Democrats Are Betraying Black Voters. Imagine What They’d Do To America.

American Thinker 

Picture this: A political party that spent 10 straight years screaming it alone could save American democracy from destruction, now caught on record ready to carve up the voting power of its most steadfast supporters just to claw back control.

That party is today’s Democrats, and the evidence should send a chill through every Republican and clear-thinking independent ahead of these midterms.

For a full decade, Democrat leaders positioned themselves as democracy’s last line of defense against Donald J. Trump and anyone who dared support him. This narrative powered their 2018 U.S. House takeover, fueled Joe Biden’s 2020 campaign, sustained his presidency, and defined Kamala Harris’s 2024 effort.

Even after crushing defeats in 2024, they kept sounding the alarm about threats to institutions and norms. Their Virginia maneuvers and fresh polling data now expose that entire pose as pure fraud.

Late last year, Democrats in the Virginia Legislature rammed through a constitutional amendment on strict party-line votes during a chaotic special session. The goal was simple: scrap the existing bipartisan redistricting rules so they could redraw congressional maps whenever they wanted, outside the usual census schedule.

They pushed it through a second time in 2026. The new lines turned Virginia’s fairly even 6-5 congressional split into a grotesque 10-1 Democrat lock. Nearly half the commonwealth’s voters back Republicans, and they would get just nine percent of the seats. Meanwhile, Democrats, with a slim electoral edge, would seize 91 percent.

Democrats put the referendum before voters on March 6, the very first day of early voting, under the slick slogan of restoring fairness. Early ballots made up roughly 45 percent of the total. The measure squeaked by with a 3.38 percent margin. Flip just half those votes and it would have lost.

The Virginia Supreme Court saw the con for what it was.

On May 8, Justice D. Arthur Kelsey delivered a ruling that killed the entire scheme. Democrats had voted on the amendment on October 31, 2025, after early voting for the general election was already underway and more than 1.3 million ballots had been cast. That timing directly violated Article XII, Section 1 of the Virginia Constitution, which demands two separate legislative sessions separated by a full House election. The court correctly tossed the process. Virginia’s lawful 2021 maps stay in place.

Democrats knew the rules full well and chose to ignore them for partisan plunder.

When the court ruled 4-3 against them, some in the party immediately began plotting to pack or restructure the Virginia Supreme Court itself. They floated ideas like lowering the mandatory retirement age to 53 or 54 to clear out justices and install reliably blue replacements. Those discussions went all the way up to figures like Hakeem Jeffries, who will be U.S. House Speaker if Democrats triumph in November.

The hypocrisy staggers. Here was the party that heretofore claimed hatred of gerrymandering, now engineering the most lopsided map possible and threatening the judiciary when stopped. Their grand talk about safeguarding democracy evaporated the second it blocked their path to power.

Even more damning is what Democrats are willing to do to black voters. Generations of loyal support from American blacks have been rewarded with public promises to protect and expand their electoral influence through the Voting Rights Act (VRA). Yet when real power is on the line, that loyalty suddenly becomes expendable.

On April 29, the U.S. Supreme Court delivered a 6-3 decision in Louisiana v. Callais. It ended decades of race-based map drawing that deliberately diluted white voting strength, effectively to prop up Democrat majorities. The ruling applies nationwide to congressional, state, and local districts. It insists maps must follow actual population, not racial engineering.

Section 2 of the VRA guarantees equal opportunity to participate and elect preferred candidates. It does not guarantee proportional racial outcomes or force states to create extra minority-majority districts.

The Court tightened the old Gingles test so plaintiffs must now show that mapmakers knowingly and willfully discriminated on the basis of race. Maps must respect gerrymandering as a legitimate motivation. Therefore, districts drawn to benefit a certain party are presumed lawful, even if partisan identity correlates with race. Furthermore, courts must focus on current conditions rather than old history.

This cleanly ended the unconstitutional practice of treating white voters as obstacles whose influence could be watered down, essentially for Democrat advantage. All six justices in the majority were appointed by Republican presidents.

One would think Democrats, who constantly lecture about protecting minority voting rights, would fiercely oppose any dilution of black electoral strength. A recent poll proves otherwise.

