Commentary Culture Investigations

Jeremy Portnoy, RCI The El Paso Independent School District bought $3.1 million worth of touchscreen blackboards and computer servers that were not needed, and left them in storage for over…

Asra Nomani, Fox News A federal grand jury in Manhattan has issued subpoenas in a DOJ probe into alleged financial crimes by Marxist tech tycoon Neville Roy Singham.

The Boston Medical Center (BMC) was slapped with a federal complaint Tuesday alleging that it discriminated and retaliated against a Jewish Israeli intern for reporting antisemitic posters in shared office space, according to a copy of the complaint shared with the Washington Free Beacon.
The complaint, filed by the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law with the Department of Health and Human Services Office for Civil Rights (HHS OCR), alleges that the hospital allowed clinical staff to harass and ostracize the mental health counseling intern. It argues that the discrimination brought academic and professional ramifications.
On her first day at BMC in May 2025, the intern spotted posters at a colleague’s workspace bearing the slogans “They killed our babies” and “They stole our lands,” according to the complaint. The materials were visible from the intern’s desk.
When she reported them to her supervisors, one acknowledged that the posters might violate BMC policy. Most of the materials were gone when she returned from a trip to Israel about a month later, but she was physically separated from the rest of her clinical team, with one supervisor allegedly telling her it was to make sure that “everyone feels safe,” the complaint alleges. Her supervisors later told her that her colleagues formed an “alliance” against her in support of the clinician she reported, according to the complaint.
One colleague stopped communicating with her entirely, even failing to deliver patient briefings on days he covered her clients. That lapse, she said, impacted “not only my learning experience at my practicum site but also client care.”
The intern met with her supervisors in July 2025 to describe the retaliation. They told her BMC “expected” some members of her team to take issue with her Israeli identity and warned them in advance that she would be joining but reassured them that her application didn’t indicate that she held unacceptable political views on the conflict in Gaza.
She eventually brought her concerns to BMC’s human resources department. The office told her via email that they “addressed the concerns you raised” but didn’t specify how. She told her clinical training adviser she didn’t observe “any meaningful changes.”
She remained isolated through the remainder of her internship. The retaliation culminated in a negative final evaluation issued on September 5, which the Brandeis Center says blamed the intern for the breakdown in workplace relationships. She was rated poorly for her “ability to function as part of a team,” and the evaluation stated she would benefit from “expanding her trauma informed approach to include her collogues [sic] and staff, acknowledging that people bring their lifetime of experiences into the space which influences their interactions.”
Her academic program also received a poor rating for how well it prepared her in the “Social & Cultural Diversity” category, according to the complaint. BMC noted it “would appreciate if the program was more transparent about any problems that students are having with their academic training which likely (and has) carried over to their field placement.”
Her supervisor declined to meet with her, writing that there was nothing “additional for us to expand on beyond what was already shared.” The intern told her adviser that the evaluation left her feeling “very distraught,” particularly since she believed she handled the situation “with a high degree of professionalism.”
By April, the intern was facing broader consequences. She was forced to omit her BMC supervisors on a reference form for a prospective employer, even though the internship represented her primary clinical experience to date. One mentor at her academic program said word had already spread among faculty that she experienced a “cultural disagreement” at her internship and that she needed extra reassurance from colleagues.
BMC did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Brandeis Center CEO and chairman Kenneth Marcus said antisemitism in health care settings creates significant risks for the broader public.
“The growth of anti-Semitism in the healthcare sector is a hazard not only for healthcare providers, trainees, and students, but for everyone who depends on the American healthcare system,” he said in a statement. “When a student reports offensive conduct and is then isolated, marginalized, and penalized for speaking up, serious civil rights concerns are raised, as are serious concerns about the future of healthcare in this country.”
The Brandeis Center’s complaint comes as the Trump administration targets federally funded organizations that fail to rein in antisemitism. BMC receives tens of millions of dollars in federal grants and funding, including from HHS in 2025 and 2026.
Earlier this month, HHS OCR opened an investigation into the American Psychological Association after the Brandeis Center filed a complaint accusing the group of antisemitic discrimination by promoting practices such as “Decolonial Therapy,” which frames Zionism as a mental illness.
The Brandeis Center also filed a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission against the National Education Association—the largest teachers’ union in the country—alleging that the union allowed activists within the organization to harass Jewish members, including at its 2025 Representative Assembly where delegates aligned with anti-Israel advocacy physically positioned themselves near Jewish caucus members, shouted down Jewish participants, and created an atmosphere in which Jewish delegates reasonably feared retaliation and physical harm.
The post Boston Medical Center Accused of Isolating Israeli Intern To Make Sure ‘Everyone Feels Safe’ in Federal Antisemitism Complaint appeared first on .

