The U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday allowed mail orders of the abortion drug mifepristone to continue, handing a major defeat for the pro-life movement while litigation over the pill continues.    In an emergency order, the court temporarily blocked a federal appeals court ruling that struck down a Biden-era policy that allowed the abortion drug mifepristone to be prescribed online and shipped by mail.  The unsigned order provided no legal explanation. Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas dissented.  “The Court’s unreasoned order granting stays in this case is remarkable,” Justice Alito wrote. “What is at stake is the perpetration of a scheme to undermine our decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which restored the right of each State to decide how to regulate abortions within its borders.” Justice Thomas went further, describing the mail distribution system for mifepristone as a “criminal enterprise.” “Applicants are not entitled to a stay of an adverse court order based on lost profits from their criminal enterprise,” he concluded. “They cannot, in any legally relevant sense, be irreparably harmed by a court order that makes it more difficult for them to commit crimes.” After the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, the Biden administration expanded nationwide access to chemical abortion. Under rules finalized in 2023, women could obtain mifepristone through telehealth appointments without an in-person doctor visit.  The majority of abortions in the U.S. are obtained through medications, usually a combination of mifepristone and a second drug, misoprostol, according to the Associated Press.  Louisiana challenged the Biden-era policy under the Administrative Procedure Act, arguing the FDA relied on flawed or nonexistent data while eliminating safety protocols. The Daily Wire previously reported that the FDA acknowledged it had not adequately studied the safety of remote dispensing and is still conducting a review, with no clear timeline for completion. The three-judge 5th Circuit panel held that the regulation, which has continued under the Trump administration, was likely unlawful.  “Every abortion facilitated by FDA’s action cancels Louisiana’s ban,” the federal appeals court wrote, emphasizing that such harm cannot be undone. Manufacturers of the abortion drug quickly filed emergency appeals asking the Supreme Court to intervene. Acting alone, Justice Samuel Alito entered and then extended an administrative stay of the Fifth Circuit ruling, which is a short-term, procedural order that freezes legal proceedings so the full court has time to weigh the issue. On Thursday, a majority of the justices appeared to agree with the abortion manufacturers, overturning the block in a significant setback for pro-life advocates as litigation drags on. “This decision keeps deadly abortion drugs available by mail and telehealth, where preborn children are killed at home and women can be abandoned, coerced, and left to suffer alone,” Lila Rose, a prominent pro-life activist, said on social media. “The FDA must act now.” BREAKING: The Supreme Court has tragically and wrongly granted the abortion pill makers’ emergency appeal, allowing the mail order abortion pill regime to continue nationwide. Justices Thomas and Alito dissented. This decision keeps deadly abortion drugs available by mail and… — Lila Rose (@LilaGraceRose) May 14, 2026 President Donald Trump’s embattled FDA commissioner Marty Makary resigned on Tuesday following intense criticism from pro-life advocates over his handling of mifepristone and the speed of the agency’s review of the abortion drug’s safety.  

To my sheer dismay, I opened a letter the other day informing me of yet another speeding ticket. How? I saw no cops. I stay just slightly above the speed limit like every other functioning adult in this country. No flashing lights, no sirens, no officer pulling me over to exercise any semblance of human judgment. No need. The District of Columbia has taken a page straight out of the Chinese Communist playbook, embedding surveillance cameras on every major road in the city, lying in wait to snare Washington, D.C. residents in a money trap. The same residents, by the way, who already pay some of the highest taxes in the nation. $400. I was as thrilled to see that bill as Pete Hegseth was shaking President Xi’s hand this week. Granted, I was going too fast, and I’ll pay it like a law-abiding citizen, but I shouldn’t have to feel like I’m dodging the Ministry of Public Security just to get to work. Because that’s exactly what this is. China operates one of the world’s largest surveillance states, with an estimated 700 million CCTV cameras tracking its residents’ every move. The Fox News crew found that out the hard way during Trump’s Beijing trip, getting slapped with a $40 ticket for parking illegally for two whole minutes! It’s authoritarian. It’s Orwellian. And it’s a reminder: keep CCP-style surveillance and Chinese influence out of