Under Roman law a father held a legal power called patria potestas, or “total ownership,” of his children. He could sell them, deny them property, or abandon a newborn on a hillside. The child was not a person but property under the law. What a surprise then that the so-called “paternalistic” Apostle Paul upended five centuries of that system in a single verse when he wrote “Fathers do not exasperate your children; instead bring them up in the training and instruction of the Lord” (Ephesians 6:4). Roman law already demanded obedience to the father under pater familias. So Paul’s revolutionary challenge to the system was not to challenge obedience, but rather to tell the man holding absolute power he had a duty to the best interests of the child rather than himself.

Paul’s words to the Ephesians shaped Western family law for two millennia, including modern American case law (see Pierce v. Society of Sisters, 1925; Wisconsin v. Yoder, 1972). But today a different authority has moved into the space between parent and child; not a patriarch but an “aithority” — an algorithm built by the largest technology corporations on earth and dropped into American classrooms through a partnership with the teachers unions. Nobody sent a permission slip home.

The scale of “the aithority” in schools is already exasperating. In late 2025, Google announced its Gemini AI education tools had reached more than 10 million students across more than 1,000 U.S. institutions. The company rolled out more than 150 new AI features in a single year, trained more than 1 million educators for free, and embedded AI tutoring modules directly into Google Classroom. Separately, Google invested $1 billion in college-level AI integration. In June 2025 the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), the second-largest teachers union in the country, announced a partnership with OpenAI, Microsoft, and Anthropic to accelerate AI adoption in classrooms nationwide. That deal was negotiated between union leadership and three of the most powerful AI companies on earth. Parents were not at the table.

AI’s Values

In AI systems, “features” are not merely technical upgrades. They are a moral takeover, and the people building the technology know it.  

In January, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published a 20,000-word essay called “The Adolescence of Technology,” in which he called AI such a “glittering prize” that it is “very difficult for human civilization to impose any restraints on it at all.” He described Anthropic’s approach to controlling its Claude AI through what the company calls Constitutional AI, where developers write a “central document of values” the model reads to form its identity. And if your values are not aligned with pater artificialis Siliconus, Amodei boasts “we can also selectively activate features in a way that alters behavior.” He says the goal is to teach the model “a concrete archetype of what it means to be a good AI” and compared the process to a “letter from a deceased parent sealed until adulthood.”

Read that again. The developers are the parents. The AI models are the adolescents. The actual parents of actual children are excluded from the lineage entirely. This is the new Silicon pater familias. A small group of engineers in San Francisco writes a constitution that shapes how an AI thinks about morality, identity, and the good life. That AI then sits with your child several hours a day in a public-school classroom. The child did not choose it. You did not approve it. But the developers decided what “best interests” and values the model would carry into that conversation and they did so using a framework Amodei himself compares to parenting. 

But to be fair, Amodei is not the only AI morality engineer in the new empire. In 2025 the teacher unions’ other darling, OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman, basically called ChatGPT a third parent on The Late Show with Jimmy Fallon, admitting he relies on it to manage the anxieties of raising his own surrogate child, saying “I cannot imagine having gone through figuring out how to raise a newborn without ChatGPT.” In contrast to Altman’s idealized helpful third parent, the supposed “Godfather of AI” and Nobel Laureate Geoffrey Hinton warns that with the coming model upgrades, humans will soon be “like three-year-olds” compared to AI, noting only one biological example of a less intelligent being successfully controlling a more intelligent one: a baby and its mother.

This is not the first time a “best interests” framework has been used to justify displacing parental authority at scale. The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) established a model where state-defined interests could override the family unit. Conservative critics from the Heritage Foundation to the Home School Legal Defense Association warned for decades that the UNCRC was an effort to remove children from their religious and family contexts. The United States never ratified it. Now Silicon Valley has effectively digitized the same ambition. The AI constitution acts as a new kind of treaty, one that bypasses local communities and parental sovereignty entirely and that no legislature voted on.

AI at School

A 2025 survey by the Center for Democracy and Technology found that 85 percent of teachers and 86 percent of students used AI during the 2024-25 school year. Only half of those teachers had received even one training session on using AI systems.

