The radical ideology of gender identity continues to hollow out the integrity of women’s athletics in the state of California, and tennis legend Martina Navratilova has seen enough. Over the weekend, high school preliminaries in Orange County became the latest theater of the absurd. AB Hernandez, a male competing as a senior for Jurupa Valley High School, dominated the girls’ field in the CIF Southern Section Division 3, seizing the triple jump title by several feet and clearing over 20 feet in the long jump — besting the nearest female competitor by more than a foot. Hernandez also tied for first in the high jump, repeating a pattern of dominance that has sparked fierce protests from athletes and parents alike, the Daily Mail reported. One year later. We’re still doing this. Weak adults who refuse to do the right thing. pic.twitter.com/SSOabYBMNq — XX-XY Athletics (@xx_xyathletics) May 10, 2026 While the “Save Girls Sports” organization and frustrated families gathered at Yorba Linda High School to decry the erasure of female biological reality, the most stinging rebuke came from Navratilova. The 18-time Grand Slam champion, a harsh critic of President Donald Trump, still took aim at the leading Democratic candidate for the 2028 presidential nomination, torching California Governor Gavin Newsom for his refusal to protect female athletes and labeling the state-sanctioned charade as “cheating.” “Newsom could overturn this in a second. No excuse,” Navratilova wrote, emphasizing that the governor has the executive authority to intervene but chooses instead to hide behind bureaucratic red tape. Responding to the news that Hernandez remains seeded at the top of upcoming tournaments, she added a caustic, “Thanks for nothing [Gavin Newsom].” Navratilova’s fury was echoed by fellow Olympic legends. Three-time gold medalist Nancy Hogshead blasted Newsom’s office for its “big fail” in legal and biological analysis. Hogshead noted that while Newsom’s camp pays lip service to “fairness, dignity, and respect,” it pointedly excludes biological girls from that standard. “Females aren’t weakened males; males and females are built from different molds,” Hogshead stated, dismantling the “woke” notion that gender identity can override the material reality of bone density and muscle mass. A spokesman for Newsom attacked the governor’s critics after it was announced that a “Save Girls Sports” protest would be held at the track meet. “The Governor has said discussions on this issue should be guided by fairness, dignity, and respect. He rejects the right wing’s cynical attempt to weaponize this debate as an excuse to vilify individual kids,” the spokesman stated. “The Governor’s position is simple: stand with all kids and stand up to bullies.” This prompted Sophia Lorey of Save Girls Sports to fire back: “Shame on Governor Newsom for calling the girls behind me bullies… These girls are not bullies for defending fairness.” While Newsom remains ensconced in his progressive ivory tower, the federal government is taking notice. The Department of Justice has already filed suit against California agencies for Title IX violations, and the Department of Education has expanded its investigation into 17 other institutions. For Navratilova and those who still believe in the “unique biology of females,” the message to Sacramento is clear: biological reality isn’t a “right-wing weapon” — it’s a fact, and ignoring it is nothing short of state-sponsored cheating.

This article is on Ohio’s response to “Medicaid Millions,” a Daily Wire series exposing billions of dollars in dubious “personal services” payments where people are paid to spend time with their own family. *** Ohio says it has safeguards in place to cut down on fraud and abuse of Medicaid home health care, but one of the biggest tools to verify care is actually taking place has been rendered useless. The Daily Wire’s investigation of the multi-billion dollar a year Medicaid industry in Ohio has raised concerns about abuse of a program in which people are paid to visit the homes of elderly poor people and provide “cooking,” “cleaning,” and other non-medical services that even include “companionship.” In response to those concerns, the Ohio Department of Medicaid said it is “aware of concerns involving home health care activity” in Columbus, and “has been actively investigating these matters since prior to the publication of The Daily Wire series.” It touted an “extensive set of safeguards” in place to ensure aides are actually going to homes. The key component is “mandatory electronic visit verification capturing date, time, and service location,” a feature that is required by federal law. But Ohio Republican Governor Mike DeWine’s administration inserted massive loopholes including making the verification optional. The 21st Century Cures Act, passed by Congress in 2016, mandated that states require electronic visit verification, or EVV, by January 2020 for the riskiest category of “personal services” – non-medical services like cooking and cleaning – and by January 2023 for in-home nursing. Yet for years, Ohio simply paid providers even if they didn’t submit any electronic evidence, according to a 2024 audit by Auditor of State Keith Faber. Faber’s audit, examining payments in 2022, found that 44% of personal services claims had no electronic verification. The situation was similar for home nursing. “This resulted in approximately $1.1 billion in claims not supported by an EVV visit,” the audit found. The audit said if the state has an electronic validation system, then using it should be a “condition of payment.” A spokeswoman for the Ohio Medicaid Department, Stephanie O’Grady, told The Daily Wire that this was done in March 2025. But shortly before EVV