopted by the federal government.  

Congress now has an opportunity to challenge four Environmental Protection Agency waivers that have expanded California’s regulatory overreach. The resolutions address the 2009 waiver allowing California to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from motor vehicles, the Advanced Clean Cars I waiver, the Biden administration’s 2022 reinstatement of that waiver, and California’s Small Off-Road Engine authorization. 

The 2009 waiver established the foundation for California’s greenhouse gas regulations for new vehicles, but California wanted to go further. In 2013, the EPA granted California another waiver to enforce its Advanced Clean Cars I program. The program combined greenhouse gas limits, low-emission vehicle requirements, and escalating zero-emission vehicle requirements covering model years through 2025. By model year 2025, its zero-emission vehicle component was designed to push qualifying vehicles to more than 15% of new sales despite negligible benefits to the climate. 

California’s Small Off-Road Engine rules cover new spark-ignition engines of 25 horsepower or less used in equipment such as lawn mowers, chainsaws, and power washers. The rules apply to manufacturers, sellers, retailers, and distributors of new equipment sold in California. Unlike California’s motor vehicle standards, the Small Off-Road Engine rules cannot be adopted by other states. But they still use federal approval to let one state direct the market for widely used equipment and pressure manufacturers to redesign what they offer. 

Although these four EPA actions apply to different products and regulatory periods, they follow the same basic playbook. Government regulations steer markets toward regulators’ preferred technologies rather than allowing customers to decide which products best meet their needs. 

California alone accounts for approximately 11% of the American light-vehicle market, but the reach of its vehicle policies does not end at the state line. Once the EPA grants California a motor vehicle waiver, Section 177 of the Clean Air Act allows other states to adopt the same standards. Seventeen states and the District of Columbia have adopted some subset of California’s vehicle standards, extending California’s regulatory influence across more than a third of the national automobile market. 

Manufacturers operate across national supply chains. When California and allied states impose a common vehicle regime, or when California’s market size makes separate product lines impractical, manufacturers must adjust broader production decisions. That gives California officials influence over products offered to consumers who never voted for them. 

Following that agenda affects affordability. A free market allows electric, hybrid, gasoline, and other vehicle technologies to compete on their merits. It also allows consumers to choose among gasoline-powered and electric outdoor equipment based on cost, performance, range, reliability, and intended use. Regulatory quotas, emissions limits, and credit systems require manufacturers to make production and pricing decisions around compliance rather than based on what customers actually want. 

Consumers who want an electric vehicle, battery-powered lawn mower, or other electric product should be free to purchase one. Families, farmers, and small businesses should also be free to choose affordable conventional products when those options better serve their needs. 

States should be free to make many of their own policy choices. But one state should not receive special federal permission to reshape national markets and export the consequences to families elsewhere. 

Federalism protects California’s authority to govern within its own borders, but it also protects Idaho and every other state from having California’s policies imposed beyond those borders. If states want to create a coordinated regulatory system with national consequences, they should negotiate an interstate compact and seek congressional approval. They should not use an EPA waiver to give one state’s regulators control over markets and consumer choices nationwide.

Fortunately, there is a solution. 

The Congressional Review Act gives elected lawmakers a way to review and overturn federal agency actions. 

Under the law, Congress can pass a joint resolution of disapproval targeting an agency rule. If both chambers approve the resolution and the president signs it, the rule loses legal effect. The law also prevents an agency from issuing another rule in “substantially the same” form unless Congress subsequently authorizes it. Moreover, the Congressional Review Act determinations, findings, actions, or omissions are not subject to judicial review. Together, these provisions give a Congressional Review Act resolution greater permanence than an agency’s rule reversal. 

The Congressional Review Act is especially important when agencies use expansive claims of authority to make decisions with national economic consequences. It returns the decision to Congress, where lawmakers are publicly accountable to the people who bear the costs. 

Congress already demonstrated that it is able to stop California from imposing its preferred vehicle policies nationwide. In 2025, lawmakers used the Congressional Review Act to overturn the EPA waiver for Advanced Clean Cars II, along with separate waivers covering the Advanced Clean Trucks program and California’s heavy-duty low-nitrogen-oxide regulations. President Donald Trump signed those resolutions in June 2025. 

Those actions were an important victory for consumer choice, but they did not eliminate the earlier federal approvals that helped build California’s regulatory chokehold. The current package would continue that work through four separate resolutions. 

Congress should approve all four. Addressing only one or two would leave other parts of the same regulatory structure in place and give a future administration more room to restore California’s authority through overlapping approvals. Passing the full set would protect consumer choice across vehicles and outdoor equipment while making clear that national emissions policy should not be dictated by regulators in a single state. 

Americans do not need California’s regulators choosing their next car, lawn mower, chainsaw, or power washer. They need markets in which manufacturers compete to make products more affordable, reliable, and useful. 

Congress has already started dismantling California’s national regulatory agenda. Now it should finish the job. 

McKinney, Texas, residents who organized a recall of the mayor and three council members have filed their petition, saying they gathered over 7,500 signatures.

On Friday, recall organizers submitted the signatures to the city secretary, a day before the deadline, to ensure that City Hall would be open to accept them.

The petition organizers only needed 5,805 signatures but exceeded that number before the deadline. John Aselton, an organizer for the recall, also said organizers had internally verified at least 6,500 signatures from registered McKinney voters, according to The Dallas Express.

Paul Chabot, chairman of Collin County Citizens for Integrity PAC, said he expects the city to follow through with the recall.

“McKinney residents are looking for new leadership. Despite multiple threats to dox recall signers, we saw overwhelming support from citizens across the political spectrum,” Chabot said. “We expect the city to follow the law throughout the recall process.”

“In the coming weeks, we anticipate a recall election date to be announced for any council member who does not resign after being formally notified by the city secretary,” he added.

Ashley Marie, a petition volunteer, also shared that residents cleared the required threshold.

“McKinney residents did what the charter allows them to do. They collected the signatures, they turned them in, and they cleared the threshold organizers were required to meet,” Marie said. “That is not extremism. That is self-government.”

The recall, launched in August, targets McKinney Mayor Bill Cox and Council Members Justin Beller, Geré Feltus, and Ernest Lynch. The stated purpose of the recall was based on “a loss of public confidence in the ability of the officers named herein to faithfully represent the citizens of the City of McKinney.”

The organizers noted that submitting the signatures does not mean that the city has certified them. Under the McKinney City Charter, the city secretary has 30 days from the date the petition was received to review and validate the signatures.

If the petition qualifies and an official does not resign within the period specified in the charter, the McKinney City Council must order a recall election, according to state law.

Cox, Beller, Feltus, and Lynch did not respond to a request for comment by the time of publication.

Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of “Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words” from Daily Signal senior contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to Victor Davis Hanson’s own YouTube channel to watch past episodes.

Sami Winc: So, Victor, lots on the agenda, but I understand you were at a political event last night with Steve Hilton. I don’t know if you had a few things to say about that first, and then— 

Victor Davis Hanson: Yeah, I was asked. He was in Fresno, and I was asked to introduce him and then have a Q&A with him. 

