Former Vice President Kamala Harris declared on Sunday that she is supporting the anti-ICE protests in and around Los Angeles, claiming the demonstrations have been “overwhelmingly peaceful” despite violent clashes with federal authorities. Harris, who has a home in Los Angeles and has been mulling a run for California governor, said in a statement that she is “appalled at what we are witnessing on the streets of our city.” But instead of focusing on how troublemakers hurled rocks, concrete, and fireworks at federal officers and their vehicles, Harris took the opportunity to criticize her 2024 election opponent, President Donald Trump. “Deploying the National Guard is a dangerous escalation meant to provoke chaos. In addition to the recent ICE raids in Southern California and across our nation, it is part of the Trump Administration’s cruel, calculated agenda to spread panic and division,” Harris said. “This Administration’s actions are not about public safety — they’re about stoking fear. Fear of a community demanding dignity and due process.” Harris extolled protesting as “a powerful tool — essential in the fight for justice” without acknowledging the rioting that prompted Trump to deploy the National Guard. “And as the LAPD, Mayor, and Governor have noted, demonstrations in defense of our immigrant neighbors have been overwhelmingly peaceful,” Harris said. “I continue to support the millions of Americans who are standing up to protect our most fundamental rights and freedoms.” Governor Gavin Newsom and Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass have vociferously opposed Trump’s deployment of the National Guard and touted peaceful demonstrations. These Democrats also took time to relay messages discouraging acts of violence, destruction, and vandalism. Harris did no such thing and faced criticism for it. “No surprise that the most incompetent Vice President in history stands with the illegal alien rioters,” Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) quipped in a post on X. “We all know you support lawless, violent, illegal alien rioters. That’s why you lost so badly in November. Back to irrelevancy you go!” said White House Deputy Press Secretary Abigail Jackson. Fox News contributor Joe Concha observed, “This statement tells us 2024 Kamala wasn’t real and she was always 2019 Kamala all along on illegal immigration.” Police have said several people have already been arrested in the protests that erupted as federal agents began to detain and deport a number of the dangerous criminal aliens who were the targets of raids throughout the Los Angeles area. The FBI is offering a reward of up to $50,000 for information leading to the arrest of a man accused of throwing rocks at law enforcement vehicles, injuring a federal officer, and damaging government vehicles. “Hit a cop, you’re going to jail … doesn’t matter where you came from, how you got here, or what movement speaks to you. If the local police force won’t back our men and women on the thin blue line, we @FBI will,” said FBI Director Kash Patel. The bedlam continued on Sunday as protesters swarmed a freeway in Los Angeles and set cars on fire in the downtown area.

BY THE OPTIMIST DAILY EDITORIAL TEAM In a move set to benefit half a million more young students, the UK government announced that beginning in September 2026, all children in England whose families receive Universal Credit will be eligible for free school meals regardless of income level. This significant shift in policy means that the current income threshold of £7,400 (around $9,430 USD) a year will no longer apply. Prime Minister Keir Starmer called the measure “a down payment on child poverty” and emphasized its importance in supporting children’s attainment. “This is a statement of intent,” he said, “to give every child the best possible start in life.” Providing nutritious school meals is a critical step in closing the opportunity gap for these children. Tackling child poverty head-on Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson said the policy could lift 100,000 children out of poverty and would save families around £500 (approximately $640 USD) a year. Speaking to BBC Radio 4, Phillipson said her own experience of growing up in poverty makes this a personal mission: “It’s my moral mission to ensure fewer children grow up in the kind of poverty I did.” The policy is supported by a £1 billion (about $1.28 billion USD) allocation from the Department for Education, covering costs through 2029. Phillipson stressed that schools would not have to divert funds to support this expansion, with more financial details to be outlined in the upcoming spending review. Savings for families, support for schools Currently, about 2.2 million children in England, or 25.7 percent of all pupils, are registered for free school meals. Eligibility requires both receiving Universal Credit and having a household income below the £7,400 threshold. These requirements have meant that many struggling families fall through the cracks. Kate Anstey of the Child Poverty Action Group praised the new policy, noting that it would now reach “all children in poverty and those at risk of poverty,” not just the two-thirds currently covered. She called it “a sign of what’s to come.” The initiative has drawn wide support from