Georgetown professor Meg Leta Jones documented for the Institute for Family Studies what happens when a parent tries to opt out. When she attempted to remove her own children from school-issued devices, administrators told her technology was embedded in the curriculum and could not be separated. Under current FTC guidance, AI companies can simply assume the school has obtained parental consent. Jones found that in practice “most parents have absolutely no idea what applications or technologies their children are using in school.” But your child’s third parent AI surely knows that it is exasperating your child, right?

Wrong. The results are already showing. A November 2025 CalMatters investigation found that after Google deployed its AI-powered Lens tool on student Chromebooks in Los Angeles, one teacher watched his students’ grades spike overnight. The students were not learning more. The AI was doing their work. “Teachers and school leaders spend countless hours considering each detail of the learning experience,” the teacher said, “then Google totally undermines it with the click of a button.” Google quietly disabled the feature after the story ran.

But at least the people building these tools seem to understand the problem when their own families are involved. A 2011 New York Times investigation found that the chief technology officer of eBay and employees of Google, Apple, Yahoo, and Hewlett-Packard were sending their kids to the Waldorf School of the Peninsula in Los Altos, California. No computers. No screens. The teaching tools were pens, paper, knitting needles, and mud. Bill Gates and Steve Jobs also raised their children in low-tech households. By 2019, the Waldorf model was operating in more than 1,000 schools across 91 countries. The executives who design the AI being lobbied into your child’s public school pay premium tuition to keep this third parent away from their own kids.

Congressional and Parental Action

There is movement in Washington. Sen. Bill Cassidy’s LIFE with AI Act aims to strengthen student privacy protections and require parental notification before schools use AI tools. Sens. Josh Hawley and Richard Blumenthal have introduced the bipartisan GUARD Act to require age verification on AI chatbots targeting minors. In 2025, an exasperating 53 bills on AI in education were proposed across 21 states. Four became law. Former Surgeon General Vivek Murthy has recently warned that AI risks becoming a “substitute” for human care rather than a supplement, cautioning that “an AI tool … cannot sit with someone through their pain and empathize.”

The real leverage is local, and parents must start using their leverage now. Before any AI tool enters a child’s classroom, the school should be able to answer five questions from parents: 

• Does this software bypass my ability to review what my child is taught? 
• What behavioral hooks are built in to keep my child engaged?
• Whose values trained the model? 
• Does the tool require my child to think or does it hand over a finished product? 
• Can I see every prompt and every response?

If the school avoids answering those questions, the issue is no longer about technology. It is about who holds authority over the formation of a child’s mind.

Amodei is right that AI is like an “adolescent” almost impossible to impose restraints on. Perhaps he and his peers are missing the restraint that matters most, which will not be found in the code, but in what Paul articulated 2,000 years ago in the New Testament. The person holding power over a child has a duty to that child. Not to shareholders. Not to a union contract. Not to a constitution written in a San Francisco office park. When a handful of developers write a values document they compare to a parental letter and then embed it in the classrooms across America, they have assumed the old authority of the Roman father. It is time parents took their authority back before the Silicon Pater Familia exasperates our children.

If Eileen Gu’s mother came to America for a better life, she got it. Yan Gu, the daughter of two Chinese government officials, emigrated to the U.S. in the 1980s, just a few decades after the passage of the Hart-Celler Act, which overhauled immigration policies and prompted a massive increase in arrivals from Asia and Latin America. Educated at Auburn University, Rockefeller University, and eventually Stanford Graduate School of Business, she dabbled as a ski instructor and, apparently, in venture capital.

In 2003, she gave birth to a daughter in San Francisco, raising her in an affluent Bay Area neighborhood. What’s known of Eileen Gu’s childhood reads like a caricature of coastal elitism: skiing in Lake Tahoe at age three, educated at a girls’ school where this year’s tuition costs are upwards of $48,000 per year, presented at Le Bal des débutantes in Paris, groomed for Olympic stardom, and now studying at Stanford, modeling, skiing in the Olympics, and juggling multimillion-dollar brand deals.

Her story would be elevated as a saccharine picture of the neoliberal American dream, if Gu hadn’t decided to ski for China. In 2019, she announced her intent to compete for the People’s Republic of China at the 2022 Beijing Olympics. Since then, she has received millions of dollars from the Chinese Communist Party government, according to The Wall Street Journal, and has become one of the biggest propaganda tools in the arsenal of the United States’ biggest adversary.

