Washington Free Beacon

A pink-vested protest group, the Rapid Response Choir, led a crowd in joyful song Monday in response to the Department of Government Efficiency’s cuts to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

“This joy that I have, the world didn’t give it to me, the world can’t take it away,” the group sang outside the NOAA building in Silver Spring, Md.

Hundreds of NOAA employees were laid off last week as part of President Donald Trump’s promise to shrink the government. Sen. Maria Cantwell’s (D., Wash.) office said 880 employees were terminated, but former NOAA officials said it was closer to 650.

“People out there are going to try to tear you down, but the world outside can’t take us down. That’s what this song is about,” one choir member said Monday in response to the layoffs before another taught the crowd the lyrics.

The Rapid Response Choir promises to “show up to be heard for the communities we’re trying to protect” and “will be ready to assemble on short notice at a school, church, community or place of business, and be ready to sing for thirty minutes or longer if need be,” according to its website. It also includes a songbook with lyrics to numbers like “DOGE is to Blame,” “Joy in Resistance,” “All You Fascists Bound To Lose,” and “Which Side Are You On?”

“We need to generate mass public disapproval through non-violent spectacle and performance,” the group wrote. “We need to be give [sic] heart to those uncertain what to do, prompting them to take action themselves.”

“If this adminstration [sic] comes to harm you, we will make noise (hopefully lovely, inspiring noise),” the choir’s website reads.

The choir also vows that it won’t “interfere with law enforcement, but we will remind everyone of their rights under the Constitution”—a salient promise considering a police officer disrupted Monday’s protest because of an unattended bag. The crowd booed when he said they had to clear the area.

Prior DOGE protests have featured awkward a cappella songs. House Democrats in February held a protest in Washington, D.C., where union leaders accused Elon Musk and other billionaires of trying to “divide us by our color” and “divide us by our tongue.”

“We’ll fight against DOGE. We’ll fight Elon Musk,” union members sang to the melody of the “Battle Hymn of the Republic.”

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The Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), the world’s largest chipmaker, will invest $100 billion in new chip manufacturing plants across the United States, President Donald Trump announced Monday.

“This is a tremendous move by the most powerful company in the world,” Trump said alongside TSMC CEO C.C. Wei. “It’s a matter of economic security, it’s also a matter of national security for us.”

TSMC will make the investment over the next four years, expanding its U.S. operations with “cutting-edge” facilities, the Wall Street Journal reported. Semiconductor chips are essential to modern technology, powering everything from cars to computers to smartphones. Demand has surged in recent years, driven by the rapid growth of artificial intelligence, which requires immense computing power.

The Taiwanese chipmaker is just the latest tech company to pledge billion-dollar investments in the United States since Trump’s return to the White House.

Apple announced last week that it will commit more than $500 billion to expanding its facilities and investments in the United States over the next four years. In January, Oracle, OpenAI, and SoftBank unveiled Stargate, a joint venture aimed at expanding U.S. artificial intelligence infrastructure, with a combined investment of $500 billion over the coming years.

The Monday announcement comes just weeks after Trump said he was considering tariffs of 25 percent or more on semiconductor imports. Trump views U.S. reliance on foreign chipmakers as a national security risk and has repeatedly pledged to bring more chip manufacturing back to the United States.

“We have to have chips made in this country,” Trump said last month. “Right now, everything is made in Taiwan, practically, almost all of it, a little bit in South Korea, but everything—almost all of it is made in Taiwan. And we want it to be made—we want those companies to come to our country, in all due respect.”

TSMC made its first major U.S. manufacturing investment during Trump’s first term, committing $12 billion to build a chip factory in Arizona.

“Back in 2020, thanks to President Trump’s vision and support, we embarked on our journey of establishing advanced chip manufacturing in the United States,” the chipmaking giant said in a Monday statement.

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The Environmental Protection Agency formally referred several Biden-era green energy grants to its inspector general, requesting a full investigation into the matter following a series of Washington Free Beacon reports that highlighted potential conflicts of interest and mismanagement.

In a letter to acting EPA inspector general Nicole Murley on Sunday, acting EPA deputy administrator W.C. McIntosh said the Biden administration’s green spending programs were rife with “financial mismanagement, conflicts of interest, and oversight failures.” McIntosh added that an inspector general probe would take place concurrently with the Department of Justice’s ongoing investigation into the matter.

Since taking office, the Trump administration has promised to conduct broad reviews of Biden-era spending, including the billions of dollars in taxpayer money doled out for green energy projects and initiatives. The EPA’s request Sunday is the latest example of the administration’s commitment to fulfilling that promise.

The referral cited three Free Beacon reports published late last month. The first revealed that the Biden EPA awarded $2 billion to a brand new nonprofit linked to perennial Georgia Democratic candidate Stacey Abrams, the second revealed that the EPA official who led green grant disbursals oversaw a $5 billion grant to his former employer, and the third revealed that a group whose CEO served on a White House environmental advisory council received $20 million.

“These examples are the tip of the iceberg and suggest a deeply entrenched pattern of political favoritism, lack of qualifications, and other possibly unlawful allocation of taxpayer funds,” McIntosh wrote. “Disturbingly, these cases likely represent only a fraction of broader issues.”

“While these issues can be fully investigated, we will continue to aggressively pursue enhanced oversight, answers, and accountability,” he continued. “We stand firmly alongside the Office of the Inspector General in our shared mission to eliminate waste, fraud, and abuse with the EPA. I look forward to your recommendations.”

