Do you eat steak? You’re killing the planet! So say climate activists. Silly media agree: Vox warns that beef is the “worst thing we eat when it comes to global warming.” The World Economic Forum, which says it’s “committed to improving the state of the world,” released a video promoting a future where “you’ll own nothing and you’ll be happy. You’ll eat much less meat.” How does meat threaten the climate? Cows give off methane—a greenhouse gas. “Cow flatulence,” says Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., on MSNBC, “it actually is an issue.” As usual, she gets it wrong. It’s not flatulence that produces most methane—it’s burping, from the other end. Bill Gates suggested the world should genetically modify cows to “not be so much a source of methane emissions.” Celebrities believe. Ellen DeGeneres tells viewers: “Be neat. No meat.” Arnold Schwarzenegger went vegan and now says, “Less meat, less heat! … Livestock … creates more pollution than all the transportation combined.” Is it true? Probably not. In our newest video, Stossel TV Fellow Linnea Lueken checks out the facts. She interviews Sailesh Rao of Climate Healers, a group that promotes global veganism and the end of all animal agriculture. That means no leather for shoes, no wool or cashmere, no eggs or milk. Rao claims animal agriculture has “caused more than half of the warming we are experiencing today.” “That’s just nonsense,” says Gregory Wrightstone, director of the CO2 Coalition. “The life cycle of methane is just 11 years. Any methane emitted today will be gone by the year (2037).” Lueken pushes back, “The United Nations says methane is 80 times more potent than carbon dioxide.” “It is 30 times, not 80,” replies Wrightstone, “and CO2 population in the atmosphere is 300 times as much as methane. That means methane’s warming potential itself is actually 10% of that of CO2.” He acknowledged that methane does increase warming, but he says that’s not a threat. “We’re going to see 0.05 degrees Celsius warming in the next 50 years from methane,” says Wrightstone. “That’s an extremely small number that you can’t even measure.” “You’re just a science denier,” replies Lueken. “That’s not only wrong, it’s quite insulting to me and my other scientists,” says Wrightstone. “What we’re doing is trying to bring the scientific method into the climate change debate.” I assumed science is what climate scientists do, but Wrightstone says reasonable research rarely gets published. “A lot of the experts, particularly at universities, only get funding if they toe the company line.” The “company line” says climate change is a horrible crisis, so climate researchers need more money. The climate activists push imitation meats like Beyond Meat and Impossible burgers. “Veggie burgers,” says Rao. “Burgers made of mushrooms. The planet is paramount!” But mock meats have never surpassed a 2% market share, and lately, sales have been dropping. “Do you really think that Americans are going to give up their hamburgers?” Lueken asks. “It’s a hard sell,” admits Rao, “but nature cannot be argued with.” Activists at the United Nations and World Economic Forum push even more dubious alternatives, such as “insect-based proteins.” The WEF lists “5 reasons why eating insects could reduce climate change.” Ready to eat bugs? Fortunately, the conversation around climate has shifted. The doom and gloom narrative has weakened.  “There is no climate crisis,” says Wrightstone. “Earth’s ecosystems are thriving and prospering. Humanity is benefiting. We should celebrate that, not demonize it.” And we should stop spending taxpayer money subsidizing crackpot schemes of climate hysteria promoters like Al Gore and his rich friends. COPYRIGHT 2026 BY JFS PRODUCTIONS INC. We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal. The post Evil Meat appeared first on The Daily Signal.

