INVESTIGATIONS

We thought the Supreme Court had finally purged anti-religious discrimination from Establishment Clause jurisprudence. After years of confusion — conflating the ban on state-sponsored religion with an invented mandate to scrub faith from public life — the Court, through a series of rulings on religious schools and public funding, had restored sanity. It returned the law to its pre-Warren era understanding: Equal treatment of religion does not violate the Constitution.

Yet, here we are again.

Those who claim that equal treatment of religion violates the Establishment Clause are the ones betraying its meaning.

In a move that stunned observers, Oklahoma’s own Republican Attorney General Gentner Drummond and the state supreme court now argue that states cannot recognize religious charter schools.

On Wednesday, the U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Oklahoma Statewide Charter School Board v. Drummond. The case centers on St. Isidore, a Catholic online school seeking to join Oklahoma’s charter school system. Drummond contends the school’s religious affiliation disqualifies it. He sued the state charter board — a move usually made by the ACLU or militant secularist groups.

The Oklahoma Supreme Court sided with him. The court claimed that granting charter status to a Catholic school would violate the First Amendment by effectively establishing Catholicism as a state religion. Justices labeled charter schools “state actors” and argued that any religious affiliation disqualifies a school from public recognition.

This logic turns the First Amendment on its head. The Constitution does not require hostility toward religion. It requires neutrality. Denying a religious school access to a public benefit — simply because it is religious — violates precedent.

Oklahoma’s Charter Schools Act permits any “private college or university, private person, or private organization” to apply for state funding to open a charter school. Excluding religious applicants contradicts not one but three major Supreme Court rulings.

In Trinity Lutheran Church of Columbia Inc v. Comer (2017), the court ruled that excluding a religious school from a public benefit for which it is otherwise qualified “solely because it is a church” is “odious to our Constitution.” That case involved a grant for playground resurfacing. If states can’t deny rubber mulch, they can’t deny full charter status.

In Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue (2020), a 5-4 majority held that state constitutions barring aid to religious institutions over secular ones violates the Free Exercise Clause. Public benefits, the Chief Justice John Roberts emphasized, cannot be denied “solely because of the religious character of the schools.”

Then came Carson v. Makin (2022), where Maine tried to distinguish between religious status and religious use, barring religious schools from voucher funds. The court rejected the distinction. Roberts, writing again for the majority, ruled that the program “operates to identify and exclude otherwise eligible schools on the basis of their religious exercise.” He warned that attempts to judge how a religious school carries out its mission invite unconstitutional state entanglement.

So how, after such ironclad precedent, do we find a Republican state attorney general and a court in a state Trump carried in every county ruling that religious schools can’t even apply for public funding?

The answer lies in years of lukewarm Republican control. These are Republicans in name only, who blocked judicial reform and refused to challenge activist courts. Now, Drummond wants a promotion. He’s announced his run for governor after already overruling the state education superintendent’s decision to ban pornography in public libraries.

This case reveals a larger pattern. Courts act as a one-way ratchet. Even after strong Supreme Court rulings, liberal lower courts defy precedent. They delay, split hairs, and distinguish without merit. The high court may reverse Oklahoma, but its rulings rarely secure lasting victories.

And the irony? Those who claim that equal treatment of religion violates the Establishment Clause are the ones betraying its meaning.

During the House debate on the First Amendment in 1789, James Madison explained: “Congress should not establish a religion, and enforce the legal observation of it by law, nor compel men to worship God in any manner contrary to their conscience.”

That principle — freedom of conscience without coercion — shaped the American experiment. Far from excluding religion, the founders assumed its influence. As Alexis de Tocqueville wrote, “The Americans combine the notions of religion and liberty so intimately in their minds, that it is impossible to make them conceive of one without the other.” He added that politics and religion formed an “alliance which has never been dissolved.”

It’s time for the Supreme Court to reaffirm that alliance — clearly, decisively, and without leaving room for lower courts to ignore. And in Oklahoma, it’s time to elect Republicans who still believe the Bible belongs in the Bible Belt.

Amid all the turmoil involving Harvard — most recently, the Trump administration withholding federal grants and making it the poster child for academic rot — the poison Ivy League’s liquidity problem is worsening. In the past two months, Harvard has turned to the bond markets twice to quickly raise over $1 billion in cash. This follows a scramble in 2024 to raise $1.5 billion through similar bond offerings, which still fell short of its initial target.

Revulsion to Harvard’s institutional wokeness and its embrace of open anti-Semitism by faculty and students was already causing a financial squeeze. As I wrote in November: “Despite an endowment exceeding $50 billion, Harvard had to expedite bond offerings earlier this year to quickly raise $1.6 billion in cash.” Harvard was already in a cash crunch before President Donald Trump announced he was turning off the spigot of federal grants.

