Judge Blocks Trump’s Second Birthright Order: Who Is Not Protected?

By The Editors

Written by The Editors

Estimated Reading Time: 2 minutes

A federal judge blocked President Trump’s new executive orders restricting birthright citizenship, the administration’s second defeat on the same question in three months.

The Supreme Court settled the constitutional question in June. The White House rewrote its order to try again, and a court has now told it the answer has not changed.

What the judge did

  • Judge Deborah Boardman issued a preliminary injunction on September 2, blocking enforcement of the new orders against a certified class of children born on US soil to parents who are here unlawfully or on temporary visas.
  • She grounded it in precedent, not preference. “The Supreme Court has spoken: Children in the certified class are ‘citizens at birth,’” Boardman wrote, calling the new order “almost certainly unconstitutional as applied to the certified class.”
  • The class is specific. The certified group covers children born on US soil on or after February 19, 2025, to parents here unlawfully or on temporary visas, excluding American Samoa, in the case captioned CASA v. Trump.

This is the sequel, and it landed the same way. The court had already blocked the first order; it has now blocked the rewrite.

The backstory

The Supreme Court decided this on the merits in June. In Trump v. Barbara, decided June 30, the justices held that children born in the United States to unlawfully present or temporary-visa parents are “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” and are citizens at birth, striking down Trump’s original January 2025 order.

The August rewrite tried to find daylight. The two orders signed August 6 targeted narrower categories: “birth tourism,” people entering on a visa specifically to give birth, children of foreign-government staff with diplomatic immunity, and children of designated terrorists and cartel members.

What they’re saying

  • The Justice Department says the new orders fit the exceptions. It argued the August orders comply with Barbara because they reach only the narrow categories the Fourteenth Amendment was never understood to cover, and that the suit was premature.
  • Boardman was unmoved. She wrote that the court “must, once again, preliminarily enjoin enforcement of the President’s most recent attempt to strip the right to citizenship from them.”

The argument

There is a serious originalist case, and it lost in June. Reasonable people read “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” to exclude the children of those with no lawful tie to the country, and birth tourism is a real abuse worth ending. That argument had its day at the Supreme Court and did not prevail.

The rule of law cuts both ways. Conservatives who cheer when courts hold the line against executive overreach cannot ask those same courts to ignore a Supreme Court ruling because, this time, it is our President testing the limits. A precedent is binding whether or not it went your way, and the honest path to changing birthright citizenship now runs through a constitutional amendment, not a second executive order.

Worth watching

An appeal is the likely next step, and the administration has defended the orders as lawful, though it has not said it will file. The bigger fight is over how much a June ruling actually forecloses. The White House is betting the Court left room for narrow exceptions. Two courts have now said it did not, and the third answer will come from the same nine justices who already gave the first one.

-The Editors

Politics · Upstream of the Swamp · September 3, 2026

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Tucson Invaded by Jerks, Oafs, Galoots and Slobs

By Letters To The Editor

Written by Letters To The Editor

Estimated Reading Time: 2 minutes

Tucson has been invaded by jerks, oafs, galoots and slobs—or JOGS for short.

They’ve come from their hometown of Los Angeles and are trying to make Tucson look as shabby and misgoverned as the City of Angels.

How are they doing that?  For the last month, they’ve been planting the following garish signs along roadways throughout the metropolis, especially on the corners and medians of busy intersections, where they are a distraction to drivers in a city that is a leader in pedestrians being run over.

At just one intersection near my house in the Foothills, they planted multiple signs on four separate days.  If a community association or the county removed them, the JOGS would quickly replace them.

At that rate, there are probably hundreds, if not thousands, of signs planted around the metro area.

Can this be cheaper and more effective than being civic-minded and advertising the right way—that is, via newspaper ads, postal mailings, radio and TV commercials, and targeted internet ads?  It must be, because many shady businesses advertise this way in Tucson.

Not only is this tacky and in violation of sign ordinances, but it’s grossly unfair to legitimate businesses that advertise the right way.  It’s certainly unfair to a jewelry store that spends thousands of dollars to install an attractive, conforming sign constructed of stone and brass in front of the store, surrounded by nice landscaping.

The city and county are essentially penalizing businesses that comply with ordinances and are good neighbors.  How perverse is that?

Meanwhile, the JOGS seem to violate ordinances with impunity.  Or maybe they have the implicit blessing of local government, given how local leaders seem to believe that carpetbaggers from L.A. will make Tucson prosperous.  Actually, what would make Tucson prosperous is improving its appearance and upkeep so that high-paying corporations will find the place attractive enough and well-governed enough to move here.

It speaks volumes that the JOGS brazenly plant the signs in the middle of the day and not in the dark of night.  For instance, while waiting for a traffic light at the intersection of Sabino Canyon and Tanque Verde, I saw one of the JOGS drilling holes on the shoulder with a battery-powered drill.  The holes were for the planting of one of the signs.

I was tempted to lower my passenger window and suggest another place where he could stick the sign.  But discretion and a moment of delusion stopped me from doing so.

My momentary delusion was thinking that the city and county would tell the JOGS to remove the signs ASAP or be fined for violating sign ordinances.

Then I remembered that the goal of the city and county is to be like Los Angeles.

-Letter from TPP Audience 

This is being written anonymously because there is no telling what other laws the JOGS are willing to break.

 

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Western Civilization and Islamic Doctrine Are Mutually Exclusive

By Catherine Salgado

Written by Catherine Salgado

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes

The question of whether Muslims can assimilate into Western civilization is a hot topic right now, partly because there have been numerous violent attacks and election upsets across Western nations involving Muslims and partly because of ongoing international conflicts. The historical precedent is not promising, given that every country with a large influx of Muslims always becomes a sharia dictatorship. But instead of talking about the end result, let us discuss the origin and root issue.

Islamic sacred texts explicitly endorse numerous evils, including jihad, sex slavery, pedophilia, rape, honor killings, domestic abuse, antisemitic genocide, religious persecution, polygamy, torture, and theocratic dictatorship. It is a religion that takes all the lowest passions and worst sins of mankind and glorifies them, painting sins as virtues.

Muhammad himself, supposedly the pinnacle of perfection in Islam, was a vicious, murderous, sexually deviant warlord. Ex-Muslim and author Dan Burmawi summed up some of the key facts (warning: disturbing details): “I found that he married a child, he took Safiyya, a Jewish woman, the same day he killed her father, her brother, and her husband, trading his companion Dihya seven other captives for her, and posting a guard by the tent in case she tried to avenge them while raping her. He had the men of the Jewish tribe beheaded, down to boys checked for pubic hair. He raided trade caravans and took other tribes’ treasures.”

Muhammad married a six-year-old. “He lied and broke truces he asked for. He slept with all of his 9 wives the same night. He killed anyone who mocked him. He recruited raiders with the promise of other cities’ women. And when his own fighters hesitated to touch married captives, because their husbands were alive and watching, Muhammad told them it was fine because allah said so… He even married his adopted son’s wife by divine decree,” Burmawi added. That last statement emphasizes the fact that Muhammad claimed every crime and perversion he committed was holy and completely approved by his demon-god.

Why does this matter for us? Because every Muslim has to believe that Muhammad was the holiest of all prophets. Even Muslims who claim to reject Jihad have to weed out parts of their own religion to do so, and they have to essentially ignore what Muhammad himself did. This is why it is always dangerous to allow large numbers of Muslims into your country, because even if they seem to be peaceful, they have to honor and imitate a man who was a mass murdering pedo, and a “god” who labels terrorism and rape the shortcut to paradise.

I recently wrote about Paterson, NJ, Dearborn, MI, and Hamtramck, MI. These towns are so dominated by Muslims that the call to prayer rings out multiple times a day, bars are being shut down, mosques are springing up like weeds, and Muslim residents increasingly insist that everyone else change their infrastructure and lives to suit Islamic guidelines. Hamtramck’s entirely Muslim town council is nearly all complicit in voter fraud. Over in Europe, Muslim migrants make up a massive percentage of their criminals. Investigate Ceuta’s crisis to see what it looks like when Muslims take over Western territories. It’s ugly.

Americans have to be honest about the realities of Islam, because millions of dollars are currently being made available to Muslim candidates across the country aiming to win elections and transform towns and states. The invasion has already begun, the conquest is dangerously close. Remember that at the midterms and vote accordingly.

-Catherine Salgado

Catherine Salgado is a contributor for PJ Media. She also writes for The Rogue Review, Media Research Center, and her Substack Pro Deo et Libertate. She received the Andrew Breitbart MVP award for August 2021 from The Rogue Review for her journalism.

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Ironic Inheritance: How Andrew Carnegie’s Millions Still Underwrite the Academy

By Daniel Smith

Written by Daniel Smith

Estimated Reading Time: 5 minutes

Academics may distrust concentrated private wealth, but their retirement system owes its origins to one of history’s great industrial fortunes.

Overwhelmingly left-leaning college professors tend to offer sharp critiques of “ultra-wealth,” concentrated capital, and the supposed moral failings of industrialists and billionaires. Yet in a delicious and lasting bit of irony, many of those same professors — millions in total — entrust their retirement to a system that traces directly to one of the richest men in history: Andrew Carnegie, the Scottish immigrant who built a steel empire and then gave most of it away.

He wasn’t alone. In 1918 John D. Rockefeller established the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial Foundation in honor of his late wife. By the mid-1920s the foundation had become a major funder of social science institutions, including substantial grants that helped transform the London School of Economics (LSE). With Edwin Cannan retiring, LSE Director William Beveridge sought a candidate of international stature for a new chair of political economy in 1925 — someone whose appointment would advance the LSE’s ambitions while remaining broadly consistent with the intellectual spirit of its Fabian socialist founders, including Sidney and Beatrice Webb. Beveridge extended an offer to Allyn A. Young of Harvard, then one of America’s most respected economists (at Cornell, Young had served as the dissertation chair for Frank Knight, who went on to mentor Milton Friedman, George Stigler, and James M. Buchanan). But, according to Charles Blitch’s Allyn Young: The Peripatetic Economist, the appointment nearly foundered over pension arrangements. This is where Andrew Carnegie comes into the story.