For years, Americans have been told that faith out of fashion. Others have rendered God an outdated thing of the past. But the success of Shannon Bream’s latest book, “Nothing Is Impossible With God,” suggests a different reality.  Debuting at No. 1 on the New York Times bestseller list, the book’s rapid rise reflects a continued, and perhaps even growing, hunger for spiritual truth in an increasingly uncertain culture.  Published by Fox News Books, it is Bream’s fourth consecutive No. 1 debut. The achievement places her among the most influential voices in faith-based publishing today.  Since its launch in 2020, Fox News Books has produced 17 bestsellers on the New York Times list and sold more than 3.5 million copies, signaling that audiences are actively seeking alternatives to the prevailing cultural narrative. Themes in Bream’s Book In “Nothing Is Impossible With God,” Bream draws from the Bible to explore the lives of unlikely heroes. She looks at figures who were marked by fear, doubt, and adversity, yet ultimately defined by faith. Drawing parallels to modern struggles, she offers readers a message that is both timeless and timely: that hope and purpose remain accessible even in moments of uncertainty.  In interviews surrounding the book’s release, Bream has emphasized that her goal is not simply to retell biblical stories, but to make them personally meaningful for readers navigating today’s challenges. She has said she hopes readers come away recognizing that “God works through imperfect people in powerful ways,” and that the same truth applies in their own lives.  That faith-based message appears to be resonating. Bream’s previous books—“The Women of the Bible Speak,” “The Mothers and Daughters of the Bible Speak,” and “The Love Stories of the Bible Speak” have collectively sold nearly 1.5 million copies. Her debut title alone spent 15 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, including several weeks at No. 1. Crossover Appeal Beyond publishing, Bream’s credibility as a journalist has helped broaden her appeal. As anchor of “Fox News Sunday” and chief legal correspondent for Fox News, she has built a reputation for thoughtful, measured reporting in an often polarized media environment. The combination of serious journalism paired with committed faith commentary has made her work particularly compelling to a wide audience.  Her success also points to a larger cultural dynamic. While surveys often highlight declining religious affiliation, they do not necessarily capture the continued interest in spirituality, meaning, and moral clarity.   The popularity of books like “Nothing Is Impossible With God” suggests that many Americans have not abandoned faith altogether and there remains an underlying desire for belief and truth. Despite the secular culture and moral chaos, God’s existence is ensured, and people are looking to that for comfort.   The post Shannon Bream’s Latest Book Debuts at No. 1, Signaling Demand for Faith-Based Titles appeared first on The Daily Signal.

This week, Under Secretary of Education Nicholas Kent put college accreditors on notice: comply with federal civil rights law or risk losing the authority that gives them control over billions in taxpayer-funded student aid. Kent’s warning was directed at the Middle States Commission on Higher Education and the Commission on Accreditation in Physical Therapy Education. The National Advisory Committee on Institutional Quality and Integrity (NACIQI), a federal oversight board, recently documented concerns about these accreditors. Established by Congress in 1992, NACIQI is an 18-member independent advisory board that evaluates accrediting agencies and makes recommendations to the Secretary of Education on whether to recognize them. Its members are appointed by Congress and the Secretary and serve six-year terms. While NACIQI doesn’t make final decisions, its recommendations carry significant weight. Concerns about one of the accreditors, the Middle States Commission on Higher Education, center on its “Guiding Principle 3.” This standard encourages institutions to consider racial diversity in areas such as student learning, employment practices, strategic planning, and institutional governance. Kent concluded that the standard effectively “prioritizes racial diversity over merit.” As for the other accreditor, the Commission on Accreditation in Physical Therapy Education, that group’s “Standard 2B” goes even further. It requires programs to promote “justice, equity, diversity, inclusivity (or JEDI), belonging, and anti-racism,” and to demonstrate how their mission and outcomes align with those aims. The Commission didn’t clearly define diversity in race-neutral terms, as Kent also pointed out. Accreditation used to be a voluntary, peer-review process for colleges and universities. It wasn’t until federal lawmakers introduced the second G.I. Bill in 1952, which provided federal assistance to servicemembers to attend college in honor of their service to the country, that institutions were required to be accredited to enroll students using federal loans. In 1965, Congress decided to expand the role of accreditors to promote academic quality among accredited institutions. Yet that influence has not translated into meaningful accountability. A 2022 report from the Postsecondary Commission, an aspiring, nonprofit institutional accreditor that’s focused on student economic outcomes, found that “less than three percent of accreditor actions involved penalizing an institution due to poor student outcomes or academic programming.” Instead, accreditors are focused on enforcing DEI standards or wrongly engaging in institutional governance decisions. This has been documented previously by scholars at the Texas Public Policy Foundation and The Heritage Foundation. Kent’s letters rightly call attention to these issues. Both the Middle States Commission on Higher Education and APTA were deemed “substantially compliant” and must now submit reports detailing how they will eliminate standards that violate federal law. Failure to do so could result in denial, suspension, or termination of their federal recognition. The Trump administration has made accreditation reform a priority. A 2025 executive order directed the Department of Education to expand opportunities for new accreditors and make it easier for institutions to switch agencies. The Department is also convening a negotiated rulemaking committee to revisit regulations governing higher education accreditation, reversing the previous administration’s reluctance to allow new entrants. Today’s system of accreditation has allowed accreditors to become ideological gatekeepers of federal dollars rather than guarantors of quality. Ultimately, Congress should decouple federal aid eligibility from federally sanctioned accrediting bodies. This would open the door to state and private quality assurance entities that evaluate institutions on student outcomes rather than ideology. In the meantime, it is reassuring to have Kent and others at the Education Department holding accreditors accountable to federal law. The post Kent’s Warning Signals a Shift in Accreditation Oversight appeared first on The Daily Signal.

