When there’s a real chance of protecting Americans’ privacy, the Deep State always runs the same playbook. Slow walk votes on reforms. Allow the clock to run out. Highlight a potential national security scare. And reiterate the status quo while calling it reform. That’s why we must deliver real reforms before the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) expires on June 12. Our demand is not complicated. It is merely for a fair vote on something that a uniquely bipartisan coalition and 76% of Americans want, and that came within a single vote of passing just two years ago. Under Section 702 of FISA, the government warrantlessly vacuums up hundreds of millions of international communications every year. The problem is that the CIA, FBI, and NSA then specifically search through that information looking for Americans’ communications. This backdoor search inverts the “foreign” part of FISA. House conservatives have come to the table on this intensely important issue many times. Rep. Andy Biggs, R-Ariz., has introduced a marquee privacy bill that would enact a slate of overwhelmingly popular privacy protections—the Protect Liberty and End Warrantless Surveillance Act. It would do nothing to stop the government from looking at foreigners. And rather than repealing Section 702, it would extend it for longer than the administration has asked for. It would simply establish independent judicial review before the government can initiate searches using your name, email address, or phone number, like the Fourth Amendment requires. This is not what the current FISA bill does. The language doesn’t require independent review whatsoever. Simply put, it will stop exactly zero of the long-documented abuses of FISA generally or Section 702 specifically. And yes, despite Congress’s best attempts at tweaking the edges over the years, we still have overwhelming and unceasing evidence of misuse. This includes “a U.S. senator, journalists and political commentators, 6,800 Social Security numbers, 19,000 donors to a congressional campaign and an FBI employee’s family member, who the employee’s mother suspected of having an extramarital affair.” The FBI even used Section 702—the “foreign intelligence” surveillance tool—against January 6 defendants. Current law doesn’t even pretend to reach the disturbing NSA queries of this incredibly sensitive surveillance data for information about potential tenants and online dating matches. We respectfully disagree with our colleagues who think we can count on the last FISA reauthorization Congress passed—RISAA. That legislation mostly codified then-current practice, the same practice that had already produced documented, widespread abuse. It also expanded FISA surveillance in alarming ways. We also disagree with those who claim there is anything new about our posture, which we have consistently maintained for many years under several presidents. It’s not our position that’s new: 60% of House Republicans voted for a warrant requirement two years ago. The votes exist. The bills exist. The only thing missing is a leadership willing to schedule them. Since RISAA, the FBI was caught using a separate querying tool that bypassed those requirements entirely. By March 2026, the FISA court issued a classified opinion finding the violations hadn’t stopped—and that they extended to the CIA and NSA. Gun owners need to know what is actually at stake here. Every major foreign firearms manufacturer is a potential Section 702 surveillance target: Glock in Austria; Heckler & Koch and SIG Sauer’s parent company in Germany; Beretta, Benelli, and Fabarm in Italy; IWI in Israel; CZ in the Czech Republic. Their communications with American subsidiaries, collectors, and dealers are precisely the kind of international business traffic swept up under Section 702. But American gun owners face another threat to their civil liberties. Federal agencies are buying personal data from commercial data brokers. That’s your location history showing when and which gun store, range, and sporting goods shop you’ve ever been to. Financial records showing every ammo purchase. Your online dossier that’s marked “gun enthusiast,” assembled from browsing and buying patterns. The Firearm Owners Protection Act of 1986 prohibits a federal gun registry. The government is building one anyway—they’re just buying it in pieces from data brokers instead of collecting it directly. The government is now using AI tools to generate the legal justifications for initiating surveillance in the first place, and if Congress doesn’t act soon, data broker-powered FedAI will be every American’s problem. Congress has no legal framework to govern this. We cannot support bringing a clean reauthorization to the floor—it would deny every American the chance to at least see Congress make these critical decisions that have massive impacts on our most fundamental rights. The standard for any bill that deserves a yes vote is straightforward: a warrant before the FBI searches any American’s communications, and a ban on purchasing what would otherwise require one. No votes on warrant requirements? Then no FISA. We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of the Daily Signal.

