Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders clarified Monday that no Bear State tax dollars supported a school counselor association that promotes diversity, equity, and inclusion, after The Daily Signal inquired about military branches—including the Arkansas Air National Guard—sponsoring an annual convention. “Governor Sanders has rooted out critical race theory and other divisive ideologies from state government since taking office, including signing an executive order banning critical race theory in schools on her first day as governor and signing legislation combatting critical race theory and divisive activism in both K-12 schools and higher education,” Sam Dubke, Sanders’ communications director, told The Daily Signal in a statement. Dubke responded to questions regarding the Arkansas School Counselor Association, the state branch of the American School Counselor Association, which has faced criticism for supporting DEI. The nonprofit group Courage Is a Habit released a report last month exposing how ASCA’s official positions echo DEI. According to its website, the Arkansas chapter “adheres to the Code of Ethics and policy statements of” the ASCA. Of the Arkansas chapter, Dubke said, “No Arkansas tax dollars have gone toward this group, and [Sanders’] administration is working to ensure the state does not waste taxpayer money on woke nonsense in the future.” While the Arkansas Air National Guard appears as a “platinum sponsor” of the ArSCA’s annual conference for 2025, Dubke told The Daily Signal that the $2,000 for that sponsorship came from federal tax dollars, not the state’s coffers. Alongside the Arkansas Air National Guard, the ArSCA’s website lists two other military branches as platinum sponsors: the Air National Guard and the United States Army Recruiting Command. When asked about the sponsorships, an Army official stated that the Army is in compliance with policies and suggested that sponsoring the event did not violate President Donald Trump’s executive orders against promoting DEI or any other Department of War policy. Promoting DEI While the ArSCA does not mention its membership numbers, the ASCA claimed in 2023 to have over 43,000 members across the country. According to Courage Is a Habit’s report, “Violation: American School Counselor Association,” the ASCA has repeatedly and systematically supported DEI, from “anti-racist” messaging to pro-transgender policies. In 2021, ASCA adopted an “anti-racist practices” position stating that “racism remains a part of society in the United States and exists throughout all of our institutions.” The policy calls on school counselors to “embrace their ethical responsibilities within roles as social justice advocates, leaders, and change agents” in order to “actively dismantle racist policies, procedures, and practices.” While most Americans oppose racism, the “anti-racist” movement ASCA embraced relies on the teachings of critical race theory, an ideology that contends that America is institutionally racist, so Americans must fundamentally question all of society to find hidden racism and advocate radical changes to remove it. This leads to discrimination, in which Americans seek to redress historic injustices by elevating people from supposedly “oppressed” minority groups. Other ASCA policy documents state that school counselors have a responsibility to “expand personal multicultural and social justice advocacy, awareness, knowledge, and skills,” and that school counselors “advocate for transgender, nonbinary, and gender-expansive students regarding access of building facilities.” The ASCA Ethical Standards document stipulates that school counselors will “actively advocate for systemic and other changes needed for equitable participation and outcomes in educational programs when disproportionality exists regarding enrollment in such programs by race, gender identity, gender expression, sexual orientation,” and more. The Courage Is a Habit report also notes that ASCA used materials from the Southern Poverty Law Center’s education arm, Learning for Justice, to craft student standards. Specifically, ASCA modeled its Student Standards: Mindsets & Behaviors for Student Success and Student Standards Crosswalk on Learning for Justice’s Social Justice Standards. The Southern Poverty Law Center—best known for putting mainstream conservative and Christian nonprofits on a “hate map” with chapters of the Ku Klux Klan—defends critical race theory and Learning for Justice advocates teaching about Black Lives Matter in schools. ASCA’s most recent 2025 National Model for school counseling links to the ASCA Ethical Standards and Student Standards in a section on “definitions.” CIAH_ASCA_Violation_2025Download Trump’s Executive Orders Trump wrote in a January executive order on “ending illegal discrimination and restoring merit-based opportunity” that many institutions “have adopted and actively use dangerous, demeaning, and immoral race- and sex-based preferences under the guise of so-called ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’ … that can violate the civil rights laws of this nation.” Trump ordered “all executive departments and agencies to terminate all discriminatory and illegal preferences … and to combat illegal private-sector DEI preferences, mandates, policies, programs, and activities.” Trump issued another executive order on “ending radical indoctrination in K-12 schooling.” His order directs the federal government “to ensure that recipients of federal funds providing K-12 education comply with all applicable laws prohibiting discrimination in various contexts and protecting parental rights.” The Courage Is a Habit report suggests the Department of War sponsorships for the ASCA annual conference violate both executive orders. The Daily Signal reached out to the National Guard, the ASCA, the ArSCA, and the Southern Poverty Law Center for comment but did not receive responses by publication time. The post Sarah Huckabee Sanders Distances Herself From Woke School Counselor Association Criticized for Promoting DEI appeared first on The Daily Signal.