The EPA’s letter requests that an investigation focuses in particular on the $20 billion Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, which was created to operate as a “green bank” by Democrats’ behemoth Inflation Reduction Act of 2022. Shortly after his confirmation, Zeldin and his team located the entirety of those funds parked at an outside financial institution—Citibank—in a first-of-its-kind arrangement that appears to block it from federal oversight.

In December, Project Veritas published an undercover video that showed Biden official Brent Efron admitting the EPA frantically pushed billions of dollars to favored industries and groups before leaving office, likening the spending to tossing “gold bars off the Titanic.” Zeldin said the $20 billion found at Citibank is an example of those gold bars.

“It is my pledge to be accountable for every penny the EPA spends. This marks a stark turn from the waste and self-dealing of the Biden-Harris Administration intentionally tossing ‘gold bars off the Titanic.’ The American people deserve accountability and responsible stewardship of their tax dollars. We will continue to deliver,” Zeldin said in a statement on Monday.

According to the EPA, Citibank agreed to a request from the FBI to pause disbursements of the funding.

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Honda is shifting production of the Civic from Mexico to the United States, in response to President Donald Trump’s planned 25 percent tariffs on Mexican imports, sources told Reuters.

Starting in May 2028, the Japanese automaker will begin manufacturing the new Civic hybrid in Indiana to avoid potential tariffs, the sources said. The Civic, one of Honda’s top-selling models, is expected to have an annual output of around 210,000 units.

The announcement comes just a day before Trump’s 25 percent tariffs on Mexican and Canadian goods are set to take effect, part of the administration’s efforts to curb drug trafficking and illegal immigration. Trump announced a 30-day pause on the tariffs, which were originally slated to go into effect last month, after Mexico and Canada agreed to deploy troops and personnel to secure their borders with the United States.

Mexico has long been a low-cost production hub for automakers, with Honda exporting around 80 percent of its Mexican output to the United States, Reuters reported.

Trump has pledged to boost domestic manufacturing, arguing that tariffs help protect American workers and counter foreign “unfair trade practices.” Since returning to the Oval Office, Trump has increased tariffs on Chinese goods, levied 25 percent tariffs on all aluminum and steel imports, and announced reciprocal tariffs on U.S. competitors and allies alike.

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President Donald Trump has invited freed hostage Eli Sharabi to the White House after watching excerpts of an interview in which Sharabi described his 16 months of torture and starvation in Hamas captivity.

Sharabi, released last month as part of the ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas, is scheduled to meet Trump on Tuesday, his brother Sharon told Haaretz on Sunday. Sharabi, whom Hamas kidnapped on October 7 along with his brother Yossi, said in a recent interview that terrorists tortured, chained, and starved him.

“Excerpts from the program were shown to Trump with English subtitles, and he was shocked,” Sharon Sharabi told Haaretz.

Sharabi, who lost 40 percent of his body weight during his captivity, learned upon release that Hamas had murdered his wife and daughters in the October 7 attack and that Yossi Sharabi had been killed in Gaza, the Times of Israel reported.

The invitation comes as the ceasefire shows signs of faltering, with Israel warning Hamas of “additional consequences” if the terrorist group refuses to accept a new proposal for an extended ceasefire. “Israel will not allow a ceasefire without a release of our hostages,” Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office said in an X post. Fifty-nine hostages remain in Hamas captivity.

Trump’s invitation “is inspiring,” Sharon Sharabi said, according to the New York Post. “It warms the heart that Trump understands the urgency. I hope the meeting will help to bring the hostage[s] home.”

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Last week, we reported that Israel planned to resume the war in Gaza with a wave of airstrikes and a reduction of humanitarian aid to the strip. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu began putting those plans into motion on Sunday, announcing that he had halted the entry of any “goods and supplies into Gaza.”

Netanyahu, the Free Beacon‘s Andrew Tobin reports from Tel Aviv, “said the decision was a response to Hamas’s rejection of a proposal by U.S. Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff to extend the phase one hostage-ceasefire deal that expired a day earlier.” Under the proposal, which Israel had agreed to, Israel and Hamas would take another 50 days to negotiate the ceasefire’s second phase. Hamas would release half of the remaining Israeli hostages on day one and the remainder on the final day.

If Hamas continues to reject the proposal, Netanyahu said, “there will be additional consequences.”

“The blockade of Gaza is one of a series of escalatory steps that Israel, backed by President Donald Trump, is prepared to take in order to end Hamas’s control of Gaza,” writes Tobin. “Israel expects it will ultimately have to take full military control of Gaza and is developing plans to do so starting in several weeks.”

“Israel’s Channel 12 reported on Saturday that Southern Command is on high alert and preparing for a return to fighting on short notice. In recent days, Israeli troops have been training to retake the strategically important Netzarim Corridor and other areas of Gaza from which the military withdrew during the ceasefire and for the possible relocation of the civilian population from the north of the strip to humanitarian zones in the south, according to the report.”

READ MORE: Israel Cuts All Aid To Gaza in Step Toward Resumption of Full-Scale War

When Georgia’s community health department solicited bids for the state’s blockbuster Medicaid contract in 2015, it asked insurers basic questions about dental care access and congestive heart failure. Things changed last year when the department’s senior staffers hijacked the bidding process to insert questions related to transgender children.