Well, he’s the best-qualified Republican nominee in the last 20 years. He’s a polymath. He had his own tech company. He ran restaurants in London. He was the political adviser to the British prime minister, David Cameron. He had “The Next Revolution” for seven years as a Fox host, so he’s done it all, and he’s mastered California issues. 

So, I asked him a series of questions on what do you do with high-speed rail? If you cancel it, what do you do with this Stonehenge infrastructure? What do you do with the Left stopping the California water project completion? What do you do with the decrepit … What do you do with California? 

He had a lot of good answers. There were a lot of people there, but it’s going to be very difficult. 

Xavier Becerra‘s attitude is two things. One, we, the Democrats, outnumber the Republicans in registration almost 3-to-1. And the Hispanic vote is 45% of the population. I don’t know how many actually are registered and vote according to that demographic. Maybe not as high turnout as other groups, but they are angry at [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] and they tend to be very left-wing, most of them. And they’re turned off by [President] Donald Trump. 

So, Becerra’s strategy is threefold. I’m going to stay in my basement, and I’m not going to campaign. I think there’s going to be a debate tonight, Friday night. I’m not going to campaign. Stay in my basement. 

No. 2, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump. Trump is at 39%. He’s endorsed Hilton. Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump. 

And three, I don’t want to say a word about the multibillion-dollar fraud in California. I was attorney general at one time when there was a lot of fraud that was starting. I was the head of [the Department of Health and Human Services] when the federal government’s funds were being misused. My chief of staff and [California Gov.] Gavin Newsom’s chief of staff have dipped into campaign funds in an improper way. I don’t want to talk about any of that. 

So, I’m not going to discuss anything about my allegations of corruption or incompetence. I’m not going to debate Steve Hilton’s issues. I’m going to rely on the fact that, as [Los Angeles Mayor] Karen Bass just said, the election is over because he’s a Republican. All people are going to do, she said, is look at the name and, after “D,” check it off. 

And that was a very cynical thing to say. She said that he’s already through. It’s not even close. 

She may be right, but if he loses, and after Spencer Pratt loses, and the billionaire tax passes, there’s going to be a lot more people leaving the state. 

And what’s happening in this state is the population is staying steady because the upper-middle class and the wealthy classes are leaving, but people are coming here because of our rich social welfare cost. And people who have come here, 27% of the California population was not born in the United States, and about 40% either were not born in the United States or their parents were not born in California. 

And they have birth rates much higher than the indigenous population, and they have, on average, greater social welfare needs. And 50% of all California residents are on Medi-Cal, and 40% of all births are on Medi-Cal. 

So, you can see what’s happening. The people who have the higher incomes are leaving because they’re taxed to death. The people who have the lower incomes, and who are recent immigrants or whose parents were, are demanding more social welfare services and think that the original population should pay for it. 

And they’re going to run out of victimizers because they see themselves as victims of a system. I don’t know why a person would come from India or China or Latin America and come here and then have all these grievances against the existing California establishment, but they do. 

And it’s just not going to work. It’s a medieval state with very wealthy people and very poor people. The middle class and the upper-middle class are leaving. 

Winc: All right, so let’s go ahead and turn to the U.N. What did you think of all of that walkout on [Israeli Prime Minister] Bibi Netanyahu and how he handled it? 

Hanson: Well, it was very funny that the Iranian government just slaughtered 30,000 to 40,000 of their own people and continues to kill them. And not as many people walked out when the Iranians spoke as when Netanyahu spoke. 

There were a lot of Europeans who walked out, and he addressed that with Britain and France. It was really amazing. 

You know, he said, “You call us settler colonialism. Our language is unchanged. Our people are unchanged since the third millennium BC.” 

And who are talking? The French, who were the great colonizers of the Middle East, along with the British. We inherited a British colony that had taken over and was not indigenous to the Middle East. 

He had a good point. 

He talked about [New York City Mayor Zohran] Mamdani trying to arrest him. You know, he said, “Why doesn’t he arrest other people?” But he won’t ever touch people from China or Iran. 

Well, it basically was a diatribe, and I don’t mean that in a negative sense, against hypocrisy. 

And [Argentine President Javier] Milei and a lot of this, what was interesting, a lot of people from South America, a lot of presidents with this new conservative wave that Trump gets no credit for. 

But as I said earlier, of the 32 nations in South and Central America and the Caribbean, there were only about seven or eight pro-American democracies, and now there are only, I think, five that are anti-American and socialist-communist. They’re all conservative. 

The Paraguay president, who was newly inaugurated, lambasted the walkout. So did Milei. He gave a great talk. He said that the U.N. was parasitical. 

Something just creepy, just to finish, looking at that delegation and reading about it. You have 170 nations. The majority now are not democratic. They come over to this rich, bustling city. They cannot be prosecuted for any crimes. They’re on budgets, and then they talk about democracy, and they vote usually to condemn the United States, the host, or Israel. 

But they never vote in their own home country. So, they act like they’re defenders of democracy, and then they trot back and their dictator pats them on the head because they walked out during Israel’s or Donald Trump’s talk. 

But I’m getting really tired of it. I think most Americans are. It’s okay just to vent, but we could just take it out of here, and it doesn’t really contribute that much to New York. 

New York’s not going to sink or swim depending on whether the U.N. is there. I think it would be a lot better for it just to move to a neutral location. Why don’t you put it in, I don’t know, the Mariana Islands or Tahiti or something, a neutral place?  

Winc: Or Iceland. 

Hanson: Iceland. 

No, they would never do that. What they want in New York is left-wing media exposure and then nice restaurants and big expense accounts. 

And a lot of them are, I don’t know how to use proper language, pretty degenerate people, so they indulge in drugs, alcohol, sex, and it’s all legal. I mean, you can’t prosecute them. 

They all get parking … That famous picture they have of all of their cars with hundreds of parking tickets on them. They’re just immune. 

And they’re mostly from the Third World, so they hate the United States.  

Winc: It’s all hush-hush.  

Hanson: It’s just a circus. 

Netanyahu was really good, and he addressed all the charges. I would have reminded him that genocide is impossible. They say he commits genocide against the Arab people, and the Arab people inside Israel are now 20% of the population. When Israel was formed, they were, I think, 12%. 

You don’t have genocide. Hitler, if you say Hitler committed genocide, he did. What if you said Hitler committed genocide, but the Jewish population doubled in the Third Reich? You see what I mean? He wiped out Jews. 

Tucker Carlson had a big rant about all this, and he went on Israeli TV and said that Israel was not a democracy because certain people don’t vote. 

And I wanted to say to him, “Who doesn’t vote?” 

In Israel, every citizen, Arab, Christian, or otherwise, over 18 can vote. 

Do people in the West Bank and Gaza vote? No, they’re not citizens. 

Do they vote for the Palestinian Authority? Yes. That has semi-autonomy. 

And do they vote in Gaza? They did one time. One time they voted for Hamas. 

But, Tucker, there are about 30 million illegal aliens in the United States, and they’re here, some of them for a long time. Are you saying we’re not a democracy because they don’t vote? They’re not citizens. 

We have a greater percentage of the population inside our borders that are not citizens, about 16%, 17%, or 15%, than does Israel. 

