Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche rescinded an order establishing the “anti-weaponization” fund, paving the way for his confirmation ahead of a key Senate committee vote on Tuesday, after Republican senators stalled his nomination over concerns about the fund. Republican Senators John Cornyn of Texas and Thom Tillis of North Carolina had held up Blanche’s attorney general nomination while seeking written assurances that the Justice Department would not move forward with the fund, which critics have derided as a slush fund for Trump’s supporters. “The Department of Justice today announced that the Acting Attorney General rescinded the May 18, 2026 Order that established “The Anti-Weaponization Fund,” according to a copy of the order by Blanche on X on Sunday. The $1.8 billion fund was created as part of a legal settlement between ​Trump and the Justice Department, to resolve his $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS over allegedly mishandling his tax records. Supporters say the fund was intended to compensate individuals they argue were unfairly targeted by the federal government, while critics said it could direct taxpayer money to Trump allies, including those who assaulted police officers during the Jan. 6, 2021 Capitol riot. PAST TAX CLAIMS The Republican senators had also objected to a Justice Department order that barred the Internal Revenue Service from pursuing any audits into past tax claims for Trump, his relatives and his companies for any tax returns filed before May 18.  “Sen. Cornyn has reached an agreement with the Department of Justice, which will be issuing a formal order permanently terminating the anti-weaponization fund and making clear in a binding written document that the scope of the audit settlement is limited to only the plaintiffs, including the President, and the IRS,” Cornyn’s spokesperson Natalie Yezbick said in an emailed statement to Reuters. Blanche’s order stated that the tax order “applied by its terms only retroactively.” “The Acting Attorney General stands by all of his July 15, 2026 Senate Judiciary Committee testimony, including answers to questions asked by Senator Cornyn related to the scope and applicability of the May 19, 2026 Order,” the DOJ statement shared by Blanche said, referring to the tax audit order. Trump had said as recently as last week that the “anti-weaponization” fund was dead.  However, the president said over the weekend that Blanche would stay in his current acting role if not confirmed by the Senate and added that he would also push Congress to codify the proposed fund. Tillis, whose term ends in January, wrote on Saturday that Blanche would not be confirmed because of Trump’s reversal, although he hoped that the matter could be resolved by Tuesday. He did not reply to a further request for comment.  Blanche has served as acting attorney general since April, when Trump fired Pam Bondi. (Reporting by Shubham Kalia and Ananya Palyekar in Bengaluru; Editing by Lincoln Feast, Kirsten Donovan)

Bishop Robert Barron‘s new feature-length film, “Heaven in Stone and Glass,” begins with a scene of Notre-Dame cathedral in flames. I visited Paris three times before the devastating 2019 fire, and the cathedral was the one place I returned to on every trip. Watching the building burn was no easier on a movie screen than it was seven years ago. The moment isn’t meant to make you mourn, however, but rather to cherish and appreciate the beauty of the great Gothic cathedral constructed during the Middle Ages. Today, Notre-Dame is once again restored and open daily for Mass, welcoming the Catholic faithful and tourists from around the world. The fire that captivated and shocked many like me inspired Barron to create Word on Fire’s first cinematic production. “Heaven in Stone and Glass” premiered Saturday night at the Museum of the Bible ahead of a two-night theatrical release on Sept. 20 and 23. Tickets went on sale Friday. The film spends 90 minutes exploring five Gothic cathedrals: Notre-Dame, Chartres, Reims, Amiens, and Saint-Denis. Barron and the filmmaking team from Spirit Juice Studios made something that serves not just as a history lesson but also a call to action. Why the Fire Shook the World Barron began work on the film shortly after the Notre-Dame fire in 2019. He was serving as auxiliary bishop for the Archdiocese of Los Angeles at the time. He wrote the script but filming was delayed by the COVID-19 pandemic and his 2022 appointment as bishop of the Diocese of Winona-Rochester in Minnesota. The panel discussion that followed Saturday’s screening returned to what the world’s reaction to the fire revealed. “A lot of buildings come and go. A lot of buildings burn down,” said the Rev. Steve Grunow, CEO of Word on Fire Catholic Ministries. “But this one—when it was burning, everyone was trembling. And then we didn’t just knock it down and put something in its place. People from all over the world contributed to the restoration of that building. And I think it’s because most of us knew intuitively, if that goes, we are all diminished in some way.” A man watches Notre-Dame engulfed in flames on April 15, 2019. (Geoffroy Van Der Hasselt/AFP via Getty Images) For Barron, that instinct is an argument against the relativism he says has hollowed out the culture. “If you take something seriously, you stop being a relativist,” he said. “All this appeal to relativism and ‘my truth, your truth.’ We say those things as long as we don’t really care. Once we care about something, we get very interested in the objectivity of it.” That, he said, is why he thinks young people are turning to the faith in larger numbers today: “That drab materialism and relativism, it produces no energy in the soul.” Centered on the Bible Barron was joined on stage by Grunow; Rob Kaczmark and Branden Stanley of Spirit Juice Studios; and moderator Matthew Petrusek of the Word on Fire Institute. Asked what role scripture plays in the cathedrals, Barron recounted his years as a doctoral student in Paris. “I got on the train and I went down to Chartres by myself,” he recalled. “I left on a Friday, checked into a hotel, and I spent the entire weekend with a really good guidebook—not a tourist thing, but a really good book on Chartres—and looked at everything. I went to every window, every sculpture. I climbed the towers.” What stayed with him wasn’t only the architecture. “My enduring memory of that was how it stirred my biblical imagination,” Barron said. He credited that weekend with eventually producing the Word on Fire Bible and a two-volume Old Testament commentary. “A lot of that started with Chartres Cathedral,” he said. “So the Bible is everything.” The Cathedral of Saint-Denis in Paris. (Word on Fire) Grunow argued that most treatments of the cathedrals miss the role of the Bible. “When you read a book about the history of the cathedrals or you see some other documentaries about them, they’ll stress the architecture, the mathematics of it and things like that, but not that which is the condition for its possibility, which is biblical revelation,” he said. “You take the scriptures, you take the revelation of God in the scriptures away from Western civilization—it’ll fall apart, but it also won’t make any sense.” Bishop Barron: ‘I Want to Play’ Petrusek pressed the panel on Word on Fire’s own warning against religious nostalgia—the temptation to look at a film like “Heaven in Stone and Glass” and simply wish for the past. Barron answered with a story about being 6 or 7 years old and going to his first Detroit Tigers baseball game with his father. “I was caught up in the beauty of the place and the feel of the colors and the sounds and the play of these Detroit Tigers,” he said. “But what it led me to was: I want to play. I knew perfectly well I couldn’t play with the Detroit Tigers, but I started Little League the following summer.” “When you see a great work of art like Chartres—well, I want to play. I want to make something beautiful. I want to contribute,” Barron said. He traced his own work at Word on Fire back to a jet-lagged first day as a doctoral student in Paris when he dropped his bags and walked to Notre-Dame. “I stood there for a half hour at the rose window,” he said. “Those are the deepest roots of Word on Fire. I saw all this great stuff, and, well, all right—I want to play.” Smoke billows and flames burn from the roof of the landmark Notre-Dame Cathedral in central Paris on April 15, 2019. (Francois Guillot/AFP via Getty Images) Grunow was blunter about the alternative: “Nostalgia is dangerous business when it gets its hold of religion, because if we’re living in the past, we’re living with this kind of idealized unreality. And it usually comes from a lack of confidence that meaning and purpose can be found in the present.” Then he turned the point around. “The evangelical challenge of a film like this is not to live in the past,” Grunow said. “Look what they did with the lack of resources they had, with the lack of technological know-how, with the lack of modern science and pharmacology and all these ideas. They didn’t have any of those things. And they raised these things up and they pushed civilization forward.” He added: “So too it should be with us. What are we building and creating? Let’s get at it.” Making the Movie Chicago-based Spirit Juice Studios, a Catholic video production company, spent more than 45 days shooting the film at the five cathedrals in France, Stanley said. “No matter how much time we spent in them, there was always something new to learn,” he said. “By the end of it, it’s like, ‘Wow, I never noticed that before.'” To convey the buildings’ long history, the team shot sequences on actual Super 8 film. “Certainly there are no videos from the 1700s or the 1600s, as cool as that might have been,” Stanley said. “But we do have the ability to shoot some of it on film.” Another choice was purely