In 1905, Carnegie had transferred $10 million (the equivalent of roughly $360 million today) in United States Steel Corporation bonds to create what became the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. College teaching was, in his view, “the least rewarded of all the professions.” Even at elite colleges and universities, salaries were low, and few institutions offered any form of retirement provision. Talented people hesitated to enter the field, and aging professors often clung to their posts because they had no means to retire. Carnegie had seen this firsthand, serving on the boards of Cornell University and the Stevens Institute of Technology. With his gift, he wanted to “remove a source of deep and constant anxiety to the poorest paid and yet one of the highest of all professions” and, in the process, dignify teaching and strengthen higher education itself.

The original design was simple. Participating institutions had to meet academic and institutional standards set by the foundation. Eligible professors received free pensions — no employee contributions required — typically structured around age or years of service. State-supported universities were initially left out, though Carnegie later added another $5 million to bring many of them in. The practical effect was to encourage colleges to raise academic standards — and standardize them under the Carnegie model — so their faculty could qualify. Pension eligibility also produced one of its most durable administrative inventions: the Carnegie Unit, now known as the credit hour as a common measure of preparation and instructional time. The standardization brought administrative coherence in a fragmented system, though it also weakened local experimentation and helped entrench the overly rigid model that plagues many colleges today.

Purely non-contributory pensions could not scale infinitely. In 1918, the foundation spun the function off into a new entity, the Teachers Insurance and Annuity Association of America (TIAA), seeded with capital from the Carnegie Corporation. TIAA offered portable, contributory annuity contracts jointly funded by institutions and individuals. The arrangement was fully vested in the participant, transferable across qualifying US colleges and universities, and designed for the nonprofit academic and research sector.

The economist Allyn Young was among the first cohort of professors to participate in the system. But it created a huge problem for the LSE. In 1926, Young’s career fell short of the 25-year service requirement built into the Carnegie Foundation’s rules. Young, like many faculty today depending on their TIAA plan for retirement, was concerned for his and his family’s future if he left the Carnegie Foundation system for a post abroad.

According to Charles Blitch, when Allyn Young initially turned down the chair over the pension, Beveridge proceeded to offer him not only the highest-paying professorship in all of Britain, but moving expenses and educational funds for his biological and adopted children. In addition, Beveridge received approval from the Carnegie Foundation to allow contributions to Young’s pension from “foreign institution” LSE. Finally, Beveridge also received approval for Young to work an additional five years past the mandatory LSE retirement age of 60. Unfortunately, he died of pneumonia well before this extension could take effect.

These special accommodations and the emerging portable framework that became TIAA ultimately allowed the move, illustrating how Carnegie’s philanthropy shaped not only domestic academic careers but the cross-border mobility of academic talent and the expansion of additional fringe benefits. Over the following decades the TIAA evolved into one of the largest and most influential retirement systems in the world. Today, TIAA, still operating using a not-for-profit model, continues to serve nearly five million educators, researchers, and employees of nonprofits.

Carnegie, in the TIAA case, voluntarily redirected private wealth to solve a concrete social problem that markets and governments had left unaddressed. Unlike the champagne socialists, he did not seek to nationalize higher education through a new government program. He instead donated his own money and expertise, created a nonprofit foundation, set clear conditions, and then, when the original design reached its limits, allowed a self-sustaining, market-compatible institution to take its place. The result was greater financial security for faculty, higher institutional quality, greater mobility of academic talent, and a portable retirement architecture that long predated Social Security and most private-sector plans.

The contemporary academy’s hostility toward concentrated private wealth sits uneasily beside this history. Millions of professors’ dignified retirement was built with steel profits, guided by a man who believed that the rich were trustees of their fortunes and that voluntary giving, not confiscation, was the proper means of social improvement. The pensions and the portable retirement infrastructure that followed were the practical fruits of both insistence and ingenuity. The institutions of a free society sometimes owe more to the voluntary generosity of the successful than current rhetoric admits.

Whether or not we approve of the broader consequences of Carnegie’s deliberate sculpting of American education, his pension experiment demonstrates something narrower and harder to dispute. Private capital, deployed with clear purpose and disciplined conditions, dramatically improved the material standing and mobility of the teaching profession. The next time you see an academic or professor denounce the “ultra-wealthy,” it might be worth remembering whose $10 million bond transfer established their TIAA retirement accounts. That architecture once shaped the career of an American economist crossing the ocean to London. Of particular note, without that portability, Allyn Young would not have been at the LSE to inspire a young high school student and future Nobel laureate, Ronald Coase.

The lasting influence of Carnegie’s wealth is complicated. Carnegie’s educational philanthropy raises questions about how much private wealth should be allowed to exercise control and apply its own standards to institutions as important as schools and universities, imposing one person’s judgment on many others. But that wealth also built institutions, libraries, pensions, and portable retirement options that solved real problems without waiting for government help. TIAA is one of those inheritances — born of Carnegie’s fortune, it long outlived its benefactor and is still paying dividends more than a century later.

-Daniel Smith

Dr. Daniel J. Smith is the Director of the Political Economy Research Institute and Associate Professor of Economics in the Jones College of Business at Middle Tennessee State University. His academic research and policy work uses Austrian and public choice economics to analyze private and public governance institutions.

This piece was reproduced with the permission of AIER. Any opinions articulated herein are those of the author, not The Prickly Pear. To read the original piece, please visit HERE.

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Met Cancels Galliano Over Antisemitism: What Happened?

By The Editors

Written by The Editors

Estimated Reading Time: 2 minutes

The Metropolitan Museum of Art scrapped its planned career retrospective of designer John Galliano and dropped him as its 2027 Met Gala honoree, undone by his 2011 antisemitic comments and conviction.

A flagship American institution decided that honoring a man convicted of antisemitic abuse was untenable at a moment when antisemitism is surging. The reversal is a small but real instance of a line being held.

What happened

  • The Met canceled the show. The exhibition, titled “John Galliano: Horizons,” had been set to open in spring 2027 with the Met Gala built around it. The museum called off both on August 31.
  • It was framed as mutual. Met director Max Hollein said that “following thoughtful discussions with John Galliano, we have together decided not to proceed with the exhibition,” and Galliano announced his own withdrawal.
  • The arc was fast. The show was announced in July, drew mounting backlash through August, and was dead by the end of the month. An institution that spent weeks defending the honor reversed itself once the backlash made the cost clear.

The backstory

  • Galliano’s fall is well documented. The 65-year-old British designer led Christian Dior until 2011, when he was fired after being caught on video making antisemitic and racist remarks in a Paris bar.
  • A French court convicted him. He was found guilty of public insults based on origin, religion, and race, a hate-crime offense, and given a suspended fine. He later ran Maison Margiela until departing in late 2024, and a 2024 documentary, “High and Low: John Galliano,” reexamined the scandal and his return.
  • The pressure was local as well as national. New York City Council Speaker Julie Menin said she pressed the Met directly and welcomed the museum’s “agreed to not honor John Galliano.”

What they’re saying

The ADL called the original plan a mistake. “With antisemitism at crisis levels, the Met honoring John Galliano at this moment was misguided,” chief executive Jonathan Greenblatt said. The group had initially accepted Galliano’s apology when the show was announced, then reversed as the details sank in.

Galliano accepted the outcome. “Meaningful atonement is not achieved through an exhibition,” he wrote, adding that he remains “fully accountable for the pain caused by my words in the past, particularly the hurt I caused to the Jewish and Asian communities.”

Opposing views

  • Redemption is real, and cancellation can be cheap. Galliano served his penalty, apologized repeatedly, and did acclaimed work afterward, and a culture that never lets a man back is its own kind of failure. Fashion’s grandees, including Anna Wintour, called his withdrawal “very courageous.”
  • But there is a difference between working again and being honored. A man is free to design; an institution is free to decline to build him a monument. Rehabilitation earns a second career. It does not obligate the Met to stage a celebration, least of all while Jewish Americans face the worst wave of hostility in a generation. Declining to honor is not the same as refusing to forgive.

The Met made the right call, if belatedly, and the pressure that forced it came from people unwilling to wave away an antisemitism conviction as ancient history. The measure of a culture is not whether it forgives, but what it chooses to hold up as worthy, and an institution that decided a hate-crime conviction disqualifies a man from a coronation drew a line more of them should.

-The Editors

Liberty · Upstream of the Swamp · September 2, 2026

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USPS Whistleblower Warns On Ballots: Partisan Play?

By The Editors

Written by The Editors

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes

A federal whistleblower warns that a hastily built Postal Service system for handling mail ballots could reject legitimate votes in batches, just as ballots go out for November.

A new, largely untested IT system is being pushed into the election-mail stream on a compressed timeline. This is about election security, but what is this whistleblower saying?

What the whistleblower alleges

  • The complaint centers on a “zero-failure” verification rule. If a single ballot’s barcode in a bulk mailing fails to scan, the whistleblower says the entire batch is rejected and sent back to the state to fix. The disclosure puts the batch size at 10,000 ballots.
  • The build was fast. Development reportedly began in mid-June for a September 1 launch, roughly three months against the nine to twelve months a project like this normally takes, with less than a week of testing.
  • The projected harm is large but unproven. The disclosure warns that “potentially millions” of voters may not get a mail ballot in time, or at all. No ballots have actually been blocked. It is a warning, not a result.
  • The complaint cites a real error rate. It points to a 2017 Postal Service inspector-general audit finding a 5 percent barcode scan error rate and notes physical sampling checks of as few as 15 ballots per small batch. Internal staff, the disclosure says, warned of “catastrophic failure” that could “derail the midterm elections.”