When Vanguard Group announced that it would settle its portion of a lawsuit brought by 13 state attorneys general, opponents of “Environmental, Social, and Governance” (ESG) declared victory. And they weren’t wrong. The suit, led by Texas AG Ken Paxton, accused Vanguard, BlackRock, and State Street of conspiring to push green-energy initiatives through their coal-company holdings, allegedly raising electricity prices for consumers. “A huge win in the fight to stop … ESG,” “incredible news”—the celebrations came quickly. The damage done to the ESG cause is significant, and the celebration is justified. But it may also be premature—and for reasons that have nothing to do with ESG. The more important question is one that almost nobody is asking: Why, exactly, did Vanguard settle? The firm says it settled “solely for the purpose of avoiding the burden and expense of litigation”—standard lawyer-speak for “we want you to leave us alone, but we can’t admit wrongdoing.” While it’s almost certainly the case that Vanguard wanted to avoid extended legal action and the associated expenses, the idea that the settlement was reached “solely” for that purpose strains credulity. After all, the firm agreed not only to pay almost $30 million in fines but also to turn over communications related to its ESG activities—a massive, potentially embarrassing and costly concession. The true “costs” of letting this case reach trial, in other words, must have far exceeded the mere “burden and expense of litigation.” Vanguard is not the same as the other two members of the Big Three and is profoundly different from BlackRock in particular. BlackRock may be the biggest asset manager in the world, with more than $14 trillion in assets under management, but Vanguard is, by far, the biggest manager of passive assets. Of its total of $12 trillion in AUM, almost all is passively managed. By comparison, only 35%-40% ($5-$6 trillion) of BlackRock’s assets are passively managed. While State Street is far more passive-focused than BlackRock, it is much smaller than Vanguard and is not entirely passive. Vanguard is, put bluntly, the undisputed king of passive investing, controlling roughly half of the entire passive investment market that has been growing at a staggering clip. According to Morningstar, passive funds saw nearly 250% growth in AUM between 2014 and 2023, compared to 36% growth for active funds. In the United States, passive AUM surpassed active AUM last year, and growth continues apace. Passive investing isn’t just Vanguard’s business model. It is Vanguard. That’s what was at stake. About a year ago, Denise Hearn and Cynthia Hanawalt, two climate investment researchers at Columbia University, published a paper noting that a trial in this case would provide the first legal test of the “common ownership theory,” which posits that index investing—in which managers hold multiple companies in the same sector—creates incentives to reduce or eliminate competition between the companies, resulting in a slowdown or stoppage in innovation, artificially inflated prices, reduced output, etc. Hearn and Hanawalt argued that the case against the Big Three was flawed but could, at trial, produce unexpected results that would profoundly disrupt the asset management business. Historically, the common ownership theory has been dismissed as ideologically tinged and is refuted specifically by an appeal to “passivity.” Managers take no advantage of the competition-deadening incentives; they are mere inert observers. But that defense may be weaker than it appears, and this is where the story gets genuinely interesting. We would argue that passivity actually has the opposite effect. Because it dulls the price-discovery mechanism, which traditionally enforces competitive behavior on corporations, passive investing creates the circumstances in which the structural incentives of common ownership—the dampening of competition in the interest of industry-wide profitability—can function without check or intent. Active collusion between managers becomes unnecessary because the competitive dampening happens by default. As a result, passivity doesn’t refute common ownership theory; it operationalizes it. The implications are potentially staggering. Together, the common ownership theory and the theory that passivity operationalizes competitive dampening could undermine the last quarter-century of capital market growth and consolidation—and destroy the very idea that passive investing is an appropriate process for capitalizing business at all. No single development in this case would have guaranteed that outcome. But none could have ruled it out, either. And if you happen to run a firm with $12 trillion in assets under management—virtually all of it passive, in a market still growing at breakneck speed—is that a chance you could afford to take? That, likely, is why Vanguard settled. The post The Real Reason That Vanguard Settled appeared first on The Daily Signal.