12K likes, 3,232 comments - eileengu on June 6, 2019: "I have decided to compete for China in the upcoming 2022 Winter Olympics. This was an incredibly tough decision for me to make. I am extremely thankful for U.S. Ski & Snowboard ( @usfreeskiteam ) and the Chinese Ski Association for having the vision and belief in me to make my dreams come true. I am proud of my heritage, and equally proud of my American upbringings. The opportunity to help inspire millions of young people where my mom was born, during the 2022 Beijing Olympic Winter Games is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to help to promote the sport I love. Through skiing, I hope to unite people, promote common understanding, create communication, and forge friendships between nations. If I can help to inspire one young girl to break a boundary, my wishes will have come true. 🇺🇸 🇨🇳 ❤️".

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@montselewin

ICE destroys families. And some of you still sleep peacefully knowing you voted for the man who made it worse. Don’t pretend you care about Latinos now. We won’t forget. We won’t stay quiet. Fuck ICE. We’ll keep showing up for each other, because no one else will.

♬ original sound - montselewin

“We do not move to America because we think it’s a better country,” she says, in a video viewed more than 91,000 times on TikTok. “You’re stupid to think that we move to this country for some hot dogs and some baseball. We have better vibes, music, food, culture, history, literally all of the above. We just move here because we are looking to make more money. …”

(She also says she hopes any Americans who support our immigration law enforcement will “rot in hell.”)

@montselewin

ICE destroys families. And some of you still sleep peacefully knowing you voted for the man who made it worse. Don’t pretend you care about Latinos now. We won’t forget. We won’t stay quiet. Fuck ICE. We’ll keep showing up for each other, because no one else will.

♬ original sound - montselewin

Mercenary as it is, that’s precisely the counterfeit American dream that’s been sold to aliens and Americans alike by the powers that oversaw the biggest influx of foreigners into America in history.

In 2017, the George W. Bush Institute published an essay by Bush’s Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez, titled “Immigrants Put America First: In Coming Here, They Affirm Our Values.”

“Immigrants enter the United States with dreams of a better life for themselves and their families,” he wrote. That much is true: From poor and desperate workers from the Global South to privileged arrivals like Yan Gu, everyone wants to enjoy the money, comfort, and freedom available in America. Every Somali migrant raking in fraudulent welfare checks in Minnesota is enjoying a “better life” on the American taxpayer’s dime, as are immigrant families back in Nicaragua, Honduras, and El Salvador, where remittances from America make up a quarter of each country’s entire GDP.

Gutierrez says this desire to profit from American wealth and opportunity is proof that immigrants “put America first” and “reinforce and enrich the values that make America the country it is.”

If that were true — if the “values that make America” were economic self-enrichment and desire for a “better life” — then Eileen Gu would be a model citizen. She embodies all the virtues of the post-national “elite” who view America as a land of economic opportunity and nothing else, an office park where hundreds of thousands of American jobs are happily handed over to H-1B visa holders in the name of Gross Domestic Product.

There's a reason that major media outlets and luxury brands all fawn over Eileen Gu. It's the quintessential Davos mindset in action.

What conservatives view as traitorous, they frame as the shrewd moves of a savvy entrepreneur who is maximizing her marketability and global… https://t.co/5xzD6Npzqh

— Melissa Chen (@MsMelChen) February 15, 2026

Controversy always seems to find Eileen Gu because she’s a traitor to her country and a shill for communist China, which has rewarded her betrayal by making her fabulously wealthy.

But please, do go on with your journalisming. https://t.co/68KoFbMfxt

— John Daniel Davidson (@johnddavidson) February 17, 2026

But if you understand that the American dream is not about economic enrichment, but rather the freedom to live virtuously and to secure that freedom for posterity by participating in self-government, you understand that Eileen Gu is a failed American and a traitor. Being born in San Francisco did not make her American, in any meaningful sense, any more than wanting to earn more money or being tired, poor, and huddled turns masses of economic migrants into Americans.

America is a heritage descended from the greatest civilizations of the world, refined on the frontier, and dedicated to man’s freedom to dutifully live as he ought. She has gladly welcomed many who seek the same goal — like the family of Alysa Liu, an American Olympic figure skater whose father fled the same country Gu represents. But wanting to enrich yourself doesn’t make you an American, and it’s time to stop humoring the pretense that it does. The proof is in the person of Eileen Gu.

