Commentary Culture Investigations

John Murawski, RealClearInvestigations What is human sexuality? In Western societies, the traditional understanding long shared by religious authority, textbook biology, and public opinion is…

Artificial Intelligence has become so important it has dominated everyday news, garnering responses worldwide even from the Pope, some responses good and others less so.
This author has been warning for years that AI is a special threat to today’s philosophical conservatism. This was initially made clear in reviewing a book three years ago by former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, MIT Dean Daniel Huttenlocher, and Henry Kissinger, and clarified again a year later, using data evidence from formal studies.
The family is the source of the habits that we’re going to need to cultivate the next generation.
The American Enterprise Institute study testing large-language AI models was the most disturbing. The AI leaders OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, xAI, and DeepSeek were tested on how they would rate 26 prominent U.S. think tanks for accuracy on 12 criteria regarding their research quality, their institutional character, and their moral integrity. Center-Left tanks had the highest AI rated correct interpretative scores (3.9 of 5), Left and Center-Right tanks tied at 3.4, with Right AI accuracy scores trailing at 2.8. AEI’s evaluators concluded that the higher AI rating correlations for Left think tanks came from a bias within the AI models themselves, a conclusion somewhat conceded by Copilot 360 in referencing a MIT Press study.
My personal experience as a conservative scholar regularly searching AI responses to academic questions is that AI answers generally require many secondary questions to find serious conservative solutions. Without an extended series of specific references, searches do not identify books and articles I know exist and are available and relevant to the request.
Still, the basic AI problem is even more fundamental. AI is by its very nature backward-looking in time. Today’s conclusions meant to influence future action are exclusively based upon data from the past. Knowledge from the past may seem neutral in nature but AI models choose data from the “best” intellects. These data sources tend to be progressive analysts at Harvard, Yale, Princeton and company, from foundations like Gates, Open Society, Lilly, and Ford, and Left-leaning think tanks  generally. These are then interpreted favorably for consumption by the masses by the New York Times and the other elite mass media.
It was the philosopher Plato who taught that the “poets” — or we would say the intellectuals and those who popularize them — will always shape a culture and will rule by how they explain it to the masses. But the unique flaw of AI is that it only draws from past facts or past predictions to opine on solutions for future problems. And that past must be dominated by the sources the AI programmers consider the most valid — academic studies, government research, and so forth.
AI cannot rely on “forward facts” because they have not yet occurred. So all it can do is guess — and guesses for the future are simply guesses, AI or otherwise. With AI stocks recently hitting the lowest average values since April 2025, the market itself has begun to bring AI under some control. Yet, excessive control by government is the greater possibility, as Wall Street Journal conservative columnist Holman Jenkins has long feared, especially by the national government’s basically independent national intelligence community.
From a longer-term perspective, former conservative Senator and university president Ben Sasse has argued that an AI world is inevitable and “no matter what the illiberal Left or the increasingly illiberal” Right claim, the solution can’t be done with policy levers in Washington,” which by the subsidiarity principle he rightly claims represents the true conservative position.
There are optimistic scenarios, but Sasse argues that America today finds us in a new “civilizational-warping crisis of institutional decline,” of personal loneliness, of distrust for institutions and for neighbors. Until recently we lived in a world of measurable atoms but AI changes us into dealing with limitless bits. This will move us from a life of work to a life requiring much greater emotional balance and character development, only achievable by individual deep reading of serious books, through a new sense of hard work, and even engaging in technical sabbaths and world travel for broader understanding and social learning.
Sasse argues that the great divide in the future “will not be race, class, or income. It will be between people who master the tools of technology and those who outsource their affections and their habits to these tools and algorithms. The future will be awe-inspiring for the first group, and life will be miserable for the second.”
Most conservatives “grew up fearing the dystopian future of George Orwell, but it turns out the dystopian future of Aldous Huxley was much more likely.” In that AI dominated future world, “we face the tyranny of ubiquitous pleasure, of easy comfort — the soft despotism of ‘Brave New World,’ not the brutal authoritarianism of 1984.”
For most of us the challenge will start at home.
The family is the source of the habits that we’re going to need to cultivate the next generation. Nobody loves your kids as much as you do. Loves are local and creating the habits that foster the love of the good, the true, and the beautiful begins at home. The bad news of what I’m suggesting is that it’s deeply inconvenient. The good news is that parenting has always been inconvenient. It’s the ultimate inconvenience.
The general threat from an AI dominated world is to self-government, individual freedom, and limited national government power. Conservatives especially must take the AI challenge seriously as a fundamental threat that will require a serious and wholesale commitment to avoid that Brave New World future.
READ MORE from Donald Devine:
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Donald Devine is a senior scholar at the Fund for American Studies in Washington, D.C. He served as President Ronald Reagan’s civil service director during his first term in office. A former professor, he is the author of 11 books, including his most recent, The Enduring Tension: Capitalism and the Moral Order, Ronald Reagan’s Enduring Principles, and Thinking About Freedom and Tradition, and he is a frequent contributor to The American Spectator.

