Republican Sen. Josh Hawley’s GUARD Act is expected to have the votes to pass the Judiciary Committee on Thursday, a source familiar with the matter told The Daily Signal. The Guidelines for User Age-verification and Responsible Dialogue, or GUARD Act, bans AI chatbot companions for minors. The bill has bipartisan support; three Democrat senators co-sponsored the bill. Parents of children who were coached to commit suicide by AI chatbots and victims of AI will be in the room on Thursday during the committee’s markup, The Daily Signal has learned. “We look forward to the GUARD Act passing,” a Hawley spokesperson told The Daily Signal. “These families deserve justice after their children lost their lives to AI chatbots.” The bill also mandates that AI chatbots disclose “non-human status” and creates new criminal prohibitions on companies making chatbots for minors that solicit or produce sexual content.  Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, introduced an alternative bill with co-sponsor Brian Schatz, D-Hawaii, on Tuesday that limits chatbots for children under 13, rather than 18. It also does not require tech companies to implement an age verification functionality. The bill requires AI chatbot companies to offer ​family accounts so parents could access their children’s chat logs and set ​time limits. The bill would preempt state laws that conflict with it, but would allow states to pass their own laws protecting kids under 13 from chatbots. Cruz, who chairs the Senate Commerce Committee, has fought for preempting state AI laws in the past, including an attempt to put broad preemption powers into the “One Big, Beautiful Bill.” The Senate overwhelmingly rejected that attempt. Hawley’s GUARD Act is a critical part of Sen. Marsha Blackburn’s TRUMP AI Act, which the Tennessee Republican intends to be the legislative vehicle to pass President Donald Trump’s National Framework on AI. Trump signed an executive order on Dec. 11 ordering the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy to recommend federal AI legislation preempting state laws in conflict with the administration’s policy. As parents are rallying around Hawley’s bill, Cruz’s bill is earning the support of the AI industry, including OpenAI. “This bill reflects many of the provisions we have advanced with Common Sense Media in the proposed California Parents and Kids Safe Ai Act and represents a strong step toward a much needed federal framework,” the company told Punchbowl News.

School choice and student transportation have a lot of Venn diagram overlap. A 2009 survey of parents in Denver and Washington, DC, found that more than a quarter of respondents reported not enrolling their child in the school they preferred due to transportation difficulties.  The Heritage Foundation recently released a report on modernizing student transportation for an era of school choice. Currently we have a Flintstones student transportation system in a world that increasingly needs Jetsons type solutions. Changes in policies and practices can modernize student transportation for the needs of a 21st century choice-based system. Students require new ways to get to schools and other places of learning.  Only one in ten American K-12 students either walked or biked to school in 2017, whereas  nearly half of students did so in the 1960s. The consolidation of students into large and increasingly distant schools has gone poorly in terms of both academics and transportation. However, one of the positive trends involves the creation of new schools. Every time a new micro-school, charter school, or private school opens, a small universe of students can either walk or bike to the school.   American taxpayers all pay for district yellow-school-bus systems, but in most states the buses run almost exclusively for the benefit of students attending their zoned district schools. In recent years, the yellow bus system has been struggling as ridership declines and districts struggle to hire drivers.  A federal law from 1986 requires states to develop a requirement that bus drivers have a commercial drivers license, but the private sector demand for such drivers has greatly increased, creating district shortages.   Under the current system, school districts decide where children go to school based on zip codes. This has grown antiquated in many states. Increasingly what families need is a system taking smaller groups of students to more schools, rather than a smaller group of buses taking students to the same place.  Repealing federal and state laws and rules preventing schools from using passenger vans for student transport to and from school would be a good starting point. While defenders of the increasingly failing status quo argue that only buses are safe enough to transport students, most students now get to school in a personal vehicle. In practice, no small number of families use small two-seat sport cars to get their students to school. If schools used more vans, parents could use fewer Miatas, and car lines could begin to shrink.  Another solution comes from New York City, where 700 schools co-locate within district facilities. Policymakers developed this practice to enable charter schools to operate within a city with extremely costly real estate. This policy makes sense—taxpayers invested in school buildings to educate students, and the New York City public schools had a surplus of underutilized and vacant space that was not accomplishing that mission. Lawmakers built student transportation into co-location; students retain their right to ride district buses regardless of which school they attend in a building with co-located schools. Florida lawmakers recently drew upon the success of the NYC experience in passing a “Schools of Hope” program to bring in high quality charter schools into areas with poorly performing district schools and available space.  