After the Supreme Court ruling, a POLITICO survey found a 45-percent plurality of Democrats believe their party should aggressively fight Republican redistricting. Even if it requires reducing the number of minority-majority districts.

Without context, 54 percent of Harris 2024 voters said protecting minority voting power should come first. Once reminded of the Court decision and subsequent GOP redistricting, that support collapsed. Harris voters split almost evenly, with 46 percent choosing more blue seats over keeping minority-majority districts intact.

Pluralities of blacks who are Democrats or Harris supporters, at 42 percent, Hispanics at 45 percent, and Asians at 48 percent, say drawing more blue seats matters more even if it reduces minority-majority districts. White Democrats showed 39 percent support for the trade-off.

Representative Sydney Kamlager-Dove, a black congresswoman, admitted Democrats may need to carve up such districts so Republicans can be fought. California Assemblymember Mia Bonta perplexingly stressed keeping black voters central while pushing aggressive maps. Of course, the poll reveals a willingness to sacrifice the very VRA principles that Democrats swooned over.

This admission carries devastating weight.

Allegedly principled blue advocacy for pre-Callais black representation crumbles under the pressure of midterm power plays. If Democrats treat their most faithful supporters so terribly, imagine the fate awaiting anyone else deemed politically expendable. Republicans, Independents, and everybody outside the blue power core would be thrown overboard without hesitation.

The pattern is unmistakable. Democrats pursue power with a hunger that borders on madness.

In Virginia, they violated constitutional law for a 10-1 map. Nationally, they defended racial gerrymanders that diluted white Republican votes. Now their own supporters signal openness to doing a 180-degree-turn via dilution of black, and otherwise minority-majority, districts to regain the House.

This is not politics as usual. It is the systematic erosion of constitutional norms, and basic consistency, by a party that lectures others about democracy.

Republican and non-lefty Independents must grasp the full danger. If Democrats gain one or both houses of Congress this November, their demonstrated willingness to bend, break, and discard standards will accelerate.

The carnage they would unleash on America’s future demands urgent action. Defeating this power-hungry machine is essential to preserving the republic.

A party that professes love for black voters and democracy itself stands prepared to dilute the former and shred the latter when victory requires it. That betrayal does not fade. It lingers like a shadow over the ballot box. It whispers across generations. When self-proclaimed guardians treat rules as obstacles and loyal supporters as pawns, the light of liberty dims for everyone who values freedom.

Ignore it, and the corrosion spreads until America herself gives way.

Podcast thread for May 21

 

Distractions in life can sometimes be the only thing to keep you from losing your sanity.

Irrelevant Europe

American Thinker 

Josep Borrell is a Spanish socialist who held several high-ranking positions in the European Union.  Until 2024, he was a vice-president of the European Commission and the high representative of the European Union for foreign affairs and security policy.  In that capacity, he ran Europe’s External Action Service, which is the diplomatic body that executes Europe’s foreign policy decisions around the world.  He remains a man with a great deal of influence over European perspectives.

In 2022, Borrell created a bit of an international incident when he described Europe as a “garden” and the rest of the world as a “jungle.”  “We have built a garden,” he told aspiring European diplomats in Bruges, Belgium.  “Most of the rest of the world is a jungle.  The jungle could invade the garden.  The gardeners should take care of it.”  

As the head of the European Defense Agency, Borrell’s comments made strategic sense.  As he said in that same speech, “The jungle has a strong growth capacity…Walls will never be high enough to protect the garden.  The gardeners have to go to the jungle, Europeans have to be much more engaged with the rest of the world.  Otherwise, the rest of the world will invade us, by different ways and means.”  

Borrell’s speech came seven years after German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s decision to open her country’s borders to millions of Islamic immigrants.  Originally touted as a humanitarian policy designed to temporarily shelter refugees from war-torn Syria, Germany’s generous welfare programs quickly became a magnet for young men across the Middle East and North Africa.  When Merkel declared on August 31, 2015, “We can do this,” she initiated an all-of-society “welcome culture” that quickly produced a full-blown migrant crisis for the whole continent.  Over ten years later, the influx of millions of Muslims into Europe has transformed school demographics and local politics, unleashed an explosion in sex crimes and anti-European violence, strained Europe’s hospital services and social safety nets, and exacerbated government debt.  

