House Republicans passed President Donald Trump’s "big, beautiful" bill on Thursday morning, advancing it to the Senate -- following an intense 48-hour effort to reconcile the priorities of fiscal conservatives and moderates from blue states.

President Trump blocked Harvard from enrolling international students. About 23% of Harvard’s students are international. The international students are a good part of the problem of pervasive anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism at the university. President Trump is trying to save Harvard from itself. You can thank the Pritzker family for the majority of the damage done […] The post Administration Blocks Harvard from Enrolling International Students appeared first on www.independentsentinel.com.

The Trump-backed “big, beautiful bill” House Republicans passed early Thursday will prohibit all federal funding for transgender procedures on both children and adults if signed into law. During a marathon nighttime session, Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-TX) successfully expanded a provision banning funding for transgender procedures for kids to include adults as well. Due to Crenshaw’s amendment, Medicaid, the Affordable Care Act, and the Children’s Health Insurance Program will no longer cover life-altering and dangerous transgender medical procedures. “The Crenshaw Amendment will become law — and it’s long overdue,” the Texas Republican told The Daily Wire. “Gender transition procedures are the lobotomy of our generation. So-called ‘gender-affirming care’ isn’t healthcare—it’s fringe science with no proven benefit and massive risks.” The provision was secured by an amendment to Section 1903(i) of the Social Security Act, prohibiting funding for medically unnecessary procedures. This would mean funding would no longer go toward things like removing the breasts of women who identify as men or crafting pseudo male or female genitalia for transgender-identifying individuals. Last week, Crenshaw introduced a provision banning the funding of the procedures on kids into the House Energy and Commerce Committee budget bill that it sent to the House Budget Committee. That provision alone would have saved $1.4 billion in taxpayer dollars, The Daily Signal reported last week. The full House passed the budget bill 215-214 Thursday morning, including Crenshaw’s transgender funding ban for both kids and adults. President Donald Trump has cited the ban on funding of child transgender procedures as one of the reasons for Republicans to back the bill. Senator Roger Marshall (R-KS) has pushed for a similar provision to end all taxpayer funding of transgender procedures. Memorial Day Sale – Get 40% Off New DailyWire+ Annual Memberships Crenshaw also secured reimbursements for Texas and other border states that have borne the brunt of the illegal immigration under former President Joe Biden, and added work requirements for able-bodied adults to be eligible for Medicaid, with exceptions for disabled people or pregnant women. Social conservatives also picked up another major win with the advancement of the budget bill, as it would end Medicaid funding for abortion giant Planned Parenthood. Terry Schilling, the president of the American Principles Project, celebrated the passage of the bill. “The One, Big, Beautiful Bill that passed the House will end taxpayer funding for gender transition surgeries, defund Planned Parenthood and increase the Child Tax Credit – all are monumental wins for our great nation,” Schilling said. “Now it is time for the Senate to get this bill across the finish line so we can Make Families Great Again.”