The Net-Zero Banking Alliance collapsed in October 2025. The Net-Zero Insurance Alliance fell apart even earlier. By the end of last year, every major U.S. bank had withdrawn from the climate cartel that had spent four years pressuring them to choke off financing to American energy producers. It should have been the end of the story. It wasn’t. Because the alliances were just the visible tip. The real machine—including the regulatory stress tests, the ESG ratings, and the climate “scenario analysis” frameworks that quietly determine who gets capital and at what cost—is still humming. And the engine driving most of it is a climate scenario the United Nations itself just officially retired. In April 2026, the international scientific committee that designs climate scenarios for the U.N. declared SSP5-8.5, the corollary to the infamous RCP 8.5, “implausible” and removed it from the framework that will underpin the next IPCC assessment. Scientists had been warning for years that the scenario was indefensible. A 2020 paper in Nature called it “increasingly implausible with every passing year.” The Biden EPA quietly pulled it from regulatory cost-benefit analysis in 2022. Reaching RCP 8.5 would have required a world in which coal use quintupled and 12 billion people walked the Earth. It was always a fantasy. Someone forgot to tell Wall Street. BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager and a principal architect of the modern ESG movement, disclosed in its 2025 Climate Report that it relied on RCP 8.5 as its primary “no climate action” scenario for stress-testing investment portfolios. BlackRock called it a “tough, but plausible” pathway. The international scientific community now disagrees on the second part. Munich Re sells a “Company Climate Risk Edition” product to insurers and corporations worldwide, marketed explicitly as a compliance tool for the Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures, the EU’s Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive, and the International Sustainability Standards Board. The product offers projections under RCP 4.5 and RCP 8.5, running out to 2030, 2050, and 2100. The International Association of Insurance Supervisors, the global body coordinating insurance regulation across more than 200 jurisdictions, commissioned a climate risk tool built directly on RCP 8.5, described as “the pathway with the highest assumed greenhouse gas emissions,” to assess climate impacts on insurers through 2080. California Insurance Commissioner Ricardo Lara rolled out a “Long-Term Solvency Regulation” in 2025 requiring climate stress tests for 2030, 2040, and 2050. This is a framework that quietly imports scenario assumptions from the same body of science the U.N. has now repudiated. And the Network for Greening the Financial System (140 central banks and supervisors strong, including the Federal Reserve, the European Central Bank, and the Bank of England) built its entire suite of climate scenarios on integrated assessment models calibrated to the IPCC’s high-emissions pathways. The Federal Reserve’s 2026 supervisory stress test began in the first quarter of this year. It is still operating. This is the weaponization of ESG laid bare. Regulators force banks and insurers to model an impossible scenario. The output gets fed into climate-related financial disclosures. Those disclosures get scored by ratings agencies like MSCI, ISS, and Sustainalytics. Those scores determine which companies get capital, and at what cost. American energy producers, which underperform on every climate metric calibrated to an apocalypse, get starved of investment. Banks that lend to them get downgraded. Insurers that underwrite them face escalating “physical risk” premiums and can be pressured to drop coverage entirely. The result is a regulatory machinery that spent nearly a decade choking off capital to American oil, gas, and coal producers on the basis of a scenario its own authors now admit will never come to pass. The market is finally pushing back. Bank lending to oil and gas grew more than 20% in 2024, hitting a three-year high of $869 billion, as major institutions quietly retreated from the net-zero pledges that never made financial sense in the first place. Real markets do not operate on retired U.N. scenarios. They operate on demand, technology, and political reality. Yet regulators and ratings agencies, operating in a parallel universe insulated from market discipline, still have not caught up. Or, more accurately, they do not want to. Here is what should happen now. Every financial regulator that has built climate stress testing on RCP 8.5 or SSP5-8.5 should formally retract those exercises and disclose the implications for any institution downgraded or restricted on their basis. ESG ratings agencies should publish exactly which inputs in their methodologies depend on retired scenarios, and to what extent. The Federal Reserve should state publicly whether its 2026 supervisory stress test relies on inputs drawn from the now-retired pathway and, if so, suspend the exercise. State insurance regulators should pause climate-related solvency requirements and reassess from scratch. And the European Central Bank, which tested 112 banks against an extreme-scenario “Hot House World” pathway, should issue corrected guidance to every institution whose capital plans it has shaped. The Net-Zero Banking Alliance is dead. The Net-Zero Insurance Alliance is dead. The doomsday scenario that justified both is now officially dead too. It is past time to bury the regulatory infrastructure they built and to restore American banks, insurers, and energy producers to the discipline of real markets and real science. We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of the Daily Signal.

