FIRST ON THE DAILY SIGNAL—A California school district spent $300,000 to partner with an LGBTQ center that provides “affirming programs, resources, and community care” to minors ages 12 and up.  Pomona Unified School District in Pomona, California, signed a memorandum of understanding for the 2024-2025 school year for a “mentoring program” with Pomona Valley Pride.  Under the memorandum obtained by The Daily Signal, the pride center was to provide “academic support, mentoring, and tutoring services to all students in middle and high school who identify themselves LGBTQ+ and their families to address their unique needs and challenges.” “Students participating in the program will be provided social-emotional support, health and wellness activities, events, and engaging programs with a youth engagement specialist,” the document continued.  The Center for American Liberty, a conservative California think tank, uncovered the partnership through a California Public Records Act request. While the school district provided some documents to the Center for American Liberty, it allegedly left the records request partially unfulfilled, so the think tank filed a lawsuit last spring. Mark Trammell, CEO of the Center for American Liberty, said California parents would be “horrified” to see what the organization uncovered. “In Pomona Unified School District, officials handed $300,000 in taxpayer money to Pomona Pride Center, Inc. to push LGBTQ programming on children and families,” he told The Daily Signal. “At the same time, schools are using ‘gender support plans’ that treat parents as obstacles, including sections specifically targeting so-called ‘unsupportive parents.’ These plans direct schools to funnel children into secret counseling services that California politicians require schools to hide from parents once a child turns 12 and the minor does not consent.” “This isn’t education — it’s ideological indoctrination funded by taxpayers and carried out behind parents’ backs,” he said. “California schools have become laboratories for progressive social activism, and they’re counting on parents never seeing the documents.” “The Center for American Liberty is dragging these records into the light because parents deserve to know exactly what activists embedded in public schools are teaching their children,” he added. The Pomona Valley Pride Center’s website features events for minors such as “Beyond the Binary,” a “social group for gender-expansive folks centering joy, identity and collective care”; “Gaymer Night, a “queer and trans centered game night”; and “Youth Advocacy Lavender Leadership,” which involves “empowering youth ages 12-17 with leadership, networking, and skills to grow as future leaders and activists.”  The center also offers minors free counseling and access to the “Gender Neutral Closet,” which is “completely free and helps you affirm your gender.”  “Our gender neutral closet aims to provide garments that every child can enjoy regardless of their gender, and rejects the idea that pink is for females and blue is for male,” a description on the website reads. “From hoodies to jeans to everyday accessories, these stylish and comfortable gender-neutral clothes fit into everyone’s wardrobe regardless of their gender.”  Neither Pomona Unified School District nor Pomona Valley Pride Center responded to The Daily Signal’s requests for comment.

Two teenage gunman opened fire on Monday at the Islamic Center of San Diego in California, killing three men outside the mosque, one of them a security guard, before the two suspects were found dead, apparently from self-inflicted gunshot wounds, police said. All of the children who were attending a day school that is part of the mosque complex – the largest in San Diego county – were accounted for and safe after the shooting, which erupted shortly before 12 noon PDT, according to San Diego Police Chief Scott Wahl. Wahl said the FBI was called in to assist in the investigation of the incident, which the police chief said authorities were treating as a hate crime. Scores of law enforcement officers called to the Islamic Center encountered the bodies of three men shot dead outside the building, including a security guard who Wahl credited with likely having helped prevent further bloodshed. A short time later, police discovered the bodies of two teenage males, aged 17 and 19, in a vehicle in the middle of a street, dead from apparently self-inflicted gunshot wounds, the chief said at an afternoon news conference. He said investigators were still piecing together details of what precipitated the shooting and how the violence transpired. “This is every community’s worst nightmare,” Wahl stated at a Monday press conference following the shooting. The Islamic Center in Clairemont is the largest mosque in San Diego County and houses the Bright Horizon Academy, a school providing Islamic education, according to its website. FBI Director Kash Patel stated on X Monday that the bureau’s San Diego office “has responded to the scene of the shooting at the Islamic Center of San Diego this afternoon – all resources will be made available assisting local partners and we will update the public as we’re able.” Reuters contributed to this report. This story is developing and may be updated.