That’s according to internal documents reviewed by our Andrew Kerr. They show that the bidding application for the multibillion-dollar contract initially asked insurers “about a hypothetical 14-year-old white female with anorexia and depression who shares a bedroom with her younger sister.” But career staffers “swapped the biological female for a transgender person”—and subsequently dinged bidders who provided answers that strayed from liberal orthodoxy on the issue.

The state scored applications out of 1,000 possible points, and the difference between winning and losing came down to less than 10 points. The transgender question was worth 10 points. The application also included a DEI question worth 15.

“The staffers’ decision to insert that question—and reward companies that regurgitated left-wing positions on transgender care—reflects a significant disconnect between Kemp’s policy preferences and the career staffers tasked with carrying them out,” writes Kerr. “Kemp signed a law banning gender surgeries and hormone therapies for children in 2023. One year earlier, he signed a law that allowed the Georgia High School Association to bar biological men from competing in women’s sports.”

READ MORE: How Left-Wing Bureaucrats Hijacked the Bidding Process for Georgia’s Multibillion-Dollar Medicaid Contract

North of the Beltway, in Delaware, state Democrats passed a 2021 law forcing 40 percent of power production to come from green energy by 2035. As a result, the state’s main utility company, Delmarva, must import large amounts of electricity produced by wind and solar, purchase renewable energy credits from other states, or face fines. So far, it’s struggled to fill the first two buckets to the state’s satisfaction—and paid $26 million in fines to stay in compliance.

In the meantime, electric bills are skyrocketing, with some residents facing a 350 percent spike in recent months. Those increases, to be sure, come amid a period of extremely low temperatures. But the green energy side of the equation is raising questions: State senate minority leader Gerald Hocker said a “meeting with stakeholders in the energy sector” made it clear “that Delaware’s green energy mandates … are a significant factor in driving up costs.”

Delaware’s green push comes in spite of the state’s unique reliance on fossil fuels. Green energy sources generate just 6 percent of Delaware’s total electricity output, while natural gas generates 87 percent. Nationwide, those numbers are 21 percent and 43 percent, respectively. At the same time, most of Delaware’s electricity comes from out of state, a dynamic “that has become more acute as it has moved to stop building gas power plants and shut down existing fossil fuel power generation,” our Thomas Catenacci reports.

“The situation—which has emerged as a key political issue, resulted in packed town halls where angry citizens have voiced concerns and has led to the creation of a petition against Delmarva and a local Facebook group named ‘Delmarva Power Victims’ with more than 14,400 members—may force lawmakers to reckon with the state’s far-left energy policies.”

READ MORE: Delaware Residents See Surging Electric Bills as State Pushes Green Mandates

Away from the Beacon:

• The DNC put out a 32-point list of what the party did last month, and when followers widely mocked it, the party’s chief mobilization officer Shelby Cole responded with this gem: “the ‘check out this giant laundry list’ template always used to bang for us. it’s full of tiny text on purpose!! but the internet thinks we are morons this time. heard.” Keep up the great work, folks!
• The Associated Press reported the obvious—that “furious Democrats filled Republican town halls across America last week”—before adding that the activists have now “turned their anger toward elected officials in their own party, who they believe are not fighting the Republican president and billionaire adviser Elon Musk with the urgency, aggression or creativity that the moment deserves.”
• Investment giant BlackRock, which once called to “embed DEI into everything we do,” is now shifting away from equity, citing “significant changes to the U.S. legal and policy environment.” It’s almost as it they didn’t really believe the things they were saying.

Check out our full Monday lineup below.

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How will you ensure access to dental care across the state of Georgia? That’s the sort of question the state’s Department of Community Health asked in 2015 to determine which insurance providers would administer Medicaid to millions of people across the state. Then, last year, the state reopened the bidding process for the multibillion-dollar contract—and senior career staffers hijacked it to insert a question related to transgender children into the bidding process, internal documents reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon show.

Thanks to the efforts of those staffers, the state picked winners for the 2024 version of the blockbuster Georgia Families Medicaid contract in a manner plainly inconsistent with the conservative agenda of Gov. Brian Kemp (R.). The community health department selected the winning companies based in part on how they answered a question about care for a hypothetical transgender child in rural Georgia. Insurers whose answers reflected left-wing policy priorities—some respondents said they’d refer the child in question to a transgender clinic that provides hormone therapy—secured a piece of the multibillion-dollar contract in December, which is set to go into effect in mid-2026.

The transgender question, however, was not in the contract’s initial draft, which instead asked respondents about a hypothetical 14-year-old white female with anorexia and depression who shares a bedroom with her younger sister. In June 2023, months before the bidding application was finalized, Chief Health Policy Officer Lynnette Rhodes; Medicaid project manager Leeclois Bolar; Office of Children, Department of Behavioral Health & Developmental Disabilities official Danté McKay; and other career staffers swapped the biological female for a transgender person, records obtained by the Free Beacon show. Those staffers, along with at least two McKinsey consultants, held a meeting on June 20, 2023, to discuss the changes to the question, emails show. The modified version made it into the final bidding application.

The staffers’ decision to insert that question—and reward companies that regurgitated left-wing positions on transgender care—reflects a significant disconnect between Kemp’s policy preferences and the career staffers tasked with carrying them out. Kemp signed a law banning gender surgeries and hormone therapies for children in 2023. One year earlier, he signed a law that allowed the Georgia High School Association to bar biological men from competing in women’s sports.

