Journalists love to boast that they are “Facts First” people, that they are the brave souls seeking out “truth.” But when it comes to transgenderism, facts go out the window, and truth is triggering. When the Supreme Court upheld state bans on boys in girls sports, NBC anchor Craig Melvin sounded apologetic in live coverage. “The terms that we’re using here during our reporting, biological male, biological female, the high court put those terms in quotations in their decision and their dissent.” They know that referring to boys and girls, those polar opposites, are a highly controversial set of terms. NBC reporter Kelly O’Donnell lamented President Donald Trump “often sort of boils it down into bumper sticker language, talking about transgender athletes … It’s obviously much more complex.” No. It’s not. There are boys, and there are girls. Anyone who can’t understand that probably shouldn’t be in journalism. They should never assert themselves as “fact-checkers.” Another pro-trans trope is to claim the number of “trans athletes” is a “tiny slice” of competing students. But if you’re the girl who loses to a boy at a swim meet or a track meet, it doesn’t matter how “rare” it is. The same goes for girls who have been injured in competitions by stronger male interlopers. On ABC, reporter Devin Dwyer was feeling the pain of “Becky Pepper-Jackson,” promoted as “the only known openly transgender student and athlete in the state of West Virginia,” who “bravely brought this case to the Supreme Court, insisting that she had an equal right to play with the girls.” He mourned “it’s certainly a blow to that transgender community and student athletes on this last day of Pride Month.” Dwyer has no sensitivity to girls on the other side of the case. A teammate, Adaleia Cross, claimed in a legal brief that “Becky” sexually harassed her in the locker room with taunts like “Suck my d—.” Speaking of terminology, the two sides of this argument are the “conservatives” or the “conservative states” versus “trans Americans” or the “transgender community.” They can’t label the Left, and there are apparently no “liberal states” in America. Then comes the miasma of terms like “assigned at birth.” Assigned by whom? God? Well, the term manglers are implying that God can make mistakes. On CNN, anchor Laura Coates explained, “The argument that they were using to support a ban was that there was an unfair advantage provided to those assigned male at birth in women’s competition.” Later, Coates repeated it: “Here was the crux of the issue: It was whether or not somebody who was assigned the male gender at birth would be allowed to play in traditionally so-called girls sports.” So, reserving a sport for girls is “so-called”? It’s only “so-called girls sports” once you mandate putting boys into it. She added that women claiming sex discrimination when boys are allowed in is “at the heart of many culture wars.” When conservatives object to the long, slow, ideological march of the libertine Left, it’s a “culture war.” When the LGBTQ+ army tramples through the culture imposing its unnatural orthodoxies, that’s somehow not a “culture war.” Their revolution is just an outbreak of “diversity and inclusion.” A New York Times poll question last year (that included the term “athletes who were male at birth”) found 79% of Americans oppose boys participating in girls’ sports. That doesn’t stop our crusading media elitists. They think this vast majority is on the “wrong side of history.” But they’re on the wrong side of facts. COPYRIGHT 2026 CREATORS.COM We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of the Daily Signal.

