Earlier this spring, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) released a new policy on protecting women’s sports in future Games. The committee concluded that “for all disciplines on the Sports Programme of an IOC Event, including individual and team sports, eligibility for any Female Category is limited to Biological Females.”  The IOC’s rationale was very thorough and scientific. The committee found that “to protect fairness in sports and events that rely on strength, power, and/or endurance, as well as safety particularly in contact sports, it is necessary and adequate to base eligibility for competition on biological sex.”   The IOC’s new policy should be applauded, yet it came on the backs of decisive and unapologetic leadership from President Donald Trump, former female athlete Riley Gaines, and many others.  For the vast majority of Americans, this finding was celebrated. Most people still use science and common sense to drive everyday life, including the line between men’s and women’s sports.   A 2025 NBC News Stay Tuned Poll showed that 75% of respondents disagreed with biological male athletes competing in female sports. In a January 2025 Ipsos survey, 94% of Republicans, 67% of Democrats, and 64% of independents also indicated their preference for protecting the integrity of women’s sports.  While the IOC and the majority of the American public may agree on the scientific facts behind safeguarding women’s sports, many elected Democrats around the nation, including in my own state of Arizona, do not.   It was unfortunate to see that while only a minority of registered Democrats across the nation think boys should be able to play in girls’ sports, 100% of Arizona’s out-of-touch liberal legislators voted to allow boys in girls’ sports.   These elected Democrats are holding on to crazy, unscientific, and dangerous fantasies. They would rather jeopardize the safety of girls and women than dare to hurt the feelings of men pretending to be women.  The issue transcends women’s sports; it has included a malicious desire to allow men into women’s private spaces like bathrooms, showers, and locker rooms. Across the country, Democrats have continually blurred the lines between men and women and what we have historically held sacred in this country.   Again, most people do not believe that a biological man should be allowed to walk into a woman’s restricted area. Yet this has been happening for years and celebrated by the Left.  The ultimate gaslighting is telling a boy that he is a girl or that he can invade girls’ private spaces and arenas. I can’t wake up one day and decide I want to identify as a cat—no matter how much I match my appearance to our feline friends. If I did so, then people would rightly think I had lost my mind. But this is effectively what has been happening around America. People are showing their insanity by working to bend the rules of biology.  That’s why, as president of the Arizona State Senate, I’ve refused to capitulate to the crazy and dangerous ideas of the Left—and I’ve gone on the offensive for what’s right.   I’ve led the charge on safeguarding girls’ bathrooms, locker rooms, and sports. I’ve even spearheaded the defense of Arizona’s commonsense law protecting the integrity of women’s sports, taking our case (Jane Doe v. Warren Petersen) all the way to the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS).   Currently, SCOTUS is considering two of these women’s sports cases (from West Virginia and Idaho), and the forthcoming opinion will decide the fate of other laws being held up in federal litigation, including Arizona’s.   In fact, I was sitting in the Supreme Court next to Attorneys General McCuskey and Labrador during the oral arguments for this case at the beginning of the year. It was sadly unsurprising to hear that some of the justices didn’t know the biological definition of a woman. Fortunately, though, for the rest of real America, most of the justices did know the biological definition of a woman—and I believe we will receive a 6-3 ruling in favor of science and common sense.  Unfortunately for Arizonans—especially girls and women—our state has a Democratic governor and attorney general. Both are unwilling to listen to the majority of reasonable people and stand for the integrity of women’s sports or the decency of privacy in bathrooms, showers, and locker rooms.   Gov. Katie Hobbs has vetoed several reasonable attempts by the Republican-led Arizona Legislature to protect women, while Attorney General Kris Mayes has been absent throughout the process to defend Arizona’s Save Women’s Sports Act.  As the IOC found in creating its new policy for future Olympic Games, “biological sex, which is divided into categories (Male and Female, based on their reproductive biology, including their sex chromosomes, gonads and hormones), is distinct from gender identity, which is a person’s sense of themselves as a woman or a man or neither/non-binary.”   This finding didn’t use to be controversial at all, and it still isn’t in most American circles. The problem is that we’ve allowed a small (though growing) number of radicals to influence our policies across our states, nation, and world, leading to chaos and insanity about unalterable scientific realities.  Though this debate has been raging now for several years, we are still in the early stages of the war over women’s sports and private spaces. We cannot lose this battle or allow future generations of Americans to grow up in a new normal, where boys and men are allowed unfettered access to girls’ and women’s restricted areas or sports.   That’s why I’m fighting every day to protect women’s sports and private spaces.  We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of the Daily Signal. 