practical. Barron, it turns out, likes to walk fast. “When we were filming those scenes in the labyrinth, there was a conversation beforehand, and it was: shoot it in slow motion,” Stanley said, to the audience’s laughter. Bishop Robert Barron at the labyrinth in Chartres Cathedral. (Word on Fire) Kaczmark, who conducts informal asides with Barron throughout the film, said he was after something that captured candid moments. “When things are authentic, there’s a sense of connection you have to it,” Kaczmark said. He recalled arriving in France during a difficult stretch in his own life: “I had been going through just some more challenging things in life leading up to the trip. These cathedrals, they’re beautiful, but for most of us are so far away, and I wanted to bring in the human aspect—when someone watches this, especially if they’re going through something.” The film doesn’t shy away from the stranger parts of the cathedrals. Barron spends time on the gargoyles, the demons, and other unusual carvings that medieval builders put in plain sight. “Yes, the saints and the sinners, the good and the bad, the ugly—it’s all in God’s creation and somehow in God’s providence fits,” Barron said. He added: “The loss of a sense of humor is a sign that you’ve lost your religion.” Stanley said keeping that material in the film was a matter of trust with the audience. “If we get to the point where we remove everything that could offend someone … people feel we’re giving them only part of the story. You lose trust,” he said. “You lose the ability to show them how to actually live in reality.” What They Want From You Petrusek closed by asking each panelist what he hopes audiences do after the credits roll. Stanley: “Making a change in our church, making a change in our country doesn’t start at the top. It starts with all of us. It starts with little decisions and little calls to holiness.” Kaczmark: “God works in those little times. And it’s really the people in your life. It’s your family members. … In the small ways you do grand things.” Grunow: “Manifest your faith to this culture as Christians—less by arguing and more by building and creating a civilization that represents Christ.” Barron: “Come closer to the Lord. The cathedral is meant to be a great symbol of Christ. … The whole purpose is to Christify you. When you go into a building like that, you’re being Christified. You’re being turned into the image of Jesus.” “That’s what I would hope,” Barron concluded. “Watch the movie and say, ‘I want to enter more deeply into the mystery of Christ.'” Word on Fire, working in tandem with Fathom Entertainment, has set a goal of getting “Heaven in Stone and Glass” into 1,000 theaters. Based on what I saw Saturday night, I hope Barron exceeds that goal—so others can see what people built for the glory of God and be inspired to build something themselves.

People tend to assume history moves in a straight line. Atrocities like genocide and slavery are confined to the distant past as progress marches permanently forward. But that simply cannot be the case. “The line separating good and evil passes … through all human hearts,” as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn reminds us. The battle for justice is ever ongoing: replete with setbacks, contradictions, and disappointments. Human beings are never beyond acts of evil, and so regimes are never unfailingly noble. Americans are often guilty of progressive assumptions when it comes to our own story. While America is a comparatively young nation, to us, history all happened long ago and gets lumped together in a generic past. Divisions between generations blur in our memory. We forget that the Founding Fathers knew slavery was morally abhorrent. Though unable to abolish it, they took measures to set it on the course of ultimate extinction. The Northwest Ordinance of 1787 banned slavery in the new territories. Many thought eliminating the slave trade would cut off the head of the snake. Congress ended that trade the day it could, and President Thomas Jefferson signed the bill into law. Despite these victories, technology and ideas altered things, as is often the case. The invention of the cotton gin disrupted economic expectations. A new generation of southerners, led by John C. Calhoun, rose to argue that slavery was not a necessary evil but a positive good. One of the youngest of the framers, James Madison, was still alive when Calhoun was spreading his constitutional theories. The Father of the Constitution opposed Calhoun’s view, writing that, “The Patrons of this new heresy will attempt, in vain to mask its antirepublicanism.” Still, Calhoun’s false statesmanship did untold damage. Alexander Stephens and the Civil War came against this backdrop. Stephens’ Cornerstone Speech brings the convictions of the Founding Fathers and his generation into sharp and open conflict. Stephens was vice president of the Confederacy, and his 1861 remarks came just a few weeks before