The Supreme Court has committed a grievous moral and legal error in Trump v. Barbara, the landmark case on birthright citizenship. In holding that the 14th Amendment confers automatic citizenship on virtually all children born on American soil, the court has severely vitiated the sanctity of American citizenship—in this “America 250” celebration year, no less. Moreover, on a prosaic level, the court’s majority botched the basic constitutional question. As this column has explained, the 14th Amendment’s Citizenship Clause was, per its principal author, Sen. Jacob Howard (R-Mich.), “simply declaratory of … the law of the land already.” As for “the law of the land already,” that was the Civil Rights Act of 1866, ratified by Congress two years prior to the 14th Amendment. That statute deliberately withheld blanket birthright citizenship for the children of those who are “subject to any foreign power.” Thus, the Senate Judiciary Committee chairman at the time, Sen. Lyman Trumbull (R-Ill.), confidently stated during the amendment’s ratification debate that “subject to the jurisdiction,” the legally relevant 14th Amendment Citizenship Clause language, meant those “not owing allegiance to anybody else.” This is why American Indians, whose allegiances in the 19th century were to their tribes, were not covered; it was not until the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924 that these children were granted blanket birthright citizenship. And if American Indians’ children were not automatically covered, then illegal aliens’ children certainly were not. This is consistent with the prevailing 19th-century definition of citizenship, which was, as law professor Richard A. Epstein wrote recently for The Wall Street Journal, “an exchange of protection by the sovereign for loyalty of the citizens.” Justice Samuel Alito’s Barbara dissent cogently explicates this allegiance-based conception of citizenship, and Justice Clarence Thomas’s separate dissent is a masterclass in history. It is shameful that Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Amy Coney Barrett constitutionalized this fraught issue, rejecting Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s middle-ground statutory overture and thus removing the question of birthright citizenship—and all that it now entails, such as the execrable practice of “birth tourism”—from our normal democratic politics. To that extent, Roberts and Barrett have indeed given us a new Roe v. Wade. Under a standard reading of Barbara, the case must be overturned, or a new constitutional amendment passed, in order to preserve the sanctity of citizenship. But what if the standard reading of Barbara is wrong? President Donald Trump responded to the court’s decision by calling on Congress to act. Most commentators dismissed this out of hand as a paroxysm of rage from an aggrieved party. But the president, it turns out, is actually grasping at an important point. Congress can, and should, act by declaring both illegal aliens and so-called birth tourists to be the functional legal equivalent of modern-day foreign army invaders. There are four distinct clauses of the Constitution that reference invasion. And while the Supreme Court has never legally defined an “invasion,” law professor Josh Blackman has explained, in surveying the four clauses, that the “Constitution affords Congress, the president, and the states the power to declare an invasion—every branch except the judiciary.” Indeed, in recent years, the state of Texas under Gov. Greg Abbott has done exactly this. Congress can do the same thing: It can stipulate, under its Article I, Section 8 power to “establish an uniform Rule of Naturalization,” that it is the sense of Congress that the United States has faced, and still does face, an “invasion,” and that the children of the invaders shall not receive automatic citizenship at birth. Instead, Congress can clarify that those children can apply for naturalization using all extant, generally available means. How does this square with Barbara? Simple: No serious person claims the children of foreign invaders are entitled to automatic birthright citizenship. Wong Kim Ark, the 1898 Supreme Court decision frequently invoked (if erroneously) by the Barbara majority and by birthright citizenship defenders everywhere, actually confirmed as much: Justice Horace Gray noted that the “children of aliens within territory in hostile occupation” are not “subject to the jurisdiction,” to use the relevant 14th Amendment language, of “the sovereign whose domains are invaded.” Put simply, under Wong Kim Ark—and thus under Barbara as well—the children of invaders are not automatic birthright citizens. Are illegal aliens and/or birth tourists really “invaders”? Reasonable minds will differ. But recall that the Supreme Court has never defined the term—and for good reason, as such a determination is an inherently political question that is, per the 2019 Supreme Court case Rucho v. Common Cause, “outside the courts’ competence and therefore beyond the courts’ jurisdiction.” It would seem that Congress can classify invasion as it reasonably deems fit and, if the president signs the bill, the courts would stay out of the way. Indeed, it is not inconceivable that all nine Supreme Court justices would duck on such “political question doctrine” grounds. All of this is perfectly consistent with both Wong Kim Ark and Barbara. The Supreme Court has made a profound error in a case of immense importance. Barbara can, and at some point likely will, be overturned on 14th Amendment grounds. And the passing of a constitutional amendment to overturn Barbara, though perhaps farfetched, is a worthwhile effort even if it amounts to nothing more than a collective flexing of the sinews of self-governance in this milestone 250th anniversary year. But We the People are not otherwise helpless. Our representatives in Congress can act. They should do so posthaste. COPYRIGHT 2026 CREATORS.COM We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of the Daily Signal.