Government programs that claim to support families actually cut fathers out of the picture—and that results in broken families and higher poverty rates, according to Delano Squires. The Heritage Foundation hosted the director of the Richard and Helen DeVos Center on Tuesday to lead a panel discussion titled “Invisible Men: How Guaranteed Income Programs for New Moms Diminish Dads,” based on Squires’ latest book. Squires and three other speakers addressed how welfare programs incentivize single-mother homes and how the black community, in particular, has suffered from a lack of attention to the importance of fathers. “Fathers are not, by definition, an attachment,” Anthony B. Bradley of the Acton Institute said. “They are crucial to the thriving of children. And if we want healthy families, healthy communities, and healthy societies, we have a duty to invest in fathers.” Most physical and behavioral issues are the result of absent fathers, according to Bradley. Fatherless children have a higher likelihood of juvenile delinquency, drug addiction, cancer, diabetes, and even an untimely onset of puberty.  Martin Brown, former assistant secretary of health and human resources in Virginia, said that he discovered while working in welfare that his state’s social policies “limited the ability of the dad to even be in their home.” “When you look at social policy, either the child or the mom is the recipient and not the family,” Brown said. “And so, we change the model from the child being the recipient of the government’s protection, or the mom being the recipient of the government’s largess, to the family unit, and by changing that goal, you’re going to change the outcomes, and so we focus on that as well.” When a married couple files jointly, their tax breaks should increase rather than decrease, according to James Jackson, CEO of Rooted in Healing. The IRS should not financially incentivize single motherhood and having children outside of marriage. “We shouldn’t just throw money at distress in the community,” Jackson said. “We should throw money in areas where we’re promoting good, where we’re promoting things like marriage, we’re promoting things like strong families.” But government policy won’t be enough to promote long-lasting marriages and good fathers. People have to see good marriages so that they desire to emulate them and have an example to follow. Bradley suggested that black families thrived the most in what he referred to as “’The Cosby Show’ era” because television programs such as “The Jeffersons” and “Good Times” celebrated family life and demonstrated both the difficulties and the joys of marriage. When author Joy Jones worked as a substitute elementary school teacher in Washington, D.C., in 2006, several boys said that when they grew up, they wanted to be fathers, according to Squires. But when Jones offered to bring in couples who could talk about marriage and having children, the boys were “unenthused.” “One told her plainly, ‘We’re not interested in the part about marriage, only about how to be good fathers,’” Squires said. “Another boy explained their stance with five words and jaw-dropping candor: ‘Marriage is for white people.’” In Washington, D.C., 77% of black children are born to unmarried parents, whereas 93% of white children are born to married parents, according to Squires. But it’s not just the black community that needs a better understanding of marriage. It’s the whole country. People today think of marriage as a capstone and a crowning achievement of adulthood, which is the opposite of what it should be, according to Bradley. “It’s the beginning of a good life. It’s not that you live a good life and then get married,” Bradley said. “You actually use marriage to ground and shape and structure a life that is characterized by flourishing. And I want all children, regardless of their income level, to see that as an aspiration above career and above the acquisition of stuff.” Social media, film, and music will help promote fatherhood and marriage. But ultimately, the responsibility to raise future fathers falls on families rather than on welfare programs and pop culture. “We need to actually disperse the work and put these young men and young women in homes with people,” Bradley said. “Let them come over for dinner, take them on vacation with you, let them see your family in action.”