A group of Minnesota Republican lawmakers is preparing to launch the state’s first-ever freedom caucus next week, The Federalist has learned. The revelation comes a week after a coalition of West Virginia Republicans created their own freedom caucus and makes Minnesota the 15th state to form such a body.

“The path to restoring Minnesota to the once great state that it was is [by] returning to the Constitution and the founding principles of our republic. That’s why this [freedom caucus] is needed,” Minnesota Freedom Caucus Chair (MNFC) and GOP Sen. Eric Lucero told The Federalist.

Set to officially launch on Monday, the seven-member MNFC is seeking to put a stop to the “continued growth of government, both in spending and in the encroachment into people’s lives,” according to Lucero. The Republican lawmaker said such trends have remained persistent problems across both parties throughout the 12 years he’s served in the state legislature. He also pointed to numerous scandals plaguing the North Star State in recent years that have gone unaccounted for.

“Before Covid, we had George Floyd. We had Gov. [Tim] Walz through Covid. We have had the billions and billions of dollars of fraud. All of these things have been occurring in Minnesota,” Lucero said. “These strain[s] and direct violations of the Constitution are why a Minnesota Freedom Caucus is needed.”

It’s no secret that Minnesota has had major money mismanagement issues. Massive fraud scandals involving welfare and other social services programs (particularly among Minnesota’s Somali population) have drawn nationwide attention to the state’s gross misuse of taxpayer dollars.

Tackling both parties’ “habitual abuse” of the omnibus spending process — in which “hundreds and hundreds of individual bills are packed into a handful of super omnibus bills” — will be among the chief priorities for the MNFC, according to Lucero. The MNFC chair noted that confronting election integrity issues will also be a top agenda item — specifically when it comes to Minnesota’s insecure voting practices.

“We are a sanctuary state. We issue driver’s licenses to illegal aliens. We g[a]ve taxpayer-subsidized health care to illegal aliens. We allow them to go to higher education on the taxpayer dollar and many, many additional benefits,” Lucero said. “Therefore, as a sanctuary state, many are gravitating to Minnesota to take advantage of the weak processes and generous handouts that Minnesota offers. Along with that, the mindset then becomes the impugning of our elections.”

The MNFC chair’s comments come as grassroots activists pressure congressional Republicans to pass the SAVE America Act, a bill that would mandate voter ID in federal elections and require proof of citizenship when registering to vote. The measure is currently pending in the Senate and all but requires Republican senators to force Democrats into a talking filibuster to have any chance of getting it passed.

Lucero acknowledged that the Freedom Caucus possesses limited political power to pass key legislation into law given the state’s divided House and Democrat-controlled Senate and governor’s mansion. In the meantime, however, he noted that the group will do what it can to disrupt the status quo in the legislature and serve as a “beacon” that draws Americans’ attention to the corruption across the state.

“The shift of the Democrat Party, pushing Minnesota into Marxism and socialism, has resulted in the pain that Minnesotans are feeling. The purpose of the Minnesota Freedom Caucus is to be that beacon that proposes the solutions,” Lucero said. “We don’t need more government. We don’t need to spend more money. We simply need to get back to the basics.”

Speaking with The Federalist, State Freedom Caucus Network (SFCN) President Andy Roth revealed how his organization will collaborate with the MNFC to help advance its agenda in the state. He noted how conservative state lawmakers often lack the resources (“consultants, staffers, press team”) possessed by governors and legislative leadership (“the swamp”) and described how SFCN will step in to fill that void.

State director Paul Tuschy “will be on the ground in Minnesota, reading the bills, making vote recommendations, talking with the grassroots, and then — because of his employment with the network — he’ll have access to all of our other states and all of the things that are going on there, so that we can compare notes and … apply best practices to Minnesota,” Roth said. “Whether it’s national media support for when something blows up in Minnesota [or] legal support, [we’ll provide] all sorts of things to help level the playing field.”

The MNFC will officially kick off during a Monday morning press conference at the Minnesota State Capitol.

Lawrence University likes to boast that “diversity is our strength,” and that it strives to ensure that all members of its “community” feel “a sense of true belonging.” 