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PicrylOur liberal friends believe they are the wave of the future. In fact, of course, they have been resisting the future since the day after they got rid of the absolute monarchs

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Book CoverJacob Siegel’s brand new book focuses on how rulers and elites use digital tools to calibrate information and control the masses.

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ChatGPTAmerica’s 250th is a great moment to stop and review some of our greatest hits.

Photo Credit:James Stuart, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Public DomainDemographic eclipse and cultural surrender in post-Christian Europe.

Rep. Ro Khanna (D., Calif.) has emerged as a potential contender for the Democratic presidential nomination while denouncing the ultra-rich who “hoard wealth and engage in financial speculation.” But the progressive, Silicon Valley congressman and his family live a life of staggering luxury, fueled by dynastic wealth they did not earn and protected by the same thicket of trusts, anonymous corporations, and foundations that Khanna condemns.
Khanna lives in a $6 million, 8,000-square-foot luxury home with a four-story elevator and so much premium marble that even the two laundry rooms have marble counters. The Northwest Washington, D.C., home is now for sale, as the Khanna family prepares to move to an even larger, more expensive house a few miles away in the Northern Virginia suburbs. Khanna’s two children, who are minors, have large ownership shares in three private golf clubs, a significant stake in a $65 billion wealth management firm, and investments in hedge funds that focus on distressed debt, of which Khanna has been critical. Khanna’s wife drives a $190,000 Range Rover she was so displeased with that she sued the dealer.
A Washington Free Beacon investigation into Khanna’s finances finds that the progressive truthteller’s lifestyle is funded by his wife, Ritu Ahuja Khanna, an heiress to her father’s Cleveland auto parts fortune. An analysis of Khanna’s financial disclosures reveals his gilded life is enriched by the same sort of investment vehicles that Khanna has said he has a “moral” duty to oppose and that Khanna’s family is a beneficiary of the “New Gilded Age” he condemns.
Khanna’s family wealth comes from his father in law, Monte Ahuja, an Indian-born, Cleveland auto parts magnate turned investor and philanthropist. Like many of the global ultra-rich with generational wealth, Ahuja has set up various trusts and other financial models to benefit his children and grandchildren. These complex financial structures are deliberately opaque, but Khanna, as a member of Congress, is legally required to disclose his family’s financial affairs to the public. This visibility, however, has been somewhat obscured by Khanna’s decision to file his financial disclosures in the old analog format, effectively rendering it immune to a thorough examination without the use of sophisticated data analysis tools.
In 2024, Khanna’s financial disclosures clocked in at 333 pages of non-text-searchable tables, listing over 3,000 individual assets owned by him, his wife, and his children, with each asset having ticked one of 13 available boxes corresponding to an asset valuation range. Put together, those assets are worth anywhere from $103 million to more than $340 million, according to a Free Beacon review. It’s possible that the net worth of Khanna’s nuclear family could far exceed $340 million. He reported a total of 10 assets held by his wife and two children—including the stakes they hold in three golf clubs—as simply being worth more than $1 million with no disclosed ceiling.
For his two young children, Khanna reported in 2024 they own between $26 million and more than $73 million in irrevocable trusts, a wealth transfer vehicle that could shield them from future inheritance taxes.
Khanna’s wife purchased the couple’s current Washington, D.C., home through one of her trusts in 2020 for $3.15 million, real estate records show. The house, which is located in an enclave of newly constructed luxury homes in Northwest D.C., is less than a mile from a private school for young children, which counted Khanna’s wife as a member of its parents association through 2023.
The Khannas put this D.C. home up for sale in June for more than $6 million, as they prepare to decamp for the wealthy D.C. suburb of McLean, Va., where the children are enrolled in an elite private school. Ahuja Khanna is identified as the chair of the school’s annual spring event, and her family’s private foundation donated $20,000 to the school in 2024.
Ahuja Khanna also has a seat on the large board of directors of Georgetown University, her alma mater, suggesting that the university hopes to bring in significant donations from her family.
Ahuja Khanna appears to have recently purchased a brand new custom-built home in McLean. A Virginia LLC managed by a partner at an elite Cleveland law firm—which has connections to the Ahuja family in Cleveland philanthropic circles—closed on the McLean house for about $10 million just two days before the Khannas put their D.C. home on the market. The selling agent for the Khannas’ D.C. home also happens to be the same buying agent for the McLean home, which is currently unoccupied.
Khanna and his wife won’t be lacking in comfort as they manage their move. In October 2024, Ahuja Khanna, who does not appear to have a conventional job, purchased a luxury Range Rover SUV for $190,000, which exceeds Khanna’s annual congressional salary of $174,000. Within a year of purchasing the vehicle, however, Ahuja Khanna alleged in a lawsuit filed in federal court that the car was an irreparable lemon, and sued for damages under the District of Columbia’s Lemon Law. She settled with Jaguar Land Rover of North America for an undisclosed sum in October, according to court records.