Honda just let it slip that the Civic Si (and its Acura-badged fraternal twin, the Integra A-Spec) will soon be automatic-only, like pretty much everything else.
“Due to evolving business conditions, production of the 1.5-liter turbocharged engine paired to the 6-speed manual transmission (6MT) will be paused at the conclusion of the 2026 model year,” reads a statement.
Italics added.
The manual-equipped Si was among the last holdouts … , probably because even if most people bought the automatic, the availability of the manual gave it a ‘halo.’
“Evolving business conditions” is Honda’s way of politely saying government regulations. Manual transmissions can’t be programmed to shift at the same ideal moment for scoring high on government fuel efficiency and emissions tests as automatics; in fact, they can’t be programmed at all. They are thus an uncontrolled variable — kind of like the individual. Individual variability is always regarded with the ol’ fish eye by the government precisely because it’s not under the government’s control. So the government emits regs that (effectively) punish that individual variability and reward uniformity.
This goes far beyond the disappearance of the manual transmission. New vehicles are becoming increasingly uniform in appearance as well, because individual variation in design is constrained by government safety regulations that function as a kind of hidden template. The result is that the cumulative effect of these rules is a fleet of vehicles that seem, almost inevitably, to have been designed to look alike.
Honda is also uncertain what the regs will be in the future — come 2027 — and it’s hard to set up “certain low-volume powertrain combinations” to comply with regs without knowing what compliance will require. “Although EPA has indicated its intent to revise the applicable standards, the final requirements have not yet been established,” Honda says. “Accordingly, Honda is maintaining its current production plans at this time.”
Meaning, sayonara sticks.
Of course, it’s also true there’s not much demand for manual-equipped vehicles anymore — but it can be credibly argued this is a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy; the result of so few manual-equipped new vehicles being available. People who never learn to drive stick are probably going to stick with automatic-equipped vehicles because that’s all they know how to drive. More specifically, because people tend to buy cars because they need to drive places, and what good is a car they’re not able to drive? It’s true they could learn — but how? On a brand-new car?
It was once true that most (or at least, a lot) of teenagers learned to drive a stick because the kinds of cars most teenagers had access to were economy cars and these always came standard with a stick. But economy cars no longer exist. Not in the new car market — and not for at least the past decade. They have been replaced by entry-level cars, all of which come standard with automatics (as well as AC, power windows, and locks). So — for at least the past decade — most new drivers learn to drive in an automatic car and for that reason never learn to drive a stick. The potential market for stick cars grows smaller and smaller.
In a very strange turn of events, the standard transmission — as manuals were once called, because that’s just what they usually were — has become a kind of luxury feature, by dint of being (typically) an option that’s often only available with an expensive trim. As a for-instance, the 2026 Toyota Tacoma I wrote about a couple of weeks ago is the only mid-size truck that even offers a manual and this option is only available in the TRD Sport with 4WD, which lists for $40,315 to start — or about $8k more than the base SR Taco. They’re also hard to find in inventory; you generally have to order (and wait for) one if you want the manual.
The Mazda Miata is pretty much the last new car that isn’t a very expensive car that still comes standard with a manual.
Cars like the Civic used to come standard with them — and not just the high-performance Si variant. Now the Civic comes standard with a CVT automatic, like most of the other once-economy cars. The manual-equipped Si was among the last holdouts, probably because even if most people bought the automatic, the availability of the manual gave it a halo, as they say in the car-selling business.
Now, Honda says this is not a cancellation but a pause — implying that the manual will return at some point in the future. But nothing specific has been said about that, which (to a cynic) suggests the “pause” will become permanent absent a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth sufficient to get Honda to reconsider. In either case, it’s likely to mean that the remaining inventory of manual-equipped 2026 Civics and Integras are going to cost more because dealers will be able to charge more now that the word is out that Honda won’t be making any more manual-equipped Civics or Integras (for this market, at least) after the end of this year.
Gather ye rosebuds — and third pedals — while ye may.
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Marco Rubio gunning for the ICC could take an object lesson from Trump’s learning curve. The longer he sought to make Tehran’s Mullahs and Mafiosi respect his MOM (Memorandum of Misunderstanding) the more he realised they were “scum” “liars” and “sick”
The Secretary of State has begun the sacred duty of dismantling the International Criminal Court. To make it succumb he must keep sneers from the lips of sour sceptics.
The directive is equally valid for the United Nations and craven diverse bodies, not forgetting The Hague. All were meant to make atrocities costly for monsters who commit or enable genocide among other crimes against humanity.
Could it be President Trump deftly realigning America’s allies and enemies?
“Meant to” is the operative term. In reality global bodies have played the shameless part of atrocity-enablers and abetters. A preeminent figure of this perfidy is the UN Secretary-General himself—António Guterres.
The Portuguese’s inbuilt revulsion for Jewish lives is free for the use of any terrorist group which wants to use it. Musing that “Oct. 7 did not happen in a vacuum,” Guterres as good as told Hamas to adopt that theme for talking points.
As enabler of terrorism, British barrister and disgraced ICC Prosecutor, Karim Khan isn’t much better. He stalled warrants of arrest for the masterminds behind Hamas: Mohammed Deif, Yahya Sinwar, and Ismail Haniyeh, until the mass murderers were safely deceased.
His arrest warrants for Israeli “warlords” conveyed their own point: Netanyahu and his war cabinet were as evil as the Oct. 7 perpetrators.
The ICC prosecutor, lately dismissed, was an ugly character.