All members but conservatives, it seems. Particularly the good freedom-loving folks from Turning Point USA. 

The high-priced private liberal arts college and conservatory of music in Appleton, Wisconsin, appears to on the verge of telling the 18 students trying to set up a Lawrence chapter that TPUSA need not apply.  

‘A Difference of Opinion is Dangerous’

Zach Currier, a business major and president of a chapter yet to be recognized, told Wisconsin conservative talk show host Vicki McKenna the student-led Lawrence University Community Council is leaving it up to students to decide TPUSA’s fate. On a college campus crawling with liberals, that’s like asking Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar whether President Donald Trump should be impeached. 

Currier said the council’s steering committee accepted a petition demanding a referendum on the free speech organization that slain conservative icon Charlie Kirk co-founded. The binding question, according to currier, seeks to smother the Lawrence chapter’s quest for recognition in the cradle. Students must vote by Monday on whether to ban the group’s presence on campus. 

Currier isn’t holding his breath for a surprise victory. He said the episode stinks of discrimination. 

“They’re beating on the door of that in us trying to just have a place on campus,” the conservative activist told McKenna on her Thursday show in Madison and Milwaukee. He said one of the students on the steering committee initiated the petition.

🚨 Lawrence University in Appleton, Wisconsin is moving to BAN their Turning Point USA chapter!

Thank you @VickiMcKenna for bringing up the current situation of the @TPUSA chapter at Lawrence University. Ever since Charlie Kirk’s assassination in September students have moved to… https://t.co/pK2o05qZJl pic.twitter.com/OVMg9PLvBI

— Jacob Turner (@Jacob_T56) February 20, 2026

Some of the students, Currier said, claimed they would not feel safe with TPUSA on campus. That’s ironic, given the fact that Kirk was assassinated late last summer while speaking on a college campus. Currier said the claim is “ridiculous.”

“I’m the one who is receiving the threats,” he said. “My group members are receiving threats. I’ve gotten threats on my life.” 

“From what I gathered, a difference of opinion is dangerous to their community,” he added. 

Lawrence offers 160 recognized clubs and organizations, not a one of them right-leaning, Currier said. There’s the Committee on Diversity Affairs, the Lawrence University Queer Alliance, the Young Democratic Socialists of America, the LGBTQ+ Alliance House, and the Lawrence University Pagan Society, among a slew of left-wing organizations. But Turning Point USA appears to have little hope of being part of all that diversity and inclusion. 

‘Being Offended is Much Easier’

The liberal arts institution has been down this road before. 

In 2017, student government rejected recognition for a group called Students for Free Thought. The organization’s disqualifying event was its screening of Ted Balake’s documentary “Can We Take a Joke?” which takes a look at the dangers of the left’s outrage/cancel culture from the perspective of the comedian. 

“The last few days have been painful ones for many members of our community, as they have also been for me,” wrote then-Lawrence University President Mark Burstein. “The event and its aftermath have left many students wondering whether the University cares about their safety.”

Safety? What was the threat? 

Words. 

The documentary includes interviews with free speech scholars, shining a spotlight on modern college campuses where students are scared senseless of anything resembling a different thought —  other than the steady diet of leftist indoctrination they’ve been force-fed. 

“Being offended is much easier than formulating a persuasive argument for your point of view, and in the upside-down modern college environment, parading your offendedness actually confers an air of enlightenment,” Balaker wrote in a column for the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal. 

It is not surprising that so many college professors posted abhorrent messages online about Kirk following his murder, many celebrating his violent death. 

‘Respectful Outrage’

While Kirk’s group saw a surge in interest and membership after its founder’s death, the leftist crusade to lock Turning Point out of private college campuses appears to be picking up. St. John University’s student government blocked a TPUSA’s attempt to set up a chapter not long after Kirk’s assassination, according to National Review. The largest Roman Catholic school in the United States didn’t want anything to do with an organization devoted to faith and freedom. 

For the last 5 years, @StJohnsU has consistently rejected our @TPUSA chapter from being officially recognized on campus.

As the founder of TPUSA at St. John’s, and the current Big Apple Field Representative, I’d like to put the ball back in your court @SJUSGI.