America. Speed cameras are annoying and invasive, but they’re the least of what’s crushing the Chinese people. China is a disaster area. As President Donald Trump sits across from Xi Jinping this week, it’s worth remembering exactly who the enemy is and exactly how weak they really are. You wouldn’t know it from their propaganda show. As Trump stepped off Air Force One in Beijing, he was greeted by perfectly choreographed children, waving flowers and American flags with rehearsed smiles, robotically jumping to the music. It looked like a scene out of The Interview. Abnormal. Creepy. Stop it. Beneath that polished, stage-managed surface is a nation rotting from the inside. China’s nominal GDP per capita is under $15,000 a year. Ours is $95,000. They’re facing a huge demographic problem after their one-child policy prevented 400 million births, gutting their workforce and leaving no one to pay the bills — bills that now sit at a 336% debt-to-GDP ratio, propped up by trillions in bad loans that will never be repaid. Beijing long ago crushed free enterprise in favor of a top-down mercantilist system where the Party picks winners and losers, and the result is a country that can’t innovate or build, which is why America is running away with the AI race and the global hegemonic title. So instead, they steal — up to $600 billion in American IP every year — and mass-produce what they can, because they have no regard for human life or child labor laws. That same apathy toward their own people shows up in how they govern them: heavy taxation just to keep the nation afloat, a military that’s large but technologically limited, with no real deep-water capability or meaningful power projection. Their one-party autocracy doesn’t produce innovation; it produces loyalty oaths. China is not an ascending power threatening to displace us. It’s a declining one, desperately trying to stop the bleeding. The CCP is not just our adversary. They are our enemy. And they’re losing. Some of it is self-inflicted, some of it is courtesy of our sanctions, investment restrictions, and the compounding advantage of being a free market that keeps innovating while they stagnate. But the Iran situation? That’s the cherry on top. Fifty-four percent of China’s total oil imports come from the Middle East. Another 3–5% was coming from Venezuela before that dried up. They are almost entirely dependent on a region currently on fire, and they have no leverage to do anything about it. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said it plainly this week: Chinese ships are stuck in the Persian Gulf, Chinese cargo got hit over the weekend, and their export market is in limbo. An Iran war hurts China far more than it hurts us. That desperation is precisely why this week’s White House meeting produced real concessions. China agreed to greater U.S. access to Chinese markets, an end to fentanyl precursor exports, a halt to purchasing American farmland, and — most significantly — that Iran cannot ever have a nuclear weapon. The Strait of Hormuz stays open. China even wants to buy American oil, because when your energy supply chain runs through a war zone, you get pragmatic fast. Our little enemy has been backed into its rightful corner. We need more of this, because China has been running a full-spectrum assault on the United States for years: espionage, economic theft on a historic scale, and subversion right here at home. In California, Arcadia Mayor Eileen Wang just pleaded guilty to spying for the PRC. A sitting mayor. A Bronx man named Lu Jianwang was just convicted for operating a secret Chinese “police station” in Manhattan’s Chinatown, monitoring dissidents and harassing fugitives on direct orders from Beijing. Eric Swalwell, the disgraced former congressman, got honey-potted by a Chinese spy named Fang Fang while sitting on the House Intelligence Committee — and it barely made a ripple. Chinese “students” embedded in our research universities go home upon graduation and take whatever they’ve collected with them. TikTok is a CCP propaganda pipeline running on 170 million American phones. The Confucius Institutes spent years pumping Beijing-approved curriculum into U.S. campuses, scrubbing any mention of Taiwan, Tiananmen, or the Uyghurs — the same Uyghurs sitting in Chinese concentration camps right now — millions of them. So when Xi this week claims he wants “strategic stability” between China and the United States — great. Close the spy stations. Stop the fentanyl. Stop the stealing. Then we’ll take you seriously. The fake news will tell you China holds the cards this week. They don’t. They never did. Trump is in Beijing, Xi is making concessions, and China is desperate for oil, stability, and a lifeline. That’s not strength. That’s a country running out of options. America, don’t be like China. Don’t let their surveillance creep into our cities. Don’t fall for the communist propaganda, whether it comes from Bernie Sanders, AOC, honeypotters, or Xi himself. And D.C.? Take those stupid cameras down.