Kemp has also worked to roll back diversity, equity, and inclusion policies within state government. The latest application for the Georgia Families Medicaid contract, however, also included a slew of race-based questions. One asked applicants how they would administer care to a 6-year-old Black child, another mentioned a suicidal 44-year-old biracial Filipina, and a third referenced a 17-year Latina with intellectual disabilities. The 2015 version of the application did not include race as a factor, instead probing insurers on how they would respond to common health care scenarios such as congestive heart failure.

The application also asked insurers to detail their internal diversity, equity, and inclusion programs. One company, Humana, responded by touting its mandatory “implicit bias training.” It scored higher than other applicants on that question and won a piece of the contract, which is worth roughly $4.5 billion per year, according to the Atlanta Journal Constitution.

State law prevents Kemp from having any involvement in the state procurement process, and his spokesman, Douglas Garrison, touted the governor’s support for “protecting girls’ sports, outlawing medical procedures that permanently mutilate the bodies of our children, and prohibiting indoctrination in our classrooms.”

Kemp’s appointee to lead the Department of Community Health, Russel Carlson, is another story. Carlson on several occasions praised the staffers responsible for injecting the transgender question into the Georgia Families Medicaid contract, records show, touting their “very organized and disciplined evaluation effort” during a Feb. 8, 2024, Board of Community Health meeting.

Carlson’s department, which did not respond to a request for comment, used a point-based system to grade bidders’ responses, with the top four companies earning shares of the contract. The margin between the winners and losers was razor-thin, state records show.

Out of 1,000 possible points on the questionnaire, the difference between the fourth- and fifth-place bidder was less than 10 points. The transgender-child-related question was worth 10 points, and the DEI question was worth 15.

The four winning bidders scored 5.5 points on average on the question about the transgender child, while the losing bidders scored 4.7. Members of the contract review panel, which included outspoken Kamala Harris supporter and donor Marvis Butler, gave high scores to several of the winning bidders for saying they would refer the child to Emory Healthcare’s Transgender Clinic, state records show. The clinic’s primary purpose is to provide hormone therapy for transgender patients, according to Emory’s website.

One winning bidder, CareSource, said the clinic could be of use to the child in question because hormone therapy “could come up in the future.” In response, panel member Peter D’Alba, the Georgia Department of Community Health’s pharmacy director, awarded CareSource the maximum 10 points.

“Excellent assessment done to address future hormone use,” he wrote.

D’Alba was less favorable to bidder Kaiser Foundation, awarding the company just 2.5 points in part for failing to “understand” the transgender child’s “pronouns.”

“Transgender needs are complex,” he wrote. “Supplier did not offer any programming to meet member needs regarding transgender/LGBT. Case worker did not leverage appropriate cultural and sensitivity training to understand members pronouns etc.”

Emails and documents obtained by the Free Beacon show that McKay, the former director of an Obamacare advocacy group who now leads the Georgia behavioral health department’s Office of Children, Young Adults & Families, inserted the transgender question into the contract bidding process around June 2023.

Bolar, the Medicaid project manager, thanked McKay for his “suggested edits” to the question in a June 20, 2023, email. Bolar requested McKay attend a meeting that afternoon to discuss the changes before a large group of state staffers. Also included in the meeting invitation were two outside consultants with McKinsey, a prominent consulting firm whose alumni include former transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg.

The Georgia Department of Behavioral Health & Developmental Disabilities and McKinsey declined to comment.

In addition to issues over “pronouns,” the contract review panel penalized another bidder, Sentara Health, for suggesting that it could connect the transgender child with “local gender-affirming support groups, LGBTQ+ organizations, faith-based organizations, school-based programs, and other relevant community resources.” Including “faith-based organizations” in that list was unacceptable, according to panel member Michael Smith.

“Unsure of reason for faith-based service connection when not introduced in scenario,” wrote Smith, the behavioral health director for the Georgia Department of Community Health. He awarded Sentara just 2.5 points for its response.

The winning bidders also scored slightly higher on the question that asked them to detail their internal DEI programs. They averaged 9.24 points to the losing bidders’ 9.02 points. The DEI question was not asked on the 2015 version of the contract.

Winning bidder United Health detailed its adherence to “health equity” training among its workforce. The insurer said it forced 100 percent compliance for its staff to complete an interactive training course about a fictional gay black man in his sixties who suffered from a stroke.

“Of our staff, 97% achieved a passing score on the first effort, and the remaining 3% engaged in remediation efforts until they passed,” United Health wrote in its bid.

This was satisfactory to Smith, the behavioral health director, who said United Health “sufficiently conceived of plan to induce DEI frameworks into the culture.”

At the same time, Smith penalized losing bidder AmeriHealth for its answer to the DEI question, awarding the company just 3.75 points because “cultural humility was not mentioned or discussed” in its response.

Review board member Gloria Beecher, the director of population health and quality planning at the Georgia Department of Community Health, in her evaluation also eviscerated AmeriHealth, giving the company just 3.75 points for its response to the DEI question. The company failed to show how it will “reduce disparity and promote cultural competency and humility” within its organization, Beecher said.

Another insurer, Peach State, came in fifth in overall scoring, losing out on a piece of the contract by just under 10 points. Peach State, which won a portion of the 2015 contract and for now administers Medicaid to approximately 700,000 Georgians, said in a legal challenge filed in December that the 2024 award was needlessly politicized and would bring “catastrophic consequences” for nearly 1.2 million state residents, including all of the state’s foster children, who may have to find new doctors if the award isn’t reversed.