Weeks before a Chinese military doctor applied for a patent on a COVID-19 vaccine in February 2020, federal bureaucrats in the United States were reviewing taxpayer-funded grants to China and flagged the doctor as a recipient.  Dr. Zhou Yusen, who held the rank of major general, was a researcher working under the Chinese Academy of Military Medical Science, which is associated with the People’s Liberation Army, according to emails obtained by the Oversight Project, a watchdog group. Zhou, who later died under unusual circumstances, was mentioned in emails between bureaucrats with the National Institutes of Health and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.  While the institutes awarded grants to China, Dr. Anthony Fauci was the director of the NIAID. Recently, outgoing Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard released newly declassified documents detailing how Fauci and other officials with the NIH and NIAID worked with an intelligence agency to prompt certain political narratives about COVID-19 and its origins.  Ping Chen, an NIH researcher, informed colleagues on Feb. 3, 2020 about Zhou. “The grants have the same Chinese collaborator, Dr. Zhou, Yusen, who is a researcher in the Beijing Institute of Microbiology and Epidemiology, an institute under the Academy of Military Medical Sciences (AMMS),” Chen wrote. The Academy of Military Medical Sciences worked with the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Chen added, “Dr. Zhou’s expertise and resources in China include his skills in developing animal models for viruses, such as Zika, and then successfully applying the models to evaluate therapeutics.” One of the NIAID grants to Zhou and his team of researchers to study Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) coronavirus (MERS-CoV) was issued in January 2019, according to the NIH. One grant was awarded in 2021. Another appears to date as far back as 2013.  On July 30, 2019, before the COVID-19 outbreak, Chen informed her colleagues about a researcher with the People’s Liberation Army who “seems to be a very successful scientist.” “Worth mentioning was a scientific presentation by a researcher in the Chinese PLA microbiology lab who studied how Zika virus causes microcephaly,” Chen wrote.  NIH-Wuhan-FOIADownload During a June 2024 hearing by House Oversight Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, then-Subcommittee Chairman Brad Wenstrup, R-Ohio, asked Fauci, “Does it concern you that U.S. taxpayer dollars would be going to someone who’s a high-ranking Chinese PLA official?” After back and forth, Fauci replied, “I don’t even know the person you’re talking about.” The 145 pages of documents show NIH officials were repeatedly surprised the Chinese government would not share information about the virus, Alex Finnegan, director of digital capabilities at the Oversight Project, noted. “They raised no objection when Chinese scientists deferred to government restrictions on information sharing—even though those same scientists were funded with U.S. taxpayer dollars,” Finnegan told the Daily Signal. “And, they naively wondered what it meant that the first Chinese laboratory to share the COVID-19 genome with the world was subsequently “closed for rectification.” Zhou’s Patent Application On Feb. 24, 2020, Zhou submitted one of the first COVID-19 vaccine patents, according to congressional reports and news reports. Developing a vaccine this early “would have required access to both the sequence of the SARS-CoV-2 and the live virus itself,” according to a 2024 report from The Heritage Foundation’s Commission on China and COVID-19, which was chaired by the current CIA Director John Ratcliffe.  A Senate report suggested the timeline makes little sense. “There is reason to believe Zhou was engaged in SARS-related coronavirus animal vaccine research with WIV researchers beginning no later than the Summer or early Fall of 2019,” stated an April 2023 report by the Republican staff of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee.  “Several experts assessed that Zhou likely would have had to start this vaccine development research no later than November 2019 to achieve the February patent submission date,” the Senate report continues.  In late 2022, Republicans on the House Select Committee on Intelligence released a report with a similar conclusion.  “To start the necessary work, General Zhou’s AMMS team would have required the entire SARS-CoV-2 genetic sequence, however, the Chinese claimed to have first sequenced the virus in early January of 2020,” House report says. “Taken at face value, that would mean that General Zhou would have developed his COVID19 vaccine in a matter of weeks after the virus was sequenced.” Zhou died in May 2020 after reportedly falling from the roof of the Wuhan Institute of Virology.  The House report goes on to reference the unusual circumstances of Zhou’s death.  “Notably, in the spring of 2020, as global COVID-19 cases surpassed 7 million and COVID-19 deaths surpassed 400,000, General Zhou reportedly died under mysterious circumstances,” the House report says.  “In light of the information above, it is plausible to hypothesize that General Zhou’s team of Fifth Institute researchers already possessed SARS-CoV-2 prior to the pandemic as part of bioweapons research; was working on vaccine-related experiments involving the virus at the WIV in 2019; and that a safety incident at the WIV led to its release into the world (presumably amplified by a super-spreader event at the Huanan Wet Market),” the report continued.