But he counts the West Bank and Gaza as Israeli citizens who are denied the right to vote. That’s absurd. 

And the more and more he talks, it’s really strange because it’s almost … I was listening to a rant, and it’s all conspiracy theories. 

And it’s basically the more he says he doesn’t do anything, the more that’s an indication that he has said or done that. 

That’s what’s strange. 

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Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., called for the release of an Islamic militia leader convicted of having led, operated, and participated in actions that resulted in the deaths of Israelis in the early 2000s.

Khanna acknowledged Marwan Barghouti’s criminal conviction but still justified his remarks by stating that the militia leader is also a Palestinian politician who is well respected among Palestinian factions.

“Releasing Barghouti does not provide him with a pardon or moral absolution of crimes he may have committed,” Khanna said in a video he posted on X over the weekend.

“So long as occupation continues, the intifada will not stop,” Barghouti said as he entered an Israeli court in 2004. “As long as Palestinian mothers are weeping, Israeli mothers will also weep.”

Barghouti is serving five life sentences after having been convicted in 2004 of complicity, one count of attempted murder, and one count of membership in a terrorist group involved in a spree of attacks that claimed the lives of a Greek Orthodox monk in the West Bank in 2001, one Israeli at the Jewish settlement of Givat Zeev in 2002, and three people at a Tel Aviv seafood restaurant.

“The release is needed to move peace forward,” Khanna continued.

In his video statement, Khanna then compared the convicted Islamic terrorist to leaders of the Irish Republican Army, who wanted peace and coexistence despite having carried out “terrible things.”

“Letting them participate in politics was the right decision,” he continued. “For now, we must begin to give Palestinians a voice in their sovereignty and their peace process.”

“Release Barghouti,” Khanna concluded.

In his video statement, Khanna did not mention that Palestinians in Gaza have been under the elected leadership of Hamas since the Palestinian Legislative Council election in January 2006. The Palestinian Authority, of which Barghouti was a member, has been democratically elected to govern the West Bank since its establishment in 1994.

Dave Rubin, a Jewish conservative commentator and host of “The Rubin Report,” slammed Khanna’s video statement online.

“I’m calling for free membership to your kids’ golf clubs that you use as a tax shelter!” Rubin wrote on X, citing Khanna’s latest annual disclosure, which highlights his three trust stakes in three private Ohio golf courses owned by his kids.

As the 81st session of the United Nations Assembly concludes, President Donald Trump has departed after keeping the pressure on the U.N. to reform.

Trump lambasted the U.N. for “criticizing the United States for protecting our children from transgender mutilization and transgender insanity.” The president observed that U.N. agencies seem to have “little to say about the persecution of Christians” while they routinely heap scorn on Israel. Additionally, he said that they want “America to open our borders to gangs and criminals from the world’s most dangerous places.”

Since the president returned to the Oval Office, he has put the U.N. on notice: End your nonsense or face deep U.S. funding cuts. It hasn’t, and cuts have followed.

To date, his administration says it has saved the American people over $1 billion by making cuts to the bloated U.N. bureaucracy with a 15% cut in its regular budget ($570 million) and another 12% cut to its endless peacekeeping operations ($549 million). This reportedly includes cuts to 4,000 jobs.

Over the years, international organizations in general have expanded their remits. The U.N. in particular has forgotten its original mission, which its charter identifies as consisting of preserving peace and security, encouraging nations to cooperate to solve problems, and protecting human rights and freedoms.

Not only has this drifting unsustainably inflated budgets, but these noncore initiatives have given international progressives well-financed global platforms to push their radical abortion, gender, equity, climate, antisemitic, and anti-American agendas.

The U.N.’s secretary-general’s own reform task force has criticized the U.N. system’s growth—a system that in 2024 conducted 27,000 meetings involving 240 bodies and produced 1,100 reports, a 20% increase since 1990, according to Reuters. The secretary-general admitted that “many of these reports are not widely read.”

Earlier this year, Trump withdrew the United States from a slew of international organizations, including 31 U.N. entities, that worked contrary to American interests and values.

This month, the U.S. Department of State paid the U.N. $800 million to cover its 2025 membership dues and finance the cost of peacekeeping operations in Haiti—to prevent illegal migration to America—and in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where the deadly Ebola virus outbreak in zones of conflict must remain contained. Earlier, the department disbursed nearly $4 billion to the U.N.’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs and $300 million to the U.N.’s Children’s Fund.

The U.N. says that the United States still owes it over $4 billion in unpaid obligations. But has the United Nations made the reforms demanded by President Trump? Has it ceased to engage in radical activities that promote abortion, gender ideology, job-killing climate agendas, anti-Americanism, and antisemitism? Frankly, no.

The U.N.’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs and UNICEF have been at the forefront of advancing the global Left’s radical agenda. They are thumbing their noses at U.S. taxpayers by publicly rejecting Trump’s executive orders prohibiting U.S. foreign aid from supporting radicalism. Each organization has been aggressively accusing Israel of committing war crimes in Gaza, transmitting reports containing claims from Hamas terrorists.

Recently, the U.N. Human Rights Office, of which the U.S. is not a member, claimed that there are “reasonable grounds to believe that the United States committed war crimes” against Iran. The basis for the accusation is UNICEF reports secured from Iranian authorities.

Another example of continued U.N. disrespect for its largest donor is its audacious interference in our domestic political process.

The head of the U.N. refugee agency, Barham Salih, rejected the Trump administration’s candidate for the deputy high commissioner in favor of a left-wing career diplomat. In 2025, the U.S. contributed over $800 million to the agency, financing one-quarter of its budget. Salih—a former Iraqi deputy prime minister and recipient of $33 million of U.S. taxpayer money for the university he founded—is a socialist (I was his former U.S. Embassy Baghdad advisor).

Trump has repeatedly called on U.N. agencies to get back to their core mission of promoting peace and international cooperation. He has also called on these agencies to end their radical practices, but they refuse to do so.

American taxpayers have no obligation to fund the salaries and activities of foreign radicals. Until the reforms that Trump has laid out are made, the administration ought not to cut any further checks to these U.N. agencies.

Human Rights Campaign President Kelley Robinson Saturday compared Immigration and Customs Enforcement patrols to lynch mobs and likened current political battles over LGBTQ+ issues to the civil rights movement.

Human Rights Campaign, the nation’s largest LGBTQ+ activist group, has sharply criticized President Donald Trump’s policies on transgender issues, including restrictions on military service for people diagnosed with gender dysphoria and opposition to transgender medical procedures on minors.

“This is a dark time in America,” Robinson said at the Human Rights Campaign annual dinner in Washington, D.C. “They say that history doesn’t repeat, but it often rhymes, that the ghosts of our unsettled sins continue to haunt us.”

“The story of Nolan Wells echoes the story of Emmett Till,” she said. Wells, an 18-year-old, mysteriously died in Georgia this summer, while the 14-year-old Till’s 1955 murder became a rallying point for the civil rights movement. “The ICE patrols look a little too similar to lynch mobs. The purging of the voter rolls looks just like poll taxes, and the attacks on our trans children, they are just as haunting.”