“When procuring contracts for the healthcare services of more than 1.5 million vulnerable Georgians, the State is obligated to do everything in its power to ensure a process that is appropriately supervised, free of undue influence, devoid of controversial political agendas, and conducted pursuant to best practices,” Peach State said in its legal challenge.

“Unfortunately, that is far from what occurred in this procurement run amok,” the insurer said.

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TEL AVIV—Israel halted any entry of goods into the Gaza Strip on Sunday, signaling the start of a more aggressive phase of its war to destroy Hamas.

Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the decision was a response to Hamas’s rejection of a proposal by U.S. Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff to extend the phase one hostage-ceasefire deal that expired a day earlier. Israel had endorsed the proposal.

“Upon the conclusion of the first stage, and in light of Hamas’s rejection of the Witkoff framework, we decided at last night’s discussion that as of this morning, the entry of goods and supplies into Gaza will be prevented,” Netanyahu said at the start of a cabinet meeting on Sunday. “If Hamas continues to stick to its position and does not release our hostages, there will be additional consequences, which I will not detail here.”

The blockade of Gaza is one of a series of escalatory steps that Israel, backed by President Donald Trump, is prepared to take to bring home the hostages and end Hamas’s control of Gaza, according to several current and former Israeli officials with knowledge of high-level discussions. Israel expects that it will ultimately have to take full military control of Gaza and is developing plans to do so starting in several weeks, the Washington Free Beacon reported on Thursday.

The sources said that Israeli decision-makers expect Hamas to resist disarmament or exile—Israel’s conditions for moving on to phase two of the deal, which would end the war—and instead to fight to the end while holding some of the hostages as human shields and bargaining chips.

Amir Avivi, a former senior Israeli military official who has advised the government and military during the 17-month Gaza war, predicted that Israel’s next steps in Gaza would be heavy airstrikes, followed by ground incursions, and finally a “decisive attack” to conquer the strip.

“It’s very hard to see Hamas simply giving up without further military pressure,” Avivi said. “I think the understanding overall in the military and government leadership is that we are going to full-scale war.”

Hezi Nehama, a former senior Israeli military official who served as a battalion commander in the war and has maintained close ties to the Israeli military’s Southern Command, told the Free Beacon, “Everybody understands that in the end, we will have to fight and to defeat Hamas.”

“And we understand that, unfortunately, some of the hostages—we won’t be able to bring them back,” he said.

Netanyahu said Israel was “not giving up on anyone” among the 59 hostages who remain in Gaza, as many as 24 of them alive, and would “immediately” return to negotiations if Hamas accepted Witkoff’s proposal.

Israeli finance minister Bezalel Smotrich said in a statement on Sunday that Israel’s halt of humanitarian aid to Gaza was an “important step” toward opening “the gates of hell” on Gaza.

“Now we need to open these gates as quickly and fatally as possible to the cruel enemy, until complete victory,” he added. “We stayed in the government to ensure this, and so it will be in Gaza.”

Israel’s Channel 12 reported on Saturday that Southern Command is on high alert and preparing for a return to fighting on short notice. In recent days, Israeli troops have been training to retake the strategically important Netzarim Corridor and other areas of Gaza from which the military withdrew during the ceasefire and for the possible relocation of the civilian population from the north of the strip to humanitarian zones in the south, according to the report.

Two Israeli military divisions have deployed to Israel’s buffer zone inside the borders of Gaza, including the Philadelphi Corridor in the south.

Omer Dostri, a spokesman for Netanyahu, said on X that no aid trucks had been allowed to enter Gaza as of Sunday morning, “nor will they at this stage.” Tzav 9, a grassroots activist group that seeks to block humanitarian aid to Gaza, confirmed in a statement on Sunday that the main crossings into Gaza had been closed to the trucks.

Hamas on Sunday called Israel’s halt to humanitarian aid “a cheap act of extortion, a war crime, and a blatant violation of the agreement.” Egypt, which has served as a key mediator between Israel and Hamas, on Sunday accused Israel of using “starvation as a weapon of war.”

Israeli foreign minister Gideon Saar said at a Sunday press conference in Jerusalem that the starvation of Gazans has been “a lie during this whole war,” adding, “We saw when our hostages were released, the terrorists and the crowd looked perfectly fine. The only ones that looked that they were starved were our hostages.”

The surge of humanitarian aid that entered Gaza during the ceasefire will last four to six months, the current and former officials told the Free Beacon, echoing Israeli media reports. Meanwhile, water and electricity have continued flowing to Gaza, Israeli media reported.

Saar also said that the Trump administration “accepts our stance and recognizes it.”

According to Israel, Witkoff proposed a 50-day extension of the first phase of the ceasefire to allow more time for deadlocked negotiations over a potential phase two, which would end the war. Under the plan, which had not previously been publicized, Hamas would release half of the remaining hostages held in Gaza on the first day of the extension and the rest on the final day if a second phase were agreed upon.

The Free Beacon previously reported that incoming Israeli military chief of staff Eyal Zamir, at the direction of Netanyahu and defense minister Israel Katz, has started developing the plan to return to war in Gaza. Initial steps include a cutoff of aid to Gaza, relocation of Gazan civilians to humanitarian zones in the south of the strip, and airstrikes on Hamas targets. The plan then calls for four or five divisions to conquer Gaza in six months or less.