On Thursday, the GOP-led Senate voted to overturn a Biden administration move that powered California’s green energy agenda for cars and trucks that 11 other states have sought to adopt. Fifty Republicans and one Democrat banded together to revoke the Clean Air Act waiver the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) granted in December to the Golden State that allowed it to proceed with a plan to ban the sale of new gas-powered light-duty vehicles by 2035. Because the Republican-controlled House already passed the resolution of disapproval, the measure now heads to President Donald Trump. California has signaled that it is prepared to file a legal challenge. Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-WV), who is the chairwoman of the Environment and Public Works Committee, spearheaded the effort in the upper chamber to repeal the waiver. “The impact of California’s waiver would have been felt across the country, harming multiple sectors of our economy and costing hundreds of thousands of jobs in the process,” Capito said in a statement. “I’m proud to have led this effort to protect American workers and consumers from this radical and drastic policy.” President Donald Trump weighed in on the issue during his presidential campaign at a rally in Saginaw, Michigan. “When I’m president, no state in America will be permitted to ban gas-powered cars or trucks, and I guarantee it,” Trump said. Senate Republicans used the Congressional Review Act (CRA), which allows bypassing a filibuster to undo regulations, to pass the resolution. Under this process, Lawmakers also voted to strike down waivers related to emissions for heavier-duty vehicles. The Government Accountability Office (GAO) and Senate parliamentarian advised that the waivers are not rules that qualify for CRA, but The Hill reported on how Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) used a series of procedural votes to alleviate concerns by some of his GOP colleagues. On X, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) accused Republicans of trying to “appease the fossil fuel industry.” He also said they were “hijacking the CRA process in a way that’s never been done before” and warned: “What goes around when you’re in the majority comes around when you’re back in the minority.” The one Democrat who joined with Republicans and spurned California was Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D-MI). “Today, I voted to prevent California and the states that follow its standard from effectively banning gas-powered cars by 2035,” she declared in a statement. “Michigan is the auto capital of the world, and as Michigan’s U.S. Senator, I have a special responsibility to stand up for the more than one million Michiganders whose livelihoods depend on the U.S. auto industry.” California Attorney General Rob Bonta, a Democrat, announced his state was ready to fight in court. “Since the Senate is caving to the Trump Admin’s demands, we will sue to protect California’s longstanding authority to maintain clean vehicle standards,” Bonta said. “President Trump may be playing partisan games with lives and good paying jobs on the line — but California won’t back down.” Jayden Jelso contributed to this report. 

Ever since the death of Nelson Mandela, it’s fair to call Cyril Ramaphosa one of the few surviving “founding fathers” of post-apartheid South Africa. He helped write the country’s new constitution, which would supposedly usher in a new era of prosperity and equality. He also oversaw the transition to the new government. And as South Africa descended into lawlessness and squalor over the ensuing 30 years, Ramaphosa gradually accumulated more wealth and power, until he finally became the country’s president in 2018. He’s currently worth something like half a billion dollars, even as the vast majority of South Africa’s residents now live in extreme poverty. What this means is that Ramaphosa is the personification of South Africa’s post-colonial experiment. When he drafted that new constitution, he presumably did not foresee that, by 2025, the country would have the single highest unemployment rate of any country in the world, at 40%. He certainly didn’t tell anyone that he eventually planned to sign new laws that would disenfranchise and rob white farmers, or that white people would be systematically slaughtered in their homes. But all of that has happened. And yet, for all this time, no one — and certainly no world leader — has held this deranged despot accountable for any of that. Instead, it’s been something of a tradition in Washington to pretend South Africa is somehow a “great ally” to the United States, and to treat Ramaphosa as royalty, as Joe Biden did a few years ago. That tradition came to a very abrupt end yesterday in the Oval Office, when Donald Trump did something no other political figure has ever done. He told Ramaphosa, to his face in the most public forum imaginable, that he’s a fraud who’s overseeing a white genocide. And in the process, Trump took a blowtorch to a mythology that pretty much every politician, from both parties, has been desperate to uphold for several decades. In order to understand the importance of *what* Donald Trump communicated here, you have to first see exactly how he communicated it. First, of course, Ramaphosa asked the United States for money, because he’s run his country into the ground and they can’t even feed themselves anymore. Then a reporter asked a patronizing question about “what it would take” for Trump to stop repeating supposedly false claims about white genocide in South Africa. In other words, the reporter is basically calling Trump a liar to his face, and asking him what it