Harvard cannot afford to also lose its revenue stream from the federal government — but it’s going to.

But why is Harvard facing a liquidity crisis if its endowment is truly worth $53 billion as reported? Per published reports as of 2024, only about 20% of Harvard’s endowment is held in liquid assets such as cash, stocks, and bonds. The remaining 80% is tied up in illiquid investments — 71% in private equity and hedge funds and another 8% in real estate and other alternative assets.

While the endowment appears impressive on paper, it produces relatively little usable cash for Harvard — roughly $2 billion annually. And when the market turns south, as it recently has, the financial gimmickry underpinning these investments can actually consume cash.

A liquidity crisis

In early March, Harvard announced it would return to the debt markets to raise $450 million in cash via tax-exempt bonds. Barely five weeks later, the university had to rush another $750 million bond offering — this time in taxable bonds — bringing its total new debt to $1.1 billion. According to the Harvard Crimson, this pushes the university’s total debt burden to $8.2 billion.

Despite its wealth, Harvard relies on billions of dollars in non-tuition revenue each year to pay its bills. In the fiscal year ending June 30, 2024, the university reported $6.5 billion in operating revenue. Of that, just 21% came from tuition. Nearly half — 45% — came from philanthropic donations, while federal grants comprised another significant portion.

With the donors starting to hold their noses and sit on their wallets, Harvard cannot afford to also lose its revenue stream from the federal government — but it’s going to. The Trump administration recently announced that it would suspend $2.2 billion in federal grants.

Consequences of ‘wokeness’

Meanwhile, Harvard President Alan Garber remains committed to admissions policies that appear racially discriminatory, as well as remaining steadfast in his commitment to keeping Harvard a welcoming space for foreign nationals who are hostile to Jews. As reported by CNN:

Harvard refused to eliminate diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, ban masks at campus protests, enact merit-based hiring and admissions reforms, and reduce the power of faculty and administrators the Republican administration has called ‘more committed to activism than scholarship.’

Despite Garber’s repugnant principles, they also invite more problems for the school. Like Bob Jones University before it, Harvard’s policies are racially discriminatory. Bob Jones University lost its tax-exempt status for racially discriminatory admissions policies and prohibiting interracial dating. Now Harvard may suffer the same fate:

The Internal Revenue Service is making plans to rescind the tax-exempt status of Harvard University, according to two sources familiar with the matter, which would be an extraordinary step of retaliation as the Trump administration seeks to turn up pressure on the university that has defied its demands to change its hiring and other practices.

Donors have long benefited from itemized tax deductions for their munificent donations to Harvard’s operating budget. If Harvard loses its tax-exempt status, donations will no longer be tax-deductible. While I do not doubt that donors had a genuine passion for Harvard while donating to the school, the tax ramifications were also a motivator. Losing the tax deductibility of donations would constrict that revenue stream even further.

Out of cash, out of time

Ultimately, Harvard’s multibillion-dollar bond offerings may barely serve as a Band-Aid if federal and donor revenue streams dry up. However illiquid the famed endowment may be, the university may soon be forced to start selling what assets it can. According to New York Post columnist Charles Gasparino, “Wall Street execs who follow the college endowment business say it’s only a matter of time before Harvard starts selling what’s liquid in its portfolio, i.e., stocks.” He is also trying to confirm if Harvard is, in fact, already selling liquid assets held by the endowment.

Harvard cannot borrow its way out of its cash crisis. For now, the university scrambles for more loans to cover bills and meet payroll. But lenders will not endlessly bankroll unsecured debt from a tarnished institution bleeding cash. A day of reckoning approaches.

New York Times columnist David Brooks’ recent essay in the Atlantic mourned the corrosion of America’s moral fabric. Naturally, Donald Trump is to blame.

Trump’s “narcissistic nihilism,” Brooks argues, is driven by a single philosophy: “Morality is for suckers.” Christian virtues are for the weak. Nietzschean pagan values of power, courage, and glory are for winners. And although many in Trump’s administration “have crosses on their chest,” they harbor “Nietzsche in their heart.” This “deadly cocktail” has transformed America into an entity unrecognizable from the “force for tremendous good” that, according to Brooks, was laid in its coffin on January 20, 2025.

Trump’s appeal to many wasn’t that he embodied virtue. Rather, it was that he promised to protect what remained of the institutions that made virtue possible.

Brooks isn’t the first to hurl such accusations against the president, though, admittedly, he does so in a manner that tickles my philosophical fancy. America’s moral decline has been an issue of concern long before Trump took office.

But is Trump — or any single political leader — really to blame?