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Like many parents this time of year, my wife and I have begun to look at colleges with our son (there’s a really good book about this). But a lot has changed since we both graduated—for instance, tuition. Take our alma mater, Georgetown University, which cost $23,000 a year in the 1990s. Annual tuition has skyrocketed to $71,000. Georgetown Law is even higher, at close to $76,000 per year. And you don’t even get good professors like Ilya Shapiro!

The good news is Shapiro has chronicled his experiences and the dismal state of our law schools in his new book, Lawless: The Miseducation of America’s Elites. Weekend Beacon contributor Tal Fortgang gives us a review.

“Shapiro had been hired to run a center-right outfit from within Georgetown Law, but sent a questionably worded tweet that his new employer met with a sham investigation and character assassination. (You can read plenty of good coverage of the affair here at the Washington Free Beacon, though Shapiro’s full version is still revelatory.) Other Georgetown professors have also been punished for stating facts that progressives do not like to hear.

“Though law schools still profess to be what they once were—educational institutions that value the pursuit of knowledge—they are actually designed now to produce ideology rather than knowledge. That is why they could not tolerate Shapiro’s presence—nor the presence of heretics like Judge Kyle Duncan, Professor Amy Wax, or even liberals who would engage with conservative Christians—while progressive radicals feel no compunction about spouting their views from cushy faculty and administrative positions.

“Shapiro advances a syllogism so simple it is practically undeniable. Lawyers wield tremendous power across every sector of American society; law schools, especially the highest-ranked, are training students to wield that power immaturely and irresponsibly; therefore, law schools need immediate reform to avert an imminent national disaster.

“What kind of reform could do the trick?

“A demonstrated (not just stated) commitment to free speech, academic freedom, and ideological diversity is Shapiro’s preferred solution. He recommends that law schools adopt the triad of policies developed at his alma mater of University of Chicago to clarify and protect true free speech. ‘It’s not rocket science,’ Shapiro writes repeatedly, notwithstanding students at elite law schools claiming not to know the difference between free speech and censorship. Heckler’s vetoes don’t count; neither do other forms of disruptive conduct that involve speech but prevent others from speaking. Enforce rules governing conduct without fear or favor. Law schools should not weigh in on world events that do not directly touch their campus. And for heaven’s sake, stop cracking down on professors who say offensive things.”

From the classroom to the courtroom, Robert Little reviews Drawn Testimony: My Four Decades as a Courtroom Sketch Artist by Jane Rosenberg.

Rosenberg “went to an arraignment without any sell-on deal in 1980. NBC bought her image, and she began her now 40 years in court art. In her new book Drawn Testimony, she recounts quite a few trials where she sketched from a corner. John Gotti asked her to avoid giving him a second chin. Ghislaine Maxwell turned around and turned the tables, sketching Rosenberg sketching Maxwell. Bill Cosby, Sam Bankman-Fried, even Tom Brady’s deflategate hearing helped fill her sketchbook.”

“The job is both challenging and an opportunity for news readers. The artist gets up at dawn to get an ideal seat, sitting through often dull hearings waiting for the witness some editor wants an image of. The artist has to work silently, usually with acrylic pencils that noiselessly scrape across paper. They bring a huge kit of material. The profession is in decline because every state now allows photography in courts.

“But the opportunity! A sketcher can pull off what Albert Camus called ‘the lie that tells a truth.’ There is no spot in a courtroom where the audience can see the front of a lawyer, the witness, the judge, and the jury all at once. But an artist can slide the personnel together, or merge different moments. Perhaps the judge didn’t form that expression at the exact moment the witness told her tale. But a sketch showing that combination might convey the judge’s reaction to the testimony.”

Weekend Beacon movie critic John Podhoretz had a reaction to watching The Brutalist, which is up for multiple awards at tonight’s Oscars. As usual, he was brutally honest.

“The Brutalist is a failure, even an offensive one, but it’s also kind of magnificent as it goes along. I’ve rarely had a more ambiguous or complex reaction to a work of cinema, and I hope I can get The Brutalist right as I talk about it so that I don’t follow director and cowriter Brady Corbet down the path of misrepresenting my subject.

“Corbet is unapologetically aiming for greatness with his gorgeously rendered portrait of a Holocaust survivor and his journey through a mid-century America that is simultaneously welcoming of his talents and viciously destructive to his soul. There are two ways to look at the story of Laszlo Toth (Adrien Brody). One is that Corbet is telling a singular tale about a singular fictional Jew who undergoes a singular set of experiences as he comes into contact with a difficult, complex, highly intelligent, and very rich American Gentile with the very suggestive name of Harrison Lee Van Buren (that’s the key general of the Confederacy and three presidents combined in just one moniker).

“The other is that he is our guide to the America that emerged after World War II, and Corbet is using his journey through 15 years of American life to offer an innovative and profound view of what this country was really like at the moment it assumed leadership not only of the world but as the great patron of the arts and the artistic future after Europe’s destruction in the war.

“If it’s just the story of Toth and Van Buren and their conflicts, and nothing larger, then Corbet is artistically justified in telling the tale as he does. But if this is a movie about America, anti-Semitism, and the depredations of capitalism, then it matters very much that the larger details are correctly and properly rendered. An indictment has to be based on facts and truth. In this regard, The Brutalist is spectacularly—and offensively—false.”