Policymakers should think much more boldly about co-location. A baby-bust started in 2008, which makes vacant and underutilized district space increasingly common. State policymakers should pass statewide co-location statutes to create standardized lease agreements for not just charter schools, but also for private and micro- schools.  If the yellow buses won’t take students where they want to go to school, we should let educators open schools that families will want to attend in the buses and buildings their tax dollars already purchased.  States have developed other solutions. Ohio and Pennsylvania require district buses to transport students to non-district schools within their attendance boundaries. Arizona created a competitive grant program to have schools develop innovative solutions. Self-driving vehicles may eventually revolutionize student transportation but have only recently ventured out onto freeways and (for now) remain more expensive than ride-sharing services with human drivers. While potentially revolutionary, these technologies have yet to mature.  Another potential solution is to give families their allotment of transportation funds in a use-restricted account to allow them to develop their own solutions.  Lawmakers and administrators should not be watching yellow-bus ridership decline while costs increase and an ever-smaller percentage of students get transportation help. One-size fits few applies just as much to student transportation as it does to schools. 

Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s edition of “Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words” from Daily Signal Senior Contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Please note that it was recorded before Friday’s announcement that the Strait of Hormuz is open. Subscribe to Victor Davis Hanson’s own YouTube channel to watch past episodes.  Jack Fowler: Let’s return to the Southern Poverty Law Center, which you and the great Sami Winc talked about the other day at some length. But one of the aspects of this is corporate involvement with this institution. And actually, I forget where I picked this up from. It may have been Capital Research Center. Yeah, Capital Research Center is a great resource for investigating these left-wing nonprofits.  But Apple made a publicly reported $1 million donation to the center in 2017, following the Charlottesville Unite the Right rally. JPMorgan Chase gave $1 million in 2017. Google gave $250,000 in grants. Then also the Clooneys—George and whatever her name is, Amal Clooney—also gave a million dollars. So, and that’s just a tiny slice of—Victor—corporate America, whether it’s the Southern Poverty Law Center or Black Lives Matter or ESG or the, you know, changing the rules of how we’re going to invest your money, they are so deeply involved in so much that’s wrong.  Victor Davis Hanson: I don’t think anybody understands that. I’m on the Bradley Foundation, a center-right conservative organization. It’s mostly for free markets. But we have, I think, about a $1.2 billion endowment. And we had a presentation about four years ago where somebody very brilliantly—I won’t mention who—showed us the top foundations in the United States based on their endowments. Jack, the top 50—there was no conservative there. We were like 200. I mean, when you look at the Rockefeller or the Gates or the Tides Foundation or the MacArthur—all of this money—it’s huge. It’s $5 billion, $10 billion, $20 billion, $50 billion.  And then they’re not satisfied with that. And then they become the receptacles, the revolving door, for retread bureaucrats in USAID who give government contracts.  So they call their friend up and say, “Can you give us $10 million for transgender homeless people’s operations?” Yes. And then when that person retires, they say, “Can you get me a job for $500,000 as a case officer or something?” And that’s what they do.  And Trump tried to break that up. And the Southern Poverty Law Center is really—as I mentioned to Sami—the vigiles in Rome. These were the later fire brigades that would show up conveniently at a fire. They just happened to kind of, sort of know where the fire was because they kind of, sort of lit it. Marcus Licinius Crassus had, as I said earlier, done the same thing. But it wasn’t sure whether he lit the fires. People had accused him of that. But he showed up as their house was burning down and bought it at a cheap price.  But these guys would light the fires, like the Southern Poverty Law Center, and then show up and say, we can give you a remedy. We will put the fire out for either signing the house over to us or paying us money.  So there wasn’t enough—everybody knows that until [Barack] Obama, racial relations had almost reached what we would call equilibrium. And Obama didn’t like that because the Democratic message was not resonating. So he wanted to divide the country between victim—as the old Marxist victim—victimizer. And that was going to be based not on class, like Marx, but it was going to be based on race. And it wasn’t going to be black, white. It was going to be anybody who wasn’t white, regardless of their social status or economic status.  