would take for him to stop lying. Here’s how it went: So after begging for cash, Ramaphosa essentially validates what the reporter is saying. He says Donald Trump needs to “listen” to the people of South Africa, in order to stop lying about the alleged genocide of white people. It’s probably the most obnoxious answer that he could’ve come up with, especially after dozens of white South Africans just fled the country in fear of their lives. WATCH: The Matt Walsh Show But Trump was prepared for it. First of all, Trump asked one of the white golfers that Ramaphosa brought with him — a two-time U.S. Open winner named Retief Goosen — what the situation was like in South Africa. And the golfer responded that his father’s friends, who own farms, have been murdered, and the farms are constantly being torched. Watch: Retief Goosen: "My dad was a property developer as well as a part-time farmer. And yeah, some of his buddy farmers got killed… it's a constant battle with — they're trying to burn the farms down to chase you away." pic.twitter.com/93b4YZhpLQ — Rapid Response 47 (@RapidResponse47) May 21, 2025 Again, this is one of the golfers that the president of South Africa brought to the Oval Office, as part of South Africa’s delegation, hoping he’d neutralize the supposedly “fake narrative” about white genocide. This is one of the people that the president of South Africa demanded, obnoxiously, that Trump “listen to.” It didn’t exactly go as planned — which probably tells you something about the level of “planning” that South Africa’s government is capable of. And things only got worse from there, as Trump dimmed the lights in the Oval Office and played a tape of South African politicians openly calling for the murders of white farmers. In other words, Trump once again called Ramaphosa’s bluff. He “listened” to the calls for genocide coming from South Africans — and he made Ramaphosa, and the rest of the world, listen to it as well. And as you watch this, notice the expression on Ramaphosa’s face, as he genuinely cannot believe what is happening. Watch: If you’ve listened to this show, or been active on social media over the past year or so, then you’ve seen or heard most of these clips before. And you’ve heard stories like the ones that Trump just cited. That’s because in South Africa, black politicians have openly called for genocide for many years now. White farmers have been tortured in their homes for decades, in attacks that are clearly racially motivated. And instead of stopping the carnage, the government has just passed a law allowing the government to seize land from white people without compensating them. All of this has been known for a while now. But in their coverage of this Oval Office meeting, the corporate press pretended to be surprised by this footage from South Africa. So before we go back to the Oval Office incident yesterday, let’s take a brief look at that coverage. Here’s ABC, for example. Watch as they deliberately give the impression that they had never seen anything like this footage before: “We do not know the source of the videos.” That’s pretty extraordinary. There are only two explanations for how that reporter could make a statement like that. Either she’s monumentally lazy, and she’s confessing that no one at ABC News is capable of verifying the authenticity of footage that’s been available on the Internet for years. Or, she’s deliberately lying to ABC’s viewers, and trying to get them to believe that the footage might be fake. Those are the options. If anyone at ABC News was actually interested in the truth about what’s happening in South Africa, they’d tell their audience that, yes, the footage is real, and that the genocide of white people is something they’re openly encouraging over there. For his part, after Trump played the footage in the Oval Office, Cyril Ramaphosa offered this response. As you listen to this, see if you can spot the very familiar sleight of hand he uses. Watch: First of all, he’s right that some of the clips show politicians from minority parties in South Africa. That’s true. But it’s also not very reassuring, for two reasons. First of all, these minority parties are filling stadiums with tens of thousands of people, chanting about murdering white farmers. So we’re not talking about one fringe politician here. This is a very common sentiment in South Africa. And secondly, as Trump pointed out, the government of South Africa has just signed legislation that calls for white people to lose their homes and their farms, without any form of compensation whatsoever. That’s a pretty good indication that, indeed, the government is aiding and abetting the ongoing genocide. Ramaphosa had no answer to that. Instead, he simply pointed out that, in South Africa, the majority of people who die are black. This is one of those lines that only works if you’re a race-obsessed, illiterate moron who doesn’t understand the concept of “per capita,” which of course describes most South African leaders. So maybe the talking point works there. But it doesn’t work when you’re dealing with intelligent people, because intelligent people recognize the significance of the fact that over 80% of the population of South Africa is black. So obviously, most of the people who are killed in South Africa are going to be black. No one is disputing that. The relevant question is whether white people (particularly white farmers) are being targeted because of their skin color, and whether they’re dying at a rate that’s higher than black people, given that they only make up something like six percent of the population. And of course, no one in South Africa’s government wants to address those questions, because they