Speaking after the “jungle” had already successfully invaded Europe’s “garden,” Borrell knew there was no way to put the genie back in the bottle.  Merkel’s fateful decision to “welcome” Middle Easterners to Europe transformed cities and towns across Europe into the Middle East.  Borrell also knew that the European Union’s patchwork defense agency did not have the requisite military and espionage assets to effectively protect the continent.  So he tried to fashion his corps of young diplomats into a network of information and persuasion agents who could do Europe’s bidding around the world. 

Borrell’s message got lost in the ensuing international kerfuffle over his “garden” / “jungle” division of the world.  From Russia to Canada, Africa to Southeast Asia, every self-described “foreign policy expert” took umbrage at Borrell’s bluntness.  Perpetually offended virtue-signalers hadn’t gotten so worked-up since President Trump had called Haiti a “shithole country” four years earlier.  Just as Conan O’Brien felt compelled to white-knight for Haiti’s dystopian, cannibal gangland by visiting a heavily guarded resort in the Caribbean country and recklessly encouraging vacationers to join him, legions of politically correct snobs from around the planet recorded social media videos from their country estates in which they turned tsk-tsk-ing into a veritable lingua franca for the vicariously aggrieved. 

All the “very best people” denounced Borrell for promoting a scarcely disguised restoration of European imperialism, colonialism, fascism, and genocide.  Young international students enjoying university scholarships and living in Europe for free made sure to remind Borrell that “diversity is our strength.”  Borrell’s socialist comrades beat him over the head with Europe’s prime directive: multiculturalism über alles.  Mohammadbagher Forough, a random research fellow at the German Institute for Global and Area Studies, publicly reprimanded Europe’s foreign minister thusly: “This kind of comment puts a serious dent in the enterprise of European strategic autonomy.  It upsets, at the most profound level, countries in the rest of the world, because of the history of colonialism.”  

In other words, Europe’s “ruling class” and auxiliary straphangers condemned Borrell for daring to defend the beneficiaries of Western civilization.  He was encouraged by threat of high-culture social banishment to follow Chancellor Merkel’s example in supplicating before the migrant hordes.  The message was clear: Europe’s minister of defense cannot properly “defend” Europe unless he allows non-Europeans to take over the continent.  It was further proof that Europe is irreparably lost.

Since his departure from the European Union’s foreign policy perch at the end of 2024, Borrell has spent most of his time in public lambasting President Trump’s global leadership.  A staunch supporter of Ukraine who once threatened to “annihilate” the Russian army, Borrell has frequently defended the honor of Volodymyr Zelenskyy by claiming that Ukraine’s holdover president is leading “the resistance” and “deserves respect.”  After President Trump described Zelenskyy as a “dictator without elections,” Borrell called the “accusation” the “height of dishonesty.”  When President Trump and Vice President Vance took offense to Zelenskyy’s sense of entitlement and disregard for American taxpayers who have paid the salaries and pensions of Ukraine’s government workforce, Borrell screamed on X, “Trump and Vance have put on a disgraceful show.  I am ashamed of that behavior.”  

In response to Vance’s speech at the Munich Security Conference last year during which the vice president excoriated Europe’s crackdown on free speech and political dissent, Borrell lectured his erstwhile colleagues: “This is a declaration of political war against the European Union.”  Going further, Europe’s former defense minister declared, “Europe must stop pretending that Trump is not an adversary and assert its technological, security, and political sovereignty with clarity and strength.”

As much as I find Borrell’s socialist-globalist politics abhorrent, I respect his impulse to defend his fellow Europeans.  The problem is that the European Union is a governmental monstrosity — bureaucratically lethargic, ideologically suffocating, foolishly regulatory, unmoored from its stated principles, opposed to public debate, enamored with its empires’ past glories, and increasingly oppressive.  Eurocrats such as Borrell believed they could reconstitute European centrality in the world by constructing a “rules-based international order” and forcing every other nation in the world to bend to Europe’s will.  Brussels has long desired to rule the world through rule-making. 