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. Subscribe to Victor Davis Hanson’s own YouTube channel to watch past episodes. Jack Fowler: First of all, there have been protests—significant protests—against the murder of Henry Nowak in England and the attempted beheading of the gentleman, whose name I forget, forgive me, in Belfast. So throughout Ireland, throughout England, and including Scotland—Glasgow—there have been these protests.  So, here’s what I think is a typical response from your typical Eurocrat. This is John Swinney, the first minister of Scotland. Here’s the headline from The Scotsman newspaper over there:  “Scotland must stand against racism, hatred and intimidation.”  “First Minister John Swinney has said Scotland must stand against racism, hatred and intimidation after protests following a knife attack in Belfast.  “In a post on social media, Mr. Swinney said, ‘The scenes we saw in Glasgow, Edinburgh and Ayr last night are unacceptable. Scotland is a welcoming nation, and those who choose to make their lives here are valued members of our community. Racism, hatred and intimidation have no place in Scotland. We must stand against it.'”  Don’t you—  Victor Davis Hanson: Where do they get this? Do they have an AI thing that always turns out this boilerplate? “This has no place here. This isn’t who we are.” All that stuff?  Why doesn’t he just admit that there’s no audit of the people coming into the U.K.? They come in illegally for the most part. They come from areas that are governed illiberally. They come with religious differences. They have ideas about women and homosexuals, other tribal people, people not of their tribe. They have very negative views of them.  And they won’t assimilate, integrate, or acculturate at a pace that would be expected of any other immigrant. So, they have gotten the message that they’re going to be subsidized with housing, education, food, and medicine, and they feel that the host owes them that.  Then, when they’re deterred from the consequences of their behavior—whether it’s a rape gang or walking down the street and hitting somebody—they go to the next level.  Now, “they” is a collective stereotype and generalization. But this demagogic politician doesn’t say anything about this. But he wants to give a soapbox platitude so that he feels good about himself. But he doesn’t understand that no one is listening to him anymore.  There’s an entire European movement, and if they don’t intervene and say, “We expect every single person in the U.K. to have come legally, and they must reside legally. If you’re an immigrant, you must be self-supporting and fully employed, and you will face the full force of the law just like subjects of the Crown. If you can’t do that, would you please leave?” They can’t say that. I don’t know why they can’t say it.  I don’t know how they got in this position where some cities are 20% to 30% non-Indigenous people, but it’s not working, and it’s going to spread.  The next thing that’s going to happen is that if they won’t address it in a sober and moderate fashion, people are going to get frustrated. We saw those two girls, I think they were from Scotland, remember? They were defending themselves from that predator.  Fowler: With the knife and a hatchet?  Hanson: Yeah. And she was trying to protect, was it her sister or her friend?  Fowler: Her sister. Her sister.  Hanson: Yeah. Everybody demonized her and said, “Oh, this is…” You know.  Then he was found guilty the other day of actually trying to attack them or solicit them in some fashion.  But if you allow grooming gangs and you don’t do anything about it, people are going to get frustrated, and they’re going to get violent.  You have to treat everybody equally under the law, and you have to have the rule of law. That’s where we learned the rule of law—from the Western tradition via Britain.  And if there’s no rule of law…  You know, here in the United States, there was just a poll that said it was overwhelming. Seventy percent wanted everybody deported who was here illegally and committed a crime.  I thought, “Well, that doesn’t do anybody any good. Who wouldn’t?”  Then I read down further: 56% of the population wants everybody deported who came here illegally.   How could that be when we’re told by the leftist media that all these people who are spitting at ICE, throwing rocks at them, and waving plastic phallic symbols represent the public?  Well, the public is tired of that. They look at the ICE agents and don’t see demonic figures. They see largely minority people who want a living and want to protect their communities, which are the most impacted by illegal immigration.  