Weeks before a Chinese military doctor applied for a patent on a COVID-19 vaccine in February 2020, federal bureaucrats in the United States were reviewing taxpayer-funded grants to China and flagged the doctor as a recipient.  Dr. Zhou Yusen, who held the rank of major general, was a researcher working under the Chinese Academy of Military Medical Science, which is associated with the People’s Liberation Army, according to emails obtained by the Oversight Project, a watchdog group. Zhou, who later died under unusual circumstances, was mentioned in emails between bureaucrats with the National Institutes of Health and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.  While the institutes awarded grants to China, Dr. Anthony Fauci was the director of the NIAID. Recently, outgoing Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard released newly declassified documents detailing how Fauci and other officials with the NIH and NIAID worked with an intelligence agency to prompt certain political narratives about COVID-19 and its origins.  Ping Chen, an NIH researcher, informed colleagues on Feb. 3, 2020 about Zhou. “The grants have the same Chinese collaborator, Dr. Zhou, Yusen, who is a researcher in the Beijing Institute of Microbiology and Epidemiology, an institute under the Academy of Military Medical Sciences (AMMS),” Chen wrote. The Academy of Military Medical Sciences worked with the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Chen added, “Dr. Zhou’s expertise and resources in China include his skills in developing animal models for viruses, such as Zika, and then successfully applying the models to evaluate therapeutics.” One of the NIAID grants to Zhou and his team of researchers to study Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) coronavirus (MERS-CoV) was issued in January 2019, according to the NIH. One grant was awarded in 2021. Another appears to date as far back as 2013.  On July 30, 2019, before the COVID-19 outbreak, Chen informed her colleagues about a researcher with the People’s Liberation Army who “seems to be a very successful scientist.” “Worth mentioning was a scientific presentation by a researcher in the Chinese PLA microbiology lab who studied how Zika virus causes microcephaly,” Chen wrote.  NIH-Wuhan-FOIADownload During a June 2024 hearing by House Oversight Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, then-Subcommittee Chairman Brad Wenstrup, R-Ohio, asked Fauci, “Does it concern you that U.S. taxpayer dollars would be going to someone who’s a high-ranking Chinese PLA official?” After back and forth, Fauci replied, “I don’t even know the person you’re talking about.” The 145 pages of documents show NIH officials were repeatedly surprised the Chinese government would not share information about the virus, Alex Finnegan, director of digital capabilities at the Oversight Project, noted. “They raised no objection when Chinese scientists deferred to government restrictions on information sharing—even though those same scientists were funded with U.S. taxpayer dollars,” Finnegan told the Daily Signal. “And, they naively wondered what it meant that the first Chinese laboratory to share the COVID-19 genome with the world was subsequently “closed for rectification.” Zhou’s Patent Application On Feb. 24, 2020, Zhou submitted one of the first COVID-19 vaccine patents, according to congressional reports and news reports. Developing a vaccine this early “would have required access to both the sequence of the SARS-CoV-2 and the live virus itself,” according to a 2024 report from The Heritage Foundation’s Commission on China and COVID-19, which was chaired by the current CIA Director John Ratcliffe.  A Senate report suggested the timeline makes little sense. “There is reason to believe Zhou was engaged in SARS-related coronavirus animal vaccine research with WIV researchers beginning no later than the Summer or early Fall of 2019,” stated an April 2023 report by the Republican staff of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee.  “Several experts assessed that Zhou likely would have had to start this vaccine development research no later than November 2019 to achieve the February patent submission date,” the Senate report continues.  In late 2022, Republicans on the House Select Committee on Intelligence released a report with a similar conclusion.  “To start the necessary work, General Zhou’s AMMS team would have required the entire SARS-CoV-2 genetic sequence, however, the Chinese claimed to have first sequenced the virus in early January of 2020,” House report says. “Taken at face value, that would mean that General Zhou would have developed his COVID19 vaccine in a matter of weeks after the virus was sequenced.” Zhou died in May 2020 after reportedly falling from the roof of the Wuhan Institute of Virology.  The House report goes on to reference the unusual circumstances of Zhou’s death.  “Notably, in the spring of 2020, as global COVID-19 cases surpassed 7 million and COVID-19 deaths surpassed 400,000, General Zhou reportedly died under mysterious circumstances,” the House report says.  “In light of the information above, it is plausible to hypothesize that General Zhou’s team of Fifth Institute researchers already possessed SARS-CoV-2 prior to the pandemic as part of bioweapons research; was working on vaccine-related experiments involving the virus at the WIV in 2019; and that a safety incident at the WIV led to its release into the world (presumably amplified by a super-spreader event at the Huanan Wet Market),” the report continued.

