For more than a decade, Vidalia High School students in Georgia took courses at Sweet Onion Christian Learning Center as part of a partnership. Now the center and the Vidalia City School District are clashing in a federal First Amendment lawsuit. The school district terminated the longstanding agreement with the Christian center after its founder, the Rev. Gady Youmans, criticized a proposed school board tax hike, and after the superintendent raised concerns about the center’s “particular interpretation” of the Bible, according to the lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Georgia on Friday. The center and Youmans are represented by Alliance Defending Freedom, a national religious freedom legal group. “Every American has the right to publicly criticize the government—that’s what makes the First Amendment guarantee of free speech so special and the envy of the world,” ADF legal counsel Mercer Martin said in a statement. “Vidalia City Schools can’t punish Rev. Youmans—or his ministry providing high school students with free religious education—for simply sharing his opinion of a proposed tax hike. We are urging the court to reinstate Sweet Onion’s released-time program and restore Rev. Youmans’ constitutional freedoms.” “Released time” means when students are released from school during school hours for clubs or other activities. The Supreme Court has held since 1952 that noncompulsory, nontaxpayer-funded religious instruction can occur during such time, as it does not violate the Establishment Clause of the Constitution. The Daily Signal left voicemail messages with Vidalia City Schools Superintendent Sandy Reid and the district’s community relations office seeking comment. Neither responded. The school district website did not list an email contact. The complaint shows that Reid objected to a Facebook post by Youmans that caused an “outpouring” from staff for offending teachers in the district. Georgia-Lawsuit-Vidalia City SchoolsDownload The school board approved the agreement in December 2014, and students first began taking courses at the center in September 2015. Youmans taught courses including Biblical Finances, Survey of the Old Testament, Survey of the New Testament, Biblical Psychology, and Comparative Religions. Students were able to receive dual-enrollment credit from Brewton-Parker Christian University for some classes. According to the complaint, the arrangement was satisfactory until September 2025, when Youmans objected to a Board of Education property tax increase and specifically raised issues about how much top school administrators were being paid. He noted 17 administrators, one coach, and one teacher were paid a combined $2.2 million. When someone replied to his post that children aren’t being educated at the center, Youmans replied, “My students told me today, ‘We have to educate ourselves in several classes. You actually teach.’” The lawsuit further states that at a November 2025 school board work session, Reid provided a report on the center that “parents have previously expressed concerns about the course content, specifically a perception that some instruction reflected a particular interpretation of the Bible rather than presenting information in a neutral or well-balanced manner.” “On Feb. 5, 2026, Superintendent Reid sent Rev. Youmans an email informing him that Vidalia City Schools would no longer permit the Center to operate the released-time education program for Vidalia High students,” the lawsuit states.

The Southern Poverty Law Center has spread its woke activist agenda in education to at least 169 school districts in 42 states, according to a new report, and the impact of teachers unions helps explain this expansive influence. Learning for Justice, the SPLC’s education arm, promotes “social justice” activism, pushes racially divisive messaging, and advocates transgender ideology. The program, launched as “Teaching Tolerance” in the 1990s, dropped the emphasis on “tolerance” amid the Great Awokening in February 2021. Around that same time, the program removed its own impact statement from the website, which had previously bragged that “more than 500,000 educators” read its magazine, screened its films, visited its website, and used its curricula. The parental rights group Defending Education exposed Learning for Justice’s broad influence in an exhaustive report Tuesday. “Unbeknownst to parents, the Southern Poverty Law Center has been poisoning pupils’ minds around the country for years with its toxic curriculum,” Nicole Neily, the group’s president, told The Daily Signal. “SPLC lesson plans on issues such as queer theory, white privilege, and anti-racism have supplanted traditional coursework in history, social studies, and other core classes—teaching children to view themselves and others through the lens of identity politics, and that America is forever stained by its original sin.” How did the SPLC spread its tentacles this far? America’s two largest teachers unions—the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers—help explain it, as does the American School Counselor Association. “By promoting and integrating Learning for Justice content and standards into mental health programming and curricula, the teachers unions and ASCA are giving the far-left organization credibility,” Rhyen Staley, director of research at Defending Education, told The Daily Signal. “This is deeply troubling for a variety of reasons, especially since the SPLC has put parents on its ‘hate map’ for simply raising concerns with their local school districts.” The SPLC gained its reputation by suing Ku Klux Klan groups into bankruptcy, but weaponized that history to smear conservatives and raise money. In 2023, it added Moms for Liberty, Defending Education, and other parental rights groups to the “hate map,” placing them alongside Klan chapters and calling them part of “the infrastructure upholding white supremacy.” Last month, a federal grand jury indicted the SPLC on wire fraud, bank fraud, and conspiracy charges for sending $3 million to KKK members. While the SPLC claimed it was paying “informants” to prevent violent attacks, the Justice Department says it was using donor cash to prop up the very “hate” it claims it exists to “dismantle.” The SPLC has pleaded not guilty to the charges. The SPLC enjoys undue influence in the media, in corporate America, and with a vast network of donors, so it stands to reason that Learning for Justice might achieve a broad impact. Even so, the boost from teachers unions and the American School Counselor Association can’t have hurt. The Teachers Unions The Defending Education report cites the National Education Association’s January 2021 “Racial Justice in Education” resource guide, which touts Teaching Tolerance as a “partner” and notes that the NEA partnered with Teaching Tolerance to “create a three-part webinar series” to help “address the climate issues.” The National Education Association claims 3 million members. The association’s President Becky Pringle condemned the SPLC indictment. “Civil rights organizations work to ensure we can live free from discrimination,” she wrote on Bluesky. “By indicting a group that fights bias and tracks extremists, Trump’s Department of Justice is abusing its power, making us less safe. They will stop at nothing to crush free speech and further hate.” The National Education Association did not respond to The Daily Signal’s request for comment by publication time. The American Federation of Teachers has promoted the SPLC program as far back as 2016, listing “Teaching Tolerance” as a resource on “school discipline.” In a social media post, the federation’s President Randi Weingarten also condemned the indictment. “It’s absurd but predictable [the SPLC] is being wrongfully targeted, an org that has documented hate & extremist groups for 50+ years,” she posted on Bluesky. She called the indictment “part of a coordinated attack on civil rights and an escalation of the campaign against those with whom this admin disagrees.” The American Federation of Teachers has approximately 1.6 million members. These unions, which have a well-documented leftist slant, enjoyed tremendous influence in the Biden administration. The American Federation of Teachers did not respond to The Daily Signal’s request for comment by publication time. The School Counselors The Defending Education report also noted that the American School Counselor Association, which claimed in 2023 to have over 43,000 members across the country, incorporated the “Social Justice Standards” into its key documents. The association modeled its Student Standards: Mindsets & Behaviors for Student Success and Student Standards Crosswalk on the SPLC materials. Neither the NEA nor the AFT nor the ASCA nor the SPLC responded to The Daily Signal’s request for comment by publication time. The American School Counselor Association did not respond to The Daily Signal’s request for comment by publication time. A Rising Movement Moms and dads across the country are taking a stand against the SPLC. Republicans in Maryland have openly condemned the state’s “implicit bias training” that incorporated Learning for Justice materials. Courage is a Habit has exposed ASCA’s reliance on the SPLC. Lake Havasu Unified School District in Arizona has rooted out an education resource that directed students to avoid the websites of SPLC-smeared “hate groups.” Last week, Moms for Liberty leader Rosalind Hanson spoke out at Montgomery County Public Schools, condemning MCPS’ use of the Social Justice Standards. This Defending Education report will hopefully inspire more moms and dads to ask school boards to stop relying on the SPLC. They may find my book, “Making Hate Pay: The Corruption of the Southern Poverty Law Center,” a resource in this effort. SPLC IN SCHOOLSA huge thank you to @Moms4Liberty leader @rosalindhanson for calling out MCPS's support for SPLC at the school board meeting today!She called out an MCPS leader demonizing Moms for Liberty and held up my book, "Making Hate Pay"https://t.co/kYpCa1yTyl pic.twitter.com/92G42jsfNA— Tyler O'Neil (@Tyler2ONeil) May 7, 2026

FIRST ON THE DAILY SIGNAL—Iranian national Sharon Gohari pleaded guilty on Tuesday to unlawfully smuggling illegal immigrants into the United States—including one with ties to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps—and intentionally receiving child pornography, The Daily Signal has learned. Gohari, a naturalized U.S. citizen who resided alternately in Iran and Nassau County, New York, asked for and received payments from Iranian nationals and others seeking to enter the United States illegally, according to the Department of Justice. These transactions occurred between at least December 2020 up to his arrest in May 2025. Gohari aided at least one person in entering the U.S. who had associations with Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which the State Department designates a Foreign Terrorist Organization. “Gohari made a