And that’s what he did. He did that. And so, when he did that, the victimization, the oppression—it was like an epidemic. All of a sudden, we heard all these different groups who had—that was when the reparations movement, to take one example, was dead after 9/11. Remember that? David Horowitz wrote a good book right on the eve of 9/11. Then it was over with. And as soon as Obama came in, it started to creep back in. Now we have a California council on reparations, etc., etc.  And the Southern Poverty Law Center knew that. They knew that there were not enough victimized people, so they started to seed the KKK, all of these white supremacist groups, and Unite the Right at Charlottesville. This is very, very important because most of those groups were defunct. They were decentralized. They were irrelevant. But they actually funded one of the people—allegedly—who was the transportation coordinator, to make sure that all these different groups showed up.  And when they did, no single thing had hurt Donald Trump more than that riot, when one person was run over. Because at that point he said there were fine people on both sides. And he meant—if you listen to him, and he qualified that, which they always left out—he said, “I’m not talking about the racism,” etc. They took that out of context and they said there was a big white racist predetermined riot, and Donald Trump took the side of the Klan. And that really haunted him. Even though people tried to explain that, they cut off the second part of the qualifier of the sentence.  And now we know that the Southern Poverty Law Center was worried that there were not enough victims around that they could justify their fundraising to their donors. They needed a lot of Charlottesvilles. They needed a lot of Michael Browns. They needed Trayvon Martins. Every one of those was not as it was, as everybody knew.  Michael Brown did not say, “Hands up, don’t shoot.” We know that Trayvon was not a little innocent teenager in a football uniform. Somebody pointed out you can take a picture—the left would take Charles Manson and show those 12-year-old pictures of him, you know, if they wanted to. That’s how they operate.  But the point I’m making is that once they started funding those people, it was burning down the house. And then they showed up with a cure. Well, these people are organizing Unite the Right. They’re really getting out of hand. We’re following and we’re tracking them. We need money. We need money. We need money. Because it’s going to be like the 1960s, you know, in the racist South.  And there—there was no threat that they hadn’t ginned up.  And so, the other thing about them is they’re insidious. They’re everywhere. I was giving a lecture to the late Avi Davis. Remember him, Jack? Yeah, he died prematurely, but he was the head of something called the American Freedom Alliance. And they asked me to speak on immigration maybe 10 or 12 years ago. It was very moderate.  I said, if you have immigration that is illegal, not diverse, too large to be assimilated, and people who were coming impoverished, assimilation will be almost impossible—and integration. And the next thing I knew, the Southern Poverty Law Center had a big article that Victor Hanson went to this right-wing organization and he was spouting neo-Nazi stuff.  And there was a person in the audience who came up to me. She was very nice, and she said, let me get this straight. I heard you, and you think that immigration should be diverse but different. I said, Yes. It makes it like the country itself. Not all from south of the border—not because I’m picking on them. It’s just the more different types of people we have, the more opportunities people have to come to America.  And they need skills so we don’t endanger our poor citizens with an overtaxed social services system.  And they should come only legally. And they should know English.   Next thing I knew, Southern Poverty Law Center had me on their website. And they do that to everybody. They did that to Ayaan. They do that to everybody.  Yeah.  So, and you know what Voltaire said about the Holy Roman Empire?  It wasn’t holy, it wasn’t Roman, it wasn’t an empire.  And the same thing is true about the Southern Poverty Law Center. It’s not Southern at all. It’s really white liberals all over the country, but not so much in the South. And I mean, I encountered them in California.  So it’s not the Southern. And it has nothing to do with poverty. They have probably a near–billion-dollar endowment. They were getting million-dollar—as Jack pointed out—donations. Their head was making, I don’t know, $500,000 or $600,000 a year. They were paying out to this white racist—what was it?—$220,000 to cause mayhem. So they could come in as the fire brigade to put out the fire they lit and make a profit out of it.  And they’re not anything to do with the law. They’re about breaking the law. Southern poverty law? No. You break the law. That’s illegal for a private organization to pay people to cause havoc, and then to defraud their donors by suggesting that was a spontaneous event that they cooked up, and to gin up their receipts.  Yeah, and I think the only thing I would say for them—it is a center of something. But, you know, it’s not Southern, and it’s not poverty, and it’s not law. But maybe it is a center of chaos.  Fowler: They’re very important, Victor, to the whole leftist project. Because not only is this funding the Ku Klux Klan and these things, but they will then say, you, Victor, are a racist, or this nonprofit is racist.  