It should never have happened in the first place -- but at least Christian McGhee and his family can smile a bit after his school was forced to pay $20,000 in a settlement agreed to late last week. McGhee, 16, was suspended for three days last year by his North...

Politics Americans Deserve Answers on Quiet Skies Surveillance The White House is ending the unconstitutional program. Now, the public deserves to know why it ever existed. (Photo by STEFANI REYNOLDS/AFP via Getty Images) Yesterday, Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem announced the end of the Transportation Security Agency’s Quiet Skies surveillance program. This is another critical action taken by President Donald Trump and his administration to reverse the last administration’s weaponization of the federal government against the American people.   I applaud their efforts—because it never should have existed in the first place. Quiet Skies was an unconstitutional dystopian nightmare masquerading as a security tool costing the American taxpayers $200 million a year. And what did we get for it? According to DHS, the Quiet Skies program failed to stop a single terrorist attack since it was created. Instead, taxpayers are footing the bill for a surveillance program that turned its watchful eye inward—targeting Americans who had committed no crimes, violated no laws, and in many cases were government officials themselves.  You don’t have to take my word for it. Look at the facts my office uncovered through its investigation into the Quiet Skies program. According to Department of Homeland Security documents I obtained, former Congresswoman and now Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard was surveilled under the program while flying domestically in 2024. Federal Air Marshals were assigned to monitor Gabbard and report back on their observations including her appearance, whether she used electronics, and whether she seemed “abnormally aware” of her surroundings. She wasn’t suspected of terrorism. She wasn’t flagged by law enforcement. Her only crime was being a vocal critic of the administration. What an insanely invasive program—the gall of Big Brother actually spying on a former congresswoman. It’s an outrageous abuse of power.  According to reports, an Air Marshal was assigned to a commercial airline pilot actively flying a plane with passengers and was told to continue the mission even after raising concerns to his Incident Coordination Section. Another Air Marshal reported that his team was assigned to surveil a Department of Homeland Security Enforcement and Removal Operation during a commercial flight while the officer was deporting an illegal alien. It was the officer that triggered the Quiet Skies list, not the individual being deported.  And perhaps the most absurd of all, the wife of a Federal Air Marshal was labeled a “domestic terrorist” after attending a political rally. She had a documented disability and no criminal record. Still, she was placed under Special Mission Coverage and tracked on commercial flights—even when accompanied by her husband, who is himself a trained federal law enforcement officer. She remained on the watchlist for more than three years. To make matters worse, this case resulted in the diversion of an Air Marshal from a high-risk international mission. This is not how a free society operates. This is not “security.” This is abuse. And yet for years, the government stonewalled congressional oversight into the Quiet Skies Program. Under the previous administration, I sent letter after letter requesting answers and records. I was ignored. I commend Secretary Noem for abolishing the Quiet Skies program. But ending the program alone isn’t enough. The American people deserve answers. They deserve transparency. And they deserve accountability. Who approved surveillance on Tulsi Gabbard? Who else in government was surveilled? Were other members of Congress, administration officials, or political opponents targeted because of constitutionally protected speech? Were federal law enforcement resources diverted from high-risk international threats just to monitor people attending political rallies? I’ve demanded the names of the officials involved. I’ve asked for every unredacted record, every standard operating procedure, and every internal communication that guided this program.  If this program was weaponized against political dissent, the American people must know.  I am hopeful that Secretary Noem will cooperate fully with my ongoing investigation into the Quiet Skies program and quickly produce all of the records I’ve requested. There is no excuse for further delay. The American people deserve to understand the full extent of the abuses that occurred under the now-defunct Quiet Skies program people. This is about much more than the Transportation Security Administration or air travel. It’s about the fundamental relationship between the citizen and the state. Are Americans free to move, speak, associate, and protest without being tracked, followed, and reported on by their own government? We were told post-9/11 surveillance programs were necessary to protect us from foreign threats. But when those tools are repurposed and weaponized to target American citizens on domestic flights—when whistleblowers are retaliated against, and oversight is obstructed—then the system is no longer about protection. It’s about control. I will keep pressing until every question is answered. I will demand that no similar program takes its place under a different name. I will not stop until the American people get the full story and can rest assured that this weaponization will not happen again. Liberty and security are not mutually exclusive. When government hides behind secrecy to justify surveillance of its own people, it has gone too far. We can—and must—do better! The post Americans Deserve Answers on Quiet Skies Surveillance appeared first on The American Conservative.