Fowler: Yeah. Look, why is an elitist type—whether in government or media in England—who believes he has the right to say, “You lower-middle-class white dude are a racist for this and this reason”?  So, they have some racism calibration, but they won’t apply it to immigrants who have racial—  Hanson: Because they have this Marxist, Foucauldian, Lacanian, Derridean, postmodern, Frantz Fanon idea that there is a binary. There’s no middle. There’s a victim and an oppressed person, and there’s a victimizer and an oppressor.  And the duty of all good Marxists is to—and they have redefined this. Marx didn’t talk about race. He talked about class. They said class doesn’t matter because many people on their side of the binary are wealthier than the so-called oppressor side.  Barack Obama is much, much, much, much wealthier than Joe Biden. His children are in much better shape than Hunter Biden.  Yet they are on the oppressed side. Nobody can define it. We don’t know what makes a person part of the oppressed side. I guess it’s one Confederate drop, one-sixteenth non-white blood, non-Christian faith, or whatever standard they use.  Once they went down that road of racial essentialism, they had to have something.  Even Native American tribes who went down that side said that nobody can be in charge of this casino unless they have tribal blood. Well, in our society, what does that mean? It means they have to have DNA, and I think it’s one-sixteenth or one-eighth.  You can see how absurd this is. It’s going back to the antebellum South. And that’s what they’re doing.   You can be very, very wealthy. You can be very privileged. You can have every advantage.  Cory Booker’s parents were corporate grandees. He grew up in a very upscale environment, and we’re supposed to think he is a champion of the oppressed?  Jasmine Crockett has two accents: one that reflects her middle-class, upscale private schooling and another that she puts on when she wants to be authentically inner-city.  It’s a joke. The whole thing is performance art, and everybody’s tired of it.  So, this guy is going to get up and lecture, lecture, lecture. But he should ask himself: If you say “black” today, or “non-white,” it’s usually in a positive sense.   But if you hear a government bureaucrat, a media figure, or a celebrity say “white,” it’s almost always in a negative context. It’s a pejorative.  And people who are somewhere between 67% and 71% of the population—  By the way, I think it’s a ridiculous rubric anyway. I live in a Hispanic area, and in the summer I am darker than many of my Hispanic friends. I see people at the bank every day speaking Spanish and they’re pure white.  I don’t know why we call them non-white. I don’t know why anybody calls anybody white or non-white. But that’s another story.  The point I’m making is that it’s always used as a pejorative, and that’s not sustainable. People will not put up with that.  When you  add “deplorables,” “irredeemables,” Peter Strzok saying, “I smelled them all at Walmart,” the CNN commentator saying, “I have more teeth than everybody at a Trump rally,” Joe Biden saying, “ultra MAGA,” “semi-fascists,” “garbage,” and “chumps,” and then Barack Obama saying they cling to their guns and religion—  It’s time to quit that because there’s a big revolt, and you don’t want it to get like it is in Europe.  When you have the young Ukrainian woman butchered, and this conniver DeCarlos Brown is now suing the FBI, and then you just recently had the young kid walking outside his home in Philadelphia who was murdered, and the woman set on fire in Chicago—these high-profile black-on-white crimes—and then the reaction is…  I don’t know what the reaction is, but in the case of Karmelo Anthony, you had counter-demonstrations where they basically said he was the victim and the man he murdered was the oppressor.  When you have AI imagery of people urinating on Austin Metcalf’s supposed grave—I guess it was manufactured by AI, but the message was still hatred.  We have got to get rid of this university idea that if you’re on the victim side of the binary, you’re incapable of racism or oppression. That’s just a get-out-of-jail-free card. That is just an invitation to be racist.  The only thing that keeps us from behaving badly is some kind of deterrence, whether that’s religious, legal, social, or shame.  But if you remove those deterrents, you’re going to see human nature in the raw, with the veneer stripped off. We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of the Daily Signal.