The internet delivers an endless stream of hardcore pornography into American homes and pockets through laptops and mobile phones. Porn once confined to seedy bookstores is now ubiquitous, free, and increasingly violent. Most youngsters, especially boys, encounter hardcore pornography before they can drive. Marriages strain under its influence. The sexual dance is compromised by suspicion and confusion. There is a growing perception that this cultural contagion is legally untouchable. That perception is wrong. General obscenity remains illegal under state and federal statutes. The real barrier to confronting the widespread pornography is not legal barriers—it is a lack of will and nerve to enforce the law. A new Heritage Foundation Backgrounder, “Is General Obscenity Still Illegal? A Postmortem on the Bush Obscenity Prosecution Task Force,” examines the last serious federal effort to deal with the scourge of pornography and charts a path forward. Created in 2005 under President George W. Bush, the Obscenity Prosecution Task Force (OPTF) marked the last national push to prosecute general, hardcore obscenity. Led by Director Brent Ward, a small team secured convictions in every case that reached conclusion—including high-profile wins against producers of obscene material like Rob Black (Extreme Associates), Max Hardcore, and others. The team of prosecutors wielded the record-keeping requirements of 18 U.S.C. section 2257 against a company called Girls Gone Wild, immediately prompting widespread industry compliance and deterring the use of children in pornography production. Every jury convicted defendants. The OPTF met strong headwinds. Despite the apparent creation of the task force to crack down on the growing porn industry, it was “calibrated so as to render obscenity enforcement only minimally effective,” as Ward wrote in a candid 2007 resignation letter to Attorney General Michael Mukasey, released for the first time as an Appendix to the Backgrounder. Prosecutors faced uncertain community standards, internet jurisdictional headaches, Supreme Court skepticism even toward child-protection measures, and techno-optimist resistance to any content regulation on the internet. Many U.S. attorneys slow-walked or refused to prosecute cases, fearing they would be labeled modern-day Comstocks. The FBI restricted investigations to the most extreme content, effectively creating a safe harbor for vast amounts of illegal material. The OPTF was starved of key resources and personnel. All this culminated in President Barack Obama’s quiet disbanding of the OPTF in 2011. Today, states largely allow general obscenity statutes to go unenforced, focusing only on child pornography. The result has been a de facto deregulation of pornography. The volume of internet pornography exploded, as did its depravity. As former Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, noted, the hiatus in prosecutions emboldened the industry to push ever more extreme products. Today, the costs are clearer than ever. Extensive research documents pornography’s harms: addiction-like patterns among users, distorted views of sex and relationships, escalation to more violent content, links to aggression (especially against women), and grooming pathways toward child sexual abuse material. A generation raised on internet pornography shows higher rates of sexual dysfunction, relationship dissatisfaction, and reluctance to marry. Sexual eros, once channeled toward commitment and family, has been pointed toward self-gratification. The legal foundation remains intact. Federal statutes from 1948 criminalize the production, distribution, mailing, and sale of obscene material—defined by prevailing Supreme Court precedent as patently offensive material that lacks serious literary, artistic, or scientific value under community standards and appeals to the prurient interest. These statutes apply to digital distribution via interstate commerce. And most states still maintain robust legal schemes criminalizing obscenity. The legal environment shows favorable shifts toward obscenity prosecutions. The Supreme Court’s 2025 decision in Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton upheld state age-verification requirements for porn sites, perhaps signaling greater openness to regulation protecting public morals. Nearly every state maintains task forces against child sex trafficking and online exploitation. Cultural critics of Big Tech and social media harms are gaining ground. Public understanding of pornography’s personal and societal damage only continues to grow. A revived OPTF—or similar state or local efforts—should not repeat past mistakes. It must target high-value distributors and platforms, operate with clear priorities and support from the attorney general, secure adequate resources, and coordinate across agencies. To have a practical effect, these prosecutions should be executed in conjunction with efforts to hold platforms accountable for obscene materials that they host. A revived OPTF should focus on material that violates contemporary community standards—standards that, in most American communities, still reject the worst excesses of the modern pornified internet. Enforcing existing obscenity law is the first step in defending human dignity and family formation from an industry that profits from vice. In the absence of that enforcement, societal harms have only continued to mount. The law is willing, but the flesh has been weak. The time for renewed state and federal leadership is now. Our OPTF postmortem shows what went wrong the last time obscenity prosecutions were taken seriously. Policymakers and prosecutors should ensure the OPTF’s failure does not become a permanent societal one.