Robinson repeatedly framed current conflicts over transgender policies as a continuation of historic civil rights struggles, arguing that government actions targeting transgender identities echoed forms of discrimination previously directed at black Americans.

Trump administration policies recognize sex as male or female, and not based on gender identity, along with restrictions on transgender medical interventions for minors. Administration officials have argued that their policies protect women’s access to sex-segregated spaces and prevent children from undergoing medical interventions that have little-to-no evidence-based benefit.

Robinson quoted the transgender activist Miss Major Griffin-Gracy, who said, “They keep continually trying to eradicate us.”

“That quote could have been from 1969 but it wasn’t—it was from present day,” the Human Rights Campaign president said.

She noted Trump’s policy disqualifying people with gender dysphoria from military service and laws penalizing controversial transgender medical interventions on minors.

“We are fighting for our rights with the full weight and force of the United States government working against us,” Robinson said.

The Human Rights Campaign dinner also featured Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, a Democrat, who condemned the political messaging of “family values” in other states.

She said “too many states” are “defunding their local public schools, poisoning air and water, making everyday life a lot more expensive, and they want to blame their problems on people different from them, in hope that we are all desperate or hopeless enough to fall for it.”

“That’s what all this ‘family values’ stuff is really about,” the governor argued. “We all saw recently that states like Alabama, Utah, and Arkansas renamed June to ‘Fidelity Month’ and ‘Nuclear Family Month.’ It’s pathetic.”

She said the “biggest threat to American families” comes not from the LGBTQ+ activist movement but from Trump administration policies.

The dinner came as Human Rights Campaign and other LGBTQ activist groups have repeatedly clashed with the Trump administration over transgender policies involving military service, sports participation, school policies, and medical interventions for minors.

The Daily Signal is a leader in conservative media with a mission to present the truth and defend traditional American values. Right now, it is looking to equip the next generation of journalists as part of its spring 2027 internship program.
               
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The spring internship application deadline for the Daily Signal is Oct. 4. The program runs from Jan. 11 to April 9, 2027, with full-time or part-time positions available.

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The Young Leaders Program typically has around 60 interns per semester, and up to four Daily Signal interns work alongside full-time staff each day.

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Supporters of women’s sports and sex-based protections have reason to celebrate. The Department of Education announced Sept. 28 that it is formally rescinding the Biden administration’s 2024 Title IX rule and reinstating the 2020 Title IX regulations promulgated under the first Trump administration.

Ongoing litigation has prevented the Trump administration from being able to formally rescind the illegal 2024 Biden regulations from the Code of Federal Regulations, even though the Education Department has been following the 2020 Trump-era Title IX regulations since January of last year.

In April 2024, the Biden administration issued final regulations rewriting the more than 50-year-old civil rights law, Title IX, to include sexual orientation and gender identity. Essentially, it allowed boys who claim to identify as girls to participate in girls and women’s sports at schools that receive federal funding.

Women’s sports advocate and former collegiate swimmer Riley Gaines said at the time, “Fifty-two years of progress and sex-based protections have been erased with the stroke of a pen.” She was right. Thankfully, many states agreed, and seven circuit courts temporarily blocked the Title IX rewrite, preventing it from taking effect in 26 states.

Several state superintendents and education commissioners in Louisiana, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and Florida also pushed back. Louisiana State Superintendent Cade Brumley stated that the Biden administration’s changes “recklessly endanger students and seek to dismantle opportunities for females.” State education leaders argued that the changes overrode state laws, compromised safety, and constituted federal overreach.

As legal challenges mounted, the Biden administration announced in December 2024 that it would withdraw the rule, citing the pending court cases and comments received during the public comment period, just weeks before President Donald Trump began his second term.

Not long after, in January 2025, a chief judge for the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Kentucky struck down and vacated the Biden regulations nationwide, ruling that they were unlawful and that the Department of Education exceeded its authority. This action left the Trump-era Title IX framework in place.

Shortly after taking office, Trump issued an executive order, “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government,” that defined sex as an immutable biological classification rather than a concept based on sexual orientation or gender identity.

Earlier this year, the Department of Education also rescinded agreements with six school districts made under previous administrations regarding gender identity policies. Citing the January 2025 court ruling and the executive order, the department concluded that “Title IX is based on sex, and the schools did not violate the law.”

Today’s action concludes a yearslong legal and political battle over the meaning of Title IX. For supporters of sex-based protections, it represents the restoration of the law’s original purpose: ensuring equal educational opportunities for women and girls.

Advocates for child protection must still work from state to state, however. As our Heritage Foundation colleague Laura Hanford explains, child-welfare workers are classifying parents as “abusive” if they treat a child according to his or her sex instead of self-proclaimed “gender.” Social science research has found that affirming a child who claims to have been born in the wrong body does not resolve mental health issues underlying a child’s sexual confusion. Adults who do not caution a child confused about his or her sex could be neglecting that child—and failing to address the true reasons for the child’s distress. Conditions such as anxiety and depression can go untreated or worsen when adults focus on advocating “gender affirmation.”

So-called gender advocates claim that children will become suicidal if adults do not affirm their children. Yet no scientific evidence supports this claim, as even the ACLU acknowledged before the Supreme Court. And contrary to activist statements, new findings from the research and advocacy organization Do No Harm show that laws banning “gender-affirming care” do not increase suicide rates.

Nevertheless, Hanford explains that some courts are removing children from their homes even when there is no evidence of actual abuse. Social workers in the foster care system, meanwhile, are affirming children’s confusion about their sex.

The Department of Education’s rule change should bolster families and state officials protecting children from making irreversible medical decisions they may come to regret. In the states, policymakers must remain vigilant.

Heritage Action President Kevin Roberts landed massive praise from President Donald Trump on Monday morning for his comments on potentially faulty midterm predictions.

The president’s Truth Social post comes after Roberts made remarks on Fox Business Monday morning, in which he dismissed political analyst Charlie Cook’s prediction that the Democrat majority in the 120th Congress is inevitable.

“Kevin Roberts, Heritage Foundation & Heritage Action President, and also, a fabulous guy, was fantastic on Fox News this morning,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “The topic was Fake Polls and how well the Republicans are going to do in the upcoming Midterms.”

During his appearance, Roberts drew from his own longtime experience in Washington politics to state that the “chattering class in Washington has been wrong” about future election outcomes.

Roberts later pointed to the Senate map, adding that not only does the Republican Party have a chance to retain current seats, but also a chance to win back seats in “places you wouldn’t expect.”

Roberts pointed to New Hampshire, Michigan, and Minnesota. He later called this prognostic a “psy-op” from polling firms that are looking to “depress conservative turnout.”

“I think it’s really important that we understand that the Senate is not going to flip. James Talarico, who believes in six genders, is not going to win a majority of the vote in Texas,” Roberts continued.

Talarico’s campaign did not respond to the Daily Signal’s immediate request for comment.

Roberts continued his remarks, adding that the reason he is “optimistic” about a potential conservative victory in November is that he looks “at this race by race, and I see the contrast between the left and the right,” and believes that there is ample time in vulnerable districts to get the conservative message directly to voters.