The internet delivers an endless stream of hardcore pornography into American homes and pockets through laptops and mobile phones. Porn once confined to seedy bookstores is now ubiquitous, free, and increasingly violent. Most youngsters, especially boys, encounter hardcore pornography before they can drive. Marriages strain under its influence. The sexual dance is compromised by suspicion and confusion. There is a growing perception that this cultural contagion is legally untouchable. That perception is wrong. General obscenity remains illegal under state and federal statutes. The real barrier to confronting the widespread pornography is not legal barriers—it is a lack of will and nerve to enforce the law. A new Heritage Foundation Backgrounder, “Is General Obscenity Still Illegal? A Postmortem on the Bush Obscenity Prosecution Task Force,” examines the last serious federal effort to deal with the scourge of pornography and charts a path forward. Created in 2005 under President George W. Bush, the Obscenity Prosecution Task Force (OPTF) marked the last national push to prosecute general, hardcore obscenity. Led by Director Brent Ward, a small team secured convictions in every case that reached conclusion—including high-profile wins against producers of obscene material like Rob Black (Extreme Associates), Max Hardcore, and others. The team of prosecutors wielded the record-keeping requirements of 18 U.S.C. section 2257 against a company called Girls Gone Wild, immediately prompting widespread industry compliance and deterring the use of children in pornography production. Every jury convicted defendants. The OPTF met strong headwinds. Despite the apparent creation of the task force to crack down on the growing porn industry, it was “calibrated so as to render obscenity enforcement only minimally effective,” as Ward wrote in a candid 2007 resignation letter to Attorney General Michael Mukasey, released for the first time as an Appendix to the Backgrounder. Prosecutors faced uncertain community standards, internet jurisdictional headaches, Supreme Court skepticism even toward child-protection measures, and techno-optimist resistance to any content regulation on the internet. Many U.S. attorneys slow-walked or refused to prosecute cases, fearing they would be labeled modern-day Comstocks. The FBI restricted investigations to the most extreme content, effectively creating a safe harbor for vast amounts of illegal material. The OPTF was starved of key resources and personnel. All this culminated in President Barack Obama’s quiet disbanding of the OPTF in 2011. Today, states largely allow general obscenity statutes to go unenforced, focusing only on child pornography. The result has been a de facto deregulation of pornography. The volume of internet pornography exploded, as did its depravity. As former Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, noted, the hiatus in prosecutions emboldened the industry to push ever more extreme products. Today, the costs are clearer than ever. Extensive research documents pornography’s harms: addiction-like patterns among users, distorted views of sex and relationships, escalation to more violent content, links to aggression (especially against women), and grooming pathways toward child sexual abuse material. A generation raised on internet pornography shows higher rates of sexual dysfunction, relationship dissatisfaction, and reluctance to marry. Sexual eros, once channeled toward commitment and family, has been pointed toward self-gratification. The legal foundation remains intact. Federal statutes from 1948 criminalize the production, distribution, mailing, and sale of obscene material—defined by prevailing Supreme Court precedent as patently offensive material that lacks serious literary, artistic, or scientific value under community standards and appeals to the prurient interest. These statutes apply to digital distribution via interstate commerce. And most states still maintain robust legal schemes criminalizing obscenity. The legal environment shows favorable shifts toward obscenity prosecutions. The Supreme Court’s 2025 decision in Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton upheld state age-verification requirements for porn sites, perhaps signaling greater openness to regulation protecting public morals. Nearly every state maintains task forces against child sex trafficking and online exploitation. Cultural critics of Big Tech and social media harms are gaining ground. Public understanding of pornography’s personal and societal damage only continues to grow. A revived OPTF—or similar state or local efforts—should not repeat past mistakes. It must target high-value distributors and platforms, operate with clear priorities and support from the attorney general, secure adequate resources, and coordinate across agencies. To have a practical effect, these prosecutions should be executed in conjunction with efforts to hold platforms accountable for obscene materials that they host. A revived OPTF should focus on material that violates contemporary community standards—standards that, in most American communities, still reject the worst excesses of the modern pornified internet. Enforcing existing obscenity law is the first step in defending human dignity and family formation from an industry that profits from vice. In the absence of that enforcement, societal harms have only continued to mount. The law is willing, but the flesh has been weak. The time for renewed state and federal leadership is now. Our OPTF postmortem shows what went wrong the last time obscenity prosecutions were taken seriously. Policymakers and prosecutors should ensure the OPTF’s failure does not become a permanent societal one.