How it got here

The system implements a Trump executive order. The March 31 order directs the Postal Service to police mail ballots and decline delivery from states that do not comply with new barcode and tracking rules.

The courts have been whipsawing it. A federal judge blocked the order, the Supreme Court lifted part of that block on August 24, a new temporary restraining order followed in late August, and the Justice Department has appealed. Implementation is on and off by the week.

Who sent it, and how

  • This was not sworn testimony. An anonymous official, represented by the group Whistleblower Aid, filed a disclosure with Sen. Richard Blumenthal, who transmitted it to the Postmaster General and released it publicly on September 1.
  • The timing is convenient, and worth flagging. The disclosure, brokered by a Democratic senator, landed one day before a court deadline in the same fight. An anonymous claim released by a partisan on the eve of a hearing deserves the same scrutiny as the system it targets.

The other side

Conservative election-law experts are skeptics. Heritage’s Hans von Spakovsky called the claims “very general and not specific enough,” a “worst-case scenario,” insisting ballots “will still get delivered.” Former Maricopa County recorder Stephen Richer, a Republican, granted the compressed timeline is a real concern but questioned an anonymous source’s motives.

The White House says the task is routine, arguing the software is “neither complex nor unique” for an agency that runs bulk mail and barcodes every day.

Our verdict

Strip away the partisan packaging and a real question remains: a new federal system was bolted onto the ballot pipeline in a hurry, weeks before an election. Election integrity is not only about who votes, but it is also about whether the machinery counts every legitimate ballot, and a rushed, untested portal is a risk to that machinery no matter which party is sounding the alarm. The fix is not to trust the whistleblower or the White House on faith. It is to test the system before November, because a process no one can vouch for is a process no one should have to. Americans are already questioning election security. It’s time to double down and make these institutions beyond reproach.

-The Editors

Liberty · Politics · Upstream of the Swamp · September 2, 2026

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NRA Sues Over Denver’s Block On Self-Defense: Your Briefing

By The Editors

Written by The Editors

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes

The NRA is backing a lawsuit that says an out-of-state visitor to Denver has no legal way to carry a handgun for self-defense, concealed or open.

The suit tests whether a state can extinguish a constitutional right for travelers by stacking rules that each sound reasonable but together leave no lawful path to carry. For the millions of Americans who cross state lines, the answer matters.

How the trap works

Colorado will not issue a nonresident a carry permit. Under R.S. 18-12-203, a visitor cannot obtain a Colorado concealed-handgun permit at all.

It honors an out-of-state permit only on a reciprocity basis, under C.R.S. 18-12-213, so a permit from a non-reciprocal state is worthless the moment its holder enters Colorado.

Denver separately bans open carry under municipal code section 38-117. Stack the three together and a qualified, law-abiding visitor has no lawful way to carry a handgun in Denver, neither concealed nor openly.

The facts

  • The case is Howeth v. City and County of Denver, docket 1:26-cv-03690 in the US District Court for the District of Colorado. The complaint was filed August 12, and the NRA publicized its backing on August 31.
  • The plaintiffs are two travelers and the NRA. Greg Howeth of Hawaii and Zackary Dougherty of South Carolina, both permit holders in their home states, say Denver leaves them defenseless. No court has ruled yet.
  • The suit names the city and the state. Defendants include Denver’s public-safety and police leadership and Colorado’s attorney general, and the complaint seeks a preliminary and permanent injunction, a declaratory judgment, and nominal damages. It asks the court to void the combination, not to rewrite Colorado’s permit system.

The precedent

The legal theory rests on Bruen. The 2022 Supreme Court decision recognized a right to carry a handgun in public for self-defense, and the plaintiffs argue Colorado and Denver have engineered that right out of existence for visitors. The claim is narrow and strong for it. This is not a challenge to permitting as such. It is a challenge to a combination that, the suit says, guarantees no lawful option, which is the one outcome Bruen forbids.

What they’re saying

The other side

Denver and Colorado will defend it on public safety grounds. A dense city regulating who carries on its streets is exercising ordinary police power, they will say, and a visitor can simply leave the gun at home.

But a right that vanishes at the county line is not much of a right. The Constitution does not issue a travel exception to the Second Amendment, and a rule that leaves a law-abiding citizen no lawful way to defend himself is the kind of paper trap courts exist to strike down.

The First Amendment does not switch off when a Texan visits Denver, and neither should the Second.

Worth watching

  • The case is newly filed, with no ruling yet, and its first real test will be whether a judge grants a preliminary injunction.
  • The stakes run past Denver. A win would pressure every state that pairs a nonresident permit ban with reciprocity-only recognition, a common design. The right to carry means little if it evaporates the moment you leave home.

-The Editors

Liberty · Upstream of the Swamp · September 2, 2026

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Top General Says No Soldiers At Ballot Boxes: Media Lie Melts Down

By The Editors

Written by The Editors

Estimated Reading Time: 2 minutes

No soldiers at the ballot box. The nation’s top military officer told a US senator in writing that the armed forces have no plans to send troops to polling places or seize ballots in November.

The uniformed military just drew a bright line around the November election, affirming that soldiers do not police American voting. That assurance had to be put in writing only due to manufactured media outrage.

What he said

How we got here

Caine answered a question from Sen. Elissa Slotkin, a Michigan Democrat, former CIA analyst, and member of the Armed Services Committee, who wrote to Caine and War Secretary Pete Hegseth in August.

Trump had floated using the military around the vote. In an interview, he mused, “We should take over the voting in at least many, 15 places. The Republicans ought to nationalize the voting,” and he has publicly lamented not deploying troops to seize voting machines in 2020.

The law is old and clear. Since 1865, federal law has barred deploying the military to polling places except to “repel armed enemies of the United States.” Slotkin’s letter also flagged the Insurrection Act, the statute a president could invoke to federalize the Guard, as the mechanism of concern.

The receipts

  • Hegseth got the same questions and did not answer. Slotkin sent identical letters to both men; Caine replied by the deadline, Hegseth stayed silent.
  • The silence is the story’s loose thread. The general reassured the country. The civilian who runs the Pentagon, and answers to the president, declined to. Does he owe a secondary response to this leading question?

The counter

This can be read as a stunt. Slotkin is a Democrat, the letter is a political document, and Trump’s “nationalize” musings were loose talk, not an order. Caine himself said he has received no unlawful order, because there was none.

Our verdict

The correct answer to “will troops be at the polls” is the one Caine gave: no, and no lawful order to that end is coming. The military passed a test it should never have been given, and the enduring lesson is that the guardrail held because an officer honored the law, not because the question stopped being asked. Remember, this story has been a constant media headline for years. Will it be put to bed now?

-The Editors

National Security · Politics · Upstream of the Swamp · September 2, 2026

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Dems Put Up Confederate Statues for Propaganda, Remove Them for Same Reason

By Catherine Salgado

Written by Catherine Salgado

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes

Democrats of the past put up statues of Confederates in order to perpetuate an unhistorical myth about the Dem traitors and war criminals who tried to rip this nation apart in order to preserve slavery. Democrats of the present are removing Confederate statues for the same reason; namely, in order to spread a certain unhistorical narrative. They are erasing and rewriting their own history.

Firstly, all Confederates made it their avowed and express purpose permanently to split the United States of America because of the slavery debate, and a country that celebrates traitors is setting itself up for failure. You can’t show children monuments to traitors and then be taken aback if those children grow up with negative views on America and positive views of those who would undermine her. But the Confederate leaders — most of whom were Democrats — were also not the noble men of generosity and integrity that Democrat propaganda and Dem-erected statues have made them out to be. And yes, statues glorify the subjects; we remember Brutus and Benedict Arnold quite well without monuments, and it is as wrong to erect statues to Civil War traitors as to the traitor Arnold.

Robert E. Lee called black Union soldiers “property,” praised Nathan Bedford Forrest, and oversaw the mass rounding up and enslavement or killing of free black men, women, and children in multiple states. “Stonewall” Jackson loved to preach religion and humanity, yet he willingly fought for the side of those who committed mass war crimes and boasted about them. Nathan Bedford Forrest bragged about killing surrendering black and white troops at Fort Pillow and later founded the KKK. Former Democrat Secretary of War and Confederate President Jefferson Davis mandated the enslavement or execution of black Union soldiers and the execution of white Union officers who commanded black troops. The Confederate Congress then passed that mandate into law as the Retaliatory Act. You can read more here. These people were not heroes or stainless idealists. They were racist, treacherous, murderous ideologues willing to commit any crime or use any means to attain their own goals.

But the Democrat revisionism of history — which U.S. Grant first noted and warned about within a couple decades of the Civil War’s end — included not only demonizing Lincoln, Grant, and other Unionists, nor simply in publishing books and pamphlets with an alternative historical narrative, but in erecting numerous statues across the former Confederate states to the Democrat traitors of America’s bloodiest conflict.

Generations of young Americans saw impressive, gigantic, noble-looking statues of Davis and Jackson and Lee and immediately thought how admirable must be the subjects, because such heroic statues have an inherently glorifying effect. But now Democrats have realized they can politically and economically enslave black people through adjusting their rhetoric, taking down their own statues, and pretending that they loathe the racist Dems of the past.

The reality is that the Democrat Party from Andrew Jackson to the present has been racist, anti-Constitutional, anti-American, elitist, ruthless, corrupt, and rhetorically clever. They have left an endless trail of corpses and ruined towns and states in their wake, and yet they still shape the historical and political narrative. Democrats also know that Republicans are reactionaries, meaning lefties have only to take down a statue of Stonewall Jackson for Republicans to start bewailing it as a tragedy, thus confirming in ignorant voters’ minds the idea that Republicans are racist and Democrats are the party of anti-racism.

