Time Is Running Out
We’re only six months from the midterm Election Day, and only four months from the start of early voting in September. In between are the slow summer months of June, July and August.
Time is running out for Republicans to hold on to control in Congress. In a half-dozen special congressional elections, voter support for the GOP candidate has declined by 6 to 10 points compared with 2024.
A loss by Republicans of the U.S. Senate, which is considered to be roughly 50% likely, would mean the inability to confirm a conservative nominee to fill a vacancy on the Supreme Court. Every one of the 47 Democrats in the current Senate votes lockstep with liberals on social issues like abortion, and a net gain of 4 seats would give them control over new federal judges.
Up for grabs in November are five Senate seats currently held by Republicans: Democrats are predicted to win Republican-held seats in Maine and North Carolina and have an edge in Ohio and Alaska, while Texas is a toss-up. The Republican candidate for Senate in Ohio is handicapped by the unpopular Vivek Ramaswamy at the top of the ticket for governor.
Gasoline prices have risen to a national average of $4.46 per gallon, and traditionally voters have rejected the party in power when gas is above $4 per gallon. The cost of gas is up 30 cents per gallon in just the most recent week, so the impact of this on political polling is still to come.
At the state level, twice as many Republican-controlled legislative chambers are at risk of flipping to Democratic control, as vice versa. The legislative chambers most vulnerable to flipping are the Republican-held House and Senate in the swing states of Arizona and Wisconsin, and the House chamber in Michigan, all of which Republicans won in 2024 by promising peace.
Delivering a high-level indictment for the wrongful weaponization of the federal government against Trump could be a watershed moment for MAGA voters. By now MAGA expected indictments of Jack Smith and his ilk, after U.S. District Court Judge Aileen Cannon found that Smith was unlawfully appointed to prosecute Trump.
Trump has tried to deport Haitians and other migrants, but it appears that the promise of mass deportations on which Trump was elected has been shut down by non-MAGA White House advisers. They’ve also blocked RFK Jr. from picking new members of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), which sets vaccine policy, or firing the members of the Preventive Services Task Force, which imposed costly health care mandates.
More attention to the needs of young men, who unexpectedly swung to the Republicans in 2024, is long overdue. An initiative to improve fathers’ rights in custody disputes, for example, would send a helpful message to the voters who could re-elect Republicans.
Young women are struggling too, and unfortunately are the demographic that elected the socialist Zohran Mamdani as Mayor of New York City. Democrats have been consolidating their support from unmarried women, and this demographic will need concerted effort and attention to draw back toward conservative positions. In the meantine, Republicans seem to be kicking away the young men who voted for them in 2024.
According to a recent poll published on May 4 by Politico, “Just 58 percent of young Republicans say they’ll vote GOP — with nearly a third selecting ‘neither’ or ‘won’t vote.’” In contrast, 85% of young Democrats – who are mostly women – plan to vote for their party this fall.
Much of this is the result of an economy that is not doing well for Gen Z. College graduates face the toughest job market in a decade, with their unemployment higher than the national average and underemployment at an astronomic 42.5%.
Young men have been pulled into the pandemic of gambling on their cell phones, and a crackdown on the predatory practices of online casinos would be welcomed relief. Sports gambling has corrupted college and professional sports, and prosecuting the few who are caught neither solves the problem nor satisfies anyone.
When asked about the prosecution of an American special forces soldier for profiting from wagers based on inside information about the raid and capture of the Venezuelan dictator Maduro, Trump said “I’m not happy with any of that stuff” and “the whole world, unfortunately, has become somewhat of a casino.”
It would be helpful to see some Teddy Roosevelt-style action against corporate cronyism that is alienating young voters who struggle with low wages, high debt, and housing prices that are out of reach. Trump should take on Big Tech and tap into the groundswell of fury by voters against the monstrous data centers that are popping up all over the country, often overloading the electric and water utilities that Americans rely upon.
Is Political Feminism Finished?
Political feminism is the push to elect women to high office, such as the U.S. Senate and the Presidency. Two out of the last three Democrat nominees for president have been women, and their campaigns ended in crushing failures.
In Maine, the very formidable two-term Governor Janet Mills appeared to be a shoo-in for the Democrat nomination to run against the incumbent Republican Susan Collins. Kamala Harris won this deep-blue state by 7 points in 2024, and traditionally that margin increases in the midterm elections in favor of the party not in control of the White House.
Mills faced off against Trump himself at an event held for governors at the White House early last year, when Trump called out Maine on the transgender issue. Mills told Trump that she would see him in court, to the thrill of liberals nationwide.
EMILYs List, the preeminent group supporting feminist candidates, praised Mills as “the first woman to be elected as a district attorney in New England,” and the only female attorney general and governor in Maine history. She won her last election in 2022 by 13 points, which was the largest margin for a statewide Democrat there since 1988.
Her opponent in the Democrat primary is a political newbie named Graham Platner, who is an oyster farmer with a checkered past that includes a Nazi-linked tattoo and posts unsympathetic to women on Reddit. EMILYs List says that “Graham Platner’s comments blaming victims of sexual assault are unacceptable and disqualifying.”
