The fruits of another woke revolution are here—and even California academics are fed up. In May 2020, weeks into the nation’s shutdown and days before George Floyd’s death, the University of California regents voted that applicants to the prestigious public higher education system would no longer need to submit SAT or ACT test scores. “I believe the test is a racist test,” said Jonathan “Jay” Sures, one of the regents. “There’s no two ways about it.” The initial vote, which was cast during the tenure of former Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano as UC president, suspended the test score requirement through 2024. A lawsuit settled in 2021 required the University of California system, which serves over 230,000 undergraduate students, to not consider standardized tests for admissions through 2025. But now, over 900 members of the University of California faculty have had enough, according to the UC Student Success site, which hosts an explosive new letter. Hundreds of professors, including dozens of STEM department chairs, ask in the letter that the UC system start requiring STEM major applicants to submit either math SAT or ACT scores. Why? Because the status quo is so broken that UC faculty are now teaching middle school—or even elementary—math skills to students old enough to vote. At the University of California, San Diego, the number of students who had math skills below high school levels increased thirtyfold from 2020 to 2025, according to a 2025 report from a working group at the university. One out of 12 students didn’t even have math skills at a middle school level. Yet looking at high school transcripts didn’t reveal how behind these students were. Forty-two percent of those students who were in the 2024 class and unable to do middle school math had taken precalculus or calculus in high school. Another 44% had taken a statistics class. Without any SAT or ACT scores to provide context, admissions officers had no way of realizing how many students were taking classes but not bothering to learn anything. As a result, UC San Diego is now teaching remedial math classes. Nor is it the only UC facing such challenges. “[F]or three consecutive years, 20%-30% of UC Berkeley first-semester calculus students who participated in mathematical diagnostic testing displayed severe preparation deficits,” states the letter. Furthermore, these students’ poor grasp of math has implications for better-educated students. “[T]he widening spread between underprepared and well-prepared students creates polarized courses, weakening the foundation available to many students and making it harder to teach at the level required for advanced STEM work,” states the letter. “UC is increasingly unable to provide its students with the education needed to become leaders in California’s scientific, technological, and economic future.” But hey, even if California’s economy careens because there’s no workforce, at least the UC system is diverse, right? Well, actually, it’s not so simple. Sure, people blithely slap the racist label on standardized tests, as Jonathan “Jay” Sures did in 2020. But the reality is significantly more complicated. “The SAT was originally designed to identify students who might not have had high [high school grade point averages] or attended elite or well-resourced high schools but who showed academic promise,” wrote members of a University of California task force in a January 2020 report. “The SAT and ACT appear to play that role for many students at the UC today.” Effectively, students who weren’t necessarily getting super-high GPAs at their high schools but were scoring well on standardized tests were still able to get into the UC system thanks to those test scores. Among the 2018 class, the task force identified about 22,000 who were admitted due to their SAT scores. “Of these students for whom the SAT score was decisive in guaranteeing them admission to UC, 4,931 were low-income and 5,704 were first-generation college [students],” the report states, adding that “5,609 were underrepresented minorities (URMs), comprised of 4,442 Latino students, 999 African American students, and 168 Native American students.” “This is a substantial proportion of these disadvantaged groups of students who would not have been guaranteed admission had they not had high SAT scores,” the report concludes. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given that finding, the task force recommended against suspending the standardized testing requirement. But of course, in 2020, the year when performative gestures trumped reality from sea to shining sea, the University of California poohbahs decided the critical thing was to seem woke, not to defend the misunderstood impacts of using standardized tests. Consider the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which ultimately took a different path. MIT suspended testing requirements for two years, citing the COVID-19 pandemic, but then reinstated the test requirement—and the results weren’t exactly what leftists would have predicted. “Once we brought the test requirement back, we admitted the most diverse class that we ever had in our history,” Stu Schmill, dean of admissions, told The New York Times in 2024. “Having test scores was helpful.” In that class, the Times reported, “15 percent of students are Black, 16 percent are Hispanic, 38 percent are white, and 40 percent are Asian American” and “[a]bout 20 percent receive Pell Grants, the federal program for lower-income students.” Since then, MIT’s incoming classes have become less racially diverse—but that’s not because of the standardized tests. It’s because the institute overhauled its admissions approach after the 2023 Supreme Court decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard that ruled race-based admissions were illegal. Interestingly, economic diversity is increasing—in the class of 2029, 27% of students at MIT were eligible for Pell Grants, a sharp increase. Ultimately, too, while white liberals are prone to angst over standardized tests, that’s not the viewpoint of minorities themselves. Only about a fifth of black and Hispanic respondents believe that test scores shouldn’t be a factor in college admissions, according to a 2022 Pew Research Center survey. In contrast, 81% of Hispanics and 79% of black respondents believed standardized test scores should be a major or minor factor in college admissions. Will UC bring back the standardized tests? This letter comes at a time when more and more colleges have reinstated testing requirements. Nor is that the only sign that higher education gurus are waking up to the fact that they have veered too far from prioritizing—or even caring about at all—academic excellence. Harvard faculty voted earlier this month to start limiting As to about 20% of students in any given class—which will be a major change for the college. Currently, about 63% of undergraduate grades are As, according to the student newspaper, The Crimson. It’s not quite 2019 all over again yet. But when even professors at public California universities are calling for a return to (partial) sanity, it shows just how extreme the overreach of 2020 was.

Is the federal government still funneling taxpayer dollars to some of the leftist activist groups that called the shots during President Joe Biden’s administration? The Trump White House is asking federal agencies to investigate past and potentially continuing funding for a host of nonprofits, many of which are associated with aggressive promotion of leftist causes. On May 13, the White House Office of Management and Budget issued a budget data request seeking comprehensive information on the federal tax dollars supporting 49 nonprofits. In the document, OMB asks each federal agency to include all grants, cooperative agreements, loans, contracts, and other monetary awards, even if the provision of the funding is under litigation. The request focuses on fiscal years 2024, 2025, and estimated obligations in fiscal year 2026. A person familiar with OMB’s request told the Daily Signal that the request might capture data not accessible on USASpending.gov, the publicly-available database of federal grants and contracts. The list includes many of the leftist activist groups that sent staff and policy ideas to the Biden administration, influencing the federal government in a “woke” direction. OMB MemoDownload OMB Memo ListDownload The Woketopus and Its Allies The Office of Management and Budget is seeking funding information regarding: the American Civil Liberties Union; the Council on American-Islamic Relations; and the Southern Poverty Law Center—three of the groups I covered extensively in my book, “The Woketopus: The Dark Money Cabal Manipulating the Federal Government.” The ACLU pushed open borders, while CAIR urged Biden to distance himself from Israel, and the SPLC—which puts mainstream conservatives on a “hate map” with chapters of the Ku Klux Klan—influenced the Justice Department against conservatives. A federal grand jury indicted the SPLC for wire fraud and bank fraud in April, claiming the center directed donor money to support members of the Klan while fundraising on opposing such groups. The SPLC maintained that it was paying informants for information on extremist groups. The list also includes foundations that form what I call the Left’s dark money network: the Open Society Institute founded by Hungarian-American billionaire George Soros, the Tides Center, and the Tides Foundation. These foundations direct donor funds to the leftist groups that influenced the Biden administration. The Immigration Industrial Complex—nonprofits that received taxpayer funding to transport and assist illegal aliens—also features on the list. The Office of Management and Budget is seeking information on funding to the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society or HIAS, Global Refuge (previously known as Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service), the U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants, along with other immigration-related groups my book didn’t cover. The list also includes the Action Network, a technology company that offers activism tools for leftist groups; the TransLatin@ Coalition; Transgender Equity Consulting; and Unidos U.S. or the National Council of La Raza, which has helped organize opposition to Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The budget request also singles out the Vera Institute of Justice, which claims the U.S. criminal justice system is “rooted in a history of white supremacy” and which aims “to establish a right to representation for all immigrants facing deportation.” The Foundation to Promote Open Society has awarded the institute more than $11 million. The Justice Department under Biden paid the group $73 million in