Politics follows culture

Like many veterans of the political class, Brooks puts too much faith in institutions. Both parties cling to the comforting illusion that culture flows downstream from politics. Spend enough time inside the D.C. bubble, and even sincere conservatives start to believe that electing the “right” people or passing the “right” laws can do more than govern — that politics can redeem souls from moral collapse.

But pretending policy carries no moral weight is equally foolish. Ask anyone who’s lived under a truly corrupt regime. Still, culture shapes politics more than Washington bureaucrats care to admit.

Diagnosing America’s cultural decline requires more than scolding a single president or passing a bill. It means examining the social landscape that produced such politics in the first place. To understand Washington, we must first look to the soul of the voters who send their leaders there.

Yes, speaking of a national “soul” risks painting in broad strokes at the expense of nuance. Even Brooks would likely concede this much. Americans are desperately reaching for moral touchstones that the culture once upheld. Those touchstones — faith, family, tradition — have been torn down by the very ideologues Trump was elected to oppose.

Up from disillusionment

Brooks concedes a sliver of the truth, admitting that the left has built “a stifling orthodoxy that stamped out dissent.” But his diagnosis barely touches the depth of America’s moral confusion.

More than 40 years ago, Alasdair MacIntyre warned in “After Virtue” that modern society had gutted the moral framework needed to make moral language coherent. Today, we still invoke that language — justice, dignity, meaning — but with no shared foundation beneath it. Efforts to rebuild those foundations now face open hostility.

When public figures like Jordan Peterson face censure for reviving moral guidance once common in homes, churches, and civic life, it reveals something darker. Americans have lost access to the moral raw materials required to build a meaningful life.

Trump’s appeal never rested on personal virtue. It rested on his willingness to defend the institutions that make virtue possible. For millions of voters, he stood as a bulwark against moral collapse — not a saint but a protector of sacred ground. That’s what won him the loyalty of Americans disillusioned by the left’s assault on the moral structures they once relied upon.

The government’s job isn’t to redeem souls. It’s to safeguard the conditions under which people can pursue goodness, truth, and a flourishing life. That means defending the cultural space where moral frameworks can take root — and keeping vandals from tearing it apart.

Brooks calls this “narcissistic nihilism.” In reality, it’s something far rarer: hope — the hope that virtue can still grow in the soil that remains.

If you say the word “chemtrails” to any government-trusting American citizen, you’ll be painted as a nutty right-wing conspiracy theorist.

However, there’s good news for those who’ve been sounding the alarm. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has recently confirmed the use of chemtrails over America — and so has an Air Force whistleblower and exposure scientist, Kristen Meghan, who’s been making claims about a secret government chemtrail program for over a decade.

Meghan has worked in occupational environmental safety and health as a senior industrial hygienist and an exposure scientist for 23 years. For nine of those years, she worked on active duty in the Air Force in a field called bioenvironmental engineering.

“So, for people to understand, it’s like the DOD’s equivalent of OSHA, EPA, DOT,” Meghan tells Sara Gonzales on “Sara Gonzales Unfiltered.”

When her brother showed her a documentary on chemtrails, Meghan recalls believing it was “the most ridiculous thing” she’d ever heard.

“In my journey of trying to debunk it and basically tell everyone they’re ridiculous, I realized not only is it real, but it’s coming right through my office,” she explains. “A lot of people that have industrial jobs are familiar with something called a safety data sheet.”

“Basically, there’s certain things that are on those sheets, and it has to have packing group information. Like, if you’re shipping it, is it double-contained, all these things. It was missing so much information, and I always say I’m never going to jail for anybody,” she continues.

“Then later, it hits me,” she says. “These same things that are coming in, like powdered oxide form — these heavy metals are the same metals that people are claiming.”

Before telling anyone, she did tests on her own.

“I started doing soil sampling, air sampling, different types of techniques, and … I finally went to my supervisors and was like, ‘Is this this?’” she tells Gonzales.

“There’s things that I can’t tell you, but I’m telling you the aircraft was being retrofitted, and that is the earth-shattering moment,” Meghan adds.

In 2008, just a few days prior to telling her supervisors, Meghan had won noncommissioned officer of the quarter for her exemplary performance. Right after, she began being treated differently.

“They threw the, ‘Are you okay?’ You know, ‘You’re looking a little depressed. I can put you on a 120-day mental hold. Who would watch your daughter?’” she recalls. “I was actually supposed to re-enlist, and without any warning, with about 10 days left, I was out the door. No job.”

“It scared my higher-ups, and I immediately got an attorney, got whistleblower protection, and I was very vocal for a long time,” she continues, noting that they’ve “admitted” why they do this.

“It’s to dim the sun because of global warming,” she says, adding, “but I wonder, though, if a lot of people that are behind this actually believe in global warming.”

Want more from Sara Gonzales?

To enjoy more of Sara’s no-holds-barred take to news and culture, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.