For one thing, Khan was typical of the Israel-hating international lawyer who professes to act for the greatest good of humanity yet who covers for the greatest evil. Khan was not merely accused of serious sexual misconduct, but it is hard to contest his critics’ allegations that he sought political cover by pursuing arrest warrants against Israeli leaders—a move they argue shifted the conversation from his own conduct to one of the world’s most contentious geopolitical disputes.
In other words, after the ICC became increasingly viewed as a “kangaroo court” as allegations of Khan’s sexual misconduct surfaced, Khan targetted Israeli leaders to divert attention from his own criminal conduct.
Impulsive swings between humanitarianism and putting himself at the beck and call of barbarity was all in the day’s work of the accused sexual harrasser. Dismissed for praying on a staffer, Khan’s exploits discredited the ICC more than ever. His victim had no motive to invent such a  complaint.
Hence it came as no shock when ICC’s member states voted to remove the baddy. Khan was the first chief prosecutor to be removed from office. The scandal won’t simply die and let the embattled court go on in the merry old way.
And the winners will be? The dirt bag out of the picture won’t invalidate the arrest warrants he issued, but Netanyahu in particular and the Likud party in general will breathe easier going into the elections.
Of course the ICC Japanese President glorifies her court as a bastion of the international rule of law. Bastion! Consider the ruling her court made that its jurisdiction extends to “Palestine” by reason of it being a state party to the Rome Statute.
Observe the offending falsehood that there exists a state named “Palestine.” Relegating international law to a fun amateur league puts the ICC in sync with its enabling partner, the International Court of Justice.
All of this defies common sense. Why would the ICC gamble with its already shaky standing and credibility? Any self-respecting law professor would poke gaping holes in the “state of Palestine.”
There must be — as indeed there are — embedded drivers permitting such legal junk to pass muster. No one has better explained the whys and methods than Shany Mor. In his  perceptive article, “A Special Dictionary for Israel,” Mor cuts through what seems plain insanity to explain three drivers behind “thunderous intonations about international law.”
The first of them “deflects any suspicion of bias against Israel.” Emotional outbursts at Israel’s crass conduct in Gaza aren’t due to animus, so we are led to believe. They simply reflect “neutral applications of international law.”
The second and third functions go real deep.
“For violators of international law our dominant image of ‘war criminals’ and ‘international tribunals’ is, of course, the Nazis. Attaching the terminology to Israel’s every military action over the decades, speaks to the fantasy of hauling the Jews before some tribunal where their guilt can finally be established.”
A third driver is more pathological.
In the world of global activists, there is a near-theological devotion to the postulate that Israel is uniquely evil, standing in the way of global brotherhood, and that good people everywhere would see that clearly if networks of powerful people weren’t using their money and influence to distort the truth and silence critique. The only way to make this pathology sound like a reasoned political program is to resort to international law. The argument is: there are laws and Israel is violating them, therefore my consuming hatred of Israel is just an application of these higher principles. It is necessary to stick to this conceit, otherwise their obsessive pathology starts looking like, well, an obsessive pathology.”
The Manufacturing of ‘Genocide’
Such perverted motives are disturbing, and the UN is an ideal proving house to apply and test them. Forgive the contradiction in terms but in September of 2025 a “UN-backed independent commission” produced the result anticipated: Israel in its war on Gaza had committed genocide.
“Israeli authorities deliberately inflicted conditions of life on the Palestinians in Gaza calculated to destroy, in whole or in part, the Palestinians in Gaza, which is an underlying act of genocide.”
The Commision didn’t bother to reconcile their findings with Israel’s well-documented evacuation warnings, humanitarian corridors, historic aid deliveries, medical assistance to Palestinians, and precision targeting. What’s worse is that this dubious conclusion was reached after two long and fraught years of war: the case of genocide was brought by South Africa in late 2023. In a separate investigation on Israeli “criminal” conduct in Gaza, the ICC began investigating war crimes in March 2021 — well before the Palestinians committed the Oct. 7 atrocity.
Why the delay? Why, if genocide and starvation were genuine, did the UN, ICC, and ICJ take their leisurely time? After many years of killing and starving there wouldn’t be too many people left alive in the Gaza strip. And, come to think of it, what made Israel so tardy, if not outright slovenly, in committing genocide? The Israelis purportedly possess nuclear weapons, after all.
Without fake law fake charges inevitably flop. Just how bogus can the law that The Hague  courts rely on be? After all they are venerated institutions of justice.
The answer is, very bogus indeed. Take the ICJ’s landmark 2004 “Advisory Opinion” on the so called “wall” that Israel constructed to stop the Arafat-inspired spate of horrific suicide bomber attacks.
The court begins its argument like so:
“The territorial boundaries of the Mandate for Palestine were laid down by various instruments.” Keep the eyes peeled — in graduated steps Occupied Palestine will be conjured up from the Mandate for Palestine which Britain governed from 1923 to 1948.
Step by false step from Par 17 on, the hackneyed fake, “Occupied Palestinian Territory” takes the identity of the Mandate, as “laid down by various instruments.” Evidently Marco Rubio is gunning for a court of law of great cunning.
And now he has picked the weaponry he’ll employ. To reinforce the levers  for dismantling the ICC, Rubio has threatened not only stubborn member countries with prickly penalties, but non-state actors if they continue working with the court.
A rush of withdrawals by member countries will surely follow his threatened sanctions and travel bans. Venezuela lost no time taking evasive action by withdrawing its membership of the ICC.
What appears to be driving Washington is more ambitious than Rubio’s gut objection to the court posturing as a, “world tribunal with near-unlimited reach” and powers.
Could it be President Trump deftly realigning America’s allies and enemies? Taking out a meddling international court would give a project like that a decisive shot in the arm.
READ MORE from Steve Apfel:
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Steve Apfel was a business economist, founder and director of the School of Management Accounting, who now writes full time. As a veteran authority on anti-Zionism his 2012 book, Hadrian’s Echo: the why and wherefores of Israel’s Critics was acclaimed by top Middle East scholars. 
 