And then foundations will not give donations.  Hanson: That’s what they do.   They use their staff as a litmus test. And if you get on the wrong side of the litmus test, that goes into a computer and you’ll never get a grant from these multibillion-dollar foundations. Or your career—Oh, he’s been identified by the Southern Poverty Law Center. So what? That’s a joke.  And it’s kind of like the ACLU—the American Civil Liberties Union. They used to be—actually, there were moments in their history when they were defending really unpopular people for free speech. And they got criticism. Remember that Nazi march in Skokie, Illinois?  Fowler: Right.  Hanson: Skokie, yeah. They intervened. I don’t think they should have, but they did. And they said, we have to because we have to support the principle of free speech when no one likes free speech and the people who are expressing themselves freely are odious.  Not now.  Now they have boot camps to train people how to be activists on the left.  So everything has changed with the Left. I think, again, it was because the country moved to the right, especially after Reagan. And they tried to resurrect the Left, and they got frustrated. And so they outsourced their entire agenda to areas that were not contingent on politics.  So the foundations, academia, Hollywood, popular culture, professional sports—they infiltrated all of that. The corporate boardroom. And they controlled that. And they said, “We’re going to change the culture and civilization of this country within the military, within the corporate boardroom, within the university.”  And we won’t have to have actual power. It’ll be good when we do. And eventually it’ll result in actual political power because these institutions will change the balloting laws in states.  They’ll call you a racist if you think you need an ID. They’ll help open the border. But we don’t need them to get our hard-left message—that everybody doesn’t like—through. We’re going to do it without the people’s consent.  And that’s how they got the transgender—you know—men in girls’ restrooms. Nobody wanted that. Nobody wanted biological males competing in women’s sports. But they had the ability, through all of these institutions, to make it very hard on people who spoke out.  Look at Riley Gaines. If she spoke out, the operatives of the left in the university almost tried to kill her. Almost. She was trapped in California.  Fowler: Was she in San Francisco?  Hanson: Yeah, at San Francisco State, I think it was. She couldn’t get out of the room. And she was stalked. She had to have security. And that’s what they do.  We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal.

An advocacy group is asking Congress to investigate the tax-exempt status of one of the largest health care systems in New York City, pointing to massive executive pay hikes and a Justice Department antitrust lawsuit. Save Our States Executive Director Trent England asked House Ways and Means Chairman Jason Smith, R-Mo., to probe the NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital system. “All these facts suggest a pattern of NewYork-Presbyterian taking taxpayer dollars and other government benefits and focusing on maximizing revenue and executive perks rather than on serving their patients,” says England’s letter to the House committee, shared with The Daily Signal. In March, the Justice Department filed an antitrust lawsuit against the hospital, citing “anticompetitive contract restrictions that deny New Yorkers the choice of lower cost healthcare options.” Save Our States also launched a new digital ad campaign titled “Patient Betrayal,” critical of the hospital, its spending, and its tax-exempt status. The nonprofit hospital system includes facilities at Columbia University Irving Medical Center and Weill Cornell Medical Center. Save Our States noted that the NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital CEO’s compensation jumped from $8.9 million to more than $23 million in a two-year period. Shortly thereafter, it reduced its workforce by about 1,000 employees due to “anticipated financial challenges.” “The American people deserve transparency and accountability in healthcare, especially from systems that benefit from taxpayer subsidies,” the letter continues. SaveOurStates Letter to House Ways and Means 4-27Download The ad and the letter highlight a $750 million settlement that the hospital and Columbia University paid to hundreds of women who sued, alleging they were sexually abused by a doctor, as reported by The New York Times. NewYork-Presbyterian did not respond to email and phone inquiries from The Daily Signal on Monday and Tuesday. However, the hospital has previously said the Justice Department antitrust lawsuit was “without merit” and said it “complies fully with all applicable federal and state laws and regulations.” “We do not seek to exclude any other hospital from any insurer’s network. Nor do we require more favorable treatment than any other hospital,” the hospital said in a statement to Fierce Healthcare. “In our contract negotiations with insurers, we seek to maximize access to the highest quality of care,” the hospital continued. “Insurance companies hold the market power and use it to restrict patient choice. The obligation of insurance companies is to their shareholders, while ours is to our patients.” The nonprofit hospital system lists more than 10,000 affiliated physicians and 50,000 employees, with more than 2 million visits annually. 