The incongruities between Khanna’s political platform and his lifestyle are among the most striking contradictions of any sitting member of Congress. He’s a vocal supporter of the California ballot initiative to impose a wealth tax on billionaires, saying the ultra-wealthy have a duty to give back some of their “unprecedented wealth” in the spirit of “shared prosperity” for the middle class. He has repeatedly boasted about standing up to the Silicon Valley billionaires in his congressional district, by many measures the wealthiest in the country, and recently made a show of standing up to Elon Musk, who had threatened to sue him after Khanna said Musk’s DOGE cuts had led to child deaths.
An analysis of Khanna’s public statements about wealth inequality and the sins of the rich shows that Khanna is careful to single out “billionaires” for criticism, rather than centimillionaires like his father in law Monte Ahuja. But while Ahuja is not a billionaire (there are fewer than 1,000 billionaires in the United States, and no billionaires in Congress), Khanna’s enormous family wealth is structured and managed in the very fashion he criticizes. Irrevocable trusts, such as the ones owned by Khanna’s children, shield beneficiaries from paying inheritance taxes, experts say.
Khanna is also one of the loudest advocates in support of banning members of Congress from trading individual stocks, saying the practice presents a specter of insider trading that has caused a “crisis of confidence right now in our democracy.” At the same time, however, Khanna holds the crown as the most prolific stock trader in Congress by a wide margin, with his disclosures showing that the trusts owned by his wife and children made over 4,100 individual trades totaling an estimated $53 million in 2025 alone. Khanna maintains he has never traded stocks and never will, telling the Political Wallet Substack page in May that he has “zero say” and “zero knowledge” of the trades being made by his wife’s trust, which was set up by his father in law prior to their marriage in 2015.
Khanna has also positioned himself as an opponent of hedge funds, saying in 2021 there was “visceral anger” over their role in propelling economic inequality in the United States. But Khanna, in his 2024 financial disclosure, reported that his wife and children, through their trusts, own positions in hedge funds including Silver Point Distressed Opportunity Fund, a Connecticut-based hedge fund that specializes in buying debt from struggling companies, typically at a steep discount. The fund manages $4.6 billion in assets and, as of June 2026, is closed to new investors.
The California Democrat’s wife and children also own minority stakes in MAI Capital Management, a behemoth wealth management firm based in Cleveland that services ultra-high net worth individuals and has more than $65 billion in assets under management. Two trusts—one for Khanna’s wife and another for his children—report owning more than $1 million worth of MAI Capital Management with no disclosed ceiling.
Monte Ahuja, the source of the Khanna family’s wealth, remains active in the philanthropic scene in Cleveland and in Naples, Fla.—a playground of the Midwest’s wealthiest snowbirds—where he and his wife have owned a sprawling, Gulf-facing penthouse condominium for more than 20 years that may now be worth as much as $30 million. Ahuja, an Indian immigrant, says he arrived in the United States in 1969 with just $12 in his pocket. In 1975, Ahuja founded Transtar, an automotive transmission distribution company. He sold the bulk of his stake in the company in 2005 to a pair of venture capital firms and used the proceeds to form MURA Holdings, a direct investment firm through which he bought companies with annual revenues of up to $100 million.
MURA Holdings now manages large portions of the assets held in the trusts for Khanna’s wife and children, including their stakes in MAI Capital Management and the Silver Point fund (MURA Holdings reportedly owns between 10 percent and 25 percent of MAI Capital Management).
ARECO LP, another fund managed by Khanna’s father in law, manages some other assets in the trusts for Khanna’s children, including a commercial property in Walton Hills, Ohio, worth $5.3 million where Transtar operates a retail establishment.
Within the Khanna children’s various trusts is their ownership interest in three Cleveland-area private golf clubs. Khanna reported his children own “over $1,000,000” in Barrington Golf Club in Aurora, Ohio, which charges new members an initiation fee of up to $30,000, according to records obtained by the Free Beacon. The children earned between $100,000 and $1 million in unearned income from their investment in Barrington in 2024, Khanna said in his financial disclosure that year.
The California Democrat’s children own another stake worth “over $1,000,000” in ARECO Golf, which owns Sand Ridge Golf Club near Chardon, Ohio, and Mayfield Country Club in South Euclid, Ohio—membership initiation fees at those two clubs run upward of $45,000. Khanna’s children earned another $100,000 to $1 million in unearned income from ARECO in 2024.
The golf club investments are just one of several ways that Monte Ahuja has ensured his grandchildren—and perhaps their children and grandchildren—will never need to worry about money. That is, unless wealth tax proposals such as the one his son in law is promoting actually go into effect. Regardless, Khanna’s father in law has said that golf investments are little more than a passion pursuit in his retirement. After he purchased the Sand Ridge and Mayfield golf clubs in 2018, Monte Ahuja told the press he acquired the clubs not to make money, but because he “loves the game of golf.”
Khanna’s office declined to comment.
The post ‘Ro’ Me the Money! How Progressive Class Warrior Ro Khanna Lives Like the Oligarchs He ‘Fights,’ With In-Home Elevator, $190K Range Rover, and Family-Owned Golf Courses. appeared first on .