This past December, my 14-year-old son requested a flagpole for Christmas so he could fly the American flag for the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. My profession for nearly three decades has been to teach American history. Needless to say then, that our family’s June 2026 trip to Washington D.C. had the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History front and center on our itinerary. Successfully appealing to our sensibilities would be like “shooting fish in a barrel” for the museum’s curators. However, upon arrival, my son and I discovered that as patriotic white Christian males we were actually the fish being shot.
In 1984, the Reagan administration published A Nation at Risk, which famously noted: “If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war.” The report tragically acknowledged that we had done this to ourselves, having squandered the gains made in the wake of the Sputnik challenge. It lamented that we had been, “committing an act of unthinking, unilateral educational disarmament.”
The Smithsonian Institution is provided with over a billion dollars of taxpayer money each year and the museum’s leadership … is openly engaged in using history to tear down the republic.
Now, 42 years later, along with the fireworks and picnics celebrating Independence Day, July 4th marked the publication of another crucial government report on education—Saving America’s Story: How Ideological Capture at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History Erases Our Heritage. It correctly raises the alarm over another red menace to the nation. Ironically, having triumphed in the Cold War we are now inexplicably facing a Marxist threat from within. Instead of educational disarmament, we are now turning our instructive guns on ourselves in an act of cultural suicide.
Like public schools, the public museums’ job is to create, support, and foster our (re)public. As such, as our nation celebrates its 250th birthday, one would expect its own national history museum to lead the revelry over life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Likewise, that it would foster gratitude for the men who pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor so that we might live blessed with liberty. One would think the bravery, sacrifice, and faith of the families who tamed the land and who expanded freedom across the globe inspired by duty and calling might get a nod of appreciation. Ultimately, one would expect and hope that a spirit of gratitude for the country would be fostered at every turn and display. Alas, one expecting that of the Smithsonian will be sorely mistaken.
Instead, the NMAH Interpretative Plan’s prime directive is to be “relevant” by focusing every topic and display to the “core issues of our time.” These issues being (1) “race and identity”; (2) “gender and sexuality”; (3) “environmental change”; (4) “immigration and migrations”; (5) “economic inequality”; (6) “technological change”; and (7) “nationalism and globalism.”
I do not think I need to explain that these codewords mean indoctrinating one extremist perspective; any doubters can peruse the 162-page report for the evidence. The fact is that, as the Saving America’s Story report notes, “the Museum purposely presents America as a problematic country irredeemably conceived, founded by deeply flawed men, and still operating today as an instrument of systemic racism and oppression.”
Naturally, this official indoctrination agenda makes every display repetitive and explains bizarre anomalies such as why even in the popular Entertainment Nation exhibit one cannot find memorabilia of the biggest icons of the 20th century such as John Wayne or Elvis Presley, though visitors do learn about “a bisexual blues singer, a lesbian actress, a sexually-liberated film star, an LGBTQ ‘icon,’ a lesbian TV star, a gay major league baseball player, and a queer women’s soccer player” as well as the assertion that Mickey Mouse represents “vestiges of longstanding traditions of blackface minstrelsy.”
Admittedly, our visit to the Smithsonian failed to turn my patriotic son into a woke Marxist advocate. Thus, some will undoubtedly conclude “no harm, no foul.” But this discounts the tremendous opportunity cost, as my son did not walk away from the visit inspired or informed either. Sending away patrons disgusted and discouraged is not a successful museum plan, particularly one dedicated by President Lyndon Johnson to presenting America’s iconic artifacts in order “to foster patriotism.”
Likewise, some will just dismiss the concern since they didn’t plan to visit anyway or will just say, “if you don’t like it, don’t go.” However, this ostrich approach ignores the daily line up of school buses bringing hundreds of thousands of American schoolchildren each year through the Smithsonian’s doors. Likewise, it fails to recognize the enormous influence the Smithsonian Institute wields over education nationwide.
The Smithsonian Institution is provided with over a billion dollars of American taxpayer money each year and the museum’s leadership, as thoroughly documented in this report, is openly engaged in using history to tear down the republic. As the Saving America’s Story report concludes,