was made mandatory, it was neutered as a fraud prevention tool. The most important feature – GPS coordinates captured by an electronic device – was made optional and defaulted to “off.” “Effective July 1, 2024, GPS functionality within any EVV application or device may only be activated with the signed consent of the individual receiving services — valid for one year and revocable at any time,” O’Grady said. “The approach allows the person receiving care to make an informed decision related to privacy protections for individuals receiving home and community-based services.” O’Grady disclosed to The Daily Wire that GPS is turned off for nearly half of home visits, with reliable coordinates present in only 53% of electronic records. The patient was also supposed to sign their name to show that the patient and aide were actually together, but that, too, was removed in 2024, Faber’s audit flagged. Earlier this year, Ohio’s attorney general Dave Yost, whose office is tasked with policing Medicaid fraud, testified that the rollback of safeguards made his job difficult. “Until about a year ago [GPS] was required, now it’s optional,” he told legislators in March. “I do not know for the life of me why it went away, but I respectfully ask you to put in statute where no vendor, no bureaucrat can object to legitimate monitoring.” “While we had the GPS, you could see where the person was, they had to drive to the house of the person they were providing services for, you could see how long they were there. That record makes it much harder to do the fake billing where they say they went to five houses but really sat at home,” he said. Ohio state lawmaker Josh Williams, a Republican from Toledo, says there was no reason why the recipient of a government service would object, or be able to object, to the government verifying that the person being paid by the government to help him actually showed up. “It seems like the DeWine administration continues to protect the bad actors. And I’m frustrated as a legislator, I’m frustrated as a taxpayer. I’m frustrated because I don’t think we should be providing protection for these individuals,” he told The Daily Wire. “We’re not checking any of your personal information. We’re making sure that the person that is assigned to your case is actually going to your residence.” “You want to be a Medicaid provider in the state of Ohio for home health care aid, we should be able to track your location data during the times in which you’re asking for payment,” he added. He said that a common fraud scheme involves a patient and caregiver colluding to have the government pay for nonexistent work — in which case the patient could now simply refuse GPS verification of the caregiver’s presence. “You have family members going to provide services to an elderly individual, and on many occasions, they’re not even showing up, but they’re getting paid. That family member is not going to report their nephew or their cousin or their niece for not showing up. That’s part of a widespread, broad fraud that we’re seeing,” he said. Williams has introduced a bill to make GPS mandatory again. But even then, it appears that GPS data could easily be faked. Faber’s audit said that Ohio spent $146 million contracting with Sandata, a company that produces EVV devices and software, resulting in Ohio providers being able to use Sandata’s software for free. Nonetheless, the state allows home care providers to use their own software instead, potentially including software that simply transmits fake coordinates rather than ones coming straight from a mobile device’s sensors. The vulnerabilities don’t end there. Ohio also permits the electronic records to be manually adjusted. In 2022, “34 percent of all EVV entries were manually adjusted,” Faber’s audit found. Additionally, ten percent of aides are exempt from EVV because they live with the patient, often a family member, O’Grady said. Yost, who resigned as attorney general last week for a job in the private sector, said in his testimony that in addition to DeWine’s rules, Ohio laws also make it difficult to prove and punish Medicaid fraud. The attorney general’s Medicaid fraud unit isn’t authorized to use subpoenas to gather information, he said. If someone is actually investigated, charged, and convicted, their punishment will be light because Medicaid fraud is “capped as being less serious than other theft, as a third degree felony,” he said. Red state blues The Medicaid scandal in Ohio has exploded under an all-Republican leadership. In fact, the historical dollar amounts in this series, relying on data through 2024, likely understate the ongoing cost, because DeWine drastically increased the pay rate for home health providers in 2024. The increases took effect as “part of Governor Mike DeWine’s commitment to making sure every Ohioan receives quality care and that providers receive support to continue delivering the highest level of care for Ohio’s residents,” a press release said. “The rate increases are historic in nature, totaling approximately $3.4 billion per year,” including home health and other Medicaid spending. DeWine has been accused of being soft on fraud, particularly after a spokesman once called fraud in the state’s Somali hotspots “the cost of doing business.” Last week, Vivek Ramaswamy secured the Republican nomination to replace DeWine next year. Responding to The Daily Wire’s reporting, he said that states have “turned a blind eye to this level of rampant fraud” despite the fact that “in a modern era of AI, you have a toolkit that allows you to detect aberrant abnormalities.” That’s partly because of an incentive issue with how Medicaid is set up, he said. Medicaid is run by the states, but is largely paid for by the federal