From the archives: Congratulations to Princeton historian and Weekend Beacon contributor Allen C. Guelzo, whose book Our Ancient Faith: Lincoln, Democracy, and the American Experiment has been nominated for this year’s Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize. James Piereson gave us a review.

“A research fellow at Princeton University and author of Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President and other books on the Civil War era, Guelzo is our foremost Lincoln scholar and an authority on just about everything he said or wrote. Lincoln, he writes in Our Ancient Faith: Lincoln, Democracy, and the American Experiment, cast the struggle for the Union as a universal cause with vast implications for future times. Can Americans find inspiration in Lincoln’s life to meet the less daunting challenges they face today? ‘To those who have despaired of the future,’ Guelzo writes, ‘I offer this man’s example.’

“As his title suggests, he finds the example to lie in Lincoln’s faith in the nation’s Founding ideals, in the principles of the Declaration of Independence, in the common sense and good judgment of its citizens, and in their determination to maintain ‘a government of the people, for the people, and by the people.’ He is aware that this kind of faith is in short supply today.”

“Lincoln was aware of the tension between faith and reason, as Guelzo explains, though he did not see a fundamental conflict between them. He distrusted passion in politics, seeing that it devolved into violence and mob rule. It was not an abstract proposition: He had witnessed lynchings and assaults on newspapers due to differences over slavery. ‘The pillars of the temple of liberty,’ he said, are ‘hewn from the solid quarry of sober reason.’ His ‘ancient faith’ was hewn from that quarry. It is in everyone’s interest to obey the laws lest the breakdown of law and order should lead to a ‘war of all against all.’ He vowed as a young man always to act on the basis of reason, as far as he could follow it. ‘Let us do nothing through passion and ill temper,’ he advised friends and supporters on the eve of the Civil War. He carried through on that advice. As the war began, Henry Adams wrote to his brother: ‘No man is fit to take hold now who is not cool as death.’ Lincoln, as things turned out, was that man.”

The winner of the Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize will be announced early this month.

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If you thought law students hijacking classes for inane exercises in “naming the violence” was bad, just wait. While my law school experience did not involve scandals of national interest, it was punctuated by students attempting to do anything—lecture, agitate, yell—except learn from others.

Here’s one story I’ll never forget, from the same criminal law class where my classmates pestered their uber-progressive professor to say she thought rape was wrong. We were studying the 1971 revolt at Attica state prison in New York, which left 10 prison workers and 33 inmates dead. Prosecutors subsequently chose not to press charges against corrections officers who had allegedly brutalized and possibly murdered some of the rioters. The episode gave a panorama view of the issues we cover in criminal law, such as theories of punishment, prosecutorial discretion, and self-defense.

Who needs to ask difficult questions, though, when you smell an opportunity to signal your progressive bona fides? One of my classmates raised a Zoom hand, but when called on did not ask a question. Instead, she began to read the “Attica Liberation Faction Manifesto of Demands” verbatim and in full. While it is mostly very reasonable and sympathetic, the manifesto is quite long. When she finished reading it, my classmate, having worked herself into a feverish state over the several minutes she spent reading, added with a scream that racialized capitalism was responsible for the mistreatment of the inmates. Only a revolution would fix things. Some classmates chimed in over Zoom chat to applaud this act of bravery. The professor thanked the young woman who had interrupted her. The only time Attica came up again for the rest of the course was when we learned about the murder of Kitty Genovese, whose story has wrongly come to stand for the idea that bystanders will fail to intervene if they think others will—because Genovese’s rapist and murderer had participated in the uprising.

That there are one or even a few people who would use their $100,000-per-year legal education (or, more likely, social-justice scholarship) to pontificate rather than think is unremarkable. Every institution has its zealots. What is remarkable is how comfortable my classmate felt interrupting a class to indulge her own solipsistic sense that she had more to tell everyone than the professor would. That comfort was justified, it turned out. Radical students, protected by a vast bureaucracy of ideologues who code left-wing views as desirable DEI and right-wing views as hate speech that are, at best, tolerated begrudgingly, run elite law schools. In fact, that’s mostly what law schools are now: Progressive madrassas where you learn first the doctrines of contracts and torts, and then to denigrate those doctrines as part of systems of oppression set up by straight white men to enrich themselves and subjugate others. Learning the tastes and habits of the radical chic is central to the enterprise.

It doesn’t take a legal mind of Ilya Shapiro’s caliber to diagnose this problem, but given Shapiro’s background in classical liberalism and the inquisition he suffered at the hands of Georgetown Law students and administrators, he is as fit as anyone to do so. (Full disclosure: Shapiro is a colleague of mine at the Manhattan Institute.) In Lawless, Shapiro alternates between his own story of mistreatment at the hands of Georgetown’s “leadership”—not a particularly apt term given its behavior—and general analysis about the radicalization of American law schools.

The two are closely related. Shapiro had been hired to run a center-right outfit from within Georgetown Law, but sent a questionably worded tweet that his new employer met with a sham investigation and character assassination. (You can read plenty of good coverage of the affair here at the Washington Free Beacon, though Shapiro’s full version is still revelatory.) Other Georgetown professors have also been punished for stating facts that progressives do not like to hear.

Though law schools still profess to be what they once were—educational institutions that value the pursuit of knowledge—they are actually designed now to produce ideology rather than knowledge. That is why they could not tolerate Shapiro’s presence—nor the presence of heretics like Judge Kyle Duncan, Professor Amy Wax, or even liberals who would engage with conservative Christians—while progressive radicals feel no compunction about spouting their views from cushy faculty and administrative positions.