contracts, mostly for providing legal services to immigrant children. The Department of Health and Human Services paid Vera nearly $200 million for “refugee assistance.” The fact that the federal government likely funded each of these organizations does not come as a surprise to me—I previously reported that $1.7 billion of your tax dollars funded the nonprofits that sued to block Trump’s reforms in his very first month. Even so, it’s worth considering exactly what this means. A Grotesque Scandal I am not familiar with every organization on the Office of Management and Budget’s list, but the notion that my tax dollars would go to support the Immigration Industrial Complex and the weaponization of government against conservatives is beyond the pale. It’s one thing for leftist activist groups to have tax-exempt status. I disagree with these groups, but I respect their right to advocate for policies they support. It’s something else entirely for the federal government to use force to extract taxes from my pocket, and then pay activist groups that I oppose for services that actually undermine America’s security and pit us against one another. Approximately 10 million illegal aliens entered this country under Biden, and while President Trump is working to deport many of them, the federal government had been propping up the very activist groups that not only fight to keep these illegal aliens in the United States but would open the borders again, if they could. The Trump White House is right to demand a full accounting.

Where did we come from? What are we made for? These two questions cut to the core of what it means to be a human person. We instinctively desire to know the answers to the deepest questions about our existence. Despite meaningless doomscrolling or gossiping, we ultimately desire to know where we came from and what we are made for. On May 31, the Catholic Church celebrates the Solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity. This formal name and feast can sound outdated and irrelevant to our ordinary lives. However, nothing could be further from the truth. In reality, the feast holds the answers to our questions about where we come from and what we are made for. God is the ground of our existence. As St. Thomas Aquinas wrote, God is “ipsum esse subsistens,” Being Itself. His nature is to exist. God is the only absolutely necessary being, for God did not exist, nothing would exist. Abstract—or even dated—as this all might sound, contemporary evidence for God’s existence continues to grow. Whether that is the argument from causality (something cannot come from nothing), the argument from morality (if there is no God, there is no absolute right or wrong), or the growing field of intelligent design (the world’s order implies an Intelligence who formed it), the story of where we came from is found in God. We were made by God, and we were made for God. But who is God? The celebration of the Most Holy Trinity helps us to understand who God is. One of the central claims of the Christian faith is that there is one God, yet that God is three persons. To be clear: Christians do not believe in three gods but that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit all share in the one divine nature. God is Father. He is creator. God is Son. He is savior. God is Holy Spirit. He is ever-present and with us. St. Augustine famously depicted the Trinity in several ways in his work “Dei Trinitate,” and these can help deepen our understanding of God. He said that God is the lover (the Father), the beloved (the Son), and the love they share (the Holy Spirit). The love between the Father and the Son is so powerful that it is its own divine person. Augustine also depicted the Trinity through the image of human intellect. He wrote that there is a kind of trinity that “exists in man, who is the image of God.” Augustine explained that in man’s mind is “the mind, and the knowledge wherewith the mind knows itself, and the love wherewith it loves both itself and its own knowledge; and these three are shown to be mutually equal, and of one essence.” There is one essence (the intellect) and three equal aspects which are intrinsically connected and necessary in order for it to be the intellect. All of the above words on the Trinity can allow us a glimpse into the reality of God. At the same time, we must always remember that nothing we can say about God can come close to defining Him. In his “Commentary on Boethius’ De Trinitate,” Aquinas explains this truth by noting that “the ultimate consummation of human knowledge of God is to know that we do not know God, inasmuch as we realize that what He is transcends all that we can conceive.” Before the grandeur of God, we are not called to completely understand Him but to be immersed in His love and to become like Him: wrapped up in communion. For this reason, the Greek word for faith (pistis) means trusting reliance on the other. Faith is intrinsically relational, and the human being was made for relationship. That is why the most important aspects of one’s life are our friendships. On this celebration of God’s identity (who is perfect relationship of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit) may we focus on our friendship with Him and have that drive our love for those we are closest to. Because that is what we were made for. We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of the Daily Signal.