It is not often that a report inadvertently and brutally exposes the left’s disregard for human life in service of their policy goals. But this report on the European heat wave does precisely that.

Watch the report in its entirety as aired on CBS Evening News on Monday, June 29th, 2026:

WATCH: CBS exposes European climate arrogance and steadfast refusal to adopt A/C in the face of a deadly heat wave,
TONY DOKOUPIL: We are launching a new series here tonight, something we are calling The Big Question- the first one inspired by our news of more than a thousand… pic.twitter.com/nhTiVJYrLM
— Jorge Bonilla (@BonillaJL) June 30, 2026

TONY DOKOUPIL: We are launching a new series here tonight, something we are calling The Big Question- the first one inspired by our news of more than a thousand heat-related deaths in Europe. The continent has more heat-related deaths per capita than anywhere else on the planet but in fact fewer hot days. So why is the heat in Europe so much deadlier than everywhere else? He is Leigh Kiniry with The Big Question.

LEIGH KINIRY: In Europe, there’s a perfect storm. The oldest population on any continent that’s warming the fastest. France’s record heat last week is linked to roughly 1000 deaths of mostly elderly.

INE VANDECASTEELE: All climate related impacts on hazards, heat is the biggest killer.

KINIRY: European officials are calling for change, but not the kind that may seem obvious.

Install air conditioning, especially for vulnerable people, and save lives. Why is that not a solution in Europe?

VANDECASTEELE: My honest response is I don’t think that should be the solution anywhere. In the longer term, what happens is installing more air conditioning actually emits more heat into our environment so it will actually increase the speed of warming.