The Democrats put up the Confederate memorials as an architectural propaganda ploy. They now remove the memorials as an even more effective propaganda ploy. And Republicans are still falling for the bait, over a century and a half after the Civil War ended.

-Catherine Salgado

Catherine Salgado is a contributor for PJ Media. She also writes for The Rogue Review, Media Research Center, and her Substack Pro Deo et Libertate. She received the Andrew Breitbart MVP award for August 2021 from The Rogue Review for her journalism.

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How Did America Get a 27 Star Flag? History We Should Know

By The Editors

Written by The Editors

Estimated Reading Time: < 1 minute

America’s Story As Told Through Her Flags. This series is brought to you by Colonial Flag, America’s premier flag maker and the exclusive partner of Freedom 250.

The History

Representing a nation officially touching the Gulf of Mexico, the 27-Star Flag was the first to fly after the death of Andrew Jackson. Like other short-lived versions, genuine 27-star flags are considered a “holy grail” for collectors today.

State Added

  • 1845-Florida

Manufacturing

Makers used high-quality, open-weave wool bunting, often imported from England because American mills weren’t yet producing enough specialized fabric. Some designs featured a slightly larger central star to symbolize Florida, the newest state.

Flag Protocol

By 1845, it was firmly established that the blue Canton should always be at the top of the flagpole. Hoisting the flag with the stars at the bottom was considered a sign of terrible disrespect or immediate danger.

This flag was not a gift; it was paid for by the sacrifice, honor, and lives of those who fought for freedom. Every stripe represents a burden carried, and every star a step toward justice. Apathy is a far greater danger to our country than any external enemy. Understand the past, live up to its promise, and keep the flame alive. Discover the full story with our partners at Colonial Flag.

-The Editors

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How the Trump Administration Is Reimagining Civil-Rights Enforcement

By Kenneth Marcus

Written by Kenneth Marcus

Estimated Reading Time: 4 minutes

Its muscular approach sets it apart from previous Republican administrations.

Earlier this month, a federal judge dismissed the Trump administration’s civil-rights case against Harvard, the latest judicial rebuke of an administration accustomed to pushing legal boundaries. But what is remarkable here is not the pushback. It is that a Republican administration is pushing the boundaries of federal civil-rights enforcement at all.

The administration has mobilized agencies across the government, allowing the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to assume a leading role in higher-education matters once left largely to the Department of Education. And it has pursued the ultimate civil-rights sanction — the complete withdrawal of federal funding in many cases — with a determination that Washington has not displayed in decades. In its whole-of-government coordination, and the sheer force of its remedies, the second Trump administration has distinguished itself from every previous Republican administration in our lifetime.

Skeptics will say that every administration promises to remake civil-rights enforcement but eventually settles back into the same tired grooves. Supporters will argue that Trump 2.o’s civil-rights officials are merely enforcing the laws as written, no more and no less. But three substantive changes make this administration’s approach unique.

The first distinguishing feature of the second Trump administration is what might be called civil-rights maximalism. From its earliest days in power, the Trump-led Education Department began proactively opening investigations rather than waiting for complaints, especially in priority areas such as antisemitism, DEI, and women’s athletics. Previous Republican administrations often took a minimalist approach — wary of expanding the administrative state, upsetting the separation of powers, intruding on federalism, or stretching civil-rights statutes beyond their text.

Those concerns were principled, but the resulting asymmetry was unmistakable: Democratic administrations energetically advanced progressive priorities through doctrines such as disparate impact, while Republican administrations often contented themselves with avoiding excesses of their own. Civil-rights enforcement therefore moved three steps left under Democrats, paused under Republicans, and then resumed its leftward march. Trump 2.0 is breaking that pattern by applying the same proactive energy to conservative civil-rights priorities.

The clearest evidence of how aggressively the administration is using its enforcement authority is money. The administration’s aggressive withholding of federal funds from Harvard, Columbia, and other major universities has no real precedent. Further, it has aimed that weaponry at a different set of targets — e.g., widespread antisemitism, race-conscious admissions — and with more force.

The Justice Department’s new Civil Rights Fraud Initiative turns the False Claims Act on universities that certify civil-rights compliance while quietly tolerating antisemitism or illegal DEI practices. In February, DOJ’s Civil Rights Division sued the University of California directly, alleging UCLA allowed a hostile work environment for Jewish and Israeli faculty and staff based on a commissioner’s charge brought proactively by Andrea Lucas, the bold and energetic chairwoman of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC).

Second, under this administration, DOJ, HHS, the EEOC, and even the General Services Administration (GSA) have all become central players. The White House has taken a more direct coordinating role, urging agencies to identify the full range of authorities available to combat antisemitism and directing them to target potentially unlawful DEI policies. The clearest example of this change is the GSA, a procurement agency that many outside of the Beltway have likely never heard of. But its Federal Acquisition Service flagged $255 million in Harvard’s federal contracts for termination amid concerns over antisemitism and joined the DOJ, HHS, and the Department of Education in canceling $400 million in Columbia’s grants and contracts outright over allegations of antisemitism. It was the GSA’s contracting capabilities that enabled these sweeping moves, something no single office could have accomplished on its own.

While the Biden administration produced the first U.S. national strategy to combat antisemitism, logging more than 100 actions across more than two dozen federal agencies, most of those actions were forgettable, such as producing training modules and holding listening sessions. The agencies that mattered were, for the most part, the Department of Education and, to a lesser extent, the State Department. The second Trump administration has delivered the coordination Biden’s strategy only gestured toward.

The third departure is the administration’s more muscular and proactive approach to targeted civil-rights enforcement. The Department of Education has begun conducting proactive compliance reviews — opening investigation files without waiting for a complaint to land first — across antisemitism, DEI, and affirmative action alike. Prior Republican administrations reserved targeted enforcement mostly for causes with broad, bipartisan appeal, such as disability access on college campuses and better diagnostic practices for minority students in special education. Other administrations spent much of their energies clearing backlogs of cases left behind by their predecessors — a bureaucratic goal, not a substantive one.

This administration is targeting core conservative concerns directly and is following through. In July, the EEOC’s $21 million settlement with Columbia became the largest EEOC settlement for victims of antisemitism in the agency’s 60-year history and the largest public settlement of any kind reached in nearly two decades. That came alongside a separate $200 million settlement with the federal government requiring Columbia to submit to an independent monitor overseeing its admissions and hiring practices and to restructure its disciplinary process. Those are systemic changes.

For a bloated federal government that is used to incremental change that takes the entire lifespan of administrations or longer to concretize, this maximalist approach might be seen by some as rash. But what is truly short-sighted is for the federal government to allow the civil-rights enforcement powers it possesses to atrophy as many institutions disregard their legal obligations. The Trump administration’s proactive and muscular approach to civil rights takes the moment with the seriousness it demands. Future administrations should treat Trump’s maximalism as a baseline and use the tools they have to protect every American’s civil rights with strong resolve.

-Kenneth Marcus

Kenneth L. Marcus is the chairman and CEO of The Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law and the former Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights at the United States Department of Education under two administrations.

This piece was reproduced with the permission of the Brandeis Center. Any opinions articulated herein are those of the author, not The Prickly Pear. To read the original piece, please visit HERE.

 

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Court Upholds Gun-Store Spy Cams

By The Editors

Written by The Editors

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes

Cameras on every law-abiding buyer? A federal appeals court upheld California’s mandate that gun stores film and record every customer around the clock, ruling it is no search at all because the state does not hold the tapes.

The decision hands government a template for mass surveillance that dodges the Fourth Amendment: order a private business to watch you, and the Constitution never enters the room. Gun buyers are the test case. They will not be the last.

What the court held

Ninth Circuit upheld the mandate 2 to 1 in Richards v. Newsom, affirming dismissal of the challenge on the merits. The panel rejected First, Fourth, and Fifth Amendment claims at once.

The law is California Penal Code Section 26806. It requires licensed firearms dealers to maintain continuous audio and video recording at least 15 frames per second, covering entrances, sales counters, and firearms displays, with a one-year retention requirement and posted “video and audio surveillance” signage.

Their logic is the alarming part. Judge Lucy Koh wrote that because the state neither installs the cameras nor accesses the footage, no government search occurs. The government now gets the surveillance without the warrant, simply by ordering someone else to run the camera.

What they’re saying

The precedent

Plaintiffs are the gun-rights movement’s core. Gun Owners of America, the Gun Owners Foundation, the Second Amendment Foundation, the California Rifle and Pistol Association, and individual dealers brought the suit. They plan to seek en banc review and, if necessary, review by the Supreme Court.

This mechanism travels. Nothing in the ruling limits the workaround to firearms. A state that can compel a gun dealer to record every buyer can compel a pharmacy, a bookstore, or a house of worship to do the same, then claim it holds no tapes and conducted no search.

How it works

  • The recording never stops. Section 26806 requires the cameras to run 24 hours a day, capture both audio and video, and keep the footage for a full year. Every purchase, every conversation at the counter, every face that walks in is on file.
  • The split on the panel was ideological. The two judges in the majority upheld the mandate; the dissent came from the panel’s lone Republican appointee, who parted ways on the Fourth and First Amendment questions. The one judge most skeptical of the surveillance was also the only one a Republican president put on the court.
  • The plaintiffs are not done. The gun-rights groups have signaled they will ask the full Ninth Circuit to rehear the case and, failing that, take it to the Supreme Court, where the custody-of-the-tapes theory would get a colder reception.

What’s in it for America

Surveillance by proxy is still surveillance. The Fourth Amendment was written to stop general searches of law-abiding people going about lawful business. A camera the state requires but pretends not to own is the general search in modern dress.

The chilling effect is the point. A citizen exercising a constitutional right, buying a lawful firearm, is now filmed and recorded by government order, the footage kept for a year. Rights exercised under a camera are rights exercised on a shorter leash.