It turns out that depending on the United States for security, the Russian Federation for energy, and communist China for critical imports is not a blueprint for European strength.  To his credit, Borrell understands Europe’s dilemma.  He knows that the European Union “was not designed for the world in which we live today.”  Forced to watch President Trump remake the world without showing any deference to Europe’s globalist prerogatives, Borrell openly laments, “We are not very relevant to international politics.”  

Can you imagine how difficult of an admission that is for Borrell to make?  He has been weaned on the notion of European superiority all his life.  Even as parts of the European continent careen toward civil war, Borrell still believes that Europe is the world’s idyllic “garden” and everywhere else remains wild “jungle.”  From Borrell’s perspective, not only is Haiti a “shithole country” but also the United States is, too.  

Borrell finally realizes, however, that Europe survives only because the rest of the world permits it to endure.  When you depend upon the United States, Japan, India, China, Russia, and the Middle East to produce everything that Europe’s dying empire needs, then you have no leverage or real power in the world.  European imperialism is dead because Europe has no armies or navies to enforce its “rules-based” edicts.  European imperialism is dead because sane nations refuse to impoverish themselves in the name of carbon credit tyranny.  European imperialism is dead because Europe opened its doors to an Islamic invasion. 

The Toxic Trio: Democrats, Netflix, and Hollywood’s Panic Playbook

The Toxic Trio: 

Democrats, Netflix, and Hollywood’s Panic Playbook

John Fredericks for PJ Media.com

AP Photo/Chris Pizzello

Trump ally David Ellison is set to purchase Warner Bros.-Discovery — the company that owns CNN, HBO, and much more — and liberals in Washington, Hollywood, and Silicon Valley will do anything to stop him.

Democrats in Congress, like Elizabeth Warren, are loudly calling for regulators to delay the deal or scuttle it altogether.

And according to sources spoken to by journalist Eriq Gardner of Puck News, Netflix has also hired a former Justice Department antitrust official to help kill the Paramount deal behind the scenes. They also may be funding an astroturf campaign in which they are getting Hollywood elites to voice their opposition.

You can always tell when the Left is losing control of the narrative.

They panic. They scream. And then they reach for whatever levers of power they still control — the courts, the regulators, the bureaucratic swamp — to try to shut you down.

We’re watching it happen in real time.

For years, they censored MAGA voices through Big Tech. Shadow bans. Algorithm suppression. Outright bans. If you challenged the narrative, you got silenced.

That door is closing.

So now it’s Plan B: delay, obstruct, and bleed out anyone who threatens their grip on power.

Enter David Ellison, stage right.

A disruptor. A Trump ally. And now the man at the center of a $111 billion bid to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery — a move that shareholders approved because it will bring a massive injection of competition into a stale, ideologically captured media landscape.

But to the Democrat–Hollywood machine? It’s an existential threat.

Because they’ve seen what Ellison does when he gets inside the system.

When he moved into the CBS orbit, he made real changes. He elevated independent voices like Bari Weiss — someone who walked away from legacy media when it became a progressive echo chamber — and helped foster an environment where journalism meant asking questions again.

Segments got killed for being one-sided. Reporters were pushed to dig into stories the corporate press ignored — government waste, fraud, failures that didn’t fit the approved narrative.

That’s not business as usual. That’s disruption. And it sent shockwaves through a media class that survives on uniformity and control.

Then there’s Hollywood — where Ellison’s track record really sets off alarm bells.

This is the guy behind Top Gun: Maverick — a patriotic, unapologetically pro-America blockbuster that did something modern Hollywood has forgotten how to do: It entertained without lecturing. It didn’t divide; it brought audiences together.

And the result? Massive success. Because Americans are starving for content that reflects who they are — not what a handful of coastal elites think they should be.

That’s the model Ellison represents. And that’s exactly what terrifies the Left.

Because for years, Democrats, Hollywood, and Big Tech have operated as one aligned machine — shaping culture, controlling narratives, and pushing a worldview that prioritizes ideology over storytelling.

Which brings us to the hypocrisy at the center of this entire fight.

When Netflix was circling Warner Bros. Discovery with an $83 billion offer, where was the outrage? Where were the hearings? The investigations? The warnings about monopoly power? Nowhere.