the first shots at Fort Sumter. Throughout, Stephens contrasts the Confederate Constitution with the American Constitution. For example, the president would serve for six years but was limited to a single term. More importantly, Stephens lays out the notions upon which his society will be built, comparing them to the principles of the Founders. The Founders believed in human equality. Stephens explained that Jefferson and other “leading statesmen” held that: “The enslavement of the African was in violation of the laws of nature; that it was wrong in principle, socially, morally, and politically. It was an evil they knew not well how to deal with, but the general opinion of the men of that day was that, somehow or other in the order of Providence, the institution would be evanescent and pass away.” Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and others surmised that America would be terribly punished for the institution of slavery. Forever inscribed on the southwest wall of the Jefferson Memorial is the warning, “Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just; that his justice cannot sleep forever.” Yet according to Stephens, the assumption of equality of the races was an error: “It was a sandy foundation, and the government built upon it fell when the “storm came and the wind blew.” Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and normal condition.” Stephens’ words are jarring and repellent. But they are worth reading to understand the competing causes of the Founding and the Civil War. Disputes throughout America’s history have often revolved around the meaning and role of the Declaration of Independence. It calls to Americans when we are not living up to our principles and unites us in the shared responsibility to realize our aspirations. Because of that, those who seek to transform America, like Stephens, simply cannot leave that document in place. It must be distorted, dismissed, or replaced. The Confederacy’s secession and the Civil War it precipitated was the most violent of attempts to subvert the Declaration. But guarding against false interpretations of the Declaration is an ongoing battle. Progressives, the authors of the 1619 Project, and others attack its precepts and centrality, directly or by redefinition. That is one of the reasons it is essential that citizens know our primary source documents, history, and landmark speeches. We read and dedicate ourselves to the word because words unify us, inspire us, and define our civilization. “We hold these truths … ”

Democrats across the country are opposing President Donald Trump’s enforcement of immigration law, arguably recreating the nullification crisis that helped spark the Civil War—and this neo-Confederate trend just received a major boost from an influential union. The American Federation of Teachers, a union that bankrolls Democrat candidates and left-leaning causes, approved a resolution opposing Immigration and Customs Enforcement at its annual convention in July, and that radical resolution encourages further opposition to immigration law, pitting state and local authorities against the federal government. Minnesota Democrat Gov. Tim Walz has threatened to deploy his state’s National Guard troops against federal agents. Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., claimed federal immigration enforcement was an “occupying force.” Virginia Democrat Gov. Abigail Spanberger signed laws attempting to dictate how federal agents enforce the law in the Old Dominion. Governors like JB Pritzker of Illinois, or Gavin Newsom of California, or Tina Kotek of Oregon, openly say that immigration law should not be enforced in their jurisdictions. Many states and cities have directed state and local law enforcement not to cooperate with ICE when it comes to removing illegal aliens. These arguments echo the doctrine of nullification, the theory that states can refuse to cooperate with—or even actively obstruct—the enforcement of federal law. South Carolina advanced this theory in the Nullification Crisis of 1832, and it formed part of the bedrock for the South’s secession movements leading up to the Civil War. Today’s “sanctuary” movement differs in many respects, but it also aims to frustrate federal enforcement by mobilizing state and local power against national policy. The AFT’s Institutional Support for Neo-Confederate Opposition The union adopted a resolution on July 18 stating that it supports “efforts by governors, attorneys general, mayors, and other state and local leaders across the nation to protect residents from ICE.” The resolution also pledges to call on elected leaders to “use every tool in their toolbox” to: ban ICE from sensitive locations, ban ICE from conducting immigration enforcement without a judicial warrant, prevent local and state law enforcement coordination with ICE, and provide resources and training for “state employees” to “properly defend against and respond to unlawful actions