A key House committee is moving forward with efforts to reform a federally funded scholarship program after extensive reporting from The College Fix uncovered the program’s overwhelming liberal bias. The House Committee on Education and Workforce advanced New York Rep. Elise Stefanik’s Truman Scholarship Clean House Act, which could soon be brought before the committee for a final vote. “Unfortunately, what started as a scholarship program to help cultivate our nation’s leaders has become a pipeline for liberal activists,” a committee spokesperson told the Daily Signal. “The Truman Foundation is receiving millions in taxpayer money, but it clearly promotes only one political viewpoint.” “We hope to see leadership take this bill to the floor so we can correct this wrong and finally return the program to its intended mission,” the committee spokesperson added. If enacted, Stefanik’s legislation would reform the taxpayer-funded scholarship by reshaping the scholarships board of directors while reforming their selection criteria and strategy. “My legislation would finally reform the Truman Scholarship Foundation to promote an ideologically diverse class of recipients and ensure that only law-abiding students receive these scholarships,” Stefanik previously said in a statement to the Daily Signal. Stefanik’s bill would also repeal and replace the scholarship’s current board of directors and executive secretary, allowing President Donald Trump to appoint new directors, who would then have to be confirmed by the Senate. The bill would also require candidates to receive the approval of a supermajority of the board in order “to prevent highly biased individuals from serving as an interviewer.” The scholarship began to attract attention after The College Fix uncovered that the taxpayer-funded program was riddled with liberal bias. In December 2025, Associate Editor of The College Fix Jennifer Kabbany testified before the committee and noted that only 29 out of the 653 scholarship recipients from 2015 to 2025 had been conservative. “The decade-long data reveals a taxpayer-funded program that, in practice, functions as a talent pipeline for the Democratic Party and liberal activist organizations,” Kabbany added during her testimony. In a recent statement to the Daily Signal, a different committee spokesperson also described the scholarship as a “talent pipeline for the Democratic Party and liberal activist organizations.” A recent analysis from The College Fix found that for 12 consecutive years, the majority of the scholarship’s recipients have overwhelmingly leaned left. The College Fix added that 2026 scholarship winners have worked or interned for candidates and politicians such as former Vice President Kamala Harris, Sens. Chris Coons, D-Del., Chris Murphy, D-Conn., Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., Jeff Merkley, D-Ore., Rep. Maggie Goodlander, D-N.H., and Gov. Matt Meyer, D-Del. Scholarship winners have also been involved with liberal organizations such as College Democrats, the Aspen Institute, Feminists of Color Collective, Rainbow Foster Home Initiative, Brennan Center for Justice, the Vermont Student Anti-Racism Network, and Revolución Violeta. Another analysis from The College Fix found that 75% of the Truman Scholarship’s regional reviewers are Democrats, while just 13% are Republicans. When looking at just red states, the awards are still overwhelmingly given to progressive students, the analysis added.