government. That means it’s up to states to stop waste and fraud, but they don’t always have a strong financial motivation to do so, because it would decrease federal dollars to the state. Ohio’s Medicaid program is set to be in the hole $33 billion over the next few years due to federal changes aimed at stopping states from gaming the numbers to offload even more of the burden to the feds. Vice President JD Vance, also from Ohio, said in response to The Daily Wire’s series: “I’m directing the task force to look into it and take immediate action to prosecute any fraudsters involved and stop all further payments as appropriate.” Ramaswamy noted that there is “uppercase F fraud, and also lowercase F fraud, which may be technically legal but doesn’t comport with anyone’s sense of who should get these dollars.” Those cases could necessitate changes in law or policy to stop the bleeding. Aggressive Medicaid “waiver” programs such as those the feds have allowed Minnesota and Ohio to run are particularly vulnerable to abuse, and have exploded in usage. Medicaid takes up nearly half of Ohio’s general revenue fund, and spending has doubled in recent years. Yet even as the red flags are hard to ignore — the percentage of people claiming to be autistic is exploding the dubious levels, for example — there has been aggressive, almost blatant pushback against using common and affordable technology to provide basic safeguards. Nationally, a group called “Stop EVV” launched a “media toolkit” showing pictures of disabled people holding signs with messages like, “I’M THE EMPLOYER. IT IS MY RIGHT TO SCHEDULE, SUPERVISE & SIGN MY EMPLOYEE’S TIMESHEET.” The site pictured a bald eagle and American flag and called stopping GPS tracking a “civil rights” issue. Ohio’s Department of Medicaid says that “all allegations of fraud are investigated,” and further that many of the companies identified by The Daily Wire “are subject to ongoing investigation” by the state. It said it is unable to comment on those investigations. But Faber, the auditor — who is running for attorney general — has been warning of abuse that mirrors The Daily Wire’s findings. He recently told the legislature that 38% of Ohio home health spending was in Franklin County, and that of that, 41% – or more than 15% of all home health care spending in the state — is spent in a four mile radius. Faber’s audit found that in 2022, there were 2,479 home health companies in Ohio, which were paid $1.8 billion. That means 10% of all home health companies in the state are located in the seven buildings owned by one landlord in Columbus’s Somali neighborhood, which was highlighted in our second installment. The data analyzed by the Daily Wire, finding a quarter billion dollars to companies in seven buildings, covered from 2018 to 2024. It understates the total because data for smaller companies is not available for privacy reasons. Parker Thayer, an investigator for the Capital Research Center, contributed reporting.

Over a dozen Americans arrived in Nebraska on Monday morning for monitoring after being trapped on board a cruise ship during a hantavirus scare.  The State Department airlifted 17 American citizens from the Dutch ship M.V. Hondius after their vacation was disrupted by fears of the Andes strain of the hantavirus. The Department of Health and Human Services said that one passenger had tested positive for the virus while another showed mild symptoms. HHS said Sunday that “two of the passengers traveling in the plane’s biocontainment units out of an abundance of caution. One passenger currently has mild symptoms and another passenger tested mildly PCR positive for the Andes virus.” The passengers were transported to the Administration for Strategic Preparedness and Response Regional Emerging Special Pathogen Treatment Center at the University of Nebraska in Omaha. The passengers are expected to be quarantined for 42 days while they undergo testing.  “Upon arrival at each facility, each individual will undergo clinical assessment and receive appropriate care and support based on their condition,” HHS said.  The person who tested positive for the virus had no symptoms, according to Nebraska Medicine.  “The passenger who is going to the Biocontainment Unit tested positive for the virus but does not have symptoms,” Nebraska Medicine said. “They were managed separately from other passengers during transport using appropriate biocontainment measures. They will be monitored in the Biocontainment Unit out of an abundance of caution and follow-up testing will be performed.” The arrival of the passengers in Nebraska comes after days of uncertainty aboard the ship, which had effectively been stranded at sea while governments and health agencies coordinated where passengers could safely disembark and quarantine. The ship docked in the Canary Islands on Sunday and Spanish health officials said that evacuation efforts were “proceeding normally” as passengers were escorted off the vessel in small groups under strict biosecurity measures. Travelers wore face masks and protective coverings while hazmat-suited crews transported them directly to quarantine flights waiting at Tenerife Airport. At least nine confirmed or suspected cases have now been linked to the outbreak, including three fatalities. Officials believe the outbreak likely began after an elderly Dutch couple contracted the virus during travel in Argentina before boarding the cruise ship. The husband later died aboard the vessel, while his wife became seriously ill after leaving the ship and died in South Africa. Another passenger, a German national, also died after developing symptoms. The Centers for Disease Controls said last week that “the risk to the American public remains extremely low.”