California insists this is about tracing stolen guns and catching straw buyers, and stopping trafficking is a legitimate aim. But a free people does not accept a standing camera on every lawful transaction as the price of a right, and the fix for a technicality that guts the Fourth Amendment is a higher court willing to say so.

-The Editors

Liberty · Upstream of the Swamp · September 1, 2026

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Where Have All the Classical Liberals Gone?

By Craig J. Cantoni

Written by Craig J. Cantoni

Estimated Reading Time: 4 minutes

A review of The Revolutionary Center:  The Lost Genius of Liberalism, by Adrian Wooldridge, 2026, Pegasus Books, New York, 386 pages.

 

You know that you’re in for an intellectual treat when the first two pages of the introduction to The Revolutionary Center make a connection between the World Economic Forum and Thomas Mann’s 1924 classic book, The Magic Mountain.

Mann’s book was set in Davos, Switzerland, which, ironically, is also where the WEF holds its annual confab for the shameless, shallow and aloof rulers of the world.

Two characters in Mann’s book argue about the pros and cons of liberalism and illiberalism, an argument that reflected the politics of the time. When the book was published in 1924, the illiberalism of communism had already subjugated Russia, the illiberalism of Mussolini’s fascism had taken seed in Italy, and, unbeknown to the characters (and Mann), the illiberalism of Nazism would soon consume Germany.

Adrian Wooldridge, the author of The Revolutionary Center, goes on to criticize today’s left-liberals and MAGA populists for undermining the classical-liberal foundations of America.  His criticisms are nonpartisan, and he attacks the sacred cows of both the left and right and both Democrats and Republicans.  My preferred political philosophy of libertarianism isn’t spared his rod, either—not because it is illiberal but because it is too doctrinaire about limited government.

Given that the vast majority of Americans are on one side or the other and aren’t prone to buy books critical of them, that doesn’t leave a large market for the book.  It doesn’t help that the book is very cerebral and is thus an outlier in today’s world of vacuous tweets, soundbites and buzzwords.

Wooldridge deserves credit for tempering his biases.  He’s a Brit with a PhD in history from Oxford but is an American at heart, having worked as a bureau chief in Washington and having two daughters who were born in the US.  Another book of his, Capitalism in America, co-authored with Alan Greenspan, praises American-style capitalism (but not crony capitalism) and was acclaimed by the Financial Times as a best book of the year.   Still another book, The Aristocracy of Talent, is an acclaimed defense of meritocracy.

He feels that Great Britain has lost its way and fears that the US is following close behind.

Being neither a dogmatist nor an absolutist, Wooldridge doesn’t provide an all-encompassing definition of classical liberalism, preferring to look at it broadly instead of narrowly.  But he does summarize the thinking of the great historical figures who would come to define it through their political, moral and economic philosophies, such as John Locke, David Hume, Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Benjamin Constant, John Stuart Mill, and too many others to list here.

The reader is reminded that liberalism was a reaction to what had preceded it throughout human history, when a king, emperor, strong man, the church, or some sort of collective was at the top of the political and social order and the individual was at the bottom.

Liberalism reversed this order through the concepts of individualism and freedom.  That didn’t mean an individualism of selfishness, greed, or unconcern for the downtrodden and the common good.  And it didn’t mean freedom disconnected from responsibility.

Related tenets of liberalism are pluralism, the rule of law, property rights, free trade, and free speech, but free speech with a tolerance for different views and a willingness to compromise.

Threats today to liberalism are both external and internal.  The external threats are China, Russia, N. Korea, Iran, and other illiberal nations.  The internal threats are the aforementioned illiberalism of left-liberals and MAGA populists.

Left-liberals manifest their affection for illiberalism by their obsession with group identities, by their cancelling of speech they disagree with, by their embrace of cultures and immigrant groups that disdain liberalism and want to overthrow it, by their promulgation of racist and unjust policies under the guise of anti-racism and social justice, by their favoring of collectivism and statism over markets, by their furtherance of dependency over independency, by their preference for equal outcomes over merit, and by their hypocrisy of pretending to care for working stiffs while tending to be in professions and jobs with sinecure that are insulated from the disastrous results of their socioeconomic policies.

MAGA populists are so joined at the hip with Trump that it is difficult to distinguish their beliefs from the behavior and actions of their leader.  Trump is a strong man with authoritarian tendences who gravitates toward likeminded men; who pits groups against groups as the left does, but for different groups in different ways; who embraces mercantilism over free trade; who has upended the liberal order by driving wedges between the US and its Western allies and trading partners; who seems to operate on whims and revenge instead of reasoned principles; who uses government power to reward friends and punish enemies, including perceived and actual enemies in the press; and who hypocritically pretends to care for working stiffs while enabling family business deals with uber-wealthy authoritarians and shady characters in what smacks of grifting.

Liberalism was revolutionary when it first came on the world scene.  As the book’s title suggests, it would be revolutionary again for classical liberalism to retake the center and prevail against the extremes of illiberalism on the left and right.

As Wooldridge concludes, classical liberalism isn’t utopia but is the best safeguard against terrible things happening.

There is enough to fight over in politics without fighting over liberalism.  In a constitutional republic based on liberal values, it is dangerous to allow politics to undermine what keeps us free as individuals.  Americans who vote for illiberalism do so at their own peril.

-Craig Cantoni

Mr. Cantoni is an author, activist and retired business executive living in Tucson.

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Democrats Openly Admit They Don’t See Unlimited Illegal Immigration As A Problem

By Brianna Lyman

Written by Brianna Lyman

Estimated Reading Time: 4 minutes

Maybe Democrats haven’t learned their lesson on immigration, but hopefully Americans will remember theirs.

Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., thinks the problem Democrats had with immigration was not that they allowed millions of illegals to invade the country, but rather that Democrats’ simply failed to explain to Americans that they should be grateful for living with illegal aliens who apparently make communities safer.

During an interview with the CT Mirror, Murphy claimed that President Donald Trump was trying to solve a “fake problem” of mass migration being a threat to the American people.

“The problem, according to the Trump administration, is a country that has been invaded, a country that is at risk physically because of the presence of people from other countries,” Murphy said. “That is a fake problem. That is not a real problem.”

Murphy then cited unnamed sources purportedly showing illegal aliens — who by definition have committed a crime by being here illegally — are actually less likely to be criminals than Americans.

“Nobody likes to hear this, but immigrants, first generation immigrants and undocumented immigrants both commit crimes at rates lower than natural-born Americans, than people that are born here in this country,” Murphy said. “So if you want to live in a safe community, you are actually better off living in a community with people that just got to the United States of America. And so we’re not seeking to solve ‘a problem’ of migrant crime.”

This answer makes a lot of sense if you understand that Democrats have learned absolutely nothing after the 2024 presidential election.

For four years the Biden administration facilitated a mass illegal alien invasion. Democrat cities and states became filled with Third World foreigners. Hotels were turned into migrant shelters, American students were sent home for remote learning so that illegal aliens could sleep in public schools, and taxpayers were forced to feed, clothe, shelter, and protect millions of illegal aliens who had no right to be here.

A September 2025 report by Documented found that over three years, more than 220,000 “asylum seekers and immigrant families” came to New York City, and “many” have “school-aged children.”

“Citywide, more than 13,000 new English Language Learners entered the public school system between the 2022 and 2023 academic years,” according to Documented, which added that NYC public schools were “inundated” with students who can’t speak English.

The country watched as Laken Riley’s mother collapsed to the ground upon hearing her daughter had been murdered by an illegal alien let into the country by President Joe Biden. They watched Jocelyn Nungaray’s mother weep after Nungaray was brutally raped and murdered by illegal aliens let in by Biden.

None of this was “fake” or created by Trump, which is why immigration was perhaps the defining issue of the 2024 election cycle. One Pew Research poll found 61 percent of voters thought immigration was “very important” to their decision, a 13-point increase from 2022.

But Murphy’s message to these voters is that the problem was actually never real to begin with and, in fact, Americans should be grateful Democrats dumped millions of Third Worlders here because now we are apparently safer! Of course that’s not true, which is why Murphy came up with the ridiculous crime argument to sidestep the greater issue, which is that even if we accept Murphy’s bogus claim that immigrants (whether legal or illegal) are safer for Americans to live amongst than actual Americans (notably, Former Assistant Attorney General and former White House deputy assistant for domestic policy Theo Wold told Fox News “There are no reliable statistics showing that illegal immigrants commit fewer crimes — and Democrats are the reason. They have blocked efforts to record and report illegal immigrant crime for decades so they can spout pseudo-statistics like these, made up out of whole cloth”), it doesn’t justify allowing millions of illegal aliens to invade the country and stay here indefinitely.

Immigration isn’t just a crime issue. It’s an issue about the strain on schools, hospitals, housing markets, and resources and most importantly, it’s about national unity and cohesion. Despite Murphy’s insistence that Trump was creating a “fake” problem, having millions of foreigners is extremely dangerous to the country.

As I’ve previously written, mass migration “is a cultural wrecking ball.” Assimilation to the degree necessary to preserve America is impossible with mass migration, whether legal or illegal. In fact, such mass migration is a threat to our safety — despite Murphy’s insistence that illegal aliens and Third World foreigners somehow make Americans more safe.

Alexander Hamilton warned in 1802, “The safety of a republic depends essentially on the energy of a common National sentiment; on a uniformity of principles and habits; on the exemption of the citizens from foreign bias, and prejudice; and on that love of country which will almost invariably be found to be closely connected with birth, education and family.”

But there is no national sentiment or uniformity when we are importing millions of Third World foreigners from different languages, cultures, and religions, all things which inhibit their ability to truly assimilate to us.

But to Murphy, all of this is a “fake” problem.

Murphy later gave a preview of what Democrats would do if they regain power, saying that we need to “tear down ICE and rebuild it” adding that “this version of ICE should not remain or come back if Democrats control the presidency or Congress.”