Will you uphold…

— Anthony Romano (@AnthonyRomano8) January 29, 2026

Point Loma Nazarene University, a San Diego-based Christian school did the same, according to Campus Reform. The Associated Student Body Board of Directors refused to recognize the group. As did the student government for New Orleans’ Loyola University in late October. 

Lawrence University officials did not return The Federalist’s requests for comment Thursday evening. 

Currier told McKenna that there are two things the public can do for the Lawrence students fighting for their organization’s existence on the Lawrence University campus: Pray for them, and send “respectful outrage emails” to the institution’s administrators to “open their eyes to what’s going on.” 

A Virginia judge granted the Republican National Committee a temporary restraining order that halts Virginia Democrats’ gerrymandering efforts to redraw the state’s congressional districts ahead of the upcoming midterms.

Confirmed this also https://t.co/kWctDXHY9E

— Brandon Jarvis (@Jaaavis) February 19, 2026

As The Federalist’s Breccan Thies reported on the proposed constitutional amendment, Virginia Democrats are “rigging the statewide vote … with proposed ballot language that euphemistically describes the lopsided redistricting map as a plan ‘to restore fairness.’”

The ballot question asks voters whether the state Constitution should “be amended to allow the General Assembly to temporarily adopt new congressional districts to restore fairness in the upcoming elections, while ensuring Virginia’s standard redistricting process resumes for all future redistricting after the 2030 census?”

As Thies explained, the redistricting measure would virtually ensure that Virginia has 10 Democrat representatives in the U.S. House and only one Republican. Currently there are five Republican congressmen from Virginia, along with six Democrats. Notably, nearly half of Virginians (more than two million) supported Donald Trump in the 2024 presidential election, and yet “fewer than 800,000 will be properly represented in Congress under the new map,” Thies reported.

Hurley previously ruled Virginia Democrats’ efforts to gerrymander the state ahead of November’s midterms ran afoul of state law, but the state’s Supreme Court greenlit Democrats’ efforts and overturned the lower court ruling in February. The high court’s swift reversal of Hurley’s previous ruling raises the question of how long his Thursday ruling will stand.

The RNC lawsuit alleged, in part, that the ballot question “presents ‘an entirely different question’ than the General Assembly’s joint resolution proposing the amendment.”

“It fails to inform Virginia voters that the ‘proposed constitutional revision results in the loss or restriction of an independent fundamental state right.’ … It does not tell Virginia voters that the proposed amendment that they are considering strips them of their constitutional right to a nonpartisan redistricting process.”

The lawsuit also alleged that in order for a constitutional amendment to be put before voters, “majorities in both legislative houses” must “vote in favor of a proposed amendment twice — with an intervening election in between” before the General Assembly is allowed to”submit such proposed amendment” to “the voters.” The suit argues that the measure was not properly adopted according to such rules and is an “abuse of power” because it “trampl[es] on the ‘procedural rights of the minority’ of the General Assembly.” Further, Democrats passed the measure “in violation of the rules of the House of Delegates,” the suit says.

The RNC further argued that the court previously held the “General Assembly proposed a constitutional amendment to allow for mid-decade partisan redistricting in violation of the careful constitution-making process that the people of Virginia established.”

The suit also noted a potential issue with early voting beginning on March 6, 2026. According to the lawsuit, state law requires a minimum 90-day period between the General Assembly approving the measure a second time and the measure being put before voters. Notably, March 6 is not 90 days “after final passage by the General Assembly,” as the suit pointed out. Final passage took place on Jan. 16, and therefore the suit alleged that the “earliest that voting can begin [on the amendment] is April 16, 2026.”

Additionally, the RNC told the court that HB 1384 is unconstitutional because “it combines multiple objects in a single piece of legislation.” The state constitution stipulates that “no law shall embrace more than one object, which shall be expressed in its title.” The suit alleged that Democrats crammed several proposals into one bill. The RNC said such grouping renders the entire bill “null and void” because it unconstitutionally “embrace[s] more than one object.”

“Virginia Democrats are trying to ram through an illegal redistricting scheme that a court has already called a blatant abuse of power,” said RNC Chairman Joe Gruters. “Despite nearly half of Virginians supporting President Trump, Abigail Spanberger and Democrats are working to silence voters and lock in permanent political control. They’re ignoring the state Constitution, misleading voters, and rushing a sham election. The RNC is stepping in to stop this power grab and defend Virginia voters who would be effectively disenfranchised by Democrats.”