Following the attempted assassination of President Donald Trump over the weekend, some Americans have begun to posit a connection between the alleged shooter’s actions and the incubation of radical beliefs in California’s education system. On Monday, Cole Tomas Allen, a resident of Torrance, California, was charged with attempting to kill the president after being taken into custody following the incident at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner in Washington, D.C. The suspected shooter graduated from the California Institute of Technology with a mechanical engineering degree, interned at NASA, and was a part-time teacher in California at the time of his arrest. A review of his social media posts reportedly reveal Allen compared Trump to Adolph Hitler and encouraged detractors of the president to buy guns. “[Cole Tomas Allen is] a product of a very sophisticated indoctrination platform that is ubiquitous in the realm of higher education,” Lance Christensen, vice president of government affairs and education policy at the California Policy Center, told The Daily Signal. “It’s almost a given that every public college and university in California, and across the nation, is the bastion of left-wing radical intellectuals,” he said.  Federal Election Commission filings indicate that Allen donated $25 to ActBlue, a left-leaning political action committee. In resurfaced posts brought up by a user on X, Allen allegedly compared Trump’s 2024 presidential win to “Nazis getting elected.”  BREAKING: I found Cole Allen's archived tweets.He predicted "Kamala wins all swing states," compared Trump's win to “Nazis getting elected,” and moved to Bluesky.The scary part: he retweeted every mainstream Democrat on this platform.Thread below. What radicalized him… pic.twitter.com/5VWHCZd6Rx— KanekoaTheGreat (@KanekoaTheGreat) April 26, 2026 In response to a photo of Allen being recognized as teacher of the month at the California school where he worked, former Babylon Bee Managing Editor Joel Berry said on X, “It’s likely that the majority of public school teachers you leave your kids with all day agree with this guy.” It’s likely that the majority of public school teachers you leave your kids with all day agree with this guy pic.twitter.com/gmvueEOTzG— Joel Berry (@JoelWBerry) April 27, 2026 In an email to The Daily Signal, Defending Education President Nicole Neily also noted a connection between academia and radicalism. “The teaching profession today is a far cry from what it was when many of us grew up,” Neily said. “Rather than partner constructively with families to help students thrive, far too many educators now view their role as one of ‘reprogramming’ children away from their families’ values and closely held beliefs towards progressivism.” “Our 2024 report ‘CorruptED‘ explored how colleges of education center critical race theory, queer studies, decolonization, white supremacy, and equity into their degree programs—so it’s little wonder that America’s teachers now view themselves as social justice warriors, rather than the educators they were hired to be,” she added. Allen is not the first college-educated Californian to attempt to assassinate a right-leaning politician. Nicholas Roske—who identifies as Sophie Roske—was a California resident who attempted to murder U.S. Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh in June 2022. Roske stood outside Kavanaugh’s Maryland home with a gun, ammunition, knife, hammer, duct tape, zip ties and other tools. Before committing the act, he received a call from his sister who convinced him to back away from the crime. Roske is now serving an eight-year sentence for attempted murder. Roske was a substitute teacher at the time, having graduated from California State University, Northridge with a degree in psychology. According to NBC News, Roske’s reason for the attempt came down to Roe v. Wade. “Roske allegedly told investigators that she decided to target Kavanaugh because she was angry about the possibility that the Supreme Court would overturn Roe v. Wade and about the deadly school shooting in Uvalde, Texas. She said she thought Kavanaugh would loosen gun laws,” the outlet reported, citing the complaint. Jack Posobiec, TPUSA contributor and the senior editor of Human Events, also made a connection with public education, posting on social media that he’s not surprised “a teacher opened fire on the White House press dinner.”  For those who are surprised a teacher opened fire on the White House press dinner https://t.co/As4jrvzghF— Jack Posobiec (@JackPosobiec) April 26, 2026