Any moment of clarity post 2024 is gone for Democrats. While the party tried to pretend like it acknowledged the radicalism and problems of their Biden-era immigration policies, Murphy just implicitly acknowledged any messaging by Democrats on border security is a farce. Democrats think Americans’ real and legitimate concerns about mass migration –legal and illegal– are “fake.”

Murphy, like most Democrats, fundamentally just doesn’t think mass illegal migration is wrong. He still thinks enforcing the law is the bigger problem rather than violating the law that is being enforced. If Americans elect Democrats this November they are going to see that the only people who will be targeted are the enforcers of the law rather than the lawbreakers because Democrats just fundamentally do not believe in borders, national sovereignty, or the American people.

Maybe Democrats haven’t learned their lesson on immigration, but hopefully Americans will remember theirs.
-Brianna Lyman
Brianna Lyman is an elections correspondent at The Federalist. Brianna graduated from Fordham University with a degree in International Political Economy. Her work has been featured on Newsmax, Fox News, Fox Business and RealClearPolitics. Follow Brianna on X: @briannalyman2

This piece was reproduced with the permission of The Federalist. Any opinions articulated herein are those of the author, not The Prickly Pear. To read the original piece, please visit HERE.

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Gun Owners Of America Has Been Accomplishing a Lot With A Little

By Sebastian Tuininga

Written by Sebastian Tuininga

Estimated Reading Time: 5 minutes

Gun Owners of America spent more on lobbying than the NRA in 2022 and secured numerous political and legal victories, all while the NRA declined in membership, revenue, and political significance.

Gun Owners of America (GOA) has recently won gun-rights victories that once seemed unimaginable for the National Rifle Association (NRA) at the height of its influence. Despite raking in a fraction of the NRA’s revenue and attention, GOA’s unique strategy has cemented it as an important player in the modern gun-rights movement.

NRA background

The National Rifle Association’s modern political influence can be traced to its 1977 annual meeting in Cincinnati. After creating the Institute for Legislative Action (ILA) in 1975, the group faced internal debate over whether to focus on political advocacy or remain centered on firearms safety and competition shooting. In 1977, roughly 1,100 voting members ousted several executives and replaced them with leaders who pushed the NRA toward a stronger focus on Second Amendment advocacy.

From there, the NRA’s legislative victories and defeats defined gun ownership in the United States from the 1980s to the 2000s.

Arguably the most relevant of these was the 1986 Firearms Owners’ Protection Act (FOPA). FOPA served as a compromise that overturned significant portions of the Gun Control Act of 1968. FOPA narrowed the definition of a firearms dealer, eased interstate sale of rifles and shotguns under certain conditions, and provided protection for people transporting firearms through states where they could otherwise face restrictions.

In 1994, an assault weapons ban narrowly passed the U.S. House by a vote of 216–214, then it passed the Senate, and was signed into law by then-President Clinton. This was a major defeat for the NRA, which had lobbied extensively against the proposal.

But the assault weapons ban language included an expiration date of September 2004. When the ban expired, the NRA successfully lobbied against its renewal, aided in part by the George W. Bush administration’s lack of interest in extending it. What had initially been a major defeat became a victory for the NRA, demonstrating its ability to remain politically influential over the long haul.

While not always so triumphant, the NRA’s frequent and important victories since the 1980s earned it an iconic reputation as the nation’s premier defender of gun ownership rights. But in recent years that reputation has tarnished a bit, and the NRA’s influence has arguably been eclipsed by the work of the smaller, yet scrappier Gun Owners of America.

Doing a lot with a little

Gun Owners of America and the National Rifle Association have employed different methods in defeating firearms restrictions. As noted above, the NRA focused on building a huge membership that would send money and write to Congress; rating and endorsing candidates; and thus influencing legislation.

The GOA formed around the same time that the NRA began to pivot toward gun rights advocacy, but aimed its focus on litigation. Instead of trying to convince lawmakers not to enact gun control, the GOA takes them to court when they do. (GOA does engage in lobbying and even outspent the NRA in lobbying in 2022.)

The GOA model has become influential in the modern era of politics, particularly following the 2008 Supreme Court case D.C. v. Heller. The Heller decision strengthened the use of the Second Amendment’s language, especially the “shall not be infringed” portion, as a tool in constitutional litigation. While the case was not initiated by GOA lawyers, Heller paved the way for their future victories.

One the GOA’s biggest wins came from New York State Rifle and Pistol Association (NYSRPA) v. Bruen in 2022. An amicus brief filed by the GOA urged the U.S. Supreme Court to establish a “text, history, and tradition” test for evaluating gun-control laws and to recognize that the Second Amendment conferred a right to carry a firearm for self-defense. The court adopted a similar framework in its decision, allowing GOA to successfully challenge concealed-carry restrictions in New York.

Earlier this year, GOA, the Silencer Shop Foundation, and other plaintiffs challenged the National Firearms Act’s (NFA) registration and approval requirements after Congress reduced the NFA’s making and transfer taxes on suppressors and certain other weapons to zero (the previous fee was $200). GOA argued that after Congress eliminated the tax, the NFA regulations designed to facilitate its collection could no longer be constitutionally enforced.

On August 5, U.S. District Judge James Wesley Hendrix ruled in favor of the plaintiffs, finding the regulations could no longer be enforced after the underlying taxes were eliminated. He permanently blocked enforcement against the plaintiffs and, where applicable, their members and customers.

Fifteen states joined the litigation. GOA subsequently announced that the ruling allowed suppressor transfers without NFA registration and approval. Firearms activist Brandon Herrera and Texas state Rep. Wes Virdell became the first purchasers to receive suppressors through such transfers since the NFA’s enactment in 1934.

Decline of the NRA

Meanwhile, the National Rifle Association has fallen out of favor with many of today’s gun owners. This is in part due to their tendency to compromise on issues, separating them from the GOA’s “no compromises” approach. As an example, while the NRA eventually supported the previously mentioned Heller case, they initially declined to participate when the named plaintiff, Dick Anthony Heller, asked the NRA for help.

But more recent scandals have also made the NRA appear less capable of using its revenue effectively.

In August 2020, New York Attorney General Letitia James sued to dissolve the NRA, accusing its leadership of using millions of dollars in NRA funds for personal expenses and improperly benefiting friends and family members. These allegations suggested that the group had lost more than $64 million because of these practices over a three-year period.

The bankruptcy proceedings that followed raised even more questions about how the NRA was spending its money, including allegations involving private jets, luxury travel, and other personal expenses. Wayne LaPierre, the longtime leader of the firearms group, later admitted to receiving undisclosed benefits and resigned as CEO in January 2024. A New York jury eventually found him responsible for corruption and financial misconduct involving $5.4 million in NRA funds. LaPierre was later barred from serving as an NRA officer or director for ten years and ordered to repay roughly $4.3 million.

Gun Owners of America reported revenue of $7.6 million in 2024, a small fraction of the NRA’s $173 million that year. However, the NRA has significantly declined in revenue. In 2020, just four years earlier, the NRA reported $282 million in revenue. The NRA has also seen a decline in annual membership dues since 2018, with revenue from annual membership consistently coming in at less than $100 million since 2021.

While GOA’s influence has grown stronger because of the overall decline of the NRA’s political effectiveness, revenue, and validity in leadership, most of GOA’s new status was earned through the success of GOA’s lawyers.

After D.C. v. Heller and the established jurisprudence of the Second Amendment’s language, GOA’s model for blocking and reversing gun-control initiatives in court has produced the most impressive recent wins for American gun owners.

The NRA won’t be going away any time soon. They are still sitting on a massive pile of money and have millions of dedicated members across the country. But it is also true that the Gun Owners of America has emerged as at least NRA’s equal in the contemporary gun-rights movement. And dollar for dollar, the GOA has been hitting a lot harder than their caliber size would suggest.

-Sebastian Tuininga

Sebastian joined CRC’s staff in mid-2025, original joining as a research intern in 2023. He is a junior content editor, focusing on editing and adding content to InfluenceWatch.org. 

This piece was reproduced with the permission of Capital Research Center. Any opinions articulated herein are those of the author, not The Prickly Pear. To read the original piece, please visit HERE.

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My 40th Anniversary: Lessons Learned

By Bruce Bialosky

Written by Bruce Bialosky

Estimated Reading Time: 4 minutes

Mark Antony and Cleopatra, Tracy and Hepburn.  Add to that the story of Teri and Bruce.

40 sounds big, and it really is big.  Being married for 40 years and still madly, deeply in love is something only a person can dream of.  With the decline in the number of people getting married, the later age at marriage, and the emergence of no-fault divorce, the number becomes even larger.

When people hear you were engaged after only 19 days from your first date, they look at you like you are telling them a fish story.  No, it isn’t a fish story.  None of our friends or family even knew we were dating.  The Beautiful Wife had mentioned me to her eventual maid of honor, and that was it.  When her mother heard of the engagement, she thought it would not last. She has been proven wildly wrong.

By the 19th day, things had advanced pretty far in our relationship, and we had big plans for Saturday night.  It was Friday, the night before.

At a time when people get engaged at football stadiums, this was the complete opposite.  I was at a business meeting close to her apartment.  I called to ask her if she had plans. I came over, and we went to dinner.  For some reason, she chose a sushi restaurant.  I say that because to this day the woman still doesn’t know how to really eat sushi.  We sat at the sushi bar and discussed all the big picture things about life. I mean big.

We returned to her apartment.  We were sitting on the couch furthering our discussion when I looked at her and said, “We really don’t have anything else to discuss.”  She looked at me oddly.  She later told me she was thinking I was invested in this guy and was wondering if he was dumping me. Quite the opposite.  I said something that I had not thought of saying to anyone before or even until that moment: “We have discussed everything important; will you marry?” She looked at me quite shocked and said, “Are you serious?”  My answer was yes, and more importantly, so was hers.