The senators who exposed the Biden administration’s snooping on Republicans and conservative groups have differing views on extending a surveillance provision for foreign intelligence gathering. The two matters are distinct, to be sure, as the latter involves intelligence, while the former was primarily a criminal investigation targeting President Donald Trump, expanded to include supporters. Still, both involve surveillance, and critics of the foreign surveillance provision argue that it can allow for incidental collection of American citizens’ data. Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, championed extending the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which allows the U.S. to spy on foreigners abroad without a warrant. He has defended it as a vital national security tool. Grassley, along with Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., helped expose the Biden Justice Department’s “Arctic Frost” probe that involved issuing subpoenas to phone companies for data on eight Republican senators and a total of about 400 individuals involved in supporting President Donald Trump; the probe was later part of special counsel Jack Smith’s investigation. “Section 702 [of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act] is an essential national security tool. That law is responsible for over 60% of the intelligence in the president’s daily brief. Section 702 enables our intelligence and law enforcement communities to thwart attacks before they occur,” Grassley said in a Senate floor speech last week. “It’s, as I see it, a preventative national defense and national security issue. Section 702 has saved countless lives in the United States and even abroad,” Grassley added. “It gives our military a strategic edge, allows us to hunt down foreign terrorists and rescue hostages, and helps us defend critical infrastructure from cyberattacks. More recently, Section 702 has enabled more than 90% of CIA-driven synthetic drug disruptions abroad and prevented a mass casualty terrorist attack at a Taylor Swift concert overseas.” On Bloomberg News, Johnson said he wanted to renew it but desired reforms.  “I wish that those who wanted to renew it would want to protect civil liberties to a greater extent, but the bottom line, if you’ve got bad actors, no matter how many controls you put in place, they will probably violate them,” Johnson said. “I think we will probably reauthorize this. I will be generally supportive.” Members of the House Freedom Caucus have insisted on a warrant for all spying. In April, Rep. Andy Ogles, R-Tenn., posted on X: “The current FISA ‘reforms’ are being championed by the same people who did Arctic Frost. Not to mention Joe Biden signed those ‘reforms’ last year. I will not yield to big brother on this. GET A WARRANT.” The current FISA “reforms” are being championed by the same people who did Arctic Frost. Not to mention Joe Biden signed those “reforms” last year. I will not yield to big brother on this. GET A WARRANT. https://t.co/wproAAchk0— Rep. Andy Ogles (@RepOgles) April 21, 2026 A leading Senate critic of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, made the comparison during a Senate hearing investigating the Arctic Frost probe in February. “As with what we’re covering here—these requests from telecommunications companies backed by a nondisclosure order—so too with FISA 702, somebody can, metaphorically speaking, be run over without ever knowing what happened,” Lee said during the hearing. “That’s why Congress has no business reauthorizing FISA 702 … without a warrant requirement … and political warfare, lawfare is bad, we shouldn’t weaponize these things.” The nature of the Arctic Frost probe was to review Trump’s challenge of the 2020 election outcome. While a federal grand jury subpoenaed the phone data of members of Congress, none of the senators nor other targets were notified. The nature of the FISA data gathering is about foreign intelligence collection authority, not a criminal investigation. Section 702 permits the government to compel electronic communication service providers to assist in the collection of intelligence on non-U.S. citizens located abroad, including phone records, emails, or texts. That can conceivably include information to or from an American in the United States, or “incidental” collection of information on Americans. In a statement of administration policy earlier this month, the Trump administration supported passage in the Senate before the lapse of the surveillance program. “As detailed in the 2026 Annual Threat Assessment, our nation faces multiple immediate threats to the homeland and to our national interests. Given the threats posed by nonstate actors—including drug cartels, which poison Americans, and cyber actors who target our critical infrastructure—as well as state adversaries engaging in espionage and illicit proliferation of destructive weapons, we must remain vigilant to keep the American people safe. This cannot be accomplished without the reauthorization of Section 702,” the June 4 statement of administration policy says.