KINIRY: It’s also more expensive. Energy prices are much higher in Europe. Governments find other ways to cool historic and densely populated cities. In Rome, wearable technology is distributed to monitor the elderly who are by far in the most danger. 

A recent survey in France said one in six people they surveyed said they’d rather suffer for the sake of the environment. Does that surprise you?

VANDECASTEELE: No. We’re not doing this for us. We’re doing this for the future generations.

KINIRY: Leigh Kiniry, CBS News, London.

The Big Obvious Answer to The Big Question is that Eurocrats refuse to allow the adoption of air conditioning across the Old Continent, even as thousands of people die of heat-related illnesses. Over a thousand dead across the CURRENT heat wave is staggering, which makes Eurocrat rhetoric more maddening.

This exchange is revelatory:

LEIGH KINIRY: A recent survey in France said one in six people they surveyed said they’d rather suffer for the sake of the environment. Does that surprise you?

INE VANDECASTEELE: No. We’re not doing this for us. We’re doing this for the future generations.

There seems to be a script, because a French rapid response account for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs posted the same thing:

We’re not banning A/C. We’re making sure future summers need it less. https://t.co/18cl2RpRtU
— French Response (@FrenchResponse) June 29, 2026
Meanwhile, thousands continue to die in furtherance of climate utopia. When explaining why the Europeans don’t adopt A/C, Kiniry cited higher energy prices. However, Kiniry fails to mention the staggering climate taxes levied on European energy. Additionally, Kiniry omits some of the auto-inflicted loss of capacity on the continent, such as the Germany’s decision to shut down their nuclear energy plants. That own-goal that left them reliant on foreign energy, which became prohibitively expensive at the outset of Russia’s war against Ukraine. Somehow, these facts get left off the reports. 

The report’s exposures of European climate policy as both callous and ineffective are not intentional. But they nonetheless perform a valuable service inasmuch as they expose their viewers to the logical conclusions of leftist policy- thousands dead so as not to disturb the climate.

 