It was a few minutes before 10 p.m. Eastern time on Tuesday, June 6, 1944, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt began his radio broadcast to an anxious nation. Earlier that day, he had held a press conference for 180 reporters about the D-Day invasion. About its scale and seriousness. Special editions of newspapers across the country led with a similar headline: The war in Europe had begun. Our soldiers, airmen and seamen, Americans learned that day, were embarked on an invasion of massive proportions to liberate the European Continent from Adolf Hitler’s war machine. They crawled out of the sea and dropped from the sky—160,000 Allied troops in all landed along a heavily fortified, 50-mile stretch of French coastline, supported by more than 5,000 ships and 13,000 aircraft. The stakes could not have been higher: The fate of the free world hung in the balance. By that evening, a solemnity fell over the country. A stillness. As if the world had suddenly stopped. Churches filled up. Families huddled together. Roosevelt was finally ready to address the nation on the true mass medium of the day: radio. Like Winston Churchill, he was a master of the medium, and he understood the gravity of the moment. Roosevelt also understood that it would take more than the mobilization of our industrial power to beat back the forces of Hitler. In this radio address, he hoped to harness our spiritual power, too. Which is why his 535-word, six-minute radio address took the form of a prayer. Roosevelt wrote it with assistance from his daughter, Anna, and her husband and distributed it to newspapers across the country so Americans could pray along with him. At 9:57 that night, Roosevelt’s prayer began: Almighty God: Our sons, pride of our Nation, this day have set upon a mighty endeavor, a struggle to preserve our Republic, our religion, and our civilization, and to set free a suffering humanity. Lead them straight and true; give strength to their arms, stoutness to their hearts, steadfastness in their faith. Roosevelt then shifted his prayer to the suffering, loss and grief that were likely to come. Men’s souls will be shaken with the violences of war. Some will never return. Embrace these, Father, and receive them, Thy heroic servants, into Thy kingdom. Roosevelt then turned to Americans at home, and to their prayer life—and faith walks. O Lord, give us Faith. Give us Faith in Thee; Faith in our sons; Faith in each other; Faith in our united crusade. Let not the keenness of our spirit ever be dulled. This is how Roosevelt ended things. It may be the most powerful and purposeful part of any public address by an American wartime president. With Thy blessing, we shall prevail over the unholy forces of our enemy. Help us to conquer the apostles of greed and racial arrogancies. Lead us to the saving of our country, and with our sister Nations into a world unity that will spell a sure peace, a peace invulnerable to the schemings of unworthy men. And a peace that will let all of men live in freedom, reaping the just rewards of their honest toil. Thy will be done, Almighty God. Amen.” Over 100 million people worldwide heard Roosevelt’s plea over the airwaves, including many living in Nazi-occupied Europe. One was a teenage Jewish girl sequestered in a secret annex (a small attic) in Amsterdam. When she heard the American president’s voice invoking “almighty God,” it gave her hope. Her name was Anne Frank. “The best part of this news is that I have the feeling friends are approaching,” she wrote in her diary. “We have been oppressed by those terrible Germans for so long that the thought of delivery fills us with confidence. “I may yet be able to go back to school in September or October,” she ended the day’s entry. She never returned to school. She died at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in February or March 1945. More than 4.400 Americans never returned home from that opening day of fighting. By the time the battle for Normandy had been won, 29,000 men, mostly young, never returned home One soldier who never came back was John Lapadula, a 17-year-old from West New York, New Jersey. He volunteered for the Army the moment he was old enough to do so. He was my mother’s only brother and her father’s only son. The uncle I never knew. He was one of 416,000 Americans who died defending the world from tyranny by war’s end. America’s industrial strength and our energy resources no doubt played a part in the Allied victory. So did the courage and selflessness of our troops, Black and white and from every ethnic background, along with the sacrifices of millions on the home front, including an army of women known as Rosie the Riveters. But the spiritual power—the prayer power—of our people was a resource too. And it was unleashed by Roosevelt that night in 1944 in what would become America’s largest mass prayer in our history—and world history too. Originally published by Newsweek. We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal. The post FDR’s D-Day Prayer: The Largest Mass Prayer in US and World History appeared first on The Daily Signal.