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is many things: a radical progressive, a viable presidential candidate, a former bartender, and apparently, America’s foremost revisionist historian. Last week she graced the country with a bombshell revelation, informing us all that it was black Americans who created democracy: I think about the Civil Rights and voting rights movement, and how black Americans really created democracy in this country… black Americans created democracy. They built something from nothing.  I had no idea. I was under the naive impression that it was the ancient Greeks and our Founding Fathers who conjured such a thing, but clearly I was the last to know. Even the podcast host, whom she was enlightening, nodded along in vigorous agreement: “Yes, YES.” Where have I been all these years? There you have it, folks. The 1619 Project rides again. History has been rewritten, you’ve been lied to your entire life, and James Madison was apparently mixed. Unless, of course, AOC hit her head falling out of a coconut tree and is simply, resoundingly, and spectacularly wrong. Let’s take a stroll down history lane. Democracy literally comes from the ancient Greek word dēmokratia: “rule by the people,” from dēmos meaning “the people” or “citizen-body,” and kratos for “power” or “rule.” By the people, for the people. Sound familiar? It describes a system in which citizens hold the power to make decisions, either directly or through their elected representatives.  In 508-507 BCE, the true “Father of Democracy,” Cleisthenes, shifted power away from hereditary elites and toward the demos. He reorganized citizens into tribes based on residence rather than bloodline, introduced equality under the law, and reformed governance through popular voting. Long after his death, the historian Thucydides praised the system: “Its administration favors the many instead of the few; this is why it is called a democracy.” Credit for the creation of democracy goes to white, ancient Greek aristocrats. My apologies, Congresswoman. If AOC means American democracy specifically, she’s no less mistaken. American democracy wasn’t “built from nothing” by any single group or era. It was deliberately engineered as a constitutional republic with robust democratic features during the late 18th century. Drawing on ancient Athens and Rome, English common law, and Enlightenment thinkers including John Locke, Montesquieu, and Blackstone, our Founders designed a republic specifically intended to avoid the pitfalls of pure direct democracy. As Madison argued in Federalist No. 10, this often resulted in mob rule and instability. In its place, they built representative government, separation of powers, checks and balances, and federalism, all to protect individual liberty. This architecture did not spring up overnight. In 1620, the Mayflower Compact established a framework in which settlers agreed to “combine ourselves together into a civil body politic” and make “just and equal laws” by majority consent, planting the seed of consensual self-governance on American soil. Over a century later, on July 4th, 1776, the Declaration of Independence proclaimed that “all men are created equal,” endowed with unalienable rights from God, not government, and that we have the right to rule ourselves. This culmination came at what historians have rightly called the “Miracle at Philadelphia,” where 55 delegates, including Madison and Washington, met in secret at the Pennsylvania State House and hammered out the most consequential governing document in human history. Popular sovereignty, elected representatives, separation of powers, checks and balances, and federalism all took final form under the tutelage of the evil, non-pigmented caucasian. Just as it would be inaccurate to say women alone created American democracy, it is equally inaccurate to say black Americans did because it is simply not true. Unless Washington and the Founders were applying considerably more face powder than the portraits suggest. I was reminded of all this just last night at an Independent Women’s event, where extraordinary women gathered to celebrate and defend exactly this history. That’s the spirit we need more of: women, Americans of all backgrounds, who know what this country is built on and aren’t afraid to say so. We should be teaching this, not erasing it. To be uncharacteristically charitable to AOC, one could argue that she means that black Americans, through the crucible of slavery, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, and the Civil Rights Movement, helped make the promise of democracy real rather than merely rhetorical. Indeed, black Americans’ contributions to expanding rights were immense and undeniable, but “expanding and perfecting democracy” is a very different claim from “creating it from nothing,” and conflating the two isn’t empowerment, it’s historical erasure. This revisionist framing flattens a complex, centuries-long story into a single-group morality tale, where one group’s activism gets sole credit for everything good. Meanwhile, that very democracy she claims was created by black Americans is being thwarted by her and her fellow Democrats in Washington, D.C. Barack Obama wants to strip away the voting rights of Republicans of all color, and they’ve promised that when they regain power, they will pack the Supreme Court, enable mass mail-in-ballots, throw away voter ID, and nuke the filibuster to add four more blue senate seats.  These are not the actions of people who revere democratic institutions. They’re the actions of people who revere power. The danger of letting the Left rewrite history and promote fallacious ideas is not abstract. When young people and useful idiots are taught a distorted version of the past by a backward education system and p(regressive) leadership, they have no framework to defend what is true. That’s been the design. Gutting civics and history education was not an accident; it was a strategy. Our Founders studied history with rigor, absorbed its lessons, and built something incredible and new: a durable, liberty-focused republic that has endured for nearly 250 years. Its genius lay not in perfection but in self-correction through elections, courts, and amendments, not reinvention. Don’t fall for the lies: communism has failed everywhere it has been tried, Capitalism harasses human self-interest to drive innovation, growth, and prosperity like no other, and our constitutional republic is a miraculous achievement, conceived by a very pale founding bunch and hardened over generations by Americans of different color and circumstance, bound under one creed. That’s not an uncomfortable fact; that’s a beautiful one, and as we approach our 250th birthday, it is one worth defending clearly and without apology. So thank you, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, for yet another opportunity to do exactly that.