As a former Army Ranger, I understand that no plan survives first contact. When conditions change, missions evolve. Veterans deserve a benefits system that operates with that same mindset.  But that’s not what’s happening when our country’s heroes return home injured.  A recent federal court ruling makes clear the failings of our current benefits system. Instead of adapting strategies to shifting realities, it’s entrenching itself in positions that are clearly detrimental to veterans’ well-being.  In that case, a federal court ruled against Veterans Guardian, a fee-based veteran service organization that helps veterans navigate the claims process. Ultimately, lawyers and courts will decide the legal questions surrounding this case. My concern is not whether Veterans Guardian wins or loses; it is why so many veterans feel they need outside help in the first place.  This case does not change the fact that the benefits system veterans are forced to navigate is unnecessarily complex and inefficient. The objective here should be easy to agree on and simple to achieve: Help our veterans access the benefits they’re entitled to as easily as possible. But achieving this straightforward goal is more like a bitter war of attrition than the straightforward mission we know it should be.  For more than a decade, veterans, lawmakers, advocacy groups, and multiple administrations have pushed the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) to modernize its systems and put service members first.  There has been progress. We’ve seen improvements in processing times, which means shorter wait times for veterans and their families to learn what benefits they will receive. That’s a welcome improvement, because that period can be extremely stressful, piling psychological burdens on top of physical ones.  The VA has also upgraded its digital tools, helping veterans access services more easily. Yet despite this, the system moves far more slowly than our veterans deserve. Secretary Doug Collins inherited these challenges, and he has said his leadership team is cutting bloat and using AI to speed up approvals. But I haven’t seen those alleged improvements trickle down to me, nor have many veterans I’ve spoken to. Until those of us who have waited years in line can actually move forward, we will wonder if there is any leadership ready to put us first.   Thousands of veterans still face claims backlogs. Scheduling an appointment is often unnecessarily complicated and cannot always be accomplished online. Even basic digital functions sometimes feel outdated. If you’ve spent an afternoon at the DMV, you know the outdated government bureaucracy I’m talking about.   My own experience navigating the system has often involved unnecessary friction. Whether filing claims, managing appointments, or trying to understand administrative requirements, I have repeatedly found myself dealing with processes that left me feeling hopeless.   Claims can be delayed or denied because of procedural nuances. Appointments can be difficult to schedule or manage, relying on outdated methods like mailers and phone calls to reschedule. Over time, veterans are forced to learn a system that should have been designed around them in the first place.  Veterans encounter battles on many fronts as they navigate disability claims, healthcare needs, mental health treatment, family obligations, and civilian careers simultaneously. Every unnecessary step, confusing process, and avoidable delay creates friction for those who deserve the highest level of support.  The level of friction these wounded heroes face would never be tolerated on the battlefield. If leaders saw that sluggish processes and clumsy bureaucracy were slowing down their troops, they would fix those problems immediately. They wouldn’t waste time defending the process and making excuses. The bottleneck would be found by talking to soldiers directly, understanding the problem, and removing it.   To make the VA efficient, leaders need to listen to those “on the ground”—we know intimately what needs to be fixed.   That mindset is what’s missing from this debate, and it is exactly the mindset Secretary Doug Collins should be bringing to the Department of Veterans Affairs.   Too much attention is focused on who is allowed to help veterans navigate the system, and not enough attention is paid to why so many veterans feel they need outside help in the first place. If people are looking for alternative avenues to access their benefits, it is a sign that something is wrong.  When veterans believe they need consultants, advocates, nonprofits, attorneys, AI assistants, and third-party services to understand a benefits process, it should prompt policymakers to consider why the process is so difficult.  Secretary Collins and the VA need to admit that the old processes and infrastructure no longer meet the needs of today’s veterans. The VA’s mission should be to make the system so intuitive and efficient that veterans rarely need outside assistance at all.   Military leaders are judged by results, not intentions. Public officials responsible for serving veterans should be held to the same standard. That includes Secretary Collins and future VA leaders. That means giving veterans a benefits system that holds itself to the same standards that we upheld in uniform. A system that gives them the freedom to seek the help they need to accomplish the mission of securing the benefits they’ve earned.   We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of the Daily Signal.