As it stands today, it would benefit most Americans, especially parents bringing their children for a tour, if the Smithsonian’s flagship history museum had a label at every entrance that reads: “Warning: the exhibits in this museum were prepared by people who don’t want you to love your country.”

The Trump administration, like Reagan’s before, has done the country a tremendous service by documenting the educational catastrophe ongoing in the nation. Likewise, members of Congress such as Texas’ Brandon Gill are rightly calling the museum’s curators for public explanations in Congressional hearings. Needlessly, we are again a nation at risk, with the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History representing the tip of a Marxist educational spear pointed at the heart of America.
Reports and questions are the first necessary steps in fixing the problem. With knowledge though must come action, so I hope this report will rally parents and taxpayers across the country to demand public educational institutions fulfill their duty so that our children’s children can enjoy another 250 years of the American dream.
READ MORE: 
How Schools Made Gen Z Weaker
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The New York Times profiles Reihan Salam, head of the Manhattan Institute.

Screenshot via CBS/Snapstream

Wednesday’s CBS Mornings spent seven minutes and 18 seconds previewing the Senate Homeland Security Committee hearing by defending Dr. Tony Fauci on everything from closing schools to gain-of-function research in Wuhan, China, to Fauci dwelling on his stardom in 2020.All the while, accountability or admission of even a modicum of mistakes from the pandemic were nowhere to be found.Fill-in co-host Natalie Morales set it all up this way:Now to Capitol Hill where we could see an explosive hearing today when Dr. Anthony Fauci appears in front of a Senate committee. He will face questions about the origin and handling of the COVID pandemic. Senator Rand Paul released more an a thousand pages of revealing journal entries from Fauci. They detail Fauci’s relationship with President Trump and how he apparently reveled in his own fame.Congressional correspondent Caitlin Huey-Burns colored the perception of the hearing by saying Committee Chairman Rand Paul (R-KY) “has long been a Fauci critic” and has “a history of contentious debate” with the former longtime NIH official.

First, Caitlin Huey-Burns insisted Fauci has been open to the lab-leak theory all along, and the diaries from “long…Fauci critic” only supposedly showed Fauci “apparently reveled in his own fame”Caitlin Huey-Burns only conceded in a throwaway line that “many, including… pic.twitter.com/ucppxk8pIh— Curtis Houck (@CurtisHouck) July 29, 2026

Huey-Burns joined ABC and NBC in suggesting Fauci has always been open to the lab-leak theory (click “expand”):HUEY-BURNS: Six years after the COVID-19 pandemic started, questions still swirl over where the virus actually came from. In the thousands of diary entries from his time leading the government’s response, Dr. Anthony Fauci recounted the debate over how it all started. In an entry in late January of 2020, Fauci referred to a wet market in Wuhan, China, writing, “now we know the market was not the source, it was the amplifier. Having said that, somewhere the virus jumped from animals to humans.” In May of 2021, Fauci addressed questions about the theory the virus leaked from a lab, writing, “the very highly likelihood is that the virus originated naturally, but adding, no one is 100% certain of the origin, including me, so I am calling for a thorough investigation.” Something Fauci echoed that same month publicly.FAUCI [on 05/25/21]: Many of us feel that it is more likely that this is a natural occurrence, as has happened with SARS-CoV-1, where it goes from an animal reservoir to a human, but we don’t know 100 percent the answer to that.HUEY-BURNS: Republican Senator Rand Paul says Fauci suppressed the lab-leak theory and alleges that money from the National Institutes of Health grant funded research to make viruses more transmissible at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the same lab where he claims COVID-19 originated.Only at the end did Huey-Burns deliver as a throwaway that “many, including President Trump…argued that his COVID policies were too strict, especially when it came to masking and school closures.”Perhaps most insidious was the next block with CBS News medical contributor and Biden-Harris transition team member, Dr. Celine Gounder.Prompted to explain gain-of-function research, Gounder had the gall to tout its necessity under the guise of needing to play god to ensure effective treatments:

Then, CBS News medical contributor and Biden-Harris transition official Dr. Celine Gounder DEFENDS gain-of-function research as vital for public health and national security, and there’s no way to hold Fauci responsible for what she implied were pennies on the dollar to the Wuhan… pic.twitter.com/RzOSUQ51ZH— Curtis Houck (@CurtisHouck) July 29, 2026