The Islamic State is leveraging artificial intelligence to recruit new members and further its ideology, according to a new report.   The Islamic State has not held any significant amount of land since 2019, yet it has found a way through AI to reinvent itself, Mohammad Taha Ali explained in a new report for the Middle East Forum.   “Unlike earlier jihadist movements that relied on physical sanctuaries, the Islamic State now thrives in virtual ones,” Ali wrote.   Ali, a postgraduate student from Jamia Millia Islamia in New Delhi, India, specializing in conflict resolution and strategic affairs, told The Daily Signal he first became aware of the Islamic State’s use of AI at the end of 2023 and start of 2024, “when ISIS-affiliated online networks began regularly using generative AI to produce multilingual propaganda and automated recruitment material.”   Today, the Islamic State is using new technology tools to create deepfake videos and manufacture news reports that are sympathetic to radical Islamic propaganda. ISIS, according to Ali, takes advantage of crisis situations, such as the war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza, to flood various digital platforms with “AI-generated extremist content.”   “The goal is not just recruitment; it is to exhaust the algorithmic defenses of major social platforms and dominate online discourse,” Ali wrote.   Even within education, female Islamic State loyalists in refugee camps, such as the al-Hol Displacement Camp in Syria, are using “algorithmically produced martyrdom stories, ensuring the continuity of the movement’s narrative even without formal leadership,” he explained.   Video Games  Gaming is one of the key digital platforms ISIS uses to spread its message and recruit new people into jihadism.   Ali referred to the trend as “gamified radicalization,” in which terrorists target gamers, often in diaspora communities, with radical Islamic ideology.   “These recruits seldom cross a border yet become ideological soldiers in the Islamic State’s virtual army,” he said. “This fusion of gaming culture and jihadist mythology represents an entirely new front in extremist mobilization.”   Cryptocurrency   The Islamic State has also taken advantage of the advent of cryptocurrency, according to Ali. He explained that ISIS uses decentralized forms of currency to evade oversight. Cryptocurrency can be exchanged with anonymity, allowing financers of the “califate,” the establishment of the Islamic state, to fund fighters with greater trust that their identity won’t be exposed.   “In this way, the Islamic State’s ‘caliphate without borders’ morphs into a financial ecosystem without identities,” Ali said.  What Can Be Done?   The Trump administration is “partially” taking the necessary steps to combat the threat of the Islamic State’s use of AI and cryptocurrency, Ali said, explaining “there has been progress on crypto enforcement, but the U.S. still lacks a coherent strategy for tracking and countering AI-generated extremist content and synthetic networks.”  The new Islamic State is a “networked, AI-enabled insurgency,” Ali said, and must be treated as such.   To address the threat, Ali recommended intelligence agencies work with technology companies to monitor and detect AI-generated Islamic State propaganda. Second, specialists who investigate cryptocurrency transactions need greater support through the Financial Action Task Force, an intergovernmental body established to combat nefarious financial activity.   Finally, Ali recommended governments “fund diaspora-led digital literacy and counternarrative programs specifically in gaming communities where extremist recruiters are now operational.”   Defeating the “AI Caliphate,” according to Ali, will require policymakers “to think not like soldiers or theologians, but like engineers.”   The post How Terrorists Are Using AI  appeared first on The Daily Signal.