Shapiro advances a syllogism so simple it is practically undeniable. Lawyers wield tremendous power across every sector of American society; law schools, especially the highest-ranked, are training students to wield that power immaturely and irresponsibly; therefore, law schools need immediate reform to avert an imminent national disaster.

What kind of reform could do the trick?

A demonstrated (not just stated) commitment to free speech, academic freedom, and ideological diversity is Shapiro’s preferred solution. He recommends that law schools adopt the triad of policies developed at his alma mater of University of Chicago to clarify and protect true free speech. “It’s not rocket science,” Shapiro writes repeatedly, notwithstanding students at elite law schools claiming not to know the difference between free speech and censorship. Heckler’s vetoes don’t count; neither do other forms of disruptive conduct that involve speech but prevent others from speaking. Enforce rules governing conduct without fear or favor. Law schools should not weigh in on world events that do not directly touch their campus. And for heaven’s sake, stop cracking down on professors who say offensive things.

The open campus may be a north star, but law schools are in much more dire conditions than can be fixed by a revolution in free inquiry. As Shapiro repeatedly demonstrates, their problems run deeper than self-censoring conservatives and occasional witch hunts against dissident figures. Free speech norms wouldn’t keep the Georgetown Law administrators, who threw Shapiro to the wolves by defaming him as a racist, from failing up until they landed plum jobs. It doesn’t address the complete capture of my own law school by radical students, who have graduated from interrupting classes and other misdeeds to posting unabashed support for the terrorist group Hamas on social media. (Our former student body president, ousted for sending a post-October-7 anti-Israel message in the student government’s name without permission, was also filmed vandalizing posters of Israeli hostages held in Gaza.)

Just recently, the anti-Israel contingent at Georgetown Law, which could not abide free-speech maximalist Ilya Shapiro, invited as a guest speaker a member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine who recently completed a stint in prison for her role in murdering a 16-year-old girl. Law schools are plagued by militant moral backwardness. They have been taken over by ideologues advancing an illiberal, intolerant, and often immoral worldview. The cancellations and mobs Shapiro documents are an important symptom, but they are a symptom indeed of a much more serious disease.

Near the end of his book, in suggesting a wide suite of reforms that might move law schools in the right direction, Shapiro correctly takes aim at the diversicrats more responsible than any for law schools’ corruption.

[A]dmissions deans should be evaluated for admitting students with the character to respect norms of free speech and open inquiry. It’s all well and good to screen for academic achievement via GPA and reasoning skills via LSAT—which, along with racial diversity, have long been the primary metrics for law school applicants—but admissions offices, particularly at higher-ranked schools, have been too focused on admitting activists instead of advocates, social-justice warriors instead of scholars.

Amen to that—and then some. Law schools are generally quite small. Yale Law School accepts just a few hundred students per year. Each class comprises not the top LSAT-scorers or Ivy League magna cum laude undergrads, but a carefully calibrated mix of characteristics. The Federalist Society must have its 10 students per year (or, where I went, 5). Affinity groups must have enough Jewish, black, Asian, or gay 1Ls to achieve continuity beyond the three-year cycle. There must even be a few people who signal in their applications that they would be willing to sing and dance as part of “Law Revue” musical theater. All the while each class must average a stellar—yet consistent year-to-year—LSAT score. At top schools, it is no exaggeration to say each admit is hand-picked.

Yet each year without fail, students at elite law schools manage to say and do abhorrent things, often in fairly large groups. Administrators announce their very serious disappointment in those students, who, against all evidence, are deemed to have not lived up to the values of the school and do not represent it. Yet not only are those students not expelled even if they repeatedly break school rules, their ranks seem replenished with each admissions cycle. It is almost as if the schools are selecting for students who will be activists, radicals, and rule-breakers.

Fine, not almost—they are obviously doing exactly that. Elite law schools love activists, celebrate them at every opportunity, and invite applicants to share their proudest activist achievements in personal statements as back entry into schools with otherwise-demanding academic requirements. Perhaps administrators do not expel them or change admissions criteria to filter them out because they see credentialing tomorrow’s radicals as the law school’s highest calling. That cycle is not going to stop itself. It will take government investigations, lawsuits, firings, and probably some more public shamings of the kind that led to leadership changes at Harvard, Penn, and Columbia. When the underbrush of ideological capture is cleared, free and open campuses can emerge without backsliding into the same bad habits.

If and when that does happen, Shapiro will have earned a victory lap. He has alerted Americans to the serious problem of law schools’ corruption, by publicizing his story in all its discomfiting detail and tying it in persuasively to a larger narrative about ideological capture and institutional cowardice.

Lawless is bracing. It presents a useful path forward for law schools that might want to take corrective action before a Trump administration Department of Education forces them to, while laying the groundwork for readers to understand that everywhere else pushback will be fierce and hysterical. Those of us who accept Shapiro’s simple syllogism about law schools’ importance and their flagrant abdication of responsibility have one question left to ponder: Are we prepared, mentally and emotionally, to root out the corruption in our elite-producing institutions even if they try to do to us what they did to him?

Lawless: The Miseducation of America’s Elites
by Ilya Shapiro
Broadside Books, 272 pp., $29.99
Tal Fortgang is a Legal Policy Fellow at the Manhattan Institute.

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