“We have a few weeks before early voting starts, and in the majority of states that have early voting, that’s time for both the message and also the money on the conservative side to bring home what is going to be an anomaly,” Roberts added.

The message that conservatives should deliver to voters in the weeks leading up to election day includes the historic wins on border security and the Working Family Tax Cuts, known as the “One Big, Beautiful Bill,” which removed over 1 million illegal aliens from federal welfare programs.

“Today, I just want to speak to the American voter and say the contrast between what conservatives have done and what the Left has done in places like New York City and blue states, where there is an increase in crime, an increase in spending, is so clear,” Roberts continued.

In his post, the president also reaffirmed his commitment to helping Republicans retain the majority this November.

“I’ll be out there spending money and helping every one of them get elected. I won most of these places, often by a landslide,” Trump continued. “MAGA, pretend I am on the ballot. Don’t let them open your Borders and allow crime to again flourish. KEEP AMERICA GREAT!!!”

Roberts later thanked the president for his remarks in an X post, adding that under Trump’s leadership, he is optimistic about a potential conservative majority in the next Congress.

“Thank you, Mr. President. The historic victories of this Congress were made possible by your leadership and refusal to settle for American decline,” Roberts wrote. “I’m optimistic the American people will recognize those achievements and keep conservative majorities in power to continue putting America first.”

In its latest move to protect women’s sports, the Department of Education formally rescinded the Biden administration’s 2024 Title IX rule.

“We’re just acknowledging that boys and men are in boys and men’s sports and girls are in theirs,” Secretary of Education Linda McMahon told OutKick.

The Biden administration’s rewrite of Title IX redefined sex to include gender identity and sexual orientation, allowing men in girls’ and women’s restrooms, locker rooms, housing accommodations, and educational programs. It also opened the door for men to play on girls’ and women’s sports teams and endangered educational institutions that receive federal funding but wish to protect women’s spaces.

Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex in any education program or activity receiving federal financial assistance.

Courts had already invalidated the Biden-era regulations, which were enjoined by eight different courts and later vacated by two separate courts. 

The Education Department announced at the beginning of the second Trump administration that it would enforce the first Trump administration’s Title IX regulations.

McMahon said Monday’s step “gives clarification to students, teachers, schools, parents.”

“Everyone now knows what the rule is and how everyone is going to abide by it,” she said.

The secretary said the landmark women’s sports regulation now reflects court orders and congressional intent, reducing parental confusion.

“We will continue to relentlessly champion equal opportunity for all Americans and hold accountable any school or college that violates the rights, privacy, or athletic opportunities of our women and girls,” she said in a news release.

Heritage Foundation education expert Jonathan Butcher said the move will give confidence to state and local policymakers who are trying to protect children.

“Public officials in some areas are still trying to cut parents out of their child’s life over ‘gender’ issues,” he told the Daily Signal. “But this is dangerous because gender interventions are harmful and do not address underlying mental health issues.”

“State and local policymakers will need to continue to watch for attempts to divide families over the issue and threaten the health—mental and physical—of young children,” he added.

Decorated historian, Hillsdale college professor and Daily Signal senior fellow Victor Davis Hanson explained the reasoning behind his New York Times bestseller “The Counter-Revolution” during Heritage Action’s Sentinel Summit in Orlando on Saturday.

As Hanson stated in both his video appearance at the summit and in his book, the Left’s challenge is to create a government and a society that fit its desires, which has prompted President Donald Trump to fuel a movement to maintain America’s traditional way of life and to act against longtime liberal institutions such as universities and legacy media.

“The United States is moving in a direction that nobody would’ve recognized, especially by our founders,” Hanson said. “Donald Trump is trying to undo this progressive project that had captured the institutions and was kind of oblivious to whether the Democratic Party actually won or not. They were able to retain power and influence without it.”

As a result, the senior fellow added, the liberal hijacking of America’s institutions and society created bias in the media, corporate boardrooms, entertainment, K-12 education, and universities.

At that point, Hanson added, those institutions created the “idea that you had to have a bachelor’s degree, or you had to go to a university, to work at the DMV, or to work at HHS, or to work at the planning commission.”

“In other words, you could be a lifelong master electrician, and when you were retiring, you couldn’t get a job, let’s say, as a building inspector, unless you were certified by a university,” he continued. “So, we created this vast 3 million-member federal workforce, and probably 10 to 20 million state and local workers.”

That liberal takeover, Hanson said, created a society that has embraced multiple genders, biological men in women’s sports, mass border crossings, and lesser criminal penalties for those who stole $950 in merchandise and not $951.

That society, Hanson said, is what led people like Trump to feel like they had to tackle the issues created by this liberal takeover.

“All of these things that have constituted a revolution,” he continued. “This kind of revolution that Trump is waging is saying, it doesn’t do any good to complain about the media if you don’t defund PBS and NPR and USAID and all of these things.”

“It doesn’t do any good to complain about the border unless you build a wall, you deport people, you stop catching release, and you eliminate the refugee status you get after you get here,” he continued.

Welcome to the ninth in our series “Landmark Speeches in American History.” We are celebrating America’s 250th anniversary with articles by prominent authors about how some of the greatest speeches in our history—by celebrated orators like Ronald Reagan, Abraham Lincoln, and Martin Luther King Jr.—honored the vision of our founding document, the Declaration of Independence.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s June 8, 1978, commencement address at Harvard University, provocative and controversial at the time, is still an important point of reference for those attempting to come to terms with what the most perspicacious political thinkers of the 20th century called “the crisis of the West” or “the moral crisis of our time.”

To be sure, many in the then-contemporary intellectual clerisy responded with dismay and even indignation to Solzhenitsyn’s deeply thoughtful and challenging remarks. Like Alexis de Tocqueville before him, Solzhenitsyn spoke as a self-described “friend,” not as an “adversary,” of American democracy. But that did not seem to matter to his “cultured despisers” and to many of his erstwhile admirers who preferred he speak negatively only about communism and not the West or America.

To read the full speech, click here.

His more heated academic and journalistic critics could only hear in his calm and reflective remarks a bitter “Jeremiad,” a screed by a “fanatic” who was incorrigibly “Orthodox,” and who wished to replace liberty and the rule of law of the American type with an alien authoritarianism tinged with “theocratic” reaction. However, there was nothing in Solzhenitsyn’s carefully calibrated speech to give support to such unhinged judgments.

Writing three years later in the pages of Foreign Affairs magazine, Solzhenitsyn remarked that he had been under the mistaken impression that Americans welcomed criticism, but now he understood that our elites only welcomed it from the Left. “Total,” unrelenting, even nihilistic, criticism of Western civilization by leftist ideologues was welcome, but “partial,” yet sympathetic, criticism of the kind proffered by Solzhenitsyn was verboten.

Later, however, Solzhenitsyn would observe in his memoir “Between Two Millstones” that after the initial round of uncomprehending indictments of the “Harvard Address,” he began to hear from those who belonged to another, more solid, traditional America. This less elite-driven America “was small-town and robust, the heartland, the America I envisioned as I was writing my speech, and to which my speech was addressed.” The receptive welcome of these patriotic and religious-minded Americans gave the great Russian writer and Nobel laureate “a glimmer of hope” that he could connect with the part of the country that had not yet succumbed to the progressivist Zeitgeist.