Winston Churchill made 16 visits to America in his lifetime. He traveled here as a soldier, a tourist, and a lecturer, but his winter visit to America in 1941 as a wartime leader was perhaps his most important. The story of that trip—and the speech he delivered to a joint session of Congress the day after Christmas—is worth telling. It revealed Churchill’s status not just as a statesman but as a salesman too. The day after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Churchill, who’d just turned 67, packed his bags and headed for America. It would be the most important sales trip of his life—and one of the most important sales of the 20th century. The stakes could not have been higher. “With the fall of France, Britain stood alone, decisively inferior in military power to the Nazis,” said Larry Arnn, the president of Hillsdale College and author of “Churchill’s Trial.” “The only thing that could save it was the English Channel—and entry into the war by the United States.” Few understood that stark reality better than Churchill. It was why he was on a boat crossing the Atlantic after one of America’s darkest days. His plan: strengthen relations with President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Congress and the American public—and prepare them for the exigencies of war. It was a 10-day trip through cold, storm-tossed seas. And a dangerous one too: U-boats filled the Atlantic. There were serious concerns about Churchill’s safety, but he wasn’t deterred. This was work that couldn’t be done by phone. Churchill’s boat docked in Norfolk, Virginia, two weeks after the Pearl Harbor attack. He flew to Washington, D.C., where Roosevelt greeted him. Churchill spent the next few days at the White House as a house guest, talking, drinking, joking, and smoking—and keeping Roosevelt up late into the night. “It was astonishing to me that anyone could smoke so much and drink so much and keep perfectly well,” Eleanor Roosevelt said of the prime minister. Having successfully bonded with Roosevelt, and having mapped out some important wartime planning, Churchill moved to an equally important objective: bonding with Congress and the American public and selling them on the importance—the inevitability—of combining America and British forces to combat the Axis powers. For days, Churchill worked on his speech. It would become, once spoken, one of his masterpieces. Here’s how it began: “The fact that my American forebears have for so many generations played their part in the life of the United States, and that here I am, an Englishman, welcomed in your midst, makes this experience one of the most moving and thrilling in my life, which is already long and has not been entirely uneventful. I wish indeed that my mother, whose memory I cherish, across the vale of years, could have been here to see.” Churchill then made clear that our countries were connected by more than a common language. “I may confess that I do not feel quite like a fish out of water in a legislative assembly where English is spoken. I am a child of the House of Commons. I was brought up in my father’s house to believe in democracy. ‘Trust the people.’ That was his message. Therefore, I have been in full harmony all my life with the tides which have flowed on both sides of the Atlantic against privilege and monopoly, and I have steered confidently towards the Gettysburg ideal of government of the people, by the people, for the people.” He then addressed America’s greater angels, more certain about the true character of our nation than many of our leaders are today. “I should like to say first of all how much I have been impressed and encouraged by the breadth of view and sense of proportion which I have found in all quarters over here to which I have had access. Anyone who did not understand the size and solidarity of the foundations of the United States might easily have expected to find an excited, disturbed, [self-centered] atmosphere, with all minds fixed upon the novel, startling, and painful episodes of sudden war as they hit America. After all, the United States have been attacked and set upon by three most powerfully armed dictator states, the greatest military power in Europe, the greatest military power in Asia—Japan, Germany, and Italy have all declared and are making war upon you, and the quarrel is opened which can only end in their overthrow or yours. But here in Washington in these memorable days I have found an Olympian fortitude which, far from being based upon complacency, is only the mask of