A federal magistrate judge on Monday criticized federal prosecutors when ordering that they turn over grand jury evidence to the defense team representing indicted former FBI Director James Comey, who faces charges of perjury and obstruction of a congressional investigation. Magistrate Judge William Fitzpatrick said interim U.S. Attorney Lindsey Halligan made two statements to grand jurors that could be “fundamental misstatements of the law,” The Hill reported. “The Court recognizes that the relief sought by the defense is rarely granted,” Fitzpatrick said in the opinion. “However, the record points to a disturbing pattern of profound investigative missteps, missteps that led an FBI agent and a prosecutor to potentially undermine the integrity of the grand jury proceeding.” Magistrate judges, such as Fitzpatrick, are not presidential appointees, but are appointed by a panel of federal district judges. John Malcolm, director of The Heritage Foundation’s legal center, explained that it is unusual for a judge to order the release of grand jury transcripts, even to the defense, as Judge Fitzpatrick acknowledged. However, Malcolm told The Daily Signal that “it is not unheard of.” “After all, Trump’s DOJ recently sought the release of the grand jury transcripts related to the [Jeffrey] Epstein indictment because they believed that the public interest outweighed the need for grand jury secrecy,” Malcolm said. “Here, the judge is obviously concerned with what documents the grand jury saw and what instructions they were given about the applicable state of the law.” It’s too early to say if this suggests the judge would dismiss the grand jury indictment, the legal analyst said.  “The defense team has made enough of a showing that he is concerned about what happened, and thinks that the defense attorneys should be afforded the opportunity to see the material and make whatever arguments they want to make,” Malcolm added.  A defendant’s legal team is entitled to have the prosecution’s evidence in a case to mount a defense. However, defense lawyers generally do not receive grand jury transcripts of non-testifying witnesses or agents who provide summary evidence. Nor do they get documents that were received by the grand jury that would not be exculpatory and are not introduced at trial by the government. The judge said Halligan seemed to suggest to the grand jury that Comey would not have a Fifth Amendment right to decline to testify at his criminal trial. Further, he said she suggested to the grand jurors they did not have to rely on the record before them and that the government had more evidence at trial.  A Justice Department spokesperson declined to comment for the story. The Eastern District of Virginia is in a mostly Democrat-leaning area, with a grand jury and jury pool that might not be eager to indict someone aligned with Democrats.  Comey faces charges for telling Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, in testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee in 2020, that he never authorized leaks. Prosecutors say this was a lie because Comey authorized Columbia University law professor Daniel Richman to talk to reporters. The post Judge Gives Comey Early Win. What Does it Mean for the Rest of the Case? appeared first on 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. There’s been a lot of confusion, discussion, but also confusion, about the idea of platforming some person or deplatforming someone versus canceling them. It came up during the Tucker Carlson interview of Nick Fuentes. I think we should make a distinction. If you have a venue, you’re a talk-show host, a podcaster, you’re inviting someone to lecture, that’s a choice that you make. And you operate within particular sidelines, parameters. In other words, you don’t invite an abject racist. You don’t invite an abject antisemite. You don’t invite somebody who would like to have that forum to advance your views. And we have to be very clear about this. People in the news that are antisemites, racist, anti-American, radicals, whatever extremist point of view they embrace, they get to a point of public exposure because they’re quite skilled in demagogic rhetoric. They’re formidable debaters. If anybody went back to “Firing Line” and watched William F. Buckley debate George Wallace, Buckley had the moral and the intellectual argument on his side. But he was dealing with a man who, for 25 years, had spoken almost every day to crowds. And George Wallace was probably the best orator that ran for president—say, in ’68 and ’72. And Buckley used all of his skills just to tie down Wallace. And it was a very even debate. So, my point is, if you have a venue and you want to bring somebody in who is beyond the pale, and that person is going to come onto your venue to do a couple of things, of course, get greater exposure for his noxious ideas, but more importantly, he’s coming equipped with formidable rhetorical skills. And three, don’t expect, when he has a large mainstream audience, he is going to voice all of the extreme positions that got him on the show in the first place. That was true of William F. Buckley with Huey Newton, Eldridge Cleaver, William Shockley, etc. So, when you bring somebody like Nick Fuentes on, be prepared that he’s not going to be transparent about the excess of his views or the extreme nature of them. He’ll calm them down in order to get a bigger audience. Two, he’s going to come after years or hours, days of debating people. So, you have to be at the top of your game. In the case of Tucker Carlson, there’s no question that he’s a very skilled interviewer. And when he wanted to pin Sen. Ted Cruz down, who, himself, is a formidable debater, Tucker Carlson did very well. I mean, it was almost an ambush interview. And he tried to embarrass—and sometimes, successfully so—Ted Cruz. So, he could have used those formidable skills to cross-examine Nick Fuentes. But he did not. So, when you don’t invite Nick Fuentes on your program, it doesn’t mean that you’re canceling him. It doesn’t mean that you’re deplatforming him because he’s beyond the pale. And you say, “Well, who are you to say