from ICE agents.” In a particularly brazen suggestion, the resolution calls on officials to “safeguard public school districts against enrollment declines… through state intervention and financial assistance.” While the union suggests that ICE is breaking the law, immigration enforcement is a civil matter, not a criminal one, so ICE agents do not need to acquire judicial warrants to carry out raids—administrative warrants are sufficient. The resolution aligns America’s second-largest teachers union with a campaign to obstruct federal immigration enforcement. Why AFT Matters Americans can disagree on immigration policy, but many of us wonder why a teachers union is devoting convention time to opposing federal immigration enforcement rather than addressing reading scores, absenteeism, classroom discipline, or teacher recruitment. The American Federation of Teachers has long supported Democrats and leftist causes. Many prominent Democrats, including House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, addressed its annual convention in July. The union’s political action arm has contributed to a wide swath of Democrat candidates in races across the country, according to public records analyzed by the parental rights group Defending Education. It contributed $500,000 to Democrat Abigail Spanberger’s 2025 gubernatorial campaign in Virginia, for example. The American Federation of Teachers “functions as nothing more than a money-laundering operation for the Democrat Party,” Corey DeAngelis, a research fellow for education policy at the Heritage Foundation, told the Daily Signal. “Year after year, 99% of the contributions from Randi Weingarten’s union go to Democrats. She herself held an at-large position at the DNC for decades.” “The AFT isn’t a labor organization focused on classrooms,” he added. “It’s an arm of the Democratic Party that uses teachers’ dues to advance partisan priorities, fund activist groups, and push policies that have nothing to do with improving education. This ICE resolution is just the latest example.” Lora Ries, director of Heritage’s border security and immigration center, noted that “the Left has a long list of ‘sensitive areas’ where they claim ICE shouldn’t operate in or near, which would render ICE unable to do its job—and that is the point.” The union gives Democrats support for the neo-Confederate opposition to Trump’s enforcement of immigration law. So long as influential leftist groups like the American Federation of Teachers encourage this divisive lawlessness, the tension will only get worse.

NEW YORK, Aug 2 (Reuters) – U.S. Representative Max Miller of Ohio “is a danger” to his ex-wife and should not serve in Congress, U.S. Senator Bernie Moreno, a fellow Ohio Republican, said on Sunday while addressing abuse allegations lodged against his former son-in-law.   Moreno, whose daughter Emily was married to Miller until last year, said he owed it to his family to “speak the truth now” about Miller. Calling the previous two years “pure hell” for his family, Moreno wrote in a social media post that Miller “is a danger to my daughter, and I hold my breath every minute he has custody of my granddaughter.” “If there are any basic standards of character required to hold elected office, Max Miller fails them. He should not serve in the House of Representatives,” Moreno wrote. “I believe Max Miller needs to seek professional help to end the clear pattern of abuse he has left in his wake. I believe he should not be free to continue endangering others until he does.”  Miller has denied the allegations. His spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment, but in a social media post of his own on Sunday, Miller disputed his ex-wife’s allegations in a video recording and vowed to remain in his congressional race. Moreno’s broadside against Miller marked a significant departure from his previous attempts to sidestep a drumbeat of abuse allegations engulfing the Republican congressman. Emily Moreno has alleged that Miller burned her with boiling hot water and physically abused her and their toddler daughter. Moreno previously said he would “not litigate these matters in the media” and that he would prioritize the safety and well-being of his daughter and granddaughter. While the senator hoped to keep the matter private, Miller’s “increasingly erratic and dangerous behavior has made that impossible,” Moreno wrote on Sunday. Miller and Moreno both owe their political rise to close associations with President Donald Trump. The allegations against Miller threaten to put what had been a safe Republican seat in play for Democrats in this November’s midterm elections. Democrats only need to flip a handful of seats to regain control of the House of Representatives, where Republicans currently hold a 218 to 214 edge, with three seats vacant.  (Reporting by Mike Spector in New York; Additional reporting by Tim Reid in Washington and Ismail Shakil in Ottawa; Editing by Bill Berkrot)