In the “Harvard Address,” Solzhenitsyn defends liberty under God and the law while taking aim at soulless legalism and facile moral relativism. Instead of recommending authoritarian coercion of any kind, Solzhenitsyn endorsed “freely accepted and serene self-limitation” as the wisest and most prudent course of action for both individuals and societies.

Prudence and self-limitation were not the only moral qualities about which Solzhenitsyn reminded Americans.

In the address, he noted a marked “decline in courage” in Western societies and linked this decline to an inordinate concern for “material well-being” and “gorg(ing) on everyday life” that had come to characterize life in the late modern world. Materialism, however, could not satisfy the deepest needs of the human soul.

To live well, human beings need a salutary appreciation of moral limits, and the exercise of “voluntary self-limitation,” to rise to levels worthy of human beings created in the image and likeness of God. No free political community worth its salt should grant boundless space to “destructive and irresponsible freedom,” since moral nihilism as much as totalitarian despotism is the deadly enemy of ordered liberty and the integrity of the human soul.

Here one should state the obvious: There is nothing extreme or distinctively “Russian” about these tried-and-true insights (which were once shared by conservatives and classical liberals alike).

Solzhenitsyn in no way repudiated “human rights”—far from it. But in his view they must always be accompanied by a robust sense of our obligations to society and our fellow human beings. Similarly, he made clear that his criticism of excessive legalism in no way entailed a denial of the indispensable role that the rule of law must play in any civilized polity.

As Solzhenitsyn stated in the “Harvard Address” itself, “Having spent all my life under a Communist regime, I will say that a society without any objective legal scale is a terrible one indeed.” Still, a “society grounded in law but never reaching any higher takes but poor advantage of the full range of human potential.”

Is that not indeed the case? Solzhenitsyn’s more fevered critics, however, addicted to “modernity without restraint,” as the political philosopher Eric Voegelin so suggestively called it, could see in classical and Christian wisdom of this sort only an invitation to repression and authoritarianism.

 Solzhenitsyn’s “partial” yet benevolent “critique of the Western system” in no way recommended “socialism as an alternative,” much to the chagrin of his port side critics. Indeed, he saw in socialism “of any style and hue” a recipe for the “comprehensive destruction of the spiritual essence of man” and “the leveling of mankind unto death.”

Nor would his criticisms of the antiwar movement for its blindness about the massive tyranny and bloodshed that would descend upon the Vietnamese and Cambodian people after 1975 win him any admirers among those blind to the lethal character of communism. Criticism of this sort, rooted in deep-seated familiarity with the criminal character of communism, was unwelcome to those with ideological blinders.

Not surprisingly, the deepest philosophical levels of the “Harvard Address” were ignored by most critics.

Solzhenitsyn makes clear in the “Harvard Address” that he is indeed a humanist, but not of the modern atheistic variant. He writes quite discreetly about religion in the 1978 address, referring to God as a “Superior Spirit” and as something “Supreme” and “Whole,” no doubt to avoid sectarianism or any appearance of special religious pleading. But Solzhenitsyn took pointed aim at the Enlightenment’s tendency to culminate in “rationalistic humanism or humanistic autonomy: the proclaimed and practiced autonomy of man from any higher force above him.”

Here is where the fundamental issue is joined. Human beings lose their ballast, their moral and spiritual core, when they succumb to “anthropocentricity,” to the illusion that Man is “the center of existence.” The necessary balance between spiritual and material goods is rapidly lost, and the existence of “intrinsic evil” in human beings is denied, with the devastating consequences that Solzhenitsyn chronicled in “The Gulag Archipelago.”

Freedom is debased when it is shorn of the noble, elevating, and altogether true recognition that “all individual rights were” initially granted “under the assumption that man is God’s creature.” At Harvard, Solzhenitsyn praises the American Founders for still appreciating this profound truth.

In contrast, the ideologues who reduce liberty to “pure autonomy” have promoted a “final emancipation” from “the moral heritage of Christian centuries, with their great reserves of mercy and sacrifice.” As a result, state systems have thus become “ever more consummately materialistic,” and the assertion of the “rights of man” has grown beyond measure as “man’s sense of accountability to God and society has grown utterly faint.” Thus, “[a]ll the celebrated technological achievements of our fabled Progress” “cannot redeem the 20th century’s moral poverty, which no one could have imagined as recently as the nineteenth century.”

This is the wisdom of Edmund Burke, Tocqueville, and Fyodor Dostoevsky, and of the most profound anti-totalitarian thought of the 20th century. Why should we perceive this wisdom as “un-American” when it is in line with the most profound insights of our larger Western inheritance?

Nearly 50 years after Solzhenitsyn’s remarkably prescient and prophetic address, it is past time to take heed of his firm—but friendly—warnings.

This is even more important as we witness the rise in public sympathy for seemingly discredited forms of radical socialism, and even communism, with the obligatory admixture of “post-colonialism” and anti-Zionism thrown into the mix.

In the concluding sections of the “Harvard Address,” Solzhenitsyn showed just how vulnerable liberal humanism shorn of classical and Christian content was to cooptation by more consistent and radical currents of modern thought.

Modern progressives habitually see no enemies to the left. In the address, Solzhenitsyn traces how moderate liberalism soon gave way to radicalism, radicalism to socialism, and socialism found itself powerless before communism’s more radical and insistent appeals to atheism, materialism, and the call for the revolutionary transformation of human nature and society. As a result, progressive intellectuals almost always “feel the kinship” with radical and revolutionary movements well to their left, however tyrannical and unsavory. Solzhenitsyn’s analysis of this phenomenon remains as compelling as when he first advanced it in 1978.

In the peroration of his address, Solzhenitsyn did not call for a return to a past which had problems all its own. Instead, he called for a new “spiritual blaze” “where our physical nature will not be cursed, as in the Middle Ages, but even more importantly, our spiritual being will not be trampled upon, as in the Modern Era.”

“No one on earth,” he concluded, “has any other way left but-upward.”

Thus Solzhenitsyn closes his remarkably consequential address with words of wisdom that are at once sobering and hope-filled—and that remain as relevant as the day he first spoke them.

THE WASHINGTON STAND—The United States Armed Forces allows homeschoolers to enlist, but the city of Fremont, Nebraska appears to think they are unfit to join their local fire department. Now, the governor’s office is investigating. 

Andrew Coates, a 22-year-old volunteer firefighter at Fremont Fire Department, hoped to turn his charity work into a full-time job. But his application was denied by the city, who claimed that since his high school diploma is from a homeschooling program, it was not from an accredited high school. When Coates applied in April 2026, there was no rule barring homeschoolers from becoming firefighters. After the closing date of the application, Coates was notified that he had been disqualified—the rules had apparently changed and he was no longer eligible. Last week, Fremont’s Civil Service Commission reviewed an appeal from Coates, before deciding that it didn’t have the authority to overturn the city’s employment policy. 