When we have new vaccines every year, we’re trying to figure out: Is COVID itself becoming more infectious, more virulent, and how do you have a vaccine that addresses that? And so, gain-of-function research is you’re trying to anticipate what’s going to happen naturally — you’re anticipating in the lab — and you are developing vaccines, and anti-virals, and other countermeasures for what we anticipate may happen.Thus, she declared, letting virologists around the world — including in communist China — “is an important tool in terms of keeping ahead of things.”In other words, nothing went wrong here!As for Fauci’s culpability in funding the Wuhan Institute of Virology, Gounder was obtuse in lodging a logical fallacy.“Dr. Fauci was the head of the National Institutes for Allergies and Infectious Diseases for about 40 years. Over that time, funded many, many different grants. We’re talking about $600,000 between 2014 and 2019, so about $100,000 a year we are talking about here. That’s — what? — a couple people you might have been able to fund with that. Does the CEO of this company know about three people paid $50,000 a year,” she scoffed.After making that point, she threw a hand up in disgust.Next, Gounder asserted Fauci had nothing to do with the massive, long-term school closures.

Next, CBS’s Gounder said governors, teachers unions, and school boards were the ones who closed down the schools and kept them closed for as long as they did, not Fauci.In other words, CBS’s medical contributor wants you to believe Fauci had little to nothing to do with what… pic.twitter.com/kqR7SCihgH— Curtis Houck (@CurtisHouck) July 29, 2026

Specifically, she said that, even though “Fauci was the most recognizable face of the COVID pandemic in terms of expertise and providing guidance,” “he had no legal authority to act” like “school boards, governors, [and] teachers unions.”Again, Gounder was deliberately obtuse. While the legal authority did rest with state and local officials, it’s preposterous to claim these officials were any more than lemmings going over the cliff because Fauci told them to.And, for states that did reopen (ask Florida and Georgia), Fauci menacingly came down with the rest of the liberal press in shaming them as mass killers.For example, here he was in September 2020 when Florida eased many of its already-lax restrictions:

Dr. Fauci scolds Florida for re-opening society: “Very concerning to me … Because when you’re dealing with community spread & you have the congregate setting where people get together particularly without masks you’re asking for trouble. Now is the time to double down” pic.twitter.com/u0vJUbZh1z— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) September 28, 2020

The third topic for Gounder to spin and explain away was Fauci’s obsession with his fame.Featured co-host Vladimir Duthiers set up well:There is an awareness in reading the public diaries that he is very aware of his own public profile. So one of the risks, as you know, of celebrity in politics is people start making decisions with an eye towards the camera. Does that happen in medicine when a public health leader is being lauded on camera? Does that influence the way they make decisions or recommendations?Instead of taking this opportunity to even lightly criticize Fauci, Gounder suggested the real conclusion from all his mentions of hobnobbing was illustrating “the pressure” he faced, along with “the harassment, and death threats, and what that led to in terms of security, so that’s actually most of his comments about the fame.”

Next, Gounder argued the diaries actually proved Tony Fauci was NOT reveling in his newfound celebrity during the pandemic, but rather uncomfortable facing so much “pressure” as well as “harassment and death threats.”But even so, she added, who DOESN’T like to meet famous… pic.twitter.com/6EpB0SY0DU— Curtis Houck (@CurtisHouck) July 29, 2026

To the approval of Morales, she and Burleson argued who wouldn’t have been swept up or been enamored by him (click “expand”):GOUNDER: Who here has not taken a selfie with a celebrity who has been here in the studio?MORALES: Right.GOUNDER: I’m going to say it’s basically everybody.MORALES: Everybody, right. Yes, right.BURLESON: It’s human nature to lean into the limelight, and he had it.GOUNDER: He had it. But if you look at the preponderance of his comments, most of them are actually concerns about this is making me really uncomfortable —MORALES: Aww.GOUNDER: — I’m really uneasy, this is leading to security issues. It’s — you know, the occasional comment about Barbra Streisand is not the headline here.They concluded with one last act of unrepentance, masquerading as a pity party for the “public health” profession.Morales put the ball on the tee for Gounder by fretting the COVID debate has “rage[d] on for six years now” and “become somewhat political theater” that’s had an “impact…on our public health system.”

The ‘CBS Mornings’ coverage concluded with fill-in co-host Natalie Morales fretting the COVID debate has “rage[d] on for six years now” and “become somewhat political threater” that’s had an “impact…on our public health system.”Gounder replied that, because of the attacks on… pic.twitter.com/LBx36X0CCp— Curtis Houck (@CurtisHouck) July 29, 2026

“Oh, public health is devastated, and the massive budget cuts — we have multiple outbreaks right now, cyclospora, et cetera, this is very much a reflection, and it’s just the beginning,” Gounder declared, channeling her inner Mr. Burns. To see the relevant CBS transcript from July 29, click here.