“I know nothing” was what Virginia Senate President Pro Tempore Louise Lucas told the Virginian-Pilot over the weekend regarding the raid of her businesses. However, a man facing federal indictment for allegedly collecting $100,000 in COVID relief money fraudulently, tells a different story. Carlton Upton Jr., a man who reportedly has business ties to Lucas, told the press on Friday that he was “just a pawn” in an alleged scheme to apply for and collect money meant to protect Virginians whose employers were closed due to the fears of the Coronavirus. According to the report by the Virginian-Pilot, Upton Jr. reportedly has connections to VA Freedom Life, a company for which Lucas is listed as owner and CEO. Along with the COVID claim, he allegedly gave false information about his criminal record and business income, according to the federal indictment. Upton Jr. must be hearing a bus revving its engine—you know, the one he might be getting thrown under. Thus, his willingness to use a more polite version of the “Mayor Marion Barry defense.” Meanwhile, the only statement Lucas has made attributes the raid to retribution from the Trump administration, for her leadership in the now defunct redistricting. What is interesting is the silence from many of Virginia’s leading Democrats. For example, Sens. Mark Warner and Tim Kaine rarely miss an opportunity to issue rebukes about President Trump, yet here we are two weeks later and nothing from either of them. The day of the raid, Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger’s office issued this statement: “The Governor is aware of today’s law enforcement operation in Portsmouth. In the absence of additional details, the Governor will not be commenting on a federal investigation at this time.” Really? Is this the same party that was holding “No More Kings” marches because there is a new Air Force One and Trump is building a ballroom at the White House? Sometimes the silence is deafening. Not that Lucas would be alone. According to the Department of Justice, as of early this year, 3,500 people were charged with COVID relief fraud and over 2,500 were convicted. The Small Business Administration has referred 562,000 other cases of suspected fraudulent loans to the FBI totaling $22 billion. Watchdog groups say that the actual number could be as high as $1 trillion lost due to fraud or misspending. In other words, make a cookie jar that big, and you can’t be surprised by how many kids will get caught with their hands in it. Economists point to COVID aid money being the chief driver of why inflation has hit Americans so hard. Each dollar printed and inserted into the economy diluted the value of the ones already out there. Maybe the governor can make a statement on what that has done to her “affordability agenda.” We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal.

Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s video from Daily Signal Senior Contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to see more of his videos. Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for The Daily Signal.    Recently at the U.S.-China Summit in Beijing, Premier Xi [Jinping] mentioned that he hoped that both parties, the United States and China, could avoid the Thucydides Trap.   What did that mean? It refers to a book and an article by the well-known political scientist Graham Allison.  In it, he presented a paradigm of international relations. Briefly, it was this: If you have an established power, like ancient Sparta, and it gets worried that there is an ascending power, a rising new neighborhood bully or something, the older power, the established power, will attack it, and there will be a war.  He gave some examples from history. He called it the Thucydides Trap because the historian Thucydides, who was born about 460 BC and died somewhere around 400 or 395 BC, wrote a history of the Peloponnesian War.   At two key places in his first book or chapter, he said that there were various reasons to go to war, but probably the most likely, in his opinion—and he said this in two different places—was that Sparta was afraid of the dominance that was growing throughout the Greek world, and so it staged a preventive war by invading Attica, the country around Athens, in 431.  He used this term that he created called a Thucydides Trap, and then he applied it to some incidents in history. Most importantly, Xi was referencing [Allison’s] book because in the book it said that the United States might do something rash or might prevent.   With all due respect to Graham Allison, who is a very distinguished scholar, this is false.  First of all, if you read Thucydides, Athens did not become ascendant in 431. It was responsible for the victory at Salamis. Athens and Sparta had partnered with each other. They fell out. They had another war called the First Peloponnesian War from 460 to 446, 30 years before the Peloponnesian War.  Second, Thucydides has a tendency to give all sorts of different interpretations that are sometimes mutually incompatible. They are antithetical to each other.   Why is that? Because he broke off his history in 411, whether because he died or did not finish it, we do not know.  It was never revised or rewritten to discover discrepancies or to get a uniform narrative. What I am getting at is that he said elsewhere in the book that there were fundamental existential differences. Sparta was an oligarchy. Athens was a democracy.  