an inflexible purpose and the proof of a sure, well-grounded confidence in the final outcome.” The speech then took a tough turn as Churchill walked Americans through the difficulty of the task ahead. And the nature of our enemies. “The forces ranged against us are enormous. They are bitter, they are ruthless. The wicked men and their factions, who have launched their peoples on the path of war and conquest, know that they will be called to terrible account if they cannot beat down by force of arms the peoples they have assailed. They will stop at nothing. They have a vast accumulation of war weapons of all kinds. They have highly trained and disciplined armies, navies, and air services. They have plans and designs which have long been contrived and matured. They will stop at nothing that violence or treachery can suggest. It is quite true that on our side our resources in manpower and materials are far greater than theirs. But only a portion of your resources are as yet mobilized and developed, and we both of us have much to learn in the cruel art of war. We have therefore, without doubt, a time of tribulation before us. In this same time, some ground will be lost which it will be hard and costly to regain. Many disappointments and unpleasant surprises await us. Many of them will afflict us before the full marshaling of our latent and total power can be accomplished.” Churchill then spoke of the brutal path forward, invoking Scripture in this part of the speech. He understood the battle ahead wasn’t merely physical and material; it was a spiritual battle too, and he wasn’t afraid to define it in those terms. “Some people may be startled or momentarily depressed when, like your president, I speak of a long and a hard war. Our peoples would rather know the truth, somber though it be. And after all, when we are doing the noblest work in the world, not only defending our hearths and homes but the cause of freedom in every land, the question of whether deliverance comes in 1942 or 1943 or 1944 falls into its proper place in the grand proportions of human history. Sure I am that this day, now, we are the masters of our fate. That the task which has been set us is not above our strength. That its pangs and toils are not beyond our endurance. As long as we have faith in our cause, and an unconquerable willpower, salvation will not be denied us.” Churchill closed out his speech by invoking the spiritual dimension of the battle one last time, and the unique relationship that two great allies—England and America—shared: “If you will allow me to use other language, I will say that he must indeed have a blind soul who cannot see that some great purpose and design is being worked out here below, of which we have the honor to be the faithful servants. It is not given to us to peer into the mysteries of the future. Still, I avow my hope and faith, sure and inviolate, that in the days to come the British and American peoples will, for their own safety and for the good of all, walk together in majesty, in justice and in peace.” The crowd in the chamber roared with applause. Churchill responded by flashing the V-for-victory sign that would become his signature gesture. “Study history, study history. In history lie all of the secrets of statecraft,” Churchill once told a student who asked a question about the subject, according to historian Andrew Roberts, author of “Churchill: Walking With Destiny.” Churchill’s statecraft—and salesmanship—were on display days after the speech to Congress. On New Year’s Day, he visited Mount Vernon to lay a wreath on the tomb of our nation’s first president and one of our greatest soldiers: George Washington. He also met with diplomats from several Allied countries to sign a joint declaration to fight the Axis powers. None, they agreed, would negotiate a separate peace. On January 14, 1942, after nearly a month away from home, Churchill left for war-torn London. “His visit to the United States has marked a turning point of the war,” a London Times editorial said upon Churchill’s return. “It would take the New World, the United States, to come to the rescue of the Old,” the late Churchill biographer Sir Martin Gilbert told an audience at Hillsdale College in 2006. “And emerge as the defenders of freedom.” Few could better understand Gilbert’s words—spoken a half-century after the prime minister’s 1941 Christmastime speech to Congress—than Churchill himself. Originally published in Newsweek We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of the Daily Signal.