Chaotic protests turned riots at a New Jersey ICE detention facility have finally been quashed, and Democratic leaders who stoked the crowd want to give themselves big pats on the back for a job well done. Of course, they were the reason the situation spiraled out of control. On Sunday night police arrested over 20 people in a major crackdown at the Delaney Hall Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in Newark, New Jersey. Groups of well-organized, Antifa-aligned protesters had been loitering around the facility for over a week and refused to leave. Some of those taking part in the protests behaved aggressively toward ICE agents and even random employees doing their jobs in and around the facility. At one point they hemmed in a garbage truck driver who became irate and yelled at them, “If I hit one of y’all, I go to jail. … What’s wrong with ya’ll?” After several violent confrontations and seemingly some pressure from the Department of Homeland Security, Newark finally set curfew and threatened the agitators with arrest if they didn’t disperse. The New York Post described the scene Sunday night. “After cops announced the 9 p.m. curfew to encourage people to leave, the number of protesters dwindled to roughly 100,” the Post wrote. “Police in riot gear then advanced into the crowd of naysayers while shouting, ‘Move in!’ Cops fired two rounds of tear gas toward protesters who yelled, ‘Give peace a chance’ and ‘No Trump, no KKK, no fascist USA’ — sending more people fleeing until roughly 50 protesters and members of the press were corralled into a tight circle.” At that point, the Post noted, police arrested between 20 to 25 people. The Department of Homeland Security posted that those arrested will now face the “full weight of the law.” Order prevails. Rioters will face the full weight of the law. pic.twitter.com/FpHi4iwGwI— Homeland Security (@DHSgov) June 1, 2026 And so, this shameful spectacle comes to an end, for now. That didn’t keep New Jersey Democrats from declaring what a great job they were doing. New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill took to X to try to make it seem as if she had taken some kind of heroic action to stop the mayhem. Last night, masked individuals at Delaney Hall attacked the barrier in the protected protest area and began aggressive and dangerous actions against Newark and New Jersey State Police, including throwing projectiles, utilizing the barriers as weapons, and lighting tires on fire…— Governor Mikie Sherrill (@GovSherrillNJ) May 31, 2026 Sherrill cleverly finagled her public statement to distance herself from the most violent elements of the protests while pinning the blame for the whole mess on ICE. “My number one priority will always be public safety, and I remain dedicated to protecting constitutional rights. We simply cannot let ICE surge into our community.” Yeah, she’s all about protecting the “constitutional rights” of people who aren’t citizens of this country by impeding federal authorities from carrying out our laws. As many were quick to note, it was Sherrill and Democratic Party leaders that empowered these protests and caused the mayhem that needed to be controlled with riot squads. They’ve done everything in their power to message that ICE—and let’s be real here, any kind of serious immigration enforcement—is inherently illegitimate. As Fox News columnist David Marcus rightly wrote on Saturday, Democrats “own the chaos” that they’ve sowed at Delaney Hall, which they fully intend to make a flashpoint in their battle against President Donald Trump’s aggressive immigration enforcement. Democrat politicians have been showing up at the Newark facility since they made a big show of support for the protests on Memorial Day. What a great way to show support for America’s fallen heroes, right? Their message has been that the conditions inside the ICE are inhumane, which the Department of Homeland Security denies. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., called for the facility to be shut down entirely. Hakeem Jeffries is now calling for Delaney Hall to be shut down and repeats the lie that there’s no food or medical treatment.He then threatens that he will go after Trump officials if Democrats regain power.Believe them when they tell you who they are pic.twitter.com/HQcerVfC4K— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) May 31, 2026 Sen. Andy Kim, D-N.J., who got caught in a cloud of pepper spray on Memorial Day because the crowd ignored his pleas not to block the entrance, has said that protesters are simply “angry” that the detention center is “not in line with our values as a nation.” That’s funny, because Delaney Hall first became an ICE facility in 2011 under President Barack Obama while Kim was serving in that administration. Was it not in line with our “values” then? The reality is that there was a time when Democrats at least pretended to be for border enforcement. Even a decade ago they dismissed the idea that they were controlled by the open borders Left as some kind or ridiculous right-wing fantasy. Then President Joe Biden happened. The mask slipped. Now they are caught in a position of defending unpopular policies while securing the fruits of their “success” in the Biden years. They are trying to appear as reasonable moderates just looking out for human rights or something while signaling to their base that America will have open borders now, open borders tomorrow, open borders forever. And that’s how you get the nonsense that took place in Newark over the past week. Democrats show up at a protest, it turns into a mob, the Trump administration tells them to clean up the mess (or cleans it up for them), and then they tell everyone who heroic and virtuous they were when the dust settles. Of course, they go right back to telling Americans that ICE is akin to the Gestapo. Their actions and reckless messaging game couldn’t be more obvious, nor more destructive to the future of the country.