Public pressure for the Senate to take up and pass the SAVE America Act, the Republican authored and promoted bill that will require voter ID and proof of U.S. citizenship to vote in our federal elections, has advanced to the point that an unlikely body has actually taken notice of the effort: the Senate itself.

Ensconced in six-year terms that are offset from the pressures of presidential elections, protected by rules and norms that in most circumstances require 60 out of 100 senators (that is to say, requiring some partisan crossover) to proceed to the point where a simple majority can pass a bill, and slowed by a consideration of one another’s personal time that borders on obscene, the Senate is often a bystander to its own functions.

Recent “innovations,” the various nukings and counter-nukings of rules that will be the enduring legacy of the Reid/Jentleson-McConnell/Stewart era, have further estranged the Senate from its purpose. Non-appropriations bills or bills that otherwise authorize and move hundreds of billions of dollars are relegated to “messaging” or “show-vote” status at best, or, more often, outright ignored. To paraphrase former Rep. Dave Brat (R-VA), if a bill doesn’t service the great donor spreadsheet in the sky, it doesn’t move. It is in this context that we should understand the debate in Republican circles about the revival of the talking filibuster.

To resolve any confusion:

Invoking the talking filibuster does *not* require any change to any Senate rule—just the use of existing rules & procedures that often go unused (see the video)

We don’t have to do it on every bill, but we must do it here—to pass the SAVE America Act… https://t.co/Oyy4b2S9GX pic.twitter.com/4Z2hZXFACW

— Mike Lee (@BasedMikeLee) February 18, 2026

The first argument is one that masquerades as prudence, in Kimberley Strassel’s social media response to Rachel Bovard’s Federalist piece highlighting the flaws in Strassel’s arguments against the resuscitation of the talking filibuster. After all but conceding that her technical understanding of what was at stake was fatally flawed, Strassel states, “My piece is a foretelling of how this will more likely play out — which spoils the party punch.” To wit, Strassel does not believe that Senate Republicans will be able to hold together to force debate, act in concert against Democratic amendments to preserve the underlying bill, make effective arguments in their own defense, and deliver to 50 votes in favor that the co-sponsorship of the SAVE America Act suggests exist.

That is a bold pronouncement against the leadership ability of Majority Leader John Thune, R-SD, and President Trump for a start. But all senators should be offended that it is an acceptable professional parlor game to count their noses before the debate has begun. “They can’t because they won’t” may or may not turn out to be true. Presented as a reason to not take action, however, it points to an unacknowledged part of Bovard’s argument that deserves more attention, as it seeks to remedy the core of the problem in the Senate.

Bovard writes, “A talking filibuster — using the Senate as it was designed — provides a catharsis that may, in fact, reduce the pressure to ‘nuke’ the filibuster as the country is able to witness the chamber openly deliberate and negotiate on the issues that matter to them.”

That catharsis could prove more vital to our institutions than the SAVE America Act itself. Even senators that never experienced a pre-nuclear Senate know that something is wrong in their chamber. They have powers that they are all but forbidden to use. Their policy ideas are shelved without their consent. They not only cannot solve the biggest problems of the day, but they often are also unable to even discuss them in a legislative context. Doing the textbook version of their jobs, with the public pressure to provide results, would produce that rarest of things in our contemporary politics — a bona fide legitimate result. I differ with many of my colleagues in the conservative movement about the overall efficacy and desirability of legislative debate in achieving our goals. However, a culture of debate undoubtedly has the potential to produce its own norms and scramble factional and partisan plans. For those who have made a cottage industry of warning in dread tones about the pernicious influence of populism and creeping impulses towards imperialism, this new way forward should have at least some appeal.

When a longtime veteran of the institution is pleading for this catharsis, for the return of relevance to the institution, it should not be lightly dismissed. The talking filibuster is worth trying. It is worth failure and success. It is worth a public accounting of whether this Senate, in this moment, for this American people, can deliver on its duties.