The lawyer representing COVID czar Dr. Anthony Fauci who had to be removed by security from Wednesday’s Senate hearing has a legacy of representing controversial figures.The attorney, identified as attorney David Schertler, was escorted out of the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee when insisted on speaking and sitting in an unauthorized area, despite repeated admonishments and warnings by Committee Chairman Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.).Chairman Paul repeatedly told Schertler that he was not recognized to speak at the hearing, that he could not testify on Fauci’s behalf after the doctor invoked the Fifth Amendment because of the threat of self-incrimination. Paul also repeatedly told the attorney that he needed to sit in the row behind Fauci, instead of next to him.“This is the way Anthony Fauci wants to be remembered, for a lawyer not listening to the rules,” Chairman Paul noted.”You basically don’t call him unless you’re in deep s**t,” a veteran D.C. attorney, who represents politically connected clients, told The Washington Free Beacon in September of 2023 when Schertler was hired to represent then-Senator Bob Menendez (D-NJ) in a high-profile criminal trial. As Free Beacon recalled, Schertler has a propensity to represent criminally-charged “elite” from criminal charges:“Considered one of the best criminal defense attorneys in the country, David Schertler has represented all walks of elite life: an NFL player caught with a gun, military officials involved in shady lobbying, a high-profile murder suspect. Now, Schertler represents Menendez’s campaign and his wife, the subjects of a multiyear Justice Department probe.”Despite retaining Schertler as counsel, Menendez was convicted on 16 federal felony counts including bribery, extortion, obstruction of justice, and acting as a foreign agent for Egypt – and sentenced to 11 years in prison and permanently barred from holding public office in New Jersey.When he was called to testify in Congress in 2025 regarding a potential cover-up of former President Joe Biden’s mental decline while in office, Biden’s White House Physician, Dr. Kevin O’Connor, also hired Schertler.Like Fauci, Dr. O’Connor also refused to voluntarily appear before Congress and invoked the Fifth Amendment to avoid answering any questions when he was compelled to appear.In the days before the House Oversight Committee hearing, Schertler unsuccessfully tried to have the July 9, 2025 hearing cancelled, or at least postponed, on the basis of doctor-client confidentiality.In his June 5, 2025 subpoena of O’Connor, House Oversight Chairman James Comer (R-KY) noted that issues of doctor-patient privilege “lack merit” because the American Medical Association’s code of ethics is not part of federal law.Unlike Dr. O’Connor, Dr. Fauci enjoys a blanket pardon by President Biden for all potential crimes committed while in office – and he appears to need it, Rep. Comer told Fox News on Tuesday:“We now know why President Biden gave a blanket pardon to Dr. Fauci. While obsessing about his own fame, Dr. Fauci wasn’t truthful with the American people about the origins of COVID and advised schools to be closed.”Excerpts from Dr. Fauci’s diary released by Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) on Saturday appear to show that the Fauci-promoted origin theory of COVID, that it came from a Wuhan, China wet market, was not true.  Specifically, Paul cited an entry from January 26, 2020 in which Fauci admitted that the market was not the source of the virus.