business of smuggling aliens into the United States, at least one of whom had ties to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, a designated foreign terrorist organization,” Assistant Attorney General for National Security John A. Eisenberg said in a statement. “I applaud the investigators and prosecutors who made possible today’s plea, taking this defendant off our streets.” In early 2021, Gohari facilitated the travel of an illegal alien from Iran to Turkey, then to Mexico and into the United States, where border patrol agents detained him, according to the Justice Department. The alien confessed to law enforcement that he had previously carried out tasks in Iran and Malaysia for the IRGC. During the investigation, police discovered that Gohari received and stored multiple videos on his phone depicting the rape of children as young as five years old. He also had filmed women around New York City without their knowledge, including taking photos and videos appeared to be taken at close range to see under the women’s skirts, according to the Justice Department. Gohari faces a mandatory minimum sentence of five years in prison and up to 20 years in prison for the child sex abuse material charge, as well as a mandatory minimum of three years in prison for alien smuggling and up to 10 years in prison. While Gohari resided in Roslyn, New York, he traveled frequently to Iran. He primarily received thousands of dollars per client to facilitate the entry of foreign nationals through Mexico, according to the Justice Department. Gohari helped these individuals obtain travel visas at the Mexican embassy in Iran and helped arrange their travel to and through Mexico and into the United States in large groups. “Our Office will continue to aggressively pursue transnational criminal schemes operating here in the United States, especially when they involve terrorist groups like the IRGC that seek to do us harm,” U.S. Attorney Joseph Nocella, Jr. for the Eastern District of New York said. “In doing so, he also put our national security at risk and circumvented the vital procedures that are in place to vet those entering our country. And we will always prosecute the sexual exploitation of children to the fullest extent of the law.” The DOJ’s Office’s National Security and Cybercrime Section is handling the case. Assistant U.S. Attorney Andrew D. Reich is in charge of the prosecution with assistance from Trial Attorney Kevin Nunnally of the National Security Division’s Counterterrorism Section and Paralegal Specialist Wayne Colon.

Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s video from Daily Signal Senior Contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to see more of his videos. Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for The Daily Signal. Recently, I say in the last two years, but especially the last three months, there’s been an increasing demonization of Israel and, by association, Jews who support it.   We’ve seen these campus protests on American universities where they have these signs, “From the river to the sea.” That’s an eliminationist slogan that Israel would be wiped off the map from the Jordan River all the way into the Mediterranean Sea and, I guess, dumped into it.  And, of course, we’ve had antisemitic incidents of students chasing Jewish students into a library and trapping them there, roughing them up on campus. Demonstrations where they get quite violent, and they’re overtly and proudly antisemitic.  And the point is, what’s behind all this? Why in America now? Because after all, there are more Jewish citizens, or at least roughly comparable in the United States than there are in Israel, which has about two and a half or 2 million Arabs and a number of Christians as well.   So why in the so-called bastion of Jewishness in the West here in the United States, which has avoided the antisemitism of Europe and the Middle East, why is it starting to come out now? What’s behind this? And from people that you wouldn’t expect it from.  Well, the first is DEI. Diversity, equity and inclusion, divided the nation into a 70/30 binary. It was dreamed up by [Barack] Obama because he felt he didn’t have enough traction with the old binary of 12% blacks being victimized, which was true, they were, by the 88% whites when, due to immigration, the country was no longer 90% white.   So he bundled a new group and said, it doesn’t matter how wealthy you are, it doesn’t matter what your class is. If you’re not white, you are a victimized, oppressed person with legitimate grievances.  What that did is it allowed people exemptions, so you didn’t question somebody’s performance on the job or how somebody was hired if it was race-based, because that would be insulting or racist.   But it also did another thing. It meant that people could express themselves in racist, biased fashion. But if they were from that protected binary, you couldn’t say anything.   Now, that had been true of the black community, unfortunately, for a long time. I can’t think of a major black leader other than Martin Luther King that didn’t voice antisemitic tropes.  I mean, Jesse Jackson said “Hymietown.” The Rev. Jeremiah Wright said, “Them Jews won’t let me see.” Obama, remember [Louis] Farrakhan called Jews “termites” and a “gutter religion.” Al Sharpton said, I’ll put on my yarmulke, and you come over here, and he had all this about diamond merchants. Pretty bad stuff.   No need to get into Kanye West, what he said. Malcolm X said a lot of very antisemitic things.   