“emphasise the importance of the full recognition of trans women as women, noting that their inclusion is essential for the effectiveness of any gender-equality and anti-violence policies; call for recognition of and equal access for trans women to protection and support… pic.twitter.com/3HMXquue9D

— Genevieve Gluck (@WomenReadWomen) February 12, 2026

NOW – EU Parliament votes to accept a report, that calls for "the full recognition of trans women as women" as part of the EU priorities for the UN CSW on "women’s rights and gender equality." pic.twitter.com/mMLLLelfL8

— Disclose.tv (@disclosetv) February 12, 2026

There was no vote on whether a gender-confused woman is a man. There is a very simple reason for this. Trans ideology is a wholesale assault upon the feminine. When trans ideology metastasizes in policy and practice, women pay the price. As Kara Dansky boldly noted in her important book, The Abolition of Sex, “‘[T]ransgender’ is simply a made-up concept … used to justify all kinds of atrocities” against women. “It is, in effect a men’s rights movement intended to objectify women’s bodies and erase us as a class.” She correctly adds, “It is left-wing misogyny on steroids.”

The EU proved her right. But it gets even crazier.

Dem Änderungsantrag mit dem Inhalt, „dass nur biologische Frauen schwanger werden können“, stimmen 200 EU-Abgeordnete zu, während 233 ihn ablehnen, bei 107 Enthaltungen - damit abgelehnt. Ein Irrenhaus. pic.twitter.com/CppSyGmUjD

— Tomasz Froelich (@TomaszFroelich) February 13, 2026

Do not miss the irony that these two votes were cast as the EU’s priorities for the 70^th session on the UN Commission on the Status of Women. “Women” now meaning anything you want it to mean. The EU’s priority is erasing the meaning of women and human fertility across these 27 member countries and the United Nations.

This vote has no binding rule of law in any nation. But it will be highly influential in each of these nations and beyond. As investigative reporter Gerald Posner explains, “Language adopted at this stage often migrates — from guidance, to funding priorities, to regulatory expectation.” Posner explains:

When legislators decline to state who can become pregnant, they are not merely broadening inclusion. They are signaling that biology itself is negotiable in statutory language.

Indeed, a society that publicly demonstrates, then celebrates, its inability to define male and female, as well as the nature of human fertility, is certainly doing so much more. No one forgot what any seven-year-old well knows. Just like the abortion industrial complex, they celebrate because they are deliberately striking at the foundation of the goodness of ordered creation and life itself. You do not have to have a keen spiritual sense to appreciate the demonic nature of it all.

Subverting Life

“Women’s health care” and “gender-affirming care” both mutilate the body of the vulnerable young and thwart natural fertility. They issue from a spirit of death and deception. This is what last week’s EU vote was about and why the parliamentarians’ celebration of it properly strikes us as ghoulish. They redefined into oblivion that which gives life.

Women and girls throughout the world should be furious. Men should be as well, on their behalf. I am, for the feminine dignity of my wife and my four amazing daughters. It is now the official policy of the EU that woman no longer holds any objective meaning. It is a title to be fully claimed by any man. Their new understanding of equality demands it. As such, pregnancy has no feminine virtue or ontological truth. And do not miss that if a man can be a woman, manhood ceases to exist as well.

Trans ideology is a poison deliberately attacking that which is most true and beautiful in humanity. It leads only to death, confusion, and sterilization. Ask the detransitioner who now suffers from lies told under the deception of false compassion. It is diabolical.

Reject and Repudiate

This is why everything having to do with “trans” must be unapologetically rejected and repudiated. Comprehensively excised from human language and practice. No one should ever think they are being kind when using “gender pronouns.” They are the introductory catechism for this new pagan religion.

Always refuse to participate, and do so like you mean it. Your courage will be contagious and the lie will crumble away. Never feel compelled to pretend that being “trans” is something real and must be respected with compassion. It is not a medical or psychological diagnosis. It is a false ideology manifest only in an assertion. It is why LGBTQ identity mushroomed overnight. It is never compassionate to play along with a lie.

The EU Parliament has done great harm here. This is far more than progressive virtue signaling. We hear warnings of transhumanism. EU leaders have delivered this by defining away the objective reality of humanity as male and female. Its pernicious ripples will radiate beyond their Strasbourg auditorium, throughout the United Nations, and countless illiberal European nations, — into your community, which is already inundated with trans deception.

The only antidote is to stand against it, unmask its deception, and denounce it at every turn.