But Platner is a progressive endorsed by Bernie Sanders, the senator for nearby Vermont. Progressives seem to be taking control of the Democrat Party away from liberal feminists.
After a poll showed Platner with a phenomenal 33-point lead over Mills, she suspended her campaign while saying it had run out of money. It appears that Mills had no chance of defeating Platner, despite his political inexperience.
Meanwhile, after just a few months on the job the approval rating of Virginia’s new Democrat Governor, Abigail Spanberger, has plummeted below 50%. The pollster State Navigate observes that she is the “most historically unpopular governor at this point in the most recent Virginia governors’ terms.”
The feminist wife of California Governor Gavin Newsom, Jennifer Siebel Newsom, is not helping his presidential ambitions. She insists on being called “First Partner” rather than the traditional title of “First Lady,” in order to push the DEI mindset.
She’s accused some Christians of “living in this silo, this evangelical, conservative silo that, ultimately, is just pulling us back as a country to a time and a place where we don’t deserve to be, and we’re not going to be.” Her husband tried to shut churches down in California during Covid, while allowing some businesses to remain open, and the Supreme Court ruled against that.
Jennifer Newsom added, “young women and fathers of daughters are awake now, and they’re woke, and they’re not going to let us go back.” Gavin Newsom and his woke wife are struggling in early polling among contenders for the 2028 Democrat presidential nomination, trailing behind Kamala Harris who lost last time.
Meanwhile, there is backlash by young men against feminists in South Korea, where birth rates have plummeted to the lowest in the world, thereby endangering the long-term survival of the country. A survey last year found that roughly 50% of men in their 20s and 30s agreed with the statement that “There needs to be a movement that honors masculinity and advocates for men’s rights.”
Over the last half-century feminists have passed many laws that continue to cause harm today. These include programs that profit from turning women against men, and family court procedures that deprive men of their rights of fatherhood.
In 2015 the Obama Administration fully placed women in combat roles in our military. Our ground troops and warships, which are now in harm’s way near Iran, are coed with women and men.
Phyllis Schlafly warned 50 years ago that ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment would result in court-ordered taxpayer-funded abortions, and she successfully blocked that terrible idea from ever becoming part of the U.S. Constitution. Feminists pretended that Phyllis did not know what she was talking about, but time has proven her correct.
On April 20, a 4-3 decision by the Pennsylvania Commonwealth Court ordered taxpayers of our fifth-largest state to start funding abortions there, based on its state ERA. The court used the same contorted logic that Phyllis predicted would be used by feminists to force the public, against the conscience of many, to pay for abortions.
As a state court decision grounded in state law, the U.S. Supreme Court cannot overturn this on appeal. Advocates for ERA back in the 1970s insisted this would not happen, and yet it just did.
Is SCOTUS Ducking Transgender School Cases?
If anyone feels that the transgender issue has been won by conservatives, think again. In April the U.S. Supreme Court ducked not one, but two, important cases in which public schools encouraged students to socially transition to the opposite sex without their parents’ knowledge or consent.
Social transitioning means adopting a name, pronoun, clothing, and gender expression suitable to the opposite sex. Many public schools have a policy of reinforcing such behavior by students and concealing it from their parents.
The latest denial of cert by SCOTUS was April 27, on a petition by parents which had been supported by many amicus briefs. Nearly half the states joined a brief in support of parents to be informed and have control over what public schools are doing to push their children toward transgender behavior.
In just the last two years, the Supreme Court has turned away five transgender cases in which parents object to the secret transitioning of their children in public schools. This latest denial by SCOTUS arose from a lawsuit initiated by Florida parents, in which the Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit sided with the public school despite the swing vote on the three-judge panel describing the school’s treatment of the parents as “shameful.”
In that case, a 13-year-old girl had delays in development and struggled with learning, and began doubting her gender. Her parents hired a private therapist and informed the school that they were opposed to social transitioning.
But even in Republican Florida, school officials were allowed to meet secretly with the child, label her as “nonbinary,” mandate that all school personnel refer to her as “they” or “them,” allow her to use boys’ bathrooms, and prohibit anyone from informing her parents. The school rejected the parents’ objections, denied their request to participate in this process, and refused the parents’ request for school records of meetings with their own daughter.
The school was acting pursuant to a parental-exclusion policy, which the Eleventh Circuit held was “executive” conduct that parents could not prevail against. In an opinion that the swing judge sided with but said “makes no sense,” the Court held that parents must first prove that an infringement on their rights “shocked the conscience” to compel a school to comply with the parents’ request.
A week earlier, the Supreme Court likewise refused a petition by two Massachusetts parents who had “repeatedly directed their public middle school not to interfere with the upbringing and mental healthcare plan for B.F., their eleven-year-old daughter.” Despite the parents’ objections, “school officials followed district protocol and secretly facilitated B.F.’s social gender transition anyway” and treated her “as though she were nonbinary.”
The entirely Democrat-appointed First Circuit panel sided with the public school by holding that an 11-year-old’s desires had priority over parental rights, and that this transgender issue supposedly did not concern her mental health. The public school even provided counseling to facilitate the gender transition of the child despite the parents’ objections, and the First Circuit sided with the school.