The following is a lightly edited transcript of a speech delivered on May 28, 2026, at the “Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death” Reenactment at The Heritage Foundation. Britain’s seven year war with France came at a great cost. Its consequences would alter the world. England accumulated a substantial amount of debt throughout the war. Parliament began to look to the American colonies, long used to governing themselves, as a solution to its problem. It imposed the Sugar and Stamp Acts of 1764 and 1765 to raise revenue from their “subjects.” The Americans found the Stamp Act particularly grating. Not only was Parliament introducing taxation without representation, but colonial forms of communication—newspapers, almanacs, pamphlets, and other documents—would need stamps to circulate. While the stamps were of little financial cost, they impeded freedom of speech and deliberation, beliefs and practices central to the American character—a character fit for citizenship, not subjugation. The back-and-forth between the colonies and Great Britain continued: with moves and countermoves, rising rhetoric, and emerging patriots. Tensions grew following the Boston Massacre of 1770, when British troops fired on a group of protesters, wounding 11 and killing five. In the final month of 1773, the Sons of Liberty dumped tea into the frigid waters of the Boston Harbor. With the Intolerable Acts, Parliament closed the port of Boston, infested Boston’s streets with British troops and forced their quartering, and replaced elected officials with ones appointed by the royal governor. American principles—freedom of speech, of representation, of consent—were being violated. And Paul Revere was at the ready. The Boston native rode for five days from Massachusetts to Carpenters’ Hall in Philadelphia. In his hands was the response to the Intolerable Acts, the Suffolk Resolves. With him, he carried a question: Would the other colonies join Massachusetts against Great Britain? Was an attack on one part an attack on the whole? Other localities had passed resolutions against Parliament, but perhaps none were as substantive as the Suffolk Resolves. The people of Massachusetts urged their fellow colonists to form local militias and boycott British goods. But more than that, they contended that Parliament had committed “gross Infractions of those Rights to which we are justly entitled by the Laws of Nature, the British Constitution, and the Charter of the Province.” The ongoing dispute was not about mere manmade laws or the rights of Englishmen, but about natural law and the inalienable rights of mankind. On Sept. 17, a day that now lives in our memory as Constitution Day, the first Continental Congress unanimously endorsed the Suffolk Resolves. In 1774, George Washington, Patrick Henry, John Adams, and Sam Adams were there, uniting Virginia and Massachusetts in Pennsylvania. That brings us to Virginia. Many of the ideas of the Revolution spread through churches to the 70% to 80% of colonists who attended services on a regular basis. (The religious revival known as the Great Awakening had swept through America in the 1730s and 1740s, and the most referenced work of the Founding generation was the Bible.) On March 20, 1775, a month before Lexington and Concord, the Second Virginia Convention gathered in St. John’s Church in Richmond. Its main objective was to elect delegates to the Second Continental Congress. The course of that weeklong convention would further solidify America’s principles. Not to be out spirited by those Massachusetts Puritans, Anglican Patrick Henry introduced resolutions to form a Virginia militia. But that was not the only point of commonality between the Suffolk Resolves and Henry’s endeavors. By 1775, the question of Revolution was upon America. The Declaration of Independence describes the revolutionary act not simply as a right, but as a duty. A duty to whom? The Suffolk Resolves provides the answer: “[I]t is an indispensable Duty which we owe to GOD, our Country, Ourselves and Posterity, by all lawful Ways and Means in our Power, to maintain, defend and preserve those civil and religious Rights and Liberties for which many of our Fathers fought—bled—and died; and to hand them down entire to future Generations.” Knowing the same, Virginia’s orator spoke “freely and without reserve,” a “responsibility which we hold to God and our country. Should I keep back my opinions at such a time, through fear of giving offense, I should consider myself as guilty of treason towards my country, and of an act of disloyalty toward the Majesty of Heaven, which I revere above all earthly kings.” The Declaration of Independence was indeed an expression of the American mind, threading itself through Suffolk County, Massachusetts; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; and Richmond, Virginia. It carries itself forward on the hearts of today’s citizens: “And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.”