This article is part of Upstream, The Daily Wire’s new home for culture and lifestyle. Real human insight and human stories — from our featured writers to you. *** Summer is coming. Do you know where your children are? Chances are you do because they haven’t left your sight. They are sitting at home, staring at a screen, scrolling through TikTok videos, texting friends, and gaming the hours away. As researchers have documented at length, most especially in Jonathan Haidt’s “The Anxious Generation,” screens have contributed to an anxiety epidemic, fractured attention spans, and increasing emotional fragility in American children. The answer to this crisis is not merely to cut down on screen time, but to replace screen hours with tangible, immersive, unstructured time in the natural world. Author Richard Louv coined the term “nature-deficit disorder” to describe how less time in nature harms modern-day children’s health, development, and wellbeing. But it’s not enough to simply get kids outside. Children don’t need to spend another week at an organized wilderness camp or to enroll in an additional sport. This only takes children out of their digital box to put them into a more physical one. What children most need this summer is, well, nothing. Every day this summer, have your kids spend at least one hour outside. No structure. No agenda. No goal. Let them climb trees, make up games, roll in grass, and be bored. If they do that, here’s what will happen. First, they will slowly recover their attention spans. In Haidt’s research, he found a clear link between social media use on the one hand and fragmented attention and reduced sustained focus on the other. While extended screen time stunts the ability to focus, being outside does the opposite. Sometimes, this starts with boredom. Unable to satisfy the urge for distraction with a swipe of the finger, kids outside are encouraged to think. They will notice details they had been too distracted to see before. They will build worlds and invent games from their own imaginations instead of accepting the pre-packaged slop of the internet. The brick wall they used to ignore outside becomes the rampart of a fortress. Never-before-noticed outdoor furniture covers become the perfect hideaway. The spiderweb in the side yard is no web at all, but an enchanted passageway only the most courageous dare cross. In days, you’ll notice the once glossy-eyes of your phone-addicted child become full of life. Second, unstructured time outdoors yields resiliency and independence. Too often in our suburbanized lives, we have professionalized play. Kids are directed to sports, games, and activities with rules they did not create, structures to which they must conform, and parents and coaches always watching. This overly structured life may shield children from present difficulties or even teach them valuable lessons, but it robs them of opportunities to think outside the box and traverse challenges on their own in the long term. When kids are outside, they’re exposed to the elements. They run and they fall. They get dirty and they scrape their knees. Then, they learn to get back up and keep running. They get a little turned around and have to remember which way home is. They take risks, learn with every misstep, and begin to put experiential knowledge into practice. Without parents watching, they feel free to make mistakes. And they also know if they do, they will have to try to fix them themselves. In short, they learn to become young men and women. Finally, children who spend time outdoors learn to love the natural world around them. Kids who grow up hiking, fishing, and gazing at the mountains learn that the greatest trees were never planted, the best roads aren’t paved, and the comfort of air conditioning can never beat the beauty of the open sky. But you don’t need wilderness to spark wonder. Even in suburbia, a backyard, community garden, or neighborhood park can teach kids to love creation. And if you decide to drive outside the city for some extra breathing room, all the better. No matter the method, know that kids who experience God’s creation are more likely to be good stewards of it. One hour outside: That’s all it takes. So this summer, offer your kids the freedom to play without a plan. Give them room to experience life outdoors. Let’s raise a generation that can reconnect with the natural world and just be kids again. *** Clare Ath is the cofounder and executive director of Vita et Terra, a conservative Catholic environmental nonprofit that champions care for creation.