Because that deal would have consolidated even more cultural influence inside a friendly, ideologically aligned ecosystem.

Netflix taking control of HBO Max. Expanding its dominance. Locking in the same pipeline of content, the same worldview, the same narrative control.

Democrats were fine with it. Encouraged it, even.

Then Ellison shows up — and suddenly it’s DEFCON 1.

Elizabeth Warren calls it an “antitrust disaster.” Richard Blumenthal demands national security probes.

National security? From the same people who’ve ignored border chaos, drug trafficking, and global instability for years? Give me a break.

This isn’t about antitrust. It’s not about security. It’s about control.

Because Ellison represents something they cannot tolerate: competition. Not just in business, but in ideas.

If this deal goes through, you don’t just get another media merger; you get a crack in the system.

More films that look like Maverick and more newsrooms willing to challenge groupthink instead of enforcing it. Then their monopoly breaks. 

That’s what this is really about: narrative control.

Democrats, Hollywood, and Netflix aren’t trying to “protect competition.” They’re trying to protect their dominance over what Americans see, hear, and ultimately believe.

So they go to the playbook: delay the deal, launch investigations, apply regulatory pressure, run up the legal bills, and drag it out until it collapses under its own weight. Classic swamp warfare.

But here’s the tell — and it’s the most important part. When they come at you this hard, this coordinated, this fast, it means you’re over the target. They see the shift happening. And they know that if Ellison breaks through at scale, their entire grip on cultural dominance collapses.

That’s why they’re panicking. Once competition in ideas actually exists again, it’s game over for the narrative they’ve been peddling for years.

This fight isn’t just about one deal. It’s about who controls the culture.

And for the first time in a long time, that control is being challenged.

Chinese Military-Linked Companies Despite Forced Labor and National Security Warnings

 WASHINGTON – A powerful bipartisan congressional committee released an explosive investigative report Thursday that found America’s largest financial institutions helped companies tied to the Chinese Communist Party’s military apparatus and forced labor system raise billions in global capital markets — proceeding with the deals even after federal warnings, incomplete due diligence responses, and internal identification of significant national security risks.

Ottawa cleared a multibillion-dollar acquisition by a Chinese mining conglomerate the same month Washington was subpoenaing Wall Street banks for financing it.

The committee’s core finding is, by its own account, simple: the United States government formally designated a foreign company as linked to China’s military, and months later, several of America’s largest banks helped that company raise billions on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange anyway.

“Each bank made the choice to disregard the U.S. government’s Chinese military company designation in order to make millions of dollars,” the report states. “If doing the deal once was not troubling enough, JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, and Morgan Stanley are also doing a second offering for the same Chinese military company to raise billions more.”

The report frames the broader stakes in terms that cut to the heart of the post-Cold War financial order.

“In a world shaped by geopolitical rivalry, those same markets can also become witting, or unwitting, conduits for strategic risk — linking American capital to the ambitions of foreign adversaries,” it states. “The question is no longer whether finance and national security intersect, but whether existing guardrails are sufficient to prevent U.S. institutions from enabling activities that undermine American national security interests.”

In a finding with direct implications for Canada, the report also flagged Wall Street’s role in underwriting Zijin Mining Group — a company whose Canadian subsidiary has made major acquisitions in Toronto-listed miners after Ottawa quietly approved a national security review of the deals, even as Washington was moving to cut the conglomerate off from American capital markets.

The House Select Committee on China concluded that JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America underwrote the Hong Kong initial public offering of Contemporary Amperex Technology Co., Ltd. (CATL), the world’s largest electric vehicle battery manufacturer, months after the Department of Defense placed the company on its list of designated Chinese military companies in January 2025. The offering raised approximately $5.2 billion in May — the largest listing of the year.

The report alleges JPMorgan and Bank of America accepted CATL’s own assertions that it had no links to China’s military, despite the Pentagon’s contrary conclusions and what the committee described as incomplete responses during due diligence reviews. CATL allegedly provided identical responses to multiple JPMorgan questions concerning ties to the People’s Liberation Army, dual-use technologies, and military-linked entities.