The American Civil Liberties Union Foundation has poured $2.5 million into a pro-abortion and pro-transgender ballot initiative campaign in Missouri after receiving millions from foreign sources. A watchdog group alleges the donations are in direct violation of the state’s law. Americans for Public Trust filed a complaint with the office of Missouri Attorney General Catherine Hanaway, a Republican, Wednesday, claiming that the ACLU likely violated Missouri law by contributing to the campaign. “Foreign nationals, foreign charities, and foreign governments are actively exploiting loopholes to funnel their foreign dark money into American politics,” Caitlin Sutherland, executive director of Americans for Public Trust, told the Daily Signal in a statement Monday. “We previously exposed how just five foreign charities spent nearly $2 billion bankrolling U.S. policy fights, litigation, research, and protests.” “Just one example of how the foreign money is flowing comes via the Swiss-based Oak Foundation’s contributions to the ACLU Foundation that have then been laundered into a Missouri ballot measure campaign,” she added. “Fortunately, Missouri recently banned foreign money in their ballot measure campaigns, so we are confident the ACLU’s foreign money pipeline into the state will be stopped,” Sutherland concluded. “This is why every state should have laws on the books banning foreign money in ballot campaigns.” When reached for comment, the ACLU Foundation told the Daily Signal that it is complying with the law. “The ACLU is aware of and compliant with this Missouri campaign finance law,” the organization said. The Abortion Ballot Initiative This November, Missouri voters will cast their ballots on Amendment 3, a ballot initiative that would repeal the “Reproductive Freedom Amendment” in the state’s constitution. The amendment, which voters approved by a narrow 51.6% to 48.4% margin in 2024, prevents the Legislature from banning abortion before the point of fetal viability, the point in which “a treating health care professional” determines that a baby is likely to survive outside the womb without “extraordinary medical measures.” Amendment 3 would repeal the “Reproductive Freedom Amendment,” allowing the Legislature to restrict abortion, except in cases of medical emergency or fetal anomaly at any point during pregnancy, or in cases of rape or incest in the first 12 weeks’ gestation. The amendment would ban all public funds for abortion, except in the rare cases just mentioned. It would also require a woman’s voluntary and informed consent for abortion, except in cases of medical emergency where she could not consent. The ballot initiative explicitly protects “a woman’s ability to access health care in cases of miscarriages, ectopic pregnancies, and other medical emergencies.” Amendment 3 prohibits gender transition surgeries, cross-sex hormones, and so-called puberty-blocking drugs for minors for the purpose of gender transition. The restriction does not apply to children born with a disorder of sex development or for other purposes, such as precocious puberty (a too-early onset of puberty). Missouri Law Americans have every right to advocate for causes they believe in, and nonprofits like the ACLU Foundation can generally contribute to ballot initiatives, but Missouri law explicitly forbids foreign funding in these campaigns. In July 2025, Gov. Mike Kehoe, R-Mo., signed Senate Bill 152, which forbids ballot measure committees and political party committees from accepting contributions from foreign nationals, foreign political parties, or entities organized under the laws of a foreign country. The law prohibits contributions from “contributors that have received more than $10,000 from prohibited sources… in the four years preceding the date of the contribution.” According to campaign finance records, the American Civil Liberties Union Foundation gave Stop the Bans, a campaign focused on defeating Amendment 3, $100,000 on March 8 and $400,000 on March 18. The ACLU gave the campaign another $2 million on Tuesday, May 26. Americans for Public Trust’s complaint—filed the day after the latest ACLU contribution—notes that the ACLU received almost $6 million from the Wyss Foundation, an entity operated by Swiss billionaire Hansjörg Wyss, according to 990 filings from 2002-2024. The ACLU also received more than $2 million from the Switzerland-based Oak Foundation, with grants received in 2014, 2017, and 2020. The Oak Foundation’s 2025 annual report mentions a new two-year $2 million grant to the ACLU. The grant aims to “provide core support,” which—in the Oak Foundation’s words—means “unrestricted funding.” In the complaint, Americans for Public Trust “respectfully requests that the attorney general initiate an investigation of the ACLU Foundation and Stop the Ban… and, if found in violation, pursue appropriate enforcement action.” Sutherland, the watchdog group’s executive director, said the ACLU’s contributions demonstrate “reckless disregard for Missouri’s law.” Hanaway’s office did not respond to the Daily Signal’s request for comment by publication time.