This week, U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders, America’s perennial socialism-salesman, lauded New York City’s Zohran Mamdani, saying the new mayor had “inherited a huge budget deficit” and “brought it down to zero,” while still boosting spending. Sanders and others have been quick to cheer Mamdani’s plan to balance the $125 billion city budget, which still must be approved by the City Council. But these boosters, quite conveniently, avoid getting into the details. That’s by necessity. Closer inspection reveals how much New York City’s problems were of its politicians’ own making — and the extremes to which they’re going to avoid making hard choices. Mamdani, with great alarm, announced in January that the city faced a budget crisis. The city’s looming fiscal crunch was hardly news; state officials had been warning about it for many months. There was a kernel of truth to the mayor’s worries, though: the city was in its fourth year of spending more than it took in. The trouble, though, was exclusively on the expenditure side. There was no single culprit, but rather a systemwide expansion of costs, including newer programs — such as a housing-voucher system whose cost quadrupled to almost $2 billion in just four years. One particular, and avoidable, trouble spot was a state-imposed “class-size” mandate set to cost the city close to $1 billion annually by requiring the city to hire more teachers. Then-Assemblyman Mamdani, along with most lawmakers, had supported the rule in 2022, which was a thinly veiled effort to shield the NYC teachers’ union from the pain of school consolidation driven by collapsing student enrollment. Part of the mayor’s budget triumph came from Albany simply postponing the law’s implementation. Mamdani will eventually have to confront the gap between his vision for democratic socialism and the extent to which New York’s public employee unions, and their stranglehold over city operations (and the state Legislature), prevent agencies from delivering, in his terms, “public excellence.” But that fight for greater efficiency is not happening today. The mayor, always quick to bemoan spending restraint as “austerity,” instead seems to have squeezed more aid from the state government, though Albany hasn’t yet approved a budget for the state’s current fiscal year (which began six weeks ago). That extra cash is only available because of the combination of Albany’s steep personal and business income taxes and the recent strong performance of the NYC-based financial sector. When markets do well, cash rains in. But when capital gains dry up, so do tax receipts. The Global Financial Crisis, and the resulting collapse in capital gains, flooded the New York state government in a sea of red ink, which washed thousands of state workers out of their jobs, and forced the state to close its aid spigot for local governments and school districts. New York pols treat that as ancient history instead of a cautionary tale about the imprudence of counting on tax receipts that might not exist a year from now. The mayor’s antagonism toward the city’s high earners, and recent expansions by financial heavyweights into Texas and South Florida, have put NYC at greater risk of tax-base erosion. The biggest chunk of Mamdani’s budget-balancing strategy is arguably the least responsible: he’s simply punting costs into the future. New York City pays into five public pension systems on behalf of current workers, expecting that the payments, plus investment returns, will be sufficient to fund each worker’s pension in retirement. But that often hasn’t been the case. The City right now is about two-thirds of the way through paying off an extra pension debt that hit its balance sheet around 2010 as the pension systems acknowledged that retirees were living (and collecting pensions) longer and that investments couldn’t be counted on to generate such high average returns (8% per year) over the long run. Instead of paying off the last of that decades-old pension debt in 2032, Mamdani wants to “restructure” the city’s pension payments in each of the next few years and instead stretch the costs out to 2037. That means deferring $1.6 billion in pension costs in the next fiscal year alone and forcing city taxpayers to pay it back, with interest. New York’s state constitution guarantees public pensions, meaning they can never be reduced, so if the pension systems’ still-generous assumptions about future investment performances don’t materialize, taxpayers will be hit up for even more to make up the difference. Mamdani should be looking more seriously at the decisions that put New York City in the red, and use the time-tested methods of previous mayors (like “programs to eliminate the gap”) to get costs back under control. In the meantime, for the people eager to tout the weekly triumphs of socialism in Gotham, these inconvenient details about the city’s long-term standing are a problem for another day. *** Ken Girardin is a fellow at the Manhattan Institute.

Yale University’s medical school illegally discriminates in admissions to favor black and Hispanic students, a Justice Department investigation found. On Thursday, the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division completed a year-long investigation into the Ivy League school’s admissions policies and practices. According to the federal government, Yale admits black and Hispanic applicants at higher rates than white and Asian applicants with similar academic credentials. “Black and Hispanic applicants were admitted with consistently lower academic qualifications than their White and Asian counterparts,” the DOJ said in a statement. “These facts support the Department’s finding that Yale violated the law by intentionally discriminating based on race in its admissions, in clear violation of federal law.” The findings suggest Yale may be violating the landmark 2023 Supreme Court ruling striking down race-based affirmative action policies at Harvard and the University of North Carolina. The Daily Wire reached out to Yale for comment, but did not receive a response before publication.  “Yale has continued its race-based admissions program despite the Supreme Court and the public’s clear mandate for reform,” Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon said. “This Department will continue to shed light on these illegal practices, and demand that institutions of higher education comply with federal law.” Dhillon later pointed to the DOJ’s statistical analysis. “At Yale Medical School, a black applicant is 29 times more likely to be invited to interview than an Asian with equally strong academics,” Dhillon added. “Today,@CivilRights told Yale that its use of race in admissions is ILLEGAL — and that @TheJusticeDept will step in to enforce Title VI.” At Yale Medical School, a black applicant is 29 times more likely to be invited to interview than an Asian with equally strong academics. Today, @CivilRights told Yale that its use of race in admissions is ILLEGAL—and that @TheJusticeDept will step in to enforce Title VI.… — AAGHarmeetDhillon (@AAGDhillon) May 14, 2026   The findings come amid renewed national debate over affirmative action and admission at elite universities. Former MSNBC host Joy Reid recently claimed that Vice President JD Vance benefited from affirmative action at Yale, suggesting the university pursued geographic diversity by admitting “an Appalachian white.” Joy Reid: “JD Vance got into Yale because they were tired of just letting in white men from New York … They wanted an Appalachian white. That’s how that man got into Yale, I promise you.” How is one such miserable person named Joy? pic.twitter.com/YepzfccNc3 — Defiant L’s (@DefiantLs) May 14, 2026 The far-left commentator has publicly credited affirmative action with helping her attend Harvard.