FIRST ON THE DAILY SIGNAL—The House Committee on Education and the Workforce is investigating a Brooklyn-based autism therapy provider over allegations of excessive billing practices that may be driving up healthcare costs for workers and employers. Committee Chairman Tim Walberg, R-Mich., and Rep. Rick Allen, R-Ga., requested extensive records from The Perfect Child LLC, a company that provides autism therapy services nationwide. The inquiry follows reporting that raised concerns about unusually large insurance claims and aggressive billing tactics in the fast-growing autism therapy industry. “Employer-sponsored health plans provide coverage to 154 million Americans and represent a significant component of employee compensation,” the letter reads. “Plan fiduciaries have a responsibility to ensure that plan assets are managed prudently and exclusively for the benefit of plan participants and beneficiaries.” “Allegations that health care providers may be submitting excessive charges, engaging in abusive reimbursement practices, or exploiting gaps in oversight raise significant concerns regarding the stewardship of plan assets,” the letter continues. The lawmakers cited a Wall Street Journal investigation that documented cases of providers charging steep fees, inflating service hours, and pursuing payment directly from families when insurers refused reimbursement. One widely reported example involved a New Jersey mother who received a bill exceeding $900,000 for her child’s therapy after initially being told there would be no out-of-pocket costs. Focus on Employer Health Plans The committee’s probe centers on how such billing practices affect employer-sponsored health plans, which cover roughly 154 million Americans and represent a major component of employee compensation. As the letter stated, under federal law, plan administrators have a fiduciary duty to ensure that funds are used prudently and for the benefit of workers and their families. Lawmakers warned that alleged abuses—such as excessive charges, inflated out-of-network reimbursement demands, and billing disputes—could undermine those responsibilities. The letter seeks to determine whether reimbursement arrangements in the autism therapy sector have “distorted incentives” and contributed to rising healthcare costs that may ultimately be passed on to employers and employees. Sweeping Document Request Lawmakers have requested Simcha Bendet, the company’s founder, to turn over a wide range of records dating back to Jan. 1, 2020 before July 20, 2026. Some of the records requested include revenue from employer-sponsored plans, as well as in-network and out-of-network claims, average amounts billed and collected for autism therapy services, and the 25 highest-reimbursed claims submitted by the company. Other records inquired about by the committee include records showing the highest annual charges for individual patients and data on patients receiving more than 20 hours of therapy in a single week. The committee also requested internal documents governing pricing, reimbursement practices, and collections, as well as any audits or compliance reviews related to billing. In addition, lawmakers are seeking information about how often the company pursued payment directly from families after insurance disputes, along with any instances in which claims were denied or flagged for potential fraud or abuse. Broader Industry Scrutiny The inquiry reflects growing concern in Washington over the rapid expansion of the autism therapy industry, particularly applied behavior analysis, or ABA, services. Once a niche field, autism therapy has become a multibillion-dollar business fueled by rising diagnoses and insurance mandates requiring coverage. But that growth has also brought increased scrutiny. Insurers report a sharp rise in investigations into potential fraud or abusive billing practices, including claims for services that were never provided, duplicate billing, and charges far above market rates. Some providers, particularly those operating outside insurer networks, have been able to charge significantly higher rates, with daily costs for a single patient reaching tens of thousands of dollars in some cases, according to reporting cited by the committee. Possible Next Steps Lawmakers emphasized that their goal is not to restrict access to autism services, which many families rely on, but to ensure that federal law adequately protects patients, workers, and employer-sponsored health plans. The committee said the information it gathers will help determine whether legislative changes are needed to address waste, fraud, and rising healthcare costs tied to autism therapy billing practices. The Perfect Child did not respond to The Daily Signal’s request for comment.