that, Victor?” Well, I’m not Victor saying that. There are accepted norms—that you don’t use the N-word, or you don’t call for people to go back to Israel, if they’re Jewish, or you don’t make fun of people’s race in the public sphere, the way he did. You can do that, of course, under the First Amendment, but you’re not invited into acceptable venues to vent those views and to spread hate. The second thing is canceling. These are options. So, when you don’t offer Fuentes a venue, you’re not canceling him out. You’re just making a choice. You make a choice every day, who you invite on your show, who you talk to, where you go. But, if he is so extreme and you decide either to withdraw the invitation or not to invite him at all, that’s not canceling, that’s not deplatforming. How about Tucker himself, which is a very different case? Tucker Carlson had had a distinguished career as a journalist, as a writer, as a debater, as a conservative pundit for years. I was on his show for six or seven years. He never once voiced anything that was remotely what I would consider antisemitic. His father was a devout Christian. Maybe he would qualify as a Christian Zionist. A big supporter of Israel. He was a patriot. He had a very distinguished career. Tucker Carlson comes from one of the oldest families in California, the Miller & Lux 19th-century land development company. So, he’s been around for a long time, and no one had ever questioned that he was antisemitic. I don’t know what happened in the last year or so, when he decided to bring on these beyond-the-pale guests. But I don’t think, necessarily, the question is to go after Tucker Carlson for bringing them on. We don’t go after William Buckley. The question’s more nuanced. The question is, if you bring them on, are you prepared to ask them the sort of questions that they are, A, going to evade, and B, going to moderate their views, and C, use you to get a larger audience? And if you don’t do that, then fairly or not, people are gonna think you’re complicit in an effort to spread those views, which, in the case of Nick Fuentes, are abhorrent. So, I think everybody was shocked, disappointed that Tucker didn’t use those skills with somebody as reprehensible as Fuentes. And I think they hope that he will in the future. We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal. The post Canceling vs. Deplatforming: Tucker Carlson’s Misstep appeared first on The Daily Signal.

As pro-lifers vigilantly track if the Trump administration’s deal to extend Affordable Care Act subsidies will include abortion funding, a top Senate Republican said the issue is a priority for his party. “Republicans are very, very, very concerned about that,” Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., told The Daily Signal. Cassidy, chair of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, proposed legislation to give subsidies directly to Obamacare enrollees rather than to insurance companies. The proposal would use the current funding for enhanced premium tax credits to fund flexible spending accounts, or FSAs, for Obamacare eligible enrollees. Obamacare is exempted from the Hyde Amendment, which prohibits taxpayer dollars from funding abortions, so Senate Republicans will need to find a way to prohibit abortion coverage under FSAs. “Now we’re working through the legislation, and I anticipate the administration being just as concerned as we, and so how you get the HSA to do that, if you will, is something that we’re working on,” Cassidy said. In order to end the record 43-day shutdown, Senate Majority Leader John Thune offered Democrats a vote on an ACA funding bill by the end of the second week of December. The Trump administration has not yet spoken on this aspect of the bipartisan Obamacare deal. “They are still keeping it close to the chest,” a senior Republican Senate staffer told RealClearPolitics’ Phil Wegmann. “We’re keeping our ears open to see what the White House is going to recommend we do.” Yet Cassidy said he expects Trump will share the urgency of Republicans and the pro-life movement to prevent the deal to expand the Affordable Care Act from funding abortion. As Republicans work through how to prevent FSAs from funding abortion, legislation from Rep. Josh Brecheen, R-Okla., could serve as a model. He proposed a bill excluding expenses paid for an abortion from being qualified medical expenses eligible for reimbursement from certain tax-exempt savings accounts. Under the bill, amounts paid for an abortion, other than an excluded abortion, are not qualified medical expenses eligible for reimbursement from a health savings account or flexible spending account. Democrats may be unlikely to agree to a deal that limits funding for abortion. But the Trump administration has another option to prevent taxpayers from funding abortions through Obamacare. The IRS can determine that abortion is not a qualified medical expense and therefore FSA and HSA money cannot be used on abortion plans. The Department of Treasury did not respond to The Daily Signal’s request for comment on that option. In the first Trump administration, the president finalized a rule requiring health insurers to send customers a bill for coverage of an elective abortion that is separate from their premium for health care coverage under the Affordable Care Act. But there has never been a rule excluding abortion from HSAs. Sen. Rick Scott, R-Fla., who is working with Cassidy and Sen. Roger Marshall of Kansas on talks with Democrats on a potential Obamacare compromise, shares Cassidy’s commitment to preventing ACA subsidies from funding abortion. “Democrats are shutting down the government … because they want … funding for free abortions,” Scott said. Democrats’ “compromise” is a JOKE that puts illegal aliens, insurance companies that pay for abortions & trans surgeries, & the wealthy, over the American people. It’s heartless! When will @SenateDems put Americans first?! pic.twitter.com/Xl9LRdR2UE— Rick Scott (@SenRickScott) November 7, 2025 The post Republicans, Trump ‘Very Concerned’ About Preventing Obamacare Deal From Funding Abortion, Senator Says appeared first on The Daily Signal.