I had just asked a woman to marry me who did not care about my three primary interests outside of work – music, baseball, and politics.  She became very interested in politics and has been to the White House many times. Thanks to Kirk Gibson, she became a Dodger fan.  She has seen baseball in all the current stadiums and in five countries.  Unfortunately, her musical tastes still haven’t gotten there, but our kids have, thankfully.

We didn’t get married for another eight months as we both wanted a big wedding and I wanted a formal one.  We went to dinner the next night as planned after spending the day euphorically informing some of our friends, but not our families.  I wanted to formally ask her parents for her hand in marriage.  Since we were engaged on Friday, December 13th (so much for Friday the 13th being a bad day), we would be walking into seasonal parties, and we decided to tell people in person at the events.

At dinner, I told her I understood we would not be officially married for some time as we both wanted that big wedding. Despite that, as far as I was concerned, what we had done the night before made us married. Then I told her, “You have two ways of getting out of this – “you die, or I kill you.”  I made it clear to her that I was here for the long haul.

Have we had challenges over the last forty years? Yes, everybody does.  In that regard, we have been blessed that, whatever those challenges, we were able to overcome them and move forward.  They never challenged our commitment to each other.

We succeeded because we worked at it.  Do we fight?  Please, we yell at each other every day.  We never let it last.  We never go to bed mad.  We talk it out and move on. What we do is we always want to share our lives with each other.  We talk during the day regularly, and we always want to share thoughts and important matters when they occur.  When I get home, she is always happy to see me walk in the door as I am when she does.  We always kiss goodbye and good night.

We succeeded because we put one foot forward, then the next, and never stopped.  We bought our first home and then the one where we have lived for the past 36 years, which the crazed wife has updated over and over and over again.

We raised our two wonderful children, Sam and Hannah, there, giving them stability.  Hannah can come back to her bedroom; Sam can’t.  That was turned into a den.

Last 4th of July, Sam brought a young lady to dinner at the house.  We had not met her before.  She absorbed some of the successes we had, including my being a presidential appointee.  She asked me a question I had never been asked before.  What do you attribute your success to?  I immediately responded because to me it is clear – getting married and staying married.

We are not having a party for this one, in a very uncharacteristic Bialosky manner.  We are going to Chicago for a couple of days tomorrow.  We will have some delicious food, including deep dish pizza, and attend a Cubbie game.  We will have a party for the 50th, which we are counting on being around for, and hopefully you will also.

We realize we are blessed as people and as a couple and we are grateful.  Our family and friends are a blessing.  Most importantly, we have each other. Yes, and I have The Beautiful Wife.  How great life is!

-Bruce Bialosky

Bruce L. Bialosky, is a former presidential appointee to the U.S Holocaust Memorial Council and the founder of the Republican Jewish Coalition of California.

Sourced from PRICKLY PEAR

First Briefs Filed With SCOTUS For AR-15 Case: What Do They Argue?

By The Editors

Written by The Editors

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes

The fight over “assault weapons” bans reached the Supreme Court’s merits stage on Friday, when the Second Amendment Foundation filed its opening brief arguing the Constitution protects the AR-15. The case is the most consequential gun-rights matter the Court has taken up since Bruen, and a decision could settle whether a dozen states may ban the country’s most popular rifle.

The Case

The Court is hearing two consolidated challenges. The lead case is Viramontes v. Cook County, No. 25-238, joined with Grant v. Higgins, No. 25-566, which targets Connecticut’s ban. The justices granted review on June 30, and the question they agreed to decide is direct: whether the Second and Fourteenth Amendments guarantee the right to possess AR-15-platform and similar semiautomatic rifles.

Friday’s filing is the opening merits brief, not a preliminary skirmish. The petitioners’ brief landed Aug 28, with the respondents’ answer due Oct 21. Argument will follow this term, realistically in the winter, with a decision expected by June 2027. Cook County’s ban, the ordinance at the center of the lead case, dates to 2006.

The Argument

The brief’s core is the “common use” test the Court set in Heller and sharpened in Bruen. Under that framework, arms commonly used by law-abiding citizens for lawful purposes are protected, and the government cannot ban them based on a judicial assessment of their dangerousness.

The petitioners’ claim is that AR-15-style rifles are not exotic. They are ordinary. The brief states that roughly 26 million Americans own an AR-15 or a similar semiautomatic rifle, with about 22 million owning AR-15-platform rifles specifically, and that more than 32 million AR-15-platform rifles were produced for the U.S. market between 1990 and 2023. A rifle owned by tens of millions and legal in the large majority of states, the argument runs, is the definition of an arm in common use. The brief calls the AR-15 the most popular rifle in American history.

The legal move is to deny the states any middle ground. If the rifle is in common use, the historical inquiry is over, and the ban falls. There is no interest-balancing step where a legislature gets to weigh the weapon’s utility against its risks. That is the Bruen structure, and the petitioners are asking the Court to apply it without flinching.

Who Is Behind It

The challenge is a coordinated effort by the gun-rights movement’s litigation arms. The Second Amendment Foundation and the Firearms Policy Coalition are lead petitioners, joined by individual gun owners and, in the Connecticut case, the Connecticut Citizens Defense League. Lead counsel is David Thompson of Cooper and Kirk, the firm that has argued many of the movement’s marquee cases.

Second Amendment Foundation founder Alan Gottlieb framed the stakes in the group’s announcement, saying lawmakers “have long relied on fearmongering to pass laws infringing on the Second Amendment, especially regarding common, semi-automatic rifles.”

What Is At Stake

Eleven states generally ban AR-15-platform and similar rifles. A ruling for the petitioners would void those bans and foreclose new ones, settling a question that has splintered the lower courts since Bruen. A ruling the other way would let the bans stand and hand legislatures a durable path to prohibit a class of common firearms.

There is a live debate about how the Court should treat weapons that legislatures deem uniquely dangerous, and it deserves an honest hearing rather than a caricature. States argue that military-style features change the constitutional calculus. The petitioners answer that “dangerous” is exactly the judgment Heller took away from judges when the weapon is in the hands of ordinary civilians.

The number that decides this case is 26 million. If a rifle owned by that many law-abiding Americans is not “in common use,” the phrase means nothing, and the Second Amendment protects only the arms a legislature is willing to tolerate. The Court agreed to answer the question. By next summer, the country may know whether the most popular rifle in its history is a constitutional right or a legislative permission.

Liberty · Upstream of the Swamp · August 31, 2026

-The Editors

Sourced from PRICKLY PEAR

Opposition To Data Centers Isn’t What The Tech Right Thinks It Is

By John Daniel Davidson

Written by John Daniel Davidson

Estimated Reading Time: 5 minutes

It’s not the data centers themselves that people fear, it’s the AI revolution they will enable. That’s what no one wants to talk about.

ne of the most striking things about the ongoing debate over AI data centers is not just the widespread opposition to them but that the opposition spans political and demographic divisions at a time when Americans from different walks of life and different political persuasions have trouble agreeing on much of anything.

In polls, people say they’re primarily concerned about environmental factors like the amount of water and electricity the data centers will consume, as well as things like pollution and the destruction of farmland. Because these objections dovetail with anti-capitalist and pro-regulation ideas of the left, it has been easy for such concerns to be dismissed by some on the right, often with open contempt, as either climate doomerism or moronic Luddism. “Oh you don’t like data centers? And you’re complaining about it online? On the internet?”

As a tactic to silence data center skeptics on the right, this isn’t going to work. For one thing, concerns over rapid technological and societal change are not hypocritical simply because those who raise them use technology or participate in society. “If you don’t like what the internet has done to society then stop using it,” is not a substantive or persuasive response — as if those who notice the deleterious effects of smartphones, for example, are disqualified from noting those effects if they personally own a smartphone.

More broadly, the tech right is failing to persuade data center skeptics because their skepticism is rooted not in the policy particulars or the mechanics of how data centers work, but in deep anxiety about the digital revolution we have been living through for the past two decades — a revolution that artificial intelligence, powered by these new data centers, will intensify and accelerate.

In other words, you can talk all day long about how over 20 years in Quincy, Washington, data centers reduced the poverty rate and decreased residents’ property taxes and funded a new high school, hospital, library, and so on. You can explain how the new AI data centers will more than pay for themselves, how they will generate their own power needs, how they will create jobs and revitalize local economies. You can do all this, but if all you do is talk about the economic upsides of data centers, and claim that any opposition to them is paid for by China or fueled by ignorance and left-wing talking points, or that it’s pure political theater, you will not persuade the skeptics because you are failing to address the actual fears of those who oppose AI data centers.

What are those fears? Some are obvious, like the fear that an AI-powered economy will eliminate most jobs and productive work, and that ordinary people will be rendered unable to contribute economically, reduced to subsisting on a universal basic income. That particular fear is fomented, sometimes with glee, by AI creators themselves.

Yet we sense, on a gut level, that the end of work in America would destroy our country and make life miserable. It would, at a minimum, mean the end of political liberty or anything like self-government. Citizens who cannot support themselves through productive work and the ownership of property are not citizens at all, but dependents. It would also mean the end of free speech for the obvious reason that an AI-managed and curated public square will be incompatible with free expression.

But the elimination of jobs and the destruction of political freedom is not the only fear lurking in the minds of AI skeptics. A deeper fear, perhaps harder to articulate, is that of rapid and uncontrollable technological change that AI will likely bring about. That fear in turn is twofold: fear of the unknown and unstable future AI will create, and fear of the known aspects of the digital revolution that AI will supercharge.

Specifically, this latter fear is tied to what society will look like if it fully embraces the next phase of the digital revolution. We already know what the first phase of the revolution brought us: the internet, social media, smart phones, and all the pathologies that have come with them. At the outset of this revolution, in the early aughts, we were told that these things would increase social solidarity, that the internet would not only be a great democratizing force but that it would forge real connections between peoples and group that might otherwise never interact.