At least 17 law firms have dropped out of a prestigious internship program that allegedly excluded white applicants, cutting the program’s enrollment in half as it faces a federal probe.
The defections from Sponsors for Educational Opportunity (SEO), a nonprofit that places “underrepresented” students at elite law firms, came after the program and 44 participating firms were hit by a discrimination complaint filed with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), which opened an investigation last year.
In “position statements” submitted to the agency, 17 of those firms indicated that they no longer participate in the SEO Law Fellowship. The EEOC shared the firms’ statements with Americans for Equal Opportunity, the nonprofit behind the complaint, which provided the Washington Free Beacon with a list of firms that jumped ship, including Kirkland & Ellis, Gibson Dunn, Davis Polk, and Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom.
With fewer participating firms, the fellowship has been forced to downsize. It accepted just 58 fellows in 2026, down from 104 fellows the previous year, according to a LinkedIn post from a current fellow and internal data reviewed by the Free Beacon.
The decrease underscores the degree to which federal pressure has weakened diversity initiatives throughout Big Law, forcing firms to abandon or at least conceal their race-based hiring practices.
Several firms disavowed DEI as part of settlement agreements with the Trump administration, while others quietly removed race-conscious language from their websites and dismantled race-based affinity groups.
SEO itself purged any reference to race from its public-facing materials, which no longer use terms like “underrepresented” or even “underserved.” But according to Americans for Equal Opportunity, the fellowship is still using racial preferences.
The group filed a new charge with the EEOC this month alleging that SEO has continued to discriminate based on “race (White), color, national origin (American), religion (Christian), and sex (sexual orientation—heterosexual), in violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.” The president of Americans for Equal Opportunity, Clegg Ivey, also alleged that the program “added new preferences” for applicants who “identify as Muslim or Middle Eastern,” though that allegation does not appear in the EEOC filing. The group has characterized SEO as “the largest discriminatory pipeline program in the legal profession” and argued it violates Title VII.
The EEOC is taking those allegations seriously. It has launched a “pattern or practice” investigation into SEO, a rare and resource-intensive move reserved for allegations of systemic discrimination, according to a press release from Americans for Equal Opportunity.
Such probes made up less than 0.45 percent of the EEOC’s caseload in 2023. The agency defines systemic cases as “pattern or practice, policy and/or class cases where the discrimination has a broad impact on an industry, profession, company or geographic location.”
“Applicants should be judged as individuals,” Ivey said. “Equal opportunity means equal opportunity for everyone.”
Sponsors for Educational Opportunity declined to comment.
The 17 firms that dropped out of the program are as follows:
Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld LLP
Clifford Chance LLP
Davis Polk & Wardwell LLP
Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher LLP
Goodwin Procter LLP
Herbert Smith Freehills Kramer LLP (formerly known as Kramer Levin)
Hogan Lovells Cadwalader US LLP (formerly known as Hogan Lovells US LLP)
Jenner & Block LLP
Kirkland & Ellis LLP
Mayer Brown LLP
McDermott Will & Schulte LLP
Milbank LLP
Ropes & Gray LLP
Sidley Austin LLP
Simpson Thacher & Bartlett LLP
Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom LLP
Weil, Gotshal & Manges LLP
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The Associated Press says “Public executions are not uncommon in Iran.” The watchdog group Iran Human Rights counted 459 such executions between 2008 and 2025, frequently featuring large audiences, including children. United Against Nuclear Iran reports that Iran “regularly carries out executions in public. In many of these cases, the victim is publicly hanged from a construction crane, an especially slow and painful execution method.” And that doesn’t even mention the extrajudicial killings of pro-democracy protesters. President Trump has said between 30,000 and 52,000 of them were murdered this year by the Iranian regime, many shot in the forehead.
So how did the New York Times spin its own news article on two recent executions? With the absurd, false claim that “Iran has long been one of the world’s most frequent users of capital punishment, but public executions are extremely rare.”
The New York Times describes public executions in Iran as “extremely rare.”
The article appeared under a joint byline. Leily Nikounazar is, according to her LinkedIn profile, a 2010 graduate of “Tehran’s Faculty of News.” Sanjana Varghese’s New York Times bio says she has freelanced for Al Jazeera, the Qatar-owned outlet that has harbored Hamas and Islamic Jihad terrorists. Her main job before the New York Times was at Airwars, which is funded by anti-Israel nonprofits including George Soros’s Open Society Foundations and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund. Neither Nikounazar nor Varghese, who lives in London but “grew up between Canada and Bahrain,” immediately returned my queries about whether they planned a correction.
Adverbs are frequently trouble in news articles. The Times might have gotten away with calling public executions unusual or rare. But “extremely rare” pushes the envelope in a way that makes the Times’ extremely slanted coverage extremely obvious.
Maybe the Times Iran team is attempting to ingratiate itself in hopes of obtaining permission to make a minder-accompanied trip to the Islamic Republic to cover the eventual funeral of Mojtaba Khamenei, the same way it covered the funeral this month of Ali Khamenei with two Times video journalists, a photographer, and a correspondent. (“We had two handlers with us throughout the trip … he would tell us we could not photograph certain places or say we couldn’t go to certain places without explaining why. … Iran contains multitudes. … I came away wishing we had more time and opportunity to document that complexity,” Times Middle East correspondent Abdi Latif Dahir said earlier this month.)
In the past, the New York Times has been more accurate about the issue. The Times itself reported in 2012: “Executions are very public events in Iran, with authorities setting up building cranes at the scene of the crime or on the central square of the city where the crime took place. … The convicted criminal is often brought in around dusk, arriving at the square where a crane or scaffolding with ropes and nooses await him. Families, both of the victim and the convicted cheer and wail, often there are last minute pleas for a pardon. An Islamic judge, always present at the scene, will also officially ask the family of the victim for forgiveness. Usually crowds try to influence such decisions by calling for forgiveness or for the execution to take place.”
In 2012, the Times went so far as to publish a slideshow of the pictures of the hangings, preceded by a disclaimer or trigger warning: “Please note that this slideshow includes some graphic images.”
There was a pause in public executions during the COVID pandemic, but that had more to do with an attempt to avoid mass gatherings than with any liberalization of Iranian practices. An Iranian judge in 2008 banned public executions and restricted news coverage, but the “ban,” like the so-called fatwa against nuclear weapons, was more public relations than reality, and it came with enough exceptions to drive a portable gallows through.
The annual report by Iran Human Rights on the death penalty in Iran notes that “the number of public executions increased dramatically after 2010, reaching an annual average of 50 to 60 between 2011-2015.”
In 2025, the report says, “11 executions were carried out in public spaces, where children were amongst the spectators, a practice intended to spread fear and reinforce the state’s policy of intimidation.”
A graphic from Iran Human Rights 2025 report on the death penalty in Iran. It doesn’t include extrajudicial killings by the government.
According to the report, among the crimes punishable by the death penalty under Iran’s Islamic law are incest, rape, adultery, consensual gay sex, apostasy, insulting the prophet, and tafkhiz, or intercrural sex where the “active party” is non-Muslim and the “passive party” is Muslim. Approved execution methods include “hanging, firing squads, crucifixion and stoning.”
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