education and advocacy groups. The Association of School and College Leaders called it “a welcome step forward,” while the Sutton Trust highlighted its potential to remove hunger from the classroom. Challenges and next steps Despite the positive reception, Labour has yet to take a firm stance on scrapping the two-child benefit cap, which limits benefits for most families to their first two children. Asked whether the cap would be lifted, Starmer pointed to the broader strategy in development: “We’ve got a task force. It’ll come out with a strategy… I want to get to the root causes of child poverty.” Phillipson confirmed that removing the cap is under consideration and could be addressed in future spending decisions. In addition to expanding meal access, the government has pledged £13 million (about $16.7 million USD) to food charities and plans to review nutritional standards for school meals. However, concerns remain about access and enrollment. Children eligible for free meals must still be registered by their parents, which MPs have noted can be a barrier for non-English speakers or those unfamiliar with the process. Despite calls for automatic enrollment, Phillipson stated that no such changes are currently planned. Eligibility standards vary across the UK. In London and Wales, all primary school children receive free meals, and Scotland offers them through the first five years of school. In Northern Ireland, the income threshold for eligibility is about double that of England, at £15,000 (around $19,100 USD). Christine Farquharson from the Institute for Fiscal Studies estimated that eventually, an additional 1.7 million children could benefit, and around 100,000 children might be lifted out of poverty, though she emphasized these results will take time. “Today’s announcement will not see anything like 100,000 children lifted out of poverty next year,” she said, noting that eliminating the two-child cap might be more cost-effective in the short term. Still, the announcement represents a clear policy shift toward addressing inequality. As Starmer said, it’s a step toward ensuring that all children, no matter their background, arrive at school ready to learn.The post Free school meals expanded to 500,000 more children under new UK government policy first appeared on The Optimist Daily: Making Solutions the News.

BY THE OPTIMIST DAILY EDITORIAL TEAM Unlike Mother’s Day, which was swiftly embraced and made official in 1914, Father’s Day spent decades in limbo. Though it finally became a national holiday in 1972, the idea faced resistance for years—ironically, in a society dominated by men. Why was Father’s Day controversial? Many men in the early 20th century balked at the idea. At the time, Mother’s Day was framed around femininity and sentimentality, often celebrated with flowers and sweet gestures. But applying the same emotional tone to fathers didn’t sit right. As some historians have put it, men “scoffed” at efforts to “domesticate manliness” and considered the holiday a commercial gimmick. There was also a broader cultural mindset: in a patriarchal society where fathers were seen as authority figures, why dedicate a special day to them? Weren’t they already running the household? The women who fought to honor fathers While many dismissed the idea, two women worked to make Father’s Day real: Grace Golden Clayton proposed the first known Father’s Day service in 1908 after a mining disaster in West Virginia left hundreds of children fatherless. Her tribute, though heartfelt, didn’t catch on beyond the local community. Sonora Smart Dodd, however, made waves in Spokane, Washington, in 1910. Raised by a single father and inspired by Mother’s Day, she advocated for a similar holiday to honor dads. The city organized an official celebration on June 19, 1910, with churches delivering sermons about fatherhood and boys donning roses in tribute. It wasn’t an easy road to national recognition Despite early efforts, Father’s Day remained unofficial for decades. Congress rejected early proposals, and even as presidents from Woodrow Wilson to Calvin Coolidge supported the idea, legislation stalled. Progress resumed mid-century: In 1966, President Lyndon Johnson declared the third Sunday in June as Father’s Day by executive order. In 1972, President Richard Nixon signed it into law. The role of Father’s Day in hard times Economic forces helped the holiday along, too. During the Great Depression, retailers used Father’s Day to encourage spending on “practical gifts.” Later, during World War II, it gained traction as a way to honor men serving in the military and support American families. Rethinking what it means to be a dad Today, Father’s Day is about more than gifts. It reflects how much our view of fatherhood has changed. Fathers are no longer just breadwinners; they’re emotional anchors, caregivers, and partners. Whether a dad likes to barbecue, build LEGO castles, or read bedtime stories, Father’s Day now celebrates the diverse ways men show up for their families. And that’s perhaps the most meaningful part of the holiday: recognizing not just who fathers are, but the many roles they play in shaping their children’s lives.The post A surprising look at how Father’s Day came to be first appeared on The Optimist Daily: Making Solutions the News.