U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio oversaw the signing of a security framework agreement between Israeli Ambassador to the U.S. Yechiel Leiter and Lebanon’s Ambassador Nada Hamadeh at the State Department in Washington on Friday, June 26. The agreement outlined a preliminary security framework for the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) to occupy “pilot zones” in southern Lebanon and begin dismantling Hezbollah under the oversight of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF).
The bilateral talks between the two ambassadors were initially established by Rubio after the U.S.-Iranian ceasefire in April as a separate discourse to ensure that Iran would not have a place at the negotiating table in Lebanon. The talks were nearly derailed last week when the US-Iran memorandum (MOU) — now being negotiated in Switzerland — linked the cessation of hostilities in Lebanon to the U.S. peace deal with Iran.
The U.S.-Iran MOU’s allowance for Iran to dictate Lebanese affairs infuriated officials in Jerusalem and Beirut. Leiter and Hamadeh showed up to the fifth round of talks at the State Department on Friday hardened and on the defensive — neither of them willing to allow Tehran’s strategic maneuvers or the U.S.’s appeasement in Switzerland to dictate the security of their respective countries.
Leiter noted that because of Rubio’s leadership, they were able to prevent any Iranian inclusion. “Iran is out, Hezbollah is out, and the road to peace between Israel and Lebanon is in,” Leiter said.
But while the U.S.-Iran MOU is still being negotiated in Switzerland, Tehran and its proxies in Lebanon are insistent on nullifying the Washington agreement and using it as leverage to derail any further peace deals. “There’s a lot of work ahead. We don’t in any way underestimate the difficulty of the task ahead, but we understand the importance of it,” Rubio said, calling this just the “beginning of the beginning.”
The Israel-Lebanon agreement permits Israeli forces to remain in the security zone they established in southern Lebanon after the Iranian war last March and calls for the establishment of two “pilot zones.” The IDF will withdraw from these zones and transfer the territory to the LAF for disarming Hezbollah. The pilot experiment will determine if the LAF can demonstrate the capabilities of dismantling Hezbollah and assuming the responsibility of security.
Israel insists on maintaining its security buffer zone to ensure that southern Lebanese villages do not give a haven to Hezbollah and put them within firing range of northern Israel. Israeli troops from the 36th Division and the Commando Brigade continue to operate north of the Litani River with operational control of the strategic Beaufort Ridge. The agreement also grants the IDF freedom of action to respond to “immediate and emerging threats” from Hezbollah.
Despite this historic moment, support for the agreement is divided among political factions within Israel and Lebanon.
Officials in Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government see this as a positive sign that Beirut is finally taking action to rid itself of Hezbollah and Iranian sponsorship. Others in Jerusalem are more skeptical, having endured decades of failed United Nations resolutions in the past that also mandated the Lebanese government and army to disarm Hezbollah, but to no avail.
In Washington, Hamadeh called the framework “the first step on the road to restoring Lebanese sovereignty and territorial integrity, securing a permanent and final cessation of hostilities, enabling our people to go back to their land and allowing all Lebanese to live in peace, security and prosperity.”
Beirut’s Maronite Christian Kataeb Party also expressed support for the agreement. “The Lebanese state has demonstrated that, when it negotiates on behalf of Lebanon and from its legitimate position, it is capable of securing the interests of the Lebanese people,” stated Kataeb’s representative in parliament, Samy Gemayel.
Lebanon’s President Joseph Aoun expressed his full support for implementing the agreement. Yet, with Hezbollah lawmakers and militants still deeply embedded in Beirut’s parliament and the ranks of the LAF, Aoun’s hands are essentially tied, giving Jerusalem reason to have little faith in diplomatic negotiations. “The state of Lebanon will not disarm Hezbollah,” stated Israel’s National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir. “Hezbollah ministers are members of the Lebanese government and Lebanon cannot be trusted to take Hezbollah’s weapons … only IDF soldiers will destroy Hezbollah — no one else will do it for us.”
Beirut’s parliament speaker and Hezbollah ally Nabih Berri called the agreement an “incitement to civil war” between Hezbollah and the LAF. From a legal standpoint, Hezbollah politicians claim that the agreement violates the Lebanese constitution, which they interpret as saying that Zionism (i.e., Israel) is a threat to human dignity and must be eliminated. This allows Hezbollah to position Aoun’s government as illegitimate and a puppet of Israel and the U.S. Hezbollah’s ally and fellow Iranian proxy in Yemen, the Houthis, stated that “the Lebanese people have the right to overthrow this puppet government by any means possible.”
Hezbollah’s political leadership insists that the only ceasefire framework must be the U.S.-Iran MOU, currently being negotiated in Switzerland. Point One of the MOU calls for a cessation of fighting on all fronts, including Lebanon, and a respect for Lebanese sovereignty. Iran is using this as leverage to enforce an immediate and complete withdrawal of Israeli troops from all Lebanese territory. They are also insisting on the full implementation of Point One as a prerequisite for moving forward in negotiating any long-term peace with the U.S.
Iran wants the Israeli-Hezbollah conflict in Lebanon inseparably linked to the U.S.-Iranian ceasefire, but Rubio managed to sever this umbilical cord by brokering a separate agreement between ambassadors in Washington. As Netanyahu said in a press conference on Saturday, the agreement in Washington is essentially telling Iran: “This is none of your business. You have no status here, no involvement, and no role. Not you, not Hezbollah, not any terror group.”
What makes this agreement different from all failed ceasefire resolutions in the past is the absence of a U.N. or international peacekeeping force and the allowance of Israeli ground troops to remain in southern Lebanon for security oversight. While France and Italy have proposed a new multinational force to replace U.N. peacekeepers in Lebanon (UNIFIL) and assist in the agreement, there has yet to be any ratification of this in the Washington framework. The new Israeli variable could be the beginning of a new era of Israeli-Lebanese military cooperation against Hezbollah and ultimately a test of its collaborative deterrent strength in diminishing Iran’s involvement in Lebanon.
READ MORE from Bennett Tucker:
Israel’s War Objectives Challenged by US-Iran Negotiations
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