A key House committee is moving forward with efforts to reform a federally funded scholarship program after extensive reporting from The College Fix uncovered the program’s overwhelming liberal bias. The House Committee on Education and Workforce advanced New York Rep. Elise Stefanik’s Truman Scholarship Clean House Act, which could soon be brought before the committee for a final vote. “Unfortunately, what started as a scholarship program to help cultivate our nation’s leaders has become a pipeline for liberal activists,” a committee spokesperson told the Daily Signal. “The Truman Foundation is receiving millions in taxpayer money, but it clearly promotes only one political viewpoint.” “We hope to see leadership take this bill to the floor so we can correct this wrong and finally return the program to its intended mission,” the committee spokesperson added. If enacted, Stefanik’s legislation would reform the taxpayer-funded scholarship by reshaping the scholarships board of directors while reforming their selection criteria and strategy. “My legislation would finally reform the Truman Scholarship Foundation to promote an ideologically diverse class of recipients and ensure that only law-abiding students receive these scholarships,” Stefanik previously said in a statement to the Daily Signal. Stefanik’s bill would also repeal and replace the scholarship’s current board of directors and executive secretary, allowing President Donald Trump to appoint new directors, who would then have to be confirmed by the Senate. The bill would also require candidates to receive the approval of a supermajority of the board in order “to prevent highly biased individuals from serving as an interviewer.” The scholarship began to attract attention after The College Fix uncovered that the taxpayer-funded program was riddled with liberal bias. In December 2025, Associate Editor of The College Fix Jennifer Kabbany testified before the committee and noted that only 29 out of the 653 scholarship recipients from 2015 to 2025 had been conservative. “The decade-long data reveals a taxpayer-funded program that, in practice, functions as a talent pipeline for the Democratic Party and liberal activist organizations,” Kabbany added during her testimony. In a recent statement to the Daily Signal, a different committee spokesperson also described the scholarship as a “talent pipeline for the Democratic Party and liberal activist organizations.” A recent analysis from The College Fix found that for 12 consecutive years, the majority of the scholarship’s recipients have overwhelmingly leaned left. The College Fix added that 2026 scholarship winners have worked or interned for candidates and politicians such as former Vice President Kamala Harris, Sens. Chris Coons, D-Del., Chris Murphy, D-Conn., Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., Jeff Merkley, D-Ore., Rep. Maggie Goodlander, D-N.H., and Gov. Matt Meyer, D-Del. Scholarship winners have also been involved with liberal organizations such as College Democrats, the Aspen Institute, Feminists of Color Collective, Rainbow Foster Home Initiative, Brennan Center for Justice, the Vermont Student Anti-Racism Network, and Revolución Violeta. Another analysis from The College Fix found that 75% of the Truman Scholarship’s regional reviewers are Democrats, while just 13% are Republicans. When looking at just red states, the awards are still overwhelmingly given to progressive students, the analysis added.