Mohammed Sabry Soliman, armed with an improvised flamethrower and Molotov cocktails, attacked a group of peaceful Jews in Boulder, Colo., who were remembering the hostages taken from Israel by Hamas on Oct. 7, 2023. At least one of Soliman’s victims was a Holocaust survivor. Soliman and his family had come to the United States on a tourist visa from Egypt in August of 2022 during the Biden administration. One month later, Soliman applied for asylum, listing his wife and children as dependents. His tourist visa expired in February of 2023 and in March of that year, the Biden administration gave Soliman a work permit that expired in March of this year.  Soliman claims he had planned the attack for about a year. He yelled about freeing Palestine as he tried to murder the Jews. Authorities arrested Soliman, and the Trump administration proceeded to process his family for deportation. On June 3, two days after Mr. Soliman’s terror attack, USA Today ran a profile of his daughter. “Habiba Soliman wanted to be a doctor. Then, her father firebombed Jewish marchers in Boulder,” ran the headline of the piece authored by Michael Loria. It provided sympathetic coverage to Mr. Soliman’s daughter. It turns out her father had waited until after her high school graduation to carry out his attack. “She moved to the United States with a dream of studying medicine. She had stepped off her high school graduation stage in May,” Loria wrote. Mr. Loria never mentioned the family’s immigration status or overstayed work permit. Mr. Loria had previously worked for “Report for America.” The website Influence Watch documents that, “The GroundTruth Project (formerly the GroundTruth Initiative) is a 501(c)(3) left-of-center media and journalism nonprofit organization that covers local news. GroundTruth is the fiscal sponsor of Report for America, a group created in 2018 to insert left-leaning journalists into news organizations across the United States in order to fill ‘a coverage gap’ in local news reporting.” USA Today had to update Mr. Loria’s piece after mass outrage over never even addressing the immigration status of the family, and added reporter Michael Collins to the piece. “Mohamed Soliman, an Egyptian immigrant who overstayed his visa, had moved to the U.S. from Kuwait. The immigration status of Habiba Soliman and her siblings is unclear,” the paper helpfully added before diving back into the sob story of the daughter. USA Today has thus far not profiled any of Mr. Soliman’s victims, including the elderly Holocaust survivor. ABC News, the same day USA Today ran its story, headlined a piece, “Colorado attack comes amid record incidents of antisemitic and Islamophobic hate crimes.” The news outlet had to go back to 2023 to reference two attacks on Muslims. In one of the two attacks, Vermont prosecutors claimed they did not have enough evidence to prosecute Jason Eaton, who shot and wounded three Palestinian American men in Vermont, for a hate crime for specifically targeting the men as Palestinians.  ABC News only had to go back a week from Soliman’s attack in Colorado to find another attack on Jews -- the murder of two Israeli Embassy employees in Washington, D.C., last week. A few months ago, a man burned down the Pennsylvania Governor’s Mansion in an effort to kill the Commonwealth’s Jewish Governor and his family. But going back to 2023, ABC News could go with a “both sides do it” story to downplay violence against Jews. NBC News captured the big takeaway of the Colorado attack with a piece headlined, “Lone wolf attacks on Jewish Americans in Boulder and D.C. highlight the difficulties in securing public spaces.” Now, a former President Joe Biden appointed federal judge has decided President Donald Trump cannot deport Mr. Soliman’s family, though they do appear to be here illegally. This issue is an eight-twenty issue. Americans do not want terrorists, their families or illegal alien criminals here generally. But the Democrats, the press and progressive judges have sided with the terrorists and criminals. They should not be surprised if Americans keep rejecting them for Trump. Likewise, the progressive judges are undermining their branch of government and providing Mr. Trump ammunition to cross the Rubicon and simply ignore the judges.