Democrats are abandoning Mayor Karen Bass as the June 2 primary approaches. A new poll shows Spencer Pratt has taken a narrow lead in the Los Angeles mayoral race, receiving 30.1% support among likely voters. The poll, conducted by McLaughlin & Associates in conjunction with the California Post, has Bass in second, at 29.5%, followed by City Councilwoman Nithya Raman, at 23.4%. The poll found that 62% of voters believe Los Angeles is on the wrong track. Furthermore, it showed that Spencer Pratt has a strong pull with Hispanic voters, leading the field with 33% support, compared with 24% for Bass and 21% for Raman. John McLaughlin, CEO of McLaughlin & Associates, told the California Post, “Normally it’s a slam dunk for the Democrats, but it’s being driven by the negatives on Bass.” Pratt has focused much of his campaign on homelessness, public safety, and dissatisfaction with city leadership, arguing that voters are increasingly looking for a commonsense alternative to the city’s political establishment. During the final mayoral debate hosted by NBC and Telemundo Los Angeles, Raman accused Pratt of being a “MAGA Republican,” to which he responded with a now-viral shrug. In the LA mayoral debate Nithya Raman calls Spencer Pratt MAGA Republicans and Spencer’s reaction is amazing!!Based… pic.twitter.com/2EmUj6dICx— Barefoot Broadcast (@BarefootBC) May 7, 2026 In an interview with Fox News last week, Pratt, a registered Republican, explained why Democrats are rallying behind him. “My supporters are all Democrats because Los Angeles is all Democrats. All the people financing me are Democrats. All the meetings I take all day are Democrats,” Pratt said. “Democrats are very angry with what happened to Los Angeles. They were fed a bunch of lies by Mayor Bass, who said she was going to literally solve homelessness.” Pratt added that a mayor’s allegiance should be to the people, not a political party. “The mayor is not supposed to represent a party. They’re supposed to make sure your moms are safe, your houses don’t burn down, and your tax money is going to your infrastructure—not to fund drug addicts.” In an interview with one city resident who voted Democrat his whole life, independent journalist Nate Friedman reported that the resident is “sick of all the stupidity” and is voting for Pratt. “Homelessness is rampant, the city is dirty, they mishandled the fires—I consider myself a liberal but it’s just too extreme right now,” the resident told Friedman. Democratic commentator Harold Ford Jr., speaking on Fox News, said he’s supporting Pratt as well. “What he’s doing is what every politician should do. Whether you’re Democrat or Republican, [a candidate should] offer real, practical, actionable solutions to actual problems people are facing,” Ford said. “Angelenos understand homelessness is a problem. They understand public safety is a problem. They understand housing is unaffordable for most Californians. “He’s actually offering answers—I say that as a Democrat. He could actually win this thing because people are fed up with the answers they’re not being given.” Posting on X late last week, Pratt said Bass and Raman have “failed humanity.” Karen Bass thinks everything is fine in LA because she doesn't actually campaign in these blighted neighborhoods and listen to the people. Two homeless bodies were found in a CAVE behind a shelter in Northridge. Karen and Nithya have failed humanity. pic.twitter.com/6hYjYWzmCF— Spencer Pratt (@spencerpratt) May 31, 2026