know the truth: white farmers are being killed at dramatically higher rates than you’ll see in literal warzones, or places like Afghanistan. By some estimates, the murder rate for white farmers is something like 150 per 100,000 people. That’s why white people in South Africa are currently leaving everything behind — their farms, their homes, everything — in order to fly to the United States and stay in Holiday Inns off the interstate in Idaho. They’re not doing it for fun. They’re doing it because their lives are endangered in South Africa. But even after Trump explained all of this in the Oval Office — even after Trump played the evidence of white genocide for the press, and for the president of South Africa — the corporate press is continuing to lie, universally, about what’s happening in South Africa. They’re simply denying that white people are being targeted. We’ll put a selection of the headlines on the screen now: I won’t read all of these, but every single one of them accuses Trump of “falsely” spreading claims of white genocide in South Africa. They say Trump “abused” the South African president with lies, even though he literally played ten minutes of video for him, and listened to first-hand testimony from the country. Pretty much every media outlet did the same thing. This is one compilation that Chaia Raichick assembled. Watch: This was shameless and coordinated to a pretty amazing degree, even by these people’s standards. But there was one outlet that told the truth, seemingly by accident. Here was a photo that the AP posted, buried in an image gallery inside their article about how South Africa is supposedly safe for white people. Here’s the caption: “A view of crosses planted at the White Cross Monument, each one marking a white farmer who has been killed in a farm murder, is seen on a hillside [in South Africa.]” That’s the reality of what’s happening. And occasionally it gets out. But you won’t find similar reporting at the New York Times. Here’s how they discussed what the white golfers said in the Oval Office: “Two of South Africa’s most famous golfers were drawn into a tense Oval Office discussion about race in their country on Wednesday, after President Trump ambushed his South African counterpart, Cyril Ramaphosa, with videos intended to support his false claim of mass killings of Afrikaners. .. Mr. Goosen … shared that his relatives on farms lived behind electric fences in fear of crime, like many other South Africans. ‘But the guys live a great life, despite what’s going on,’ he said.” Yes, that’s what the New York Times took from the golfer’s statement. They left out the fact that the farmer’s friends are dead, that the farms are being torched, and that his elderly 80-year-old mother was attacked in their home. And the reason they left those details out is that, ordinarily, most criminals don’t set fire to farms or beat old women for no reason whatsoever. But they will do those things if they’re motivated by racial resentment, which is clearly the case in South Africa. Over at CNN, meanwhile, they tried to convince their 15 viewers that the song about killing white farmers, which is often repeated at political rallies in South Africa, really isn’t meant to be taken literally. Watch: They’re simply incapable of bringing themselves to say that, yes, it’s bad to call for the mass executions of white farmers. They can’t acknowledge that post-colonial South Africa is a failure, for the same reason they can’t acknowledge that Rhodesia was a functioning, thriving state — the “breadbasket of Africa,” they called it — while Zimbabwe (the new name for Rhodesia) is a hellhole that needs to import food in order to avert famine. One after another, these post-colonial African states are demonstrating that colonialism wasn’t so bad after all. In fact, it was a lot better than the alternative. It’s obvious why they can’t admit any of this. Every single Left-wing agenda item — from the modern civil rights movement to DEI — is predicated on the idea that past “oppression,” as they define it, justifies hand-outs and preferential treatment today. But that logic falls apart when you realize that, any effort to supposedly balance things out and make up for the alleged sins of the past, only means the murder rate would be ten times higher than it was in Afghanistan at the height of the U.S. occupation, everyone would be poor, and elderly women would regularly be tortured and beaten to death in their own homes. That’s the reality. It’s gone unsaid for generations, and people in South Africa — of all races — have suffered because of it. So have people in this country. It is a lie that, yesterday in the Oval Office, Donald Trump confronted and debunked in the most direct way that he possibly could. And in doing so, Trump didn’t just demolish one of the central mythologies of the Left — one that, until now, has sustained the vast majority of their depraved social experiments. Trump also signaled that, in this administration, doublespeak and innuendo are not going to be the default mode of communication, with foreign leaders or anyone else. Instead, we’ll be direct. We won’t cower from the truth, or sugarcoat it with euphemism. Every single aspect of society would be improved if we all adopted that level of discourse. We need a lot more of this if we’re going to reverse the damage that South Africa’s leaders have done — and more importantly, if we’re going to prevent that ideology from spreading here. That’s been the main goal of true conservatives in this country for many years now. And yesterday in the Oval Office, for the first time since the 1960s, Donald Trump gave us reason to think we’re going to succeed in that effort.