The committee’s investigation found that CATL maintained deep institutional ties to the Chinese defense-industrial base, including partnerships and business relationships with blacklisted entities — among them Huawei, China North Industries Group, China Electronics Technology Group Corp., China State Shipbuilding Corporation, Commercial Aircraft Corporation of China, China Mobile, and China National Nuclear Corporation.

The report also details CATL’s ownership stake in Wuhu Shipyard, a key builder of Chinese naval vessels and military equipment, as well as research partnerships tied to the People’s Liberation Army’s National University of Defense Technology and China’s nuclear weapons complex. The committee separately cited CATL’s role in modernizing China’s submarine fleet with advanced lithium-ion batteries — a finding that former Senator and current Secretary of State Marco Rubio and 26 bipartisan members of Congress had previously raised as a direct threat to American naval security.

On the question of forced labor, the committee cited CATL’s close tier-one supplier relationship with the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps, a sanctioned paramilitary entity linked to the operation of forced labor camps and the detention and abuse of Uyghur Muslims — the same paramilitary organization that sits at the center of the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act. According to the investigation, CATL refused to provide full supply chain audits, while the banks proceeded with the deals regardless, despite both public evidence and internal diligence reports identifying ongoing forced labor exposure.

The Morgan Stanley findings are equally damaging.

In September 2025, Morgan Stanley assisted with the initial public offering of Zijin Gold International — a subsidiary of Zijin Mining Group, which had been added to the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act Entity List in January 2025. The committee found that Morgan Stanley’s involvement raised direct questions of whether it helped Zijin Mining evade American prohibitions by stripping out its non-Chinese gold mining assets and listing them on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. Internal documents showed the firm had identified significant sanctions and national security risks before proceeding. Morgan Stanley declined to comment.

The Select Committee’s allegations and findings come in the wake of Zijin Mining’s aggressive expansion into Canada — an expansion that Ottawa has actively facilitated even as Washington works to shut the company out of American capital markets. In January 2026, Zijin Gold International agreed to acquire Toronto-based Allied Gold for approximately C$5.5 billion, adding major open-pit gold mining operations across Africa to its portfolio. The deal cleared a Canadian national security review in April 2026. The acquisition follows Zijin’s earlier purchase of Toronto-based Continental Gold and its large-scale Buriticá gold project in Colombia. Through its Canadian subsidiary, Zijin Mining Canada, the company has continued to use Canadian corporate vehicles as acquisition platforms across the Americas and Africa.

That divergence carries new weight in the context of rapidly deteriorating security relations between Ottawa and Washington.

On Monday, Under Secretary of Defense Elbridge Colby announced the Pentagon is pausing participation in the Permanent Joint Board on Defence, an advisory body on North American continental defense established in 1940 — the first time any American administration has suspended participation in the board in its more than eight decades of existence. Colby accused Canada of failing “to make credible progress on its defense commitments,” saying: “We can no longer avoid the gaps between rhetoric and reality.” Prime Minister Mark Carney had declared in April that “the days of our military sending 70 cents of every dollar to the United States are over” — a statement the Trump administration interpreted as a direct provocation.

The implications of Thursday’s report reach further still.

The committee concluded that existing American law is insufficient to stop financial institutions from financing companies tied to China’s military-industrial base, because Section 1260H restrictions primarily affect Defense Department procurement rather than broader commercial activity. “The deals were legal, so the banks proceeded,” the report states. The committee is now calling for legislative reforms that would require American financial institutions to treat Pentagon military-company designations as binding constraints on capital markets activity — closing a legal gap that, as the CATL and Zijin Gold transactions make plain, the largest banks on Wall Street have been willing to exploit.

A prior House Select Committee investigation had already found that Wall Street firms channeled roughly $6.5 billion into 63 Chinese companies appearing on American government blacklists through index providers and asset managers, with the MSCI index complex alone funneling approximately $3.7 billion into those same firms. Thursday’s report makes clear that voluntary compliance and reputational pressure have not been sufficient deterrents. JPMorgan pursued the CATL deal aggressively — reportedly deprioritizing other transactions to secure the listing — despite a low fee structure that raised its own questions about what the bank was purchasing beyond the immediate transaction. Morgan Stanley identified significant sanctions and national security risks internally and proceeded regardless.