Nebraska Governor Jim Pillen (R) told The Washington Stand Wednesday that he strongly disagrees with the decision. “Andrew Coates has already proven his commitment to public safety by serving as a volunteer firefighter. Nebraskans who are qualified and eager to serve their communities should not be turned away simply because of their educational background. We should be encouraging young leaders like Coates, not turning them away. My administration will be investigating ways to remedy this situation.” 

For the past two years, Coates served as a volunteer firefighter. He is a state licensed EMT, and is enrolled in college courses, with a 3.8 grade point average. “For the last five months, my family and I have tried repeatedly to resolve this with the city and through the Civil Service Commission,” Coates told TWS. “The Commission eventually found that there was an irregularity in the hiring process, but I still wasn’t restored to the process or given the opportunity to compete for the position.”

Seth Coates, Andrew’s father, told the Omaha World-Herald that he would have never predicted the situation. “We understood that our homeschool operated legally under Nebraska’s Rule 13 and was exempt from the state’s accreditation requirements. What we never imagined was that the City of Fremont would treat the absence of accreditation — an inherent and legally permitted feature of Rule 13 education—as a basis for disqualifying Andrew from public employment.”

Coates shared his surprise about the predicament during a Tuesday appearance on “Washington Watch with Tony Perkins.” “I couldn’t believe it at first. And then when they told me it was because I was homeschooled… I really just couldn’t believe it. … I was just shocked.” 

Coates also confirmed that the chief at the Cedar Bluffs Fire Department where he volunteered appeared before Fremont County to advocate on his behalf. Coates explained that he is not exactly sure what the real reason for his disqualification is. “I don’t know what the intent on that person’s heart was that day, but there seems to be [discrimination] against homeschoolers. … I couldn’t tell you why.” 

Nate Grasz, executive director of Nebraska Family Alliance, told TWS that homeschoolers should not be discriminated against. “Homeschooling is more than just a lawful education option that continues to grow in Nebraska; it is a fundamental right of parents. Families should never be punished by the government for choosing it. Nebraska Family Alliance is pursuing and supporting corrective action to ensure homeschool graduates receive equal opportunity and that the rights of parents and families are protected.”

Former Atlanta Fire Chief Kelvin Cochran, who himself experienced discrimination after he was fired by the city over his Christian views on marriage and sexuality, expressed dismay over Coates’s predicament. “Every community deserves the best possible fire department to protect life and property,” he told TWS. “A candidate should be judged on merit, and no policy should single out educational background that excludes qualified people from that calling.”

Coates explained that he has aspired to be a firefighter for many years. “The inspiration behind it all was from a Fremont firefighter that worked for my father’s business, and he just really encouraged me to kind of seek after the job. So that just kind of stuck with me, what he said.” 

He requested prayer for wisdom, clarity and humility for himself and his family as they further discern next steps in the process of challenging the rule. “Pray…that we would just be seeking God first… as we continue to stand against this.”

Members of the Fremont Civil Service Commission and the mayor of Fremont did not respond to The Washington Stand’s request for comment by press time.

Originally published by The Washington Stand.

More than 125 Virginia pastors have signed an open letter urging voters to reject two proposed constitutional amendments on abortion and marriage. The letter adds a broad coalition of Protestant voices to the growing faith-based opposition ahead of the Nov. 3 election.

“We believe these two amendments must be rejected for the Commonwealth of Virginia because they will harm our state as they are opposed to human flourishing and contrary to the Word of God,” the pastors write.

The signers are from congregations across the commonwealth, from Arlington and Alexandria to Lynchburg, Roanoke, Virginia Beach, and Tazewell. They include Jesse Johnson of Immanuel Bible Church in Springfield, Ryan Helfenbein of Thomas Road Baptist Church in Lynchburg, Brian Autry of Grove Avenue Baptist Church in Henrico, Benjamin Purves of Occoquan Bible Church in Woodbridge, and Courtney McBath of Calvary Alliance of Churches in Norfolk.

Virginia Pastors Unite

A pastor who helped coordinate the letter told the Daily Signal that about 90 churches are currently represented, reaching an estimated 50,000 parishioners across Virginia.

Early voting began Sept. 18. The ballot measures reached voters after winning approval in two consecutive sessions of the Democrat-controlled General Assembly, as Virginia requires for constitutional amendments.

The pastors’ letter follows a high-profile “Catholics Vote No” campaign by Bishop Michael Burbidge of the Diocese of Arlington. He had priests in 70 parishes across Northern Virginia read a letter at Mass opposing the amendments. That effort built on a joint statement he issued in August with Richmond Bishop Barry Knestout.

‘Let Your Baby Live’

Ballot Question 1 would amend Virginia’s constitution to expand abortion access throughout pregnancy and eliminate the need for parental consent. The pastors expressed strong opposition to the amendment and its fatal consequences for the unborn.

“Abortion is the killing of a pre-born child in the womb,” they write. “It is moral distortion to present this violation of the sixth commandment as a moral good or as a fundamental right, and it is deceptive framing to present abortion’s destruction of life as healthcare.”

The letter speaks directly to women facing an unexpected pregnancy: “To the mother considering abortion, we implore you, let your baby live.”

It also rejects the idea of abortion as a parental right. “There is never a parental right to take the life of a child,” the pastors write.

‘What God Has Defined’

Question 2 would strike the constitution’s 2006 definition of marriage as the union of one man and one woman and replace it with language guaranteeing two adults the right to marry regardless of sex.

The pastors argue that marriage “has only one meaning: the uniting of one man and one woman into a single, exclusive union.” They cite Jesus’ words in Matthew 19:6: “What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate.”

“It is likewise true to say what God has defined, let not man seek to redefine,” the letter says.

The pastors also warn that the amendment carries other implications.

“Denying reality only brings a ripple effect of harm to society that is acutely felt by individuals, families, schools, and sports teams,” they write.

‘We Disagree With You for Your Good’

Like the letter from Burbidge to Catholics, the Protestant pastors speak directly to Virginians and implore them to vote against the amendments.

“If you support these amendments, know that we disagree with you for your good, and for the good of Virginia,” they write. “Love will communicate truth and speak for the good of others, and it does not go silent when the need is great.”

The pastors also “repudiate hateful and harassing behavior or attitudes directed toward any individual.” They close by inviting readers to pick up a Bible, read the Gospel of John, and visit one of the signers’ churches on a Sunday.

The pastor who spoke to the Daily Signal said additional signatures are still being added. Any Virginia pastor who affirms the Apostles’ Creed, the Nicene Creed, and the Five Solas of the Protestant Reformation may sign the letter. Organizers review names before posting them, and they encourage pastors to share the letter with their congregations.

Read the full letter at VirginiaPastors.org.

SHIPPINGPORT, Pa.—The last time that I stood on these grounds along the Ohio River in Beaver County was 1976, 19 years after the first commercial nuclear power plant in the United States opened here.

My Perry High School physics teacher, David Burrows, had loaded a handful of us into a van for a field trip to the atomic station and to the coal-fired Bruce Mansfield plant next door.

What Burrows and I both still remember is the climb—20 flights up metal bar-grating stairs to the top of a cavernous industrial cathedral built to house Mansfield’s multistory steam boilers—and the black mountains of coal heaped along the riverbank, waiting to be fed into them.