So it was there, and that was based on you don’t dare call a black leader an anti-Semite or biased given his protected status as a victim. So DEI allowed people to express overt antisemitism, sometimes cloaked as anti-Israelism, without repercussions.  The second is demography. There had traditionally been about, oh, 6% to 7% of the population was Jewish and maybe 1% was Muslim, and that has radically changed now—mostly through immigration—and the Muslim birth rate in the United States is about 2.6, and all other ethnic groups, white, black, it’s about 1.7. And that population is about 5 million, and it’s projected to increase to a number higher than the Jewish population.   But you can see the trends already.  And then you have to factor in that it’s very hard for a Muslim to be secular, agnostic, atheistic, Christian. But in the case of Jews, they’re more and more being secularized or intermarrying much more, and their support of Israel is not contingent on their being Jewish.  More importantly, we’re getting billions of dollars. The UAE, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia are among the top five donors to universities in America, and they have founded Middle East studies programs, and those are not Middle East studies programs. They’re indoctrination centers for the entire student body.   So demography means that people feel that in states like Michigan, the future will be you have to say something critical of Israel.  I mean, remember [Abdul] El-Sayed, the candidate in the Democratic primary, said he didn’t want to really criticize anything about Iran, and if he said anything positive about the United States taking out, or Israel taking out, this atrocious leader, [Ali] Khamenei, the supreme leader, then his constituency in Michigan would be upset.   That was, kind of, an admission that there’s a growing minority in America that hates Israel. And they have a lot of money, and they are gaining political power. And that’s going to increase. What we see in the university is going to be mainstreamed to society at large.  The third is the Democratic Party is not democratic anymore. As I’ve said before, it has a Jacobin agenda, a French revolutionary party agenda. It’s not just that they want to tear down statues and rename buildings and change the foundational date to 1619. Those were all Jacobin trademarks.  But they have a holistic socialist agenda: open borders, illegal immigration mainstream, mass amnesties, no-cash bail, critical legal theory, DEI and massive cuts in defense, raising taxes and more entitlements. And of course, in the Green New Deal.   But embedded in that agenda is anti-Israelism and indifference to antisemitism.  I say embedded because that’s a non-negotiable agenda. If you want to be nominated for an office in the Democratic Party, you can’t come out for pipelines or more drilling. “Drill, baby, drill.” You can’t say we need tougher criminal prosecutions. You can’t say, I love the wall. It’s a good idea. You can’t say anything.   And by that same reasoning, you cannot say you support wholeheartedly Israel.   Anybody who does so in the Democratic Party, like John Fetterman, the senior senator from Pennsylvania, becomes persona non grata, in his own party.  Finally, there is a sense that the institutions in the United States that bequeath laurels and mainstreaming and adulation, they’re all Left-wing. All the awards are Left-wing. All the book reviews, the major venues, are Left-wing. The major media is Left-wing.   And a lot of people feel that they’ve been in the wilderness. They’ve been pelted with this Left-wing hailstorm, and at some point they get tired, and they want to come out of the storm.   And so we’ve seen people at The Bulwark, for example, who have flipped over, and now they receive adulation.  So when Tucker Carlson said he was going to interview a number of really strident antisemites and anti-Israelis, and he wants to have Graham Plattner, the notorious would-be nominee, he is the nominee now, from Maine, who had a Totenkopf death’s-head Nazi tattoo on him, then there were people—he immediately won a New York Times interview.   The New Yorker wants to interview him. The Atlantic writes about him. They would not have touched Tucker Carlson two years ago.   So there’s a sense that in this growing momentum, a lot of people want to piggyback on it, whether for clicks, especially foreign audiences.   We’re starting to learn that a lot of our people on the Left that hate Israel and a lot of the people on the right that do, get enormous audiences overseas, mostly from the Middle East.  So you add this all together, and for many people without strong convictions, they look at the ledger and they say, well, the DEI community is anti-Israel. And probably many of them think they can be antisemitic without consequences. The demography is there. The money is there. The whole Left-wing agenda is a parcel, so you can’t really defect from it. You have to embrace it if you’re a Democrat.  And there’s some money to be made, or there’s some power to be gained, or there’s some approval to be had. You add it all up, and we’re going to see a lot more antisemitism.  The final irony, the so-called, “bigot,” Donald Trump, the so-called, “racist,” Donald Trump, he has admitted he’s probably going to be the last president that wholeheartedly supports Israel.   For now, he is the last dam holding back this deluge.  We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal.