Sparta was a land power with a superb infantry. Athens was a maritime empire with a great navy. Athens was cosmopolitan. Sparta was insular and parochial. Tribally or ethnically, the Athenian Greeks were Ionian. The Spartans were Dorian. The Athenians had a model of chattel slavery. The Spartans used indentured serfs, or helots.  I could go on, but there were so many differences that Thucydides accentuated throughout the history. It was bound, maybe, that they would have problems, as they did in the First Peloponnesian War and as they did after the Persian War, well before this.  Does this apply to us at all with China? No. I do not think that we are a stodgy, worried establishment power and China is the new ascendant worry and that we are going to preempt.  Why do I think that is not going to happen? In all the major criteria that denote whether a superpower is strong or in decline, we are ascending. China is the one that has the problem.  Fertility: 1.7 for us. China: 1.0, shrinking and getting older. Oil production—fuel, the stuff that empires are made of—we are the largest producer of gas and oil in the history of civilization. China has to import 70% of its oil.   Food: We are the biggest exporter in the world, and the value of our agricultural products is unmatched.  China, as it gets more affluent, has tastes that have diverged, and it is importing 30% of its food.   Nuclear power: We are the greatest civilian user of nuclear power, and we are ahead in fusion nuclear power. For military purposes, I do not want to get into that, but we have 6,000 to 7,000 nuclear weapons. China has 600 to 700.  Nuclear aircraft carriers and carrier groups: We invented them 100 years ago. We have had 100 years of expertise. China has about 15 years. China is trying to get a third carrier group. We have 11.  Combat aircraft: Ours are better and more numerous. We could go on and on, but in every barometer of cultural, social, military, and political power, we overshadow China.  We are a free society. Our Constitution is older and more stable. Eight of the top 10 companies in the world by market capitalization are American, not Chinese. One American produces 40% more GDP than four of his Chinese counterparts.  So that model—that we are worried because we are losing influence or power to this upstart—does not really hold.  More importantly, when the upstart and the establishment power have a confrontation, it is not the establishment power that always preempts. It is usually the upstart.  Germany was flattened after World War I. It recovered, wanted to challenge the British Empire, did so, and lost World War II. Imperial Japan attacked the United States in 1941—a much more industrial and powerful country—and it lost.  In the Cold War, the Soviet Union was wrecked during World War II and wanted to challenge us, the global hegemon. We won the Cold War.  More importantly, when you have these antitheses between a rising power, supposedly, and an establishment power, it does not always lead to war. Not just that the rising power loses, but look what happened when the United States, somewhere around 1870 to 1920, challenged the primacy of the British Empire and the British Navy. There was no war when we took the place of Britain as the world’s policeman.  After World War II, Germany had been defeated. France and Britain were the powerhouses of Europe. What happened? There was a German miracle, and West Germany alone by 1970 was running Europe. There was no war between these two nations, these two blocs.  War is not inevitable. And if it is inevitable, it is not the establishment power that starts it. Usually it is the upstart, and the upstart usually loses.  So what does this mean for the Chinese-American relationship? There is no Thucydides Trap, ancient or modern. We are not Athens, and they are not Sparta. We are not going to start a preventive war to stop China’s rise.  If anything, China is starting to have fundamental existential problems with fertility, finance, debt, energy, and food that make it unstable. But we both are nuclear powers. We deter each other.  So how will these fundamental differences be resolved? Taiwan is a sore spot, but mostly it will be resolved because both sides have nuclear weapons and do not want Armageddon. There will be a balance of power.  One side will try to be friendly with Russia. The other side will try to be friendly with Russia. There will be a Kissinger triangulation: no better friend, no worse enemy, each one to one another in a triangle.  We have alliances. China has North Korea and what is left of Iran. Sometimes it cozies up to Russia. We have NATO. We have the Western Hemisphere. We have Japan, Australia, the Philippines, and South Korea.  So we have a balance of power, alliances, and military deterrence. There is no Thucydides Trap. If there were, it would not apply to us. If it did apply to us, we would not start a war. And if we did start a war, we would be foolish—but we would probably win a conventional war.  The entire notion that Premier Xi suggested is bankrupt, but it should be expected from the Chinese to adopt the idea that they are the rising power and that we are on the way out.   That is untrue.  We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal.