We were all working-class kids. Our fathers were firefighters, cops, steelworkers, and mechanical engineers. When Burrows took us there, he told us we could be anyone who worked there: a welder, electrician, engineer, chemist, plumber, or programmer.

“That was the point,” he said in a conversation this week. “I wanted you to see your possibilities.”

Today I’m back on the same ground, a few days after Aligned Data Centers officially broke ground on a 2-gigawatt artificial intelligence campus called Project Phoenix, and built on the footprint where part of Bruce Mansfield used to stand.

The name is not subtle, and neither is the transformation. A 660-acre industrial site that once held Pennsylvania’s largest coal-fired power plant, the 2,490-megawatt FirstEnergy behemoth that went dark in 2019, is now being rebuilt as a three-building, $10 billion complex designed to feed the country’s insatiable appetite for AI.

For most of the second half of the 20th century, Shippingport was where America came to figure out how to make electricity at an industrial scale. The Shippingport Atomic Power Station, the world’s first full-scale commercial nuclear plant, went online in 1957 and operated until 1982 as part of Dwight Eisenhower’s Atoms for Peace program, which was designed to pivot the perception of nuclear technology away from military might to civilian development.

Bruce Mansfield came online a decade later. At its peak, it was the largest coal plant in the commonwealth, moving barges of coal up the Ohio and shipping electrons out to the PJM grid that keeps the eastern seaboard lit.

When Mansfield closed in 2019, it left behind exactly what Burrows had walked us through in 1976: 660 acres of riverfront, 6,000 feet of developed waterfront, barge terminals, CSX rail, and the skeletons of buildings sized for a different century.

Frontier Group of Companies bought the site in 2022 and renamed it the Shippingport Industrial Park, betting that the lonely sentinels of an old power plant would be worth more than the plant itself.

It also left behind a borough that had been quietly hollowing out for a generation. Shippingport counted 441 residents in 1950, 235 as recently as 2000, and just 154 today; roughly a third smaller than at the turn of the century and closer to half its mid-century peak.

That is what a decommissioned nuclear plant and a shuttered coal plant look like on a census sheet: fewer paychecks, fewer children in the school, higher property taxes, and fewer lights on at night along the same river that once powered the region.

Recently, Aligned, a Dallas-based operator of hyperscale data centers, announced that Project Phoenix will rise on the Mansfield footprint as a three-facility, 2-gigawatt campus. Just to understand the enormity of it, 2 gigawatts is roughly the output of the coal plant it replaces, now dedicated entirely to running the graphics processors and cooling systems that train and serve modern AI models.

The company projects 3,000 construction jobs, 640 permanent operations careers, and thousands more in the regional supply chain.

Case in point: The local mom-and-pop gas station on the way to the development entrance, at the corner of Green Garden and Frankfort roads, had a brisk flow of construction workers heading into the convenience store.

The data center will not draw its power from the local grid. Rather, a dedicated on-site generation source at the neighboring former Shippingport Power Station is now being rebuilt as a natural gas energy campus. It will feed the servers directly and eventually send surplus electricity back to PJM, Aligned says.

Cooling will run on a closed-loop system that recycles deionized water, giving the campus a water footprint the company compares to that of a standard commercial office building.

Shippingport Mayor John Erickson framed the moment in the language of continuity rather than disruption.

“For decades, Shippingport has been defined by powering the country as the birthplace of commercial nuclear energy,” he said. “Project Phoenix honors that legacy, opening a new chapter by taking a historic site and rebuilding it into a modern engine of innovation.”

Aligned CEO Andrew Schaap called it “a legacy reimagined” in the same statement.

None of this is landing in a neutral country. It is landing in one where the debate over AI has turned political, cultural, and increasingly fearful.

A Quinnipiac University poll released this past March found that 55% of Americans now believe AI will do more harm than good in their daily lives, up 11 points in a single year. Eighty percent said that they were concerned about AI. Seventy percent believed it would cut the number of jobs available to human beings. And the number most relevant to places such as Appalachian Pennsylvania: Sixty-five percent said they would oppose the construction of an AI data center in their own community.

That opposition is not theoretical. In Archbald, in Conshohocken, in Wilkes-Barre, in Hampden Township outside Harrisburg, Pennsylvanians have packed municipal meeting rooms to fight data center proposals over noise, water, air quality, property values, and the fear that their power bills will subsidize somebody else’s chatbot.

A statewide Quinnipiac survey found 68% of Pennsylvanians would oppose a data center in their community, including 81% of Democrats, 67% of independents, and, notably, 53% of Republicans. This is one of the few things that polls the same way across the aisle right now.

And yet Shippingport, a borough of 154 people that has watched its tax base evaporate twice in one lifetime, is not Archbald. The mayor is on the podium. The building trades are counting jobs. The county is counting revenue. When your town has already lost the nuclear plant and the coal plant, a 2-gigawatt anything looks less like an imposition and more like a lifeline.

Both of those reactions are real. And people—actual complicated people and not the caricatures that the loudest voices on either side reduce them to—are perfectly capable of holding both views at once.

A pipefitter can be grateful for six years of union work on the Mansfield site and still worry, on the drive home, about what happens to his nephew’s first job if the models keep getting better.

A grandmother in Shippingport can welcome the tax revenue that keeps her borough solvent and still ask hard questions about the hum of a gas turbine three blocks from her kitchen window. No subject this big can be flattened into a slogan.

This one demands nuance, and nuance is precisely what our political vocabulary has spent two decades unlearning how to speak.

That is the harder story sitting on top of the groundbreaking. The infrastructure being poured here is going to arrive faster than the political infrastructure meant to govern it.

Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, a Democrat, has responded with a voluntary GRID framework and a Ratepayer Protection Pledge. State Sen. Katie Muth has introduced a three-year moratorium on hyperscale builds. PJM is trying to figure out in real time how to keep the grid stable while data center load doubles.

Municipalities—most of them running on part-time councils and volunteer solicitors—are being asked to referee zoning fights with multibillion-dollar counterparties whose lawyers know the ordinances better than the councils do.

Our political structure is atrophied for exactly this kind of work. It is built for two speeds: campaign season and gridlock. And for two settings: for and against.

It is not built for a decadelong negotiation between a small borough and a hyperscaler over water, noise, transmission lines, tax abatements, workforce agreements, and what “community benefit” actually means when the community is 154 people.

It is not built for a citizenry that is, correctly, both hopeful and skeptical at the same time.

Three generations of American energy history have now been staged on this same stretch of riverbank: atoms in the 1950s, coal from the 1970s through the 2010s, and now gas turbines feeding silicon in the 2020s.

Each time, the same argument was made that this was the future, that the jobs would come, that the river and the rail and the workforce were what made it possible. Each time, the argument was partly right and partly wrong, and the town lived with both.

Burrows walked us up those 20 flights of stairs in 1976 to make a point about scale. He encouraged us to go into the trades. He encouraged us to go into the sciences. He pushed us to imagine the possibilities. Whatever gets built here next will be measured in a different unit. But the climb, if there still is one, will start from the same ground, and it will demand more of us, not less, than the politics we currently have.

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