With these two latest denials of cert, the Supreme Court has now denied petitions for its review from anti-parent decisions by the First, Fourth, Seventh, Tenth, and Eleventh Circuits. In each case, often over dissent by a conservative appellate judge, the federal judiciary sided with schools as they secretly transition children without the knowledge or even over the objection of the parents.
Washington, D.C., is the transgender capital of the world and the Supreme Court justices and their clerks are immersed in that culture. The percentage of law students who are transgender also continues to climb, who become law clerks at the Supreme Court to do most of the work in screening cases for review.
The Supreme Court did intervene in an emergency appeal from a case in California, to reinstate a district court injunction against a California law that prevented public schools from notifying parents about their child’s gender identity or sexual orientation. Captioned Mirabelli v. Bonta, this case continues to be litigated in federal court in California and does not directly affect the rest of the country.
This case is based on a “religious obligation to raise their children in accordance with those beliefs,” the 6-3 Supreme Court wrote in temporarily siding with the parents. California’s opening brief is due on July 6 in the left-leaning Ninth Circuit, which has previously held against parents.
It was this same Ninth Circuit that infamously declared two decades ago that a parent’s right over her child’s upbringing “does not extend beyond the threshold of the school door.” Phyllis Schlafly then led such an uproar against that arrogant denial of parental rights that the court extraordinarily amended its decision to reword its much-criticized statement. SCOTUS then denied cert in that case, too.
The Bible Belongs in Public School Readings
A strong education includes reading from the greatest works of all time. A full understanding of history requires knowledge of the books that influenced leaders, thinkers, and decision-makers.
The Texas State Board of Education has released its tentative 53-page list of about 300 literary works that will be part of the public school curriculum for grades K through 12. Many familiar classics are on this list, including Charlotte’s Web, Animal Farm, and the humorous story by Mark Twain about the amazing jumping frog, which are for students prior to high school.
This list results from the enactment of HB1605 back in 2023, and will not take effect until 2030. A full seven years from the passage of this reform to its implementation is appalling.
The biblical excerpts on this reading list, which is not yet final, include the Golden Rule (which is not solely from the Bible), the Parable of the Prodigal Son, and the Road to Damascus, for Kindergarten through 3rd grade. Then there is a gap until 7th grade, when recommended readings include the Book of Psalms and the tale of Jonah and the Whale.
For high school, Bible readings are passages from David and Goliath, Lamentations, the Tower of Babel, Ecclesiastes, and the Book of Job. The Board should be criticized for recommending almost nothing from the New Testament.
The loudest protests are from those who oppose including anything at all from the Bible in public school reading lists. The Bible is the most influential and widely read book ever, and continues to rank first in readership annually.
The Bible should be listed #1 in every bestseller list, but it is kept off those lists because it wins every time. People are misled by weekly bestseller lists omitting the Bible at the top, which is the hottest seller now and has been ever since the invention of the printing press more than 500 years ago.
Sales of the Bible have been increasing, too, soaring to high levels with Gen Z who are even more interested in the Bible than older generations have been. In 2025, Bible sales reached new record highs in the U.S. and U.K., as U.S. sales totaled over 19 million copies, double the number sold in 2019.
In light of this, it is straightforward to include passages from the Bible on any list of required readings for public schools. Stories like the parable of the Prodigal Son, which is unique to the Bible and cannot be found in any prior works, are often cited and every educated person should be familiar with them.
There are threats of lawsuits to block the inclusion of any part of the Bible in a public school curriculum. Any such lawsuits will fail.
The Bible has been incorporated into great speeches like President Lincoln’s “House Divided” speech, where he used that Gospel metaphor to argue against slavery. Many of the greatest scientists of all time, such as Isaac Newton and Louis Pasteur, were avid readers of the Bible.
No one is forced to believe in the Bible or in any other reading assigned in school. Works by Leftists, such as Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, are routinely assigned to high school students and they are expected to understand, analyze, and repeat the themes of these controversial writings.
Unfortunately, too much liberal propaganda remains on this list for high school students, during their formative years. The Texas Board recommends Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, which uses the Salem Witch Trials in 1692 as an allegory for the congressional investigations of communism in the 1950s, after which Miller himself was held in contempt (later reversed) for refusing to identify the communists he knew.
Books that promote the LGBTQIA+ agenda are commonly assigned to students today, and are more controversial to most parents than anything in the Bible. The books preferred by liberals and atheists are also far less influential or quoted than the Bible is, and thus less likely to prepare a student to become a knowledgeable adult.
A significant segment of our society quotes from the Bible or cites biblical figures frequently, and students should receive an education that enables them to understand these references. When someone hears a suggestion that he “turn the other cheek,” he should be educated enough to understand immediately what that biblical expression means.
The Texas State Board of Education expressly states that students can opt out of any Bible reading based on religious or moral beliefs. It seems that Democrats are not really concerned about the rights of a few families who will be free to opt out, but instead are protesting that students whose parents want them to read from the Bible will be allowed to do so as part of public school curricula.