With data centers increasingly in the news—and increasingly contentious— a bipartisan committee in Ohio has been created to study the impact of these large facilities, both the benefits they could bring to residents of the Buckeye State, as well as concerns. The Ohio Joint Data Center Committee, consisting of six Republicans and two Democrats from the state House and Senate will begin holding meetings May 27, according to the State Newshouse. State Sen. Brian Chavez, a Republican and co-chair, called the committee “a fact-finding effort.” State Rep. Adam Holmes, another co-chair and also a Republican, emphasized the idea to “build more informed opinions on data center development.” There are currently 232 data centers built in Ohio, making it sixth in the nation, The Columbus Dispatch pointed out. Supporters say data centers are crucial to America’s technological and national security future, in addition to generating tax revenue, employment opportunities, and allowing municipalities to strengthen local infrastructure. Yesterday, Representative Holmes and Senator Chavez hosted a press conference to announce the Ohio Joint Data Center Committee, which will work to ensure that Ohio citizens have accurate, relevant, and usable information concerning the economic, environmental, and security… pic.twitter.com/11ollmT7ph— Ohio House GOP (@OHRGOPCaucus) May 14, 2026 Patrick Hedger, director of policy at NetChoice, spoke to The Daily Signal, calling data centers “the backbone of the modern internet and the modern technology sector.” Not only do data centers create construction jobs, but they also create permanent jobs ranging from positions for high school graduates to those making six-figure salaries, Hedger explained. He also argued that the presence of data centers sends a good message to the community as examples of “positive secondary effects.” “It’s a good signal that it’s a business-friendly environment” and “signals that there’s a good workforce and that there is good infrastructure nearby as well,” which he said those centers contribute to paying for, as well as paying property taxes. The President’s Podcast, a project of Ohio Senate Republicans, addressed data centers with a conversation between host John Fortney and Senate Finance Committee Chairman Jerry Cirino, a Republican, and also cited the cost benefits. Cirino said taxes from data centers “help ease the tax burden on homeowners.” Critics cite environmental concerns with data centers, including land and water use, with residents concerned about higher utility costs. Legislation has been introduced by U.S. Rep. Greg Landsman, D-Ohio, designed to “protect residents and small businesses from rising electricity costs caused by artificial intelligence data centers.” Holmes addressed concerns from those opposed to data centers. “We’re well aware of initiatives to limit Ohio data center development during this critical point in America’s history,” he said. “This public concern has become a priority issue for us. That could have dramatic impact on Ohio and America’s future.” There’s an effort to ban data centers that use more than 25 megawatts monthly, with a preliminary total of 25,000 signatures collected by Ohio Residents for Responsible Development. The group needs 413,487 valid signatures in half of Ohio’s 88 counties by July 1 to make the ballot. Hedger countered the opposition, noting data centers “absolutely” have to do with national security. “There’s a lot of misinformation out there about what’s happening in electricity markets. Electricity markets are very heavily regulated. It’s the whole point of the utility model. And so it is already the law in all 50 states that public utility commissions cannot offload the cost of a large user onto the residential retail base,” Hedger said, pointing out that “data centers are paying their way.” “It’s important that we’re not offshoring that infrastructure, especially when it’s powering some of the more critical applications, data processing, in our economy,” Hedger added. “We do see evidence of foreign disinformation, coming from Russia and China, trying to undermine America’s infrastructure.” That national security concern centers on where data centers are located. “Do we want to have data centers and control of information flow in the United States, in Ohio, or do we want to have it someplace else in another country?” Cirino asked. He warned about the United States having previously depended on China. The Daily Signal’s Tony Kinnett also addressed opposition to data centers, noting that it “is really starting to fall apart as a tool for the Left” because data centers actually take up less water than feared and are building plants that are putting more power into the community. Foreign involvement in anti-data center campaigns was a major topic of conversation for Fortney, who described the effort as “international,” with funding tied to organizations involved in a gerrymandering 2024 ballot initiative from “leftwing foreign billionaire donors.” Regardless of whether initiative makes its way onto the ballot, data centers could be an issue in statewide elections. During a Turning Point USA event last month at Ohio State University, Republican Vivek Ramaswamy said he doesn’t see the issue as “an either-or” when it comes to agricultural concerns involving data centers. “We will do economic development in a way that brings high-paying jobs to the state,” Ramaswamy said, acknowledging that “we have to protect our farmland and keep our electric bills low by making sure we’re also producing more energy in the state.” Dr. Amy Acton, the Democratic nominee, has a section on her website addressing her “Affordability Plan,” which involves “Tackling High Energy Bills,” and includes “Cost Guardrails for Data Centers.”