New York’s desperate governor is turning to a well-known practice in New York City: aggressive begging. While speaking at Politico’s “New York Agenda: Albany Summit” last week, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, admitted that the state’s tax base has eroded and that it faces a deepening fiscal crisis. She then put out a call for wealthy, former New Yorkers to come back to the state so they can be robbed again by beneficent government overlords. Kathy Hochul making a weak plea for wealthy people who have left New York (to red states like Florida) to come back to pay their high taxes to fund failing (unaccountable) social programs: “I need people who are high net worth to support the generous social programs we have in… pic.twitter.com/7quhsFyWyn— Matt Whitlock (@MattWhitlock) March 18, 2026 “I need people who are high net worth to support the generous social programs we want to have in our state,” Hochul said. “There are some patriotic millionaires who stepped up. Ok. Cut me the checks. But if you want to be supportive, maybe the first step should be to go down to Palm Beach and see who you can bring back home.” This is unbelievably, well, rich of her to say. As more than a few folks on X recalled, Hochul was insistent in 2022 that anyone who disagreed with the leftward direction of the state should just “jump on a bus and head down to Florida.” Whats really Ironic about the Kathy Hochul Begging for Millionaires to come back to NYC is that in her Victory Speech after she defeated Lee Zeldin in 2022 she told people that didn't like her Policies to "Get Out of Here, We Don't Need You Here"And they did…and it turns out… https://t.co/lRHHfE1X3F pic.twitter.com/8viXgKY205— Jason Robertson (@JRobFromMN) March 19, 2026 Whelp, I guess a lot of them did and now she’s pleading with them to come back so they can be milked like cows and bilked like suckers. What a great message. Keep in mind that the New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and the New York legislature have proposed a bevy of new “wealth” taxes to make up for their growing budget shortfalls. I think Hochul knows that Mamdani’s socialist schemes and ridiculous fiscal requests are a recipe for disaster. But she can’t or won’t do anything about it. The young leftist is far too popular with the Democrat Party base; his New York City experiment is seen as critical to the Left’s success elsewhere. So Hochul and her allies in Albany have no choice but to mitigate, to squeeze what they can from the rest of the state and pathetically beg former New Yorkers to come back from Florida’s greener pastures. And if it isn’t obvious already, well-run states like Florida have created quite an embarrassment for Hochul and the most petulant defenders of the blue state model. There is a reason why California Gov. Gavin Newsom, who is totally not running for president, keeps concocting bizarre narratives about how Texas and Florida are high tax states compared to California. Yes, he really thinks people are dumb enough to believe that. The comparison between Florida and New York is certainly an instructive one. The two states have roughly the same population. New York has an estimated population of just under 20 million. Florida’s population is around 23 million. Yet, Florida spent about $115 billion last year and New York spent $235 billion. New York City’s budget alone was nearly the same as Florida’s despite having less than half the population. And remarkably, that budget still isn’t enough for New York politicians. Mamdani intends to spend enough to insult even the most profligate drunken sailors. He already plans to raid the city’s rainy-day fund, ensuring that nothing will be there in a real crisis. No surprise, Moody’s financial rating service has already issued a warning to the city by giving it a negative credit outlook. Meanwhile, Mamdani’s working hard to ensure that legitimate public services are overrun by vagrants, and services for vagrants are overrun by NGO leeches. NYC spends more per homeless person than the median NYC household earns. $81,705 per person in FY2025.And $81,705 is a floor. It excludes supportive housing (~$500M/yr), mental health response teams, and NYPD encampment costs. The city projects ~$97K per person in FY2026. pic.twitter.com/haXJenA4Q3— Charlie Smirkley (@charliesmirkley) March 16, 2026 Some are calling for the “grownups” to step in and convince Mamdani and his minions to see reason. Unfortunately, Hochul is the adult in this scenario and she’s not going to do anything to put serious pressure on the Left’s favorite mayor. It’s bleak, and she knows it. On the other hand, with a much lower budget, Florida mostly delivers on its more limited governmental promises. From K-12 schools to even public transit, Florida has been going in a positive direction for years. Americans—and not just the “rich”—have been moving en masse to the Sunshine state because it has lower taxes, lower cost of living, a better job market, and isn’t foisting transgenderism on children along with a litany of other woke garbage. So why would someone who has decided to make the swap decide to go back unless they absolutely must? They won’t. And New York’s leaders are unlikely to address what’s going wrong. Their only hope might be for a federal government to step in and save them after they’ve made it their proud mission to stop the operations of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. If they think President Donald Trump and congressional Republicans are going to bail them out I have a bridge to sell them in Brooklyn. The post Hochul Begs Wealthy Floridians to Return to New York. She Can Pound Sand. appeared first on The Daily Signal.