“My committee’s investigation calls for serious policy changes to ensure what JPMorgan and Bank of America did never happens again,” Chairman Moolenaar said.

https://www.thebureau.news/p/select-committee-finds-jpmorgan-bank?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=1444443&post_id=198751077&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=false&r=rd3ao&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email

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National Sovereignty Is At Stake In Imminent Supreme Court Ruling

SCOTUS should rule that the 14th Amendment does not grant citizenship to children of illegal aliens born within the territory of the U.S.

The Federalist 

With the Supreme Court nearing the end of this term, it will soon release its ruling in Trump v. Barbara, the landmark case on the constitutionality of President Trump’s Jan. 20, 2025, executive order clarifying and protecting the meaning of American birthright citizenship. Expectation that the court will rule against the president has prompted a recent social media blast from Trump against the unreliable “conservative” justices on the court. Trump predicted that the court will be “ruling against us on Birthright Citizenship, making us the only Country in the World that practices this unsustainable, unsafe, and incredibly costly DISASTER. I don’t want loyalty, but I do want and expect it for our country … Sometimes decisions have to be allowed to use Good, Strong, Common Sense as a guide.”

President Trump is predictably insightful in his analysis of the politics of the court. Despite Chief Justice John Roberts’ desire to preserve the alleged impartiality and supra-political character of the court, it is impossible to deny that the courts have always been political actors in American government. As the president exhorted, the Supreme Court should make its decisions by “Good, Strong Common Sense” and with an underlying loyalty to the United States, which means loyal prioritization of our people, our founding principles, and our national preservation. Fortunately, the original meaning of the 14th Amendment supports President Trump’s position.

Specifically, while U.S. v. Wong Kim Ark (1898), which allegedly established the liberal interpretation of birthright citizenship, should ultimately be overturned, there remains a viable path where the court could uphold that ruling’s precedent and simultaneously recognize that the 14th Amendment does not grant citizenship to children of illegal aliens born within the territory of the U.S. This would be a major win and step toward securing and restoring our national sovereignty.

Ed Erler, one of the foremost scholars on the issue of birthright citizenship and the 14th Amendment, has treated this topic in great detail in his compelling book The United States in Crisis: Citizenship, Immigration, and the Nation-State. As Erler demonstrates, the original intention of the 14th Amendment, as expressed by its framers, was to grant American citizenship to former slaves and their children. The clause “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” excludes illegal aliens and foreign citizens, given that they are not fully subject to the jurisdiction of the American regime. They are subject to our laws while they sojourn here, but not subject as loyal citizens, since they owe allegiance to their foreign nations of origin.

Erler relies upon the political principles of the American founders to reject the British common law doctrine whereby anyone born within the territory of the British Empire was a perpetual subject of Britain. Erler further provides evidence from the ratification debates, the Civil Rights Act of 1866, the Expatriation Act of 1868, and Elk v. Wilkins (1884) to clarify the original meaning of birthright citizenship in the 14th Amendment.

Wong Kim Ark Case

Nevertheless, the big obstacle for modern reform of birthright citizenship is the precedent case U.S. v. Wong Kim Ark, which is the foundation of the left’s interpretation of birthright citizenship that prevails politically and academically today. The fundamental holding of Wong Kim Ark was that, due to a faulty interpretation of the 14th Amendment, Ark was born an American citizen due to his birth on American soil, despite the fact that his parents resided at the time of his birth in San Francisco as lawful permanent residents (i.e., domiciled workers) and were not American but Chinese citizens, owing allegiance to the Chinese emperor.

Erler believes the Wong Kim Ark decision was decided wrongly, echoing the contemporaneous view of Chief Justice Melville Weston Fuller and Justice John Marshall Harlan, who dissented in the 1898 decision. Consequently, the strongest pro-American position consistent with founding principles would be to overrule Wong Kim Ark (1898) entirely and to clarify a view of birthright citizenship that children born to American citizens are citizens by birthright (though possessing the natural right of expatriation), but noncitizens can become citizens only through naturalization, which must be in accord with laws passed by our legislature and embodying the will of existing citizens. Of course, as noted earlier, this is essentially a fantastical ideal, given the current landscape of the Supreme Court and what has been signaled in oral arguments.