Americans are no stranger to government shutdowns after facing the longest in history last year, but now the GOP is warning another one is on the way. Sen. Eric Schmitt, R-Mo., is already predicting a 2026 Democrat-caused shutdown unless the majority enforces deadlines, pushes for reform, and holds members accountable who are “hell bent” on forcing their policies into appropriations legislation. The legislative season to appropriate government spending for the 2027 fiscal year is already upon Congress, all while the Department of Homeland Security is still not fully funded from 2025. Republicans face the Sept. 30 deadline to pass all 12 appropriations bills to fund government departments and avoid another shutdown. Schmitt told reporters Tuesday night that Democrats are “legislative terrorists” who want a shutdown, and he said Republicans “ought to be prepared” for another. “Look at what they’re willing to do with ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement]. It’s just an extension of ‘defund the police.’ It’ll be something else. It may be ICE again,” Schmitt said. “We ought to have some plans in place to account for that, to make it painful for them if they want to do that, because the American people suffer on it.” Schmitt warned that it’s “game on” if Democrats continue to implement their agenda into appropriations legislation. “Guess who’s coming on USAID [United States Agency for International Development] next year? Me. We’re going to start pulling stuff out. Great, game on, USAID. We’re not going to do Guatemalan sex change anymore,” he said, hinting at a future legislative push. Unbelievable. USAID appears to have funneled US Taxpayer dollars to "Soros-aligned" causes, per Senator Eric Schmitt.Yet another reason USAID must go. https://t.co/7FAaWcGGIq— Charlie Kirk (@charliekirk11) February 7, 2025 Schmitt Calls for ‘Regular Order’ Schmitt explained that if the Senate operates in “regular order,” they may be able to avoid a shutdown. “I would prefer individual appropriations bills,” Schmitt said, instead of packaging 12 separate department spending bills into one. “To [Senate Majority Leader John] Thune’s credit, he did have 11 of the 12 done. All 12 were out there. My first two years, Chuck Schumer didn’t have a single appropriations bill on the Senate floor ever,” Schmitt said, referencing when Schumer avoided regular order in 2023 by passing the funding bill as a giant package rather than giving each bill separate debate time and a separate vote. The Senate used to be the most deliberative body. As we face the specter of yet another government shutdown, we can’t continue to only pass massive omnibus bills. We need to debate each funding bill individually. My speech on the Senate floor. pic.twitter.com/PZIPLInOjg— Senator Eric Schmitt (@SenEricSchmitt) October 17, 2023 “I’m good with a more free-wheeling Senate floor where people are actually out there proposing amendments, and then maybe have some unusual coalitions. To me, that’s legislating. But that’s not in our muscle memory,” Schmitt said. Schmitt added that there are ways Congress can be held accountable. When asked if he would support canceling the monthlong August recess to meet the deadline, Schmitt said, “If that’s what they’re willing to do, well, I’m all for that.” “No matter what we do on the front end, there has to be something at the deadline that solves the problem,” Schmitt continued. Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., has proposed legislation that would act as a Band-Aid for shutdowns, which Schmitt supports. The bill would implement “automatic two-week rolling continuing resolutions for any department for which an appropriations bill or longer-term continuing resolution hasn’t been passed” by prorating the previous year’s spending. The legislation was originally introduced and passed out of committee in 2019 but has still not been granted a vote. Paycheck Penalties Schmitt said he also supports legislative options that would threaten or punish members who insist on keeping the government shut down by withholding their paychecks. Sen. John Kennedy, R-La., a member of the Appropriations Committee, introduced the No Shutdown Paychecks to Politicians Act. This legislation would withhold paychecks during a shutdown, and members would not receive back pay. “If we can’t do our jobs and fund the government, we don’t deserve a paycheck—plain and simple,” Kennedy said in a November press release. In reality, the Senate is likely to see a less harsh version of this bill without language that would withhold back pay. Did you know politicians in Congress are getting paid during the DHS shutdown while TSA agents don’t get paid? It’s ridiculous that Congress can fail but have no accountability. I have a way to fix it: the No Budget, No Pay Act.I want to fund ALL of DHS, but if Democrats want… pic.twitter.com/aosFmQRjI8— Rick Scott (@SenRickScott) March 23, 2026