On Saturday, Americans celebrated the 250th anniversary of our nation’s founding. Shockingly, according to a detailed new report from the White House’s Domestic Policy Council, the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History (NMAH) did not. The report, titled “Saving America’s Story: How Ideological Capture at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History Erases Our Heritage,” was released Saturday night during America 250 commemorations. It concludes the museum has been captured by “radical, activist ideology that is fundamentally opposed to telling the noble, honest story of the great country we know and love.” Specifically, in regard to America’s 250th, the report stated: NMAH has refused to celebrate the Nation and its history. It has not created any exhibit dedicated to presenting a general narrative of American history or telling the story of any of our Founding Fathers, the Second Continental Congress, the Declaration of Independence, the American Revolutionary War, or the achievement of independence and the establishment of the constitutional rule of law—even in the 250th anniversary of the first of those pivotal events. According to the investigation, part of a review of the Smithsonian mandated by a March 2025 executive order from President Donald Trump, the problem goes far beyond Independence Day. Current leadership of the museum has “explicitly adopted an ideological framework that no longer treats the American story as a shared national inheritance to be taught or celebrated, but as a political instrument to divide, dispirit, and discourage our citizens.” Mike Gonzalez, the Angeles T. Arredondo E Pluribus Unum Senior Fellow at The Heritage Foundation, posted on X that the Smithsonian museums and places like it had taught people to “hate America.” The @NYCMayor Mamdanis and Darializa Chevaliers of this world don't come out of nowhere. They learn to hate America from places like the Smithsonian. She wiped her dirty hands on Old Glory becase schools, universities, and museums told her it was a symbol of evil. https://t.co/2wCxXnNfIt— Mike Gonzalez (@Gundisalvus) July 5, 2026 The National Museum of American History Designed to ‘Cement America’s Progress’ In 1955, then-Smithsonian Secretary Leonard Carmichael testified to Congress that, if authorized, NMAH would “tell the story of American national progress” and “cement America’s progress for citizen and foreign visitors alike.” “The museum we envision,” Carmichael said, “is planned to instill in each citizen a deepened faith in our country’s destiny as champion of individual dignity and enterprise. At the museum’s opening in 1964, then-NMAH Director Remington Kellogg declared the new facility was intended “to awaken in citizen and foreigner alike a clear understanding of the inspiring story of the United States—its origins, struggles, development, traditions, strength.” However, the current director has far different, more radical aims. Trashing the ‘Traditional Celebratory Narrative’ According to the report, Anthea M. Hartig, NMAH’s director since 2019, has explicitly stated that she sees history as a “prime tool of social justice” and one of her roles as connecting “research and scholarship to activism and advocacy.” Hartig has also stated that “we work to reframe the traditional celebratory narrative of U.S. history for visitors.” Hartig believed the museum profession had “to figure out” how “we’re going to” “problematize” the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence in 2026” and that “loving America is very complicated.” As a result, the report claims, the museum now “purposely presents America as a problematic country irredeemably conceived, founded by deeply flawed men, and still operating today as an instrument of systemic racism and oppression. In the Museum’s current telling, the country is, above all, defined by white supremacy, slavery, conquest, exclusion, hierarchy, racism, xenophobia, misogyny, and systemic injustice.” Five Key Findings The report made five key findings. 1. NMAH Fails to Substantively Present America’s Founders and Founding For example, a “visitor to the Museum today will find no major exhibit dedicated to America’s Founding era, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, other Founding Fathers, the Continental Congress, the Pilgrims, the Puritans, or major moments of the American Revolution, such as Washington’s crossing of the Delaware. However, you will find Benjamin Franklin, chiefly because of his anti-slavery efforts. 2. NMAH Has ‘Problematized’ the 250th Anniversary of America’s Founding The report documents how museum leadership stated that the 250th anniversary should be “problematized.” For “Critical Social Justice” theorists, this refers to the process of highlighting alleged “oppressions” within a given subject to “deconstruct, disqualify, and discredit the prevailing narrative on that subject.” For NMAH, this means American history should be reframed away from an “America First mentality” and an “Anglo-centric” focus on its founding, including highlighting the “gaps” in the Declaration of Independence rather than its unprecedented affirmation of mankind’s unalienable rights. 3. NMAH Removed ‘American History’ From Its Mission Statement to ‘Get Out of the ‘America First’ Mentality‘ Removing the “America First mentality” included replacing “American history” and “infinite richness” in the museum’s mission statement with language about empowering people to create “a more just and compassionate future” by exploring “the complexity of our past.” 4. NMAH Has Abandoned Historical Scholarship for Political Activism The report notes that the museum’s interpretive plan directs staff to, “whatever the topic,” tie exhibits back to a set of seven “core issues of our time”—specifically, race/identity, gender/sexuality, climate change, immigration/migrations, economic inequality, technological change, and nationalism/globalism—as part of its “commitment to relevance.” This means reshaping, in a woke manner, any subject, be it democracy, entertainment, immigration, childhood, women’s labor, sports, or early American settlement. This is why visitors would see LGBTQ-centric displays alongside R2-D2 and Dorothy’s ruby slippers. 5. The Smithsonian Has Not Met Its Obligations to the American People The report concludes that “the Smithsonian Institution, and the National Museum of American History in particular, under its current leadership and current interpretive ideology, cannot be trusted to tell America’s story honestly and in a way that is inspiring, unifying, and worthy of our great republic.”