What happened of course was the opposite. Social fragmentation and isolation, already exacerbated by the conditions of modern life, was amplified by the internet, and especially by the advent of the smartphone and social media. Young people bore the brunt of this. Today they are more depressed, anxious, lonely, and suicidal than previous generations — thanks largely to the effects of the social media. In the twenty years since the arrival of the iPhone, the suicide rate has steadily increased. For young people, it has increased by nearly 70 percent since the turn of the millennium.

In a recent essay for Compact on how the GOP has embraced the vice economy, Brad Wilcox and James Lynch share new survey data from the Institute for Family Studies that show men age 18 to 29 “have been hit hardest by the proliferation of gambling apps, prediction markets, chatbot companions, digital tokens, and harmful substances.” Among this cohort, “Forty-three percent agree that ‘I am inclined to think that I am a failure.’ Sixty-one percent say they often feel they have little control over the things that happen to them. Almost half agree that they will never achieve the American dream.” A majority or near-majorities say they struggle with online gambling, porn addiction, and compulsive video gaming. Yet most young men also say they want to get married, start a family, buy a house, and be financially independent — all of which they feel is out of reach.

The vices and struggles are different for women but no less dispiriting. Rampant use of SSRIs, substance abuse, and rates of anxiety and depression among young women tell a similar tale. Under these conditions, it’s no surprise that young people are failing to couple up, get married, and have kids, let alone even dating at rates they once did.

None of this is natural, and all of it is part of the legacy of the digital revolution. Anyone now arguing that AI will boost social solidarity and improve life for ordinary people has to make the counterfactual case that this time, for the first time ever in history, rapid technological change won’t fragment the social order and exacerbate existing societal tensions. They have to argue, against the obvious sociological evidence, that more internet, more app use, more social media, more virtual communication will somehow not produce the isolation, addiction, loneliness, and despair that these things have produce over the past twenty years.

Put simply, the reason so many people are skeptical of the next phase of the digital revolution is because they don’t believe the first phase has made their lives better. They know that an AI-dominated society — powered by massive data centers scattered across the land — means more of what the internet age has already brought us, in increasingly powerful and irresistible forms.

So if you want to make the case for data centers, don’t talk about how they will reduce electricity bills or increasing local tax revenue, or how they don’t actually use that much water. That is not why people really object to them. They object because they know that the promises of the digital revolution were empty, and that the internet and social media and hyper-connectivity has not made life better. Life is not better because you can use an app to get toilet paper delivered to your house or because you can place bets in real time on everything imaginable. Actually, life is worse because of those things, in ways that are hard to quantify, unlike GDP or utility rates.

If the tech right wants to make a persuasive case, it will have to address the actual fears that people harbor about being left naked before the rapacious forces of the AI revolution — a revolution no one understands and no one can control.

Seen in that light, no wonder they want instead to talk about local tax revenue and water usage.

-John Daniel Davidson

John Daniel Davidson is a senior editor at The Federalist. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Claremont Review of Books, The New York Post, and elsewhere. He is the author of Pagan America: the Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come. Follow him on Twitter, @johnddavidson.

This piece was reproduced with the permission of The Federalist. Any opinions articulated herein are those of the author, not The Prickly Pear. To read the original piece, please visit HERE.

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ICE Wants $2M Robot Dogs: Your Briefing

By The Editors

Written by The Editors

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes

Immigration and Customs Enforcement wants robot dogs, and it is willing to spend up to $2 million to get them. A federal solicitation first reported by NBC News reveals the agency is shopping for Boston Dynamics’ quadruped machines to support immigration enforcement, and the plan is drawing exactly the civil-liberties objections a robot at the front door invites.

What ICE Is Actually Buying

ICE has posted a market-research solicitation, not a signed contract, seeking up to $2 million in Boston Dynamics “Spot” robots, the four-legged machines familiar from viral videos. The notice explicitly states a purchase is not guaranteed. No units have been bought, no dollars committed, and the agency has not disclosed how many robots it wants or where they would go.

The stated missions are inspection and reconnaissance in dangerous places. The procurement notice describes a need for “a remotely operated robotic capability for inspection, situational awareness, and hazard assessment in environments that may pose risks to personnel,” language aimed at confined or unstable spaces. The Spot units carry 360-degree cameras, can open doors, and can be fitted with an extendable arm. They cannot attack. Unlike a police K-9, the machine is a sensor on legs, not a weapon.

The Company Draws A Line

Boston Dynamics, sensitive to how its robots are photographed during an immigration raid, put distance between its product and the fears it provokes. The firm said its machines “are used to keep people out of harm’s way and aid first responders in assessing dangerous situations,” and added a hard limit: “Any attempted weaponization of Boston Dynamics’ robots is strictly prohibited.”

The Fine Print

The civil-liberties concern is not about weapons. It is about what a machine does to the human judgment on the other side of a door. Matthew Guariglia of the Electronic Frontier Foundation put the worry precisely: agents “might be willing to be more reckless with raids on individuals’ homes if the first person through to kick the door is a robot, not a human.” Or it might protect agents that deserve it, and limit person-to-person encounters.

The Balance

The agency’s case is straightforward. Immigration enforcement puts officers into meth labs, structurally unsound stash houses, and standoffs where a camera on four legs is safer than a man. A DHS spokesman said ICE “is constantly assessing the needs of our officers in the field to ensure they have the tools and equipment necessary to safely arrest and remove criminal illegal aliens from our country.” Sending a machine into a dangerous room instead of a person is, in the narrow case, a defensible use of technology.

The problem is that surveillance tools rarely stay narrow. A robot justified by the meth lab ends up at the ordinary residential raid, because the capability, once bought, looks for work. The march from exceptional to routine is the pattern behind every surveillance debate of the last two decades, from wiretaps to license-plate readers, and the honest observer has watched it happen too often to assume this time is different.

Conservatives who value both robust immigration enforcement and a healthy suspicion of government power sit squarely on the tension here. A machine that keeps an officer out of a collapsing building is a good thing. A machine that makes the government casual about kicking in a citizen’s door is a bad thing, and it is the same machine.

The right answer is not to ban the tool. It is to fence it, with clear rules on when a robot may lead a home entry and real accountability when it does.

-The Editors

Liberty · National Security · Upstream of the Swamp · August 30, 2026

Sourced from PRICKLY PEAR

Court Blocks Trump Deportations Over Anti-Semitic Speech

By The Editors

Written by The Editors

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes

A federal judge struck down the Trump administration’s practice of deporting noncitizen students for speech critical of Israel, ruling the policy violates the First Amendment. The decision from the Northern District of California is a defeat for the State Department, a win for a college newspaper, and a test of whether the free-speech principle means anything when the speech in question is unpopular on the right.

What The Court Held

The ruling is a final decision on the merits, not a preliminary pause. U.S. District Judge Noel Wise held that the government cannot revoke visas and deport noncitizens for constitutionally protected speech, and declared the underlying practice a violation of the First and Fifth Amendments. The First Amendment problem is retaliation against protected expression. The Fifth Amendment problem is vagueness, a legal standard so undefined that no one could know what speech might cost them their status.

The mechanism the court struck down was the pairing of State Department visa revocations with immigration removal proceedings against people for what they said. The enforcement dated to March 2025, targeting noncitizens who spoke in support of Palestinians or against Israel’s conduct in Gaza. The suit was brought by The Stanford Daily, the student newspaper, together with the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression.

The Principle Over The Politics

 

The government was revoking visas and moving to deport people because of the political views they expressed. Is that a fair reason, or not? Could it be turned the other way under a future administration?

Strip away the specific politics, and that is a state punishing speech it dislikes, using immigration law as the instrument. The principle does not care whether the speaker is protesting Israel, protesting abortion, or protesting a mask mandate.

A power to deport noncitizens for criticizing the government outlives the administration holding it and points to whichever speech the next government decides it cannot tolerate.

Judge Wise made the point in language conservatives have used for years: “Freedom of speech is illusory if we are only free to express complimentary views about the government and its leaders.” She added that the freedom to criticize the government “is not a sign of our democracy’s fragility. It is evidence of its strength.” Those sentences would draw applause at any gathering on the right if the speaker in the dock were different.

The Chilling Effect Was The Point

The ruling detailed what the policy did to a newsroom. Noncitizen staff at The Stanford Daily quit, withheld articles, or sought anonymity rather than risk deportation for their reporting. Editor-in-chief George Porteous said, “the reporters in our newsroom shouldn’t have to fear that writing a story will result in their deportation.”

That is a press-freedom injury, not an abstraction. A government that can deport a student journalist for a byline has found a lever on the free press, and it does not matter that the journalist is a noncitizen or that the coverage cuts against the administration. FIRE attorney Conor Fitzpatrick put the stakes where they belong: “In America, free speech doesn’t just belong to the people who say things the government agrees with.”

The Limits, And The Fight Ahead

The win is not total, and the administration is not done. The court declared the practice unconstitutional but the fight over remedies and appeals runs on. The Justice Department did not respond to requests for comment on the ruling, and an administration this committed to the policy is unlikely to accept a district court’s word as the last one. This is one decision, from one court, and the Supreme Court will likely have the final say on how far the executive’s power over noncitizen speech extends.

There is a real government interest buried in the case, and it should not be waved away. The executive holds broad constitutional authority over immigration and foreign affairs, and a serious argument exists that visa decisions are not ordinary domestic speech cases. That argument deserves to be litigated on its merits, all the way up.

But the instinct to cheer a deportation because the deportee’s politics offend us is the instinct that builds the weapon our opponents will one day aim back. A free-speech principle that protects only friendly speech is not a principle. It is a preference, and the government that enforces preferences with deportation orders will not always be one you voted for. There are limits on free speech, however. These cases are increasingly searching for that limit.

-The Editors

Liberty · Upstream of the Swamp · August 30, 2026

Sourced from PRICKLY PEAR

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