Eric Church has had a “record year” plenty of times, but the Carolina-born country singer can now say he gave one heck of a commencement speech. And yes, his guitar skills were included. The die-hard Tar Heel fan gave the commencement speech at the University of North Carolina on Saturday, where he used six strings to deliver a sermon you don’t hear too often on campuses anymore.   Church compared the six strings of a guitar to what he described as the six pillars of life: Faith, family, your spouse, ambition, community, and you. Church began with the biggest string on the guitar and the biggest pillar in life to him, which is faith. “The people who tend to their faith in ordinary seasons do not come undone in extraordinary ones,” Church said. “They still hurt. They still sit in hospital waiting rooms asking unanswerable questions at three in the morning, but they have a foundation to return to.” “The world will try to ‘untune’ this string… through business, through slow accumulation of a full schedule, a full inbox, a full life. Listen to me, tend to your faith not just when you’re broken, but when you’re whole.” Church went on to stress family, telling the new graduates to “call your people.” “[Family] is the string that makes you feel like you’re not alone in a room. I want to warn you about something. You’re about to get busy in ways that feel important, and many are professionally ambitious… building the life you’ve been pointed toward for years. And family, because they love you with a grace you will spend most of your life trying to deserve, will rarely demand your time. They’ll tell you they understand, and they’ll mean it. Do not take them up on it.” When describing the “heart string” of the guitar, Church said it holds the guitar together, like a spouse holds your life together. “Find your best friend. Someone you want to talk to at the end of a long day. Look for shared values over shared interest. You don’t need to love the same food or music … you need the same compass — though it would be a benefit if you both hated N.C. State.” The Grammy winner has been married to his wife since 2008 and encouraged the UNC alums to find the person who amplifies their faith and every aspect of their life. “The person you choose to share your life with is the most important decision you will ever make outside of your faith,” Church told the crowd. After picking the next guitar string, Church explained how ambition and resilience pull in opposite directions, but he encouraged them to keep pursuing their goals regardless. “And when you fail, and you will fail … get back up, tune the strung, and keep on playing.” For the fifth string, Church got serious when explaining to the Gen-Z crowd the importance of true community and getting offline. He said this generation of new alumni faces a world of temptation, specifically the temptation to “perform” for an online crowd of followers. Church urged the crowd to “resist” and instead “plant yourself.” “Put down roots with the full intention of growing there. Learn the actual names, not usernames, of the people around you. Volunteer. Coach the team. Build the thing your community needs. Even if the internet will never see it,” he added. The final guitar string Church described was the high E string, which he told the crowd represents the graduate. “Social media is going to show you a thousand versions of a life that looks better than yours.” “Six strings — Six strings of life and willingness to keep them in tune. Six principles. Six pillars. When all six are in tune with each other, the chord your life makes is full and resonant and true,” Church said. “All six will drift, not one or two, all six in their own time, in their own season. Your faith will go quiet when you need it loud. Your family will get complicated in a way only the people who love you most can complicate things. You will go through hard seasons with your spouse. Your ambition will hollow out, and your resilience will wear thin. Your community will start to feel like an obligation, and your world will try to sand down the edges of exactly who you are.” But when that happens, Church reminded the UNC crowd, “this is not failure.” “It’s the inevitable universal experience of living in an imperfect world that doesn’t stop to let us tune up. And the difference between a life that sounds like music and a life that sounds like noise, is whether you stop and listen, whether you’re honest enough to hear which string has drifted out of tune… and humble enough to make the adjustment instead of just turning up the volume and hoping nobody notices.” Church wrapped up the speech by telling the graduates to tune up their “six strings” of life before breaking out into his hit “Carolina.” The reaction on social media from this crafty commencement speech proves why “The Chief” has 10 No. 1 songs, but for this hit, he didn’t even need the radio. Encore!