Administration’s More Modest Proposal

Perhaps prudently, the Trump administration, guided by the tactful skill of its lawyers, has not chosen to argue the full-throated position, but instead a more modest proposal. In the brief, Trump’s Solicitor General John Sauer explained, “But Wong Kim Ark involved a child of aliens with lawful ‘permanent domicil and residence,’ id. at 652, not the children of illegal or temporarily present aliens … the government has not asked this Court to overrule Wong Kim Ark. But the government does not need to do so, since Wong Kim Ark does not address the question presented in these cases.” In short, by ruling in the president’s favor, the court could seek to preserve the appearance of their own legitimacy by upholding precedent (Wong Kim Ark), while also correcting the worst application of the liberal doctrine of birthright citizenship.

While it is bad enough children of lawfully domiciled foreign workers in the U.S. can become citizens by birth on U.S. soil, it is egregiously worse that we currently treat children of illegal aliens and foreign tourists as “birthright citizens” if they happen to be born on U.S. soil. The “middle path” decision suggested here, and which the Trump administration is requesting, would still preserve birthright citizenship for children of lawfully domiciled resident foreigners in the U.S., but would admit that children of illegal aliens or mere tourists are not “birthright citizens.” While conservatives ultimately want an even stronger definition of American citizenship, a Supreme Court decision in Trump’s favor would still be a massive improvement over current doctrine and practice.

Also, it’s important to note that the president’s order stated it “shall apply only to persons who are born within the United States after 30 days from the date of this order,” so it is not retroactive. To fix our grossly abused immigration system and citizenship practices will require far more than an executive order, but would require congressional legislation allied with support from the courts and the executive. 

Restoring Sovereignty

President Trump’s attempt to clarify the meaning of birthright citizenship was a major, unprecedented step forward in restoring American citizenship and national sovereignty. The Supreme Court should not hinder his efforts by ruling in favor of the most liberal interpretation possible, but rather take at least the moderate middle path and admit that, even if Wong Kim Ark stands as precedent, we need not continue the irrational, destructive practice of granting birthright citizenship to illegal aliens and foreign tourists. An endorsement of the liberal position on birthright citizenship effectively promotes the destruction of national sovereignty.

A Supreme Court decision against Trump on this issue will be a major blow, and yet there are still many departmentalist methods of attack for the Trump administration to advance his position. Nevertheless, it would be immensely helpful for the court to uphold President Trump’s order on this issue, even if much work remains to be done to restore the founders’ understanding of American citizenship.

NANO Nuclear's Reactor Construction Permit Accepted For Review

NANO Nuclear's Reactor Construction Permit Accepted For Review

zerohedge.com

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) has formally begun its review of the construction permit application for an advanced microreactor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. 

✅ #NRCNews: We've kicked off the formal review of the @UofIllinoisapplication for an advanced microreactor. https://t.co/0gMFCuDv5u

— NRC (@NRCgov) May 19, 2026

The announcement marks the transition from the agency’s acceptance review to the substantive technical evaluation of NANO Nuclear’s KRONOS design.

This step carries more weight than the initial filing. Submitting an application demonstrates readiness on paper; the NRC’s decision to open a full review confirms the submission meets the threshold for detailed scrutiny. 

For a first-of-a-kind microreactor project, clearing that gate is a concrete regulatory advance.

We've tracked the Illinois project closely, including the construction permit application submission itself, described at the time as a defining moment for commercial microreactor deployment. Earlier coverage in October 2025 detailed the start of drilling and site preparation work with the university. 

We've also detailed other updates from the company including their recent MOU with Supermicro and progress with their high-assay low enriched uranium (HALEU) transportation package.

The KRONOS effort is also not occurring in isolation. Other advanced reactor programs have recorded measurable NRC milestones in recent months with TerraPower’s Natrium reactor in Wyoming receiving its construction permit and X-energy achieving a notable environmental clearance for its four-unit Xe-100 project at Dow’s Seadrift site in Texas.