Have you been canceled? Have you lost your family, your social circle, your job, your reputation? I have. People who had known me for years, including people I’d met in real life, mused online about how I was likely to become a 'spree killer' who murdered women. Just like the countless Americans who had their lives and livelihoods uprooted or destroyed over the past five years or so, my story is unique. But also depressingly familiar. Today, I want to talk about how I came out on the other side. Painful lessonsThere’s no sense in sugarcoating the issue: It absolutely sucked. It was one of the hardest periods in my life, and I am not the same person I was before it happened. RELATED: Death is inevitable — getting stiffed by the funeral home isn't Corbis/Getty ImagesAfter seeing clearly for the first time how duplicitous, selfish, and downright evil humans can be, there's no going back. For me, it won’t be possible to trust other people, including loved ones, the way I did before.But painful life lessons have their compensations. What we call the woke left has been around for a long time. While the most egregious abuses by radical leftists occurred during the past 10 years, the problem started decades ago. You might say that the seeds planted in universities in the 1960s by leftist European Marxist intellectuals finally reached full flower by 2020. With the alleged pandemic, those with actually fascist inclinations in their hearts made themselves known, and for many of us, that group turned out to include family and friends. Spoiler: The liberals are the real authoritarians.Closet MarxistBack in the 1990s, I was studying at the most liberal of liberal arts schools, Sarah Lawrence College in New York State. If you haven’t heard of it, the school is hard leftist like Vassar, Bryn Mawr, and similar small colleges. What I didn’t know when I attended was that it was Marxist, and so was I. The intellectual architects of postmodernism — the idea that there’s no such thing as the truth, that everything is only about oppressor and oppressed — were the mainstays of the curriculum. We studied Herbert Marcuse, Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, and many others. These “intellectuals” are the patron saints of the radical “queers,” “trans” activists, and other seething malcontents who believe all of their problems are because of capitalism instead of their own resentful laziness.Among the libsAfter graduation, I spent a few years as a newspaper reporter during the last period in which any semblance of actual reporting and objectivity was still valued. Then, I took a job at a nonprofit consumer organization. Yes, I entered the dreaded NGO sector.The group I worked for was a consumer education organization focused on helping grieving people plan funerals and burials without going into debt. With the average American funeral costing $10,000 easily, financial heartache gets piled onto grief for many families. The mission was a worthy one, and I don’t regret my time working to better protect people in mourning from aggressive mortuary sales pitches.But while the organization was officially nonpartisan, it was staffed and governed almost exclusively by Democrats and hard liberals.That was “fine” when I was one of them, but if you’ve ever disagreed with a liberal, you know how fast a disagreement can turn into a bloodbath. Growing upBy 2020 to 2021, I had changed my mind politically. Today, I’m a conservative traditionalist. The shock of watching transgenderism capture children, and the lying and hatred directed at conservatives in general and Donald Trump in particular, pushed me to belated political maturity in my 40s.RELATED: Why is the media out to get Jonathan Keeperman? Jonathan KeepermanIn 2021, I launched a weekly show called "Disaffected" with a friend and business partner. The show looks at politics and culture through the frame of warped personal psychology. In brief, I believe that the same narcissistic and unstable personal characteristics that drive domestic and child abuse (the same characteristics that ruled the home in which I grew up) drive the left."Disaffected" directly critiques transgenderism, anti-capitalist agitation, fake victimhood for attention, and warped states of mind such as Trump derangement syndrome. Cast outWhen volunteers and staffers at my job discovered what I put out in my private time, they engineered a coup from within. Satellite offices put out press releases calling me a misogynist and a bigot who was a danger to “trans” people and women and a public health menace for my stance against forced vaccination.At the same time, my online friendship group circled the wagons and made sure my reputation was thoroughly trashed. People who had known me for years, including people I’d met in real life, mused online about how I was likely to become a “spree killer” who murdered women. These were the people I thought of as friends.At the end of 2023, I finally lost my job. It’s true that I resigned, but had I not, I would have been fired. My board of directors would not defend me, and only a handful of colleagues from two decades of working together sent any messages of support.Fighting backDid it hurt? Yeah. It also scared the daylights out of me. For the first time in 20 years, I didn’t have a steady paycheck. My name was ruined in the consumer advocacy field; there was no point in even showing my face in the nonprofit sector. Not only did these people cancel my job, but they made sure I was unemployable even though I was the top legal expert in consumer burial and funeral law in the country.What to do? I spent a few months in despair and depression, but that can’t last forever. You have to put your life back together but in a new way. Here’s what I did:Lying and duplicity exercise me to the point of hot anger pretty quickly. I channeled that into exposing the abusive practices of the left even more acutely on my weekly show.I launched a Substack blog to supplement the show and offer essays on topics that didn’t make it "on air."After 20 years of counseling grieving people by phone on the worst day of their lives, I started a private coaching and consulting practice. Now, I offer private conversations and advice for those facing social and family ostracism in abusive or leftist (I repeat myself) households. Clients can come to me for affordable funeral planning, too.When one door closes, another opens. I used to be a screeching leftist liberal, and now I write a weekly column for Align (hello).Going from a biweekly paycheck with health benefits to working four or five freelance jobs is a hell of an adjustment. Work isn’t guaranteed when you make your living this way. But that’s the price of actual freedom. And I am free today mentally, emotionally, and politically in a way I never had been before as an unreflective “Democrat from birth.”Hard as it was, I wouldn’t go back.

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