• The report: Describes the US's decision to reinstate the VOA's Persian service due to escalating conflict between Iran and Israel.

• Background: President Trump ordered the shutdown of the Persian service in March as part of a broader dismantling of US-backed global media.

• Action: Employees previously placed on administrative leave have been recalled to counter Iranian state media.

• Context: The move comes amid missile strikes exchanged between Israel and Iran, highlighting the need for the Persian service.

• Statements: Cites a VOA employee and Patsy Widakuswara, a lead plaintiff in a lawsuit against the Trump administration, criticizing the decision.

• Protests Evolution: The article discusses the evolving Wikipedia description of the June 2025 Los Angeles events, shifting between 'protest,' 'riot,' and 'civil unrest'.

• Editor Discussions: Editors debate appropriate terms like 'unrest,' drawing parallels to the 2014 Ferguson unrest, with consideration of whether events constitute a 'riot' based on violence and damage.

• Differing Perspectives: Views vary, with some favoring 'riot' based on widespread violence, while others, citing Wikipedia convention, prefer 'protest' even with clashes.

• Historical Context: The article contrasts the 2020 George Floyd protests with earlier events like the Boston Tea Party, highlighting the shifting nature of protests and riots.

• Wikipedia's Role: The article examines how historical events are documented in real time by anonymous users, reflecting broader cultural changes and editorial biases.

• The article introduces Meela: An AI companion designed to alleviate loneliness and depression in senior citizens.

• Meela's Functionality: The AI engages in empathetic conversations, remembers past interactions, and offers cognitive behavioral therapy.

• Pilot Study Results: Early trials at RiverSpring Living showed improved mental health outcomes for residents using Meela.

• Meela’s Developer: Josh Sach created Meela after witnessing his father-in-law's isolation.

• Future Plans: Sach plans to expand Meela's availability through a subscription service and to other senior living communities.

The new dominant form of organized crime has shown its face in Los Angeles in recent days. Though it comes under the banner of “protest” and is whitewashed in the media as “mostly peaceful” and presumed spontaneous, a close observer can see that it is none of these things. It is in fact the result of a calculated civil terrorism movement taking advantage of Americans’ reluctance to treat criminals as criminals.

Images and videos from the riots give the game away. Why are there keffiyehs everywhere? What does Palestinianism have to do with preventing the federal government from enforcing immigration law, and how did the rioters know to show up covering their faces with the same symbolic gear? Who brought gas masks by the truckload? Who managed to convince hundreds of people to take up rock-throwing, Molotov cocktail-dropping, and arson at seemingly arbitrary places and times? Who laid the groundwork for street violence by training people in the tactics that prevent law enforcement from ending it promptly? As domestic-extremism expert Kyle Shideler puts it, this violence is “not black magic, it’s just hard work.”

But just as it is not black magic—not orchestrated down to fine details by mob bosses—neither is it grassroots. Nothing about this “protest” is organic. It is organized, activated, and AstroTurfed—and it has a hard time sticking to script. When Students for Justice in Palestine chimes in to say that “from the barrios of LA to the refugee camps of Bethlehem, we will globalize the intifada,” it makes the unrest look less like an expression of outrage against immigration policy than a lashing out against the rule of law itself.

It will still cloak itself in the language of law and democracy. It gets significant help from credulous media reporting, like CNN’s claim that “protests in and around Los Angeles erupted on Friday after federal immigration agents arrested at least 44 people.” A protest is when people peaceably assemble for a redress of grievances. What has transpired in Los Angeles is wanton property destruction, assaults on cops, and exuberant lawlessness.

None of this stands any chance of showing the American people that the government’s actions are wrong and the “protesters” are right. All it can do is show that the rioters are loose cannons, and that Americans ought to be afraid of what they might do. It is the opposite of democratic.

Strategically deployed acts of intimidation are the mechanism by which civil terror groups—themselves strategic, organized, well-funded, and cleverer than they look—seek to advance their anti-Western cause. One would have to be naive, at this point, not to suspect that they want to make immigration law enforcement a third rail in American politics.

For those who openly seek to “globalize the intifada”—the guerrilla campaign against civilians in the “Little Satan,” Israel—lax immigration standards provide an excellent way to amass manpower for the burgeoning struggle against the “Great Satan,” America. While no hard evidence demonstrates Iran’s involvement in fomenting this organized chaos, civil terror groups do use Tehran’s terms and those of its proxies for other acts of terror. All appear to view the two nations in the same way.

Is the mass criminal activity we’re seeing in cities a foreign-funded effort to destabilize our politics, intimidate Americans to subvert the democratic process, and prevent the federal government from carrying out entirely justifiable immigration law enforcement? It’s hard to say definitively without further investigation. So long as these miscreants continue to act lawlessly, however, states and the federal government will have ample cause to open those investigations—to identify who is laying the groundwork for violence, which large nonprofits should face massive asset forfeitures for bankrolling civil terrorism, and which individuals should be facing prison time for bringing the new wave of organized crime to American streets.

Top Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images

Many believe that masculine industries, such as military and defense, are naturally immune to left-wing race and gender ideologies. This is mostly a myth. These institutions are organized according to prestige and profit—and when those signals point to “woke,” industry leaders have dutifully followed.

Take America’s largest defense contractor, Lockheed Martin. As we have previously reported, after the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement, Lockheed adopted radical DEI policies and, in one instance, required white men in leadership positions to attend a racial reeducation program and atone for their “white male privilege.”

Now, a whistleblower has come forward to claim that Lockheed executives were so committed to DEI policies that they awarded some year-end bonuses based on employees’ skin color, rather than performance—in open violation of civil rights law.

The story began in December 2022, when the whistleblower was preparing recommendations for the aeronautics division’s year-end bonuses. The whistleblower was proud of the work the team had done to calculate awards. But soon after the bonuses were submitted for approval, higher-ups told the whistleblower that there was a problem: the “Comp Adder” list, which named recipients of bonus compensation, had too many white employees on it.

Santiago Bulnes, a vice president who now leads engineering on Lockheed’s F-35 program, wrote an email to the whistleblower. “I got a call from [human resources director] La Wanda [Moorer] last night regarding diversity stats on comp adder,” Bulnes, who did not respond to a request for comment, said. “They took a run at getting your few approved and we’re told that we need to fit in the box. I asked her to send you the list of diversity names to simplify the task of finding the best in the group.”

Next, our source claims, officials in Lockheed’s human resources department made the demand explicit. One communication instructed the whistleblower to add more than a dozen minorities to the list and recommended removing an equal number of “non-minority” employees. The implication was clear—“increasing POC for Comp Adder will result in removing equal count of non-minority”—and the instructions were deliberate, recommending specific race swaps by manager. For example, for one team, human resources officials instructed the whistleblower to “increase POC 4 and decrease non-minority 4.”

Our source was outraged. The company was requiring managers to reward employees “on the basis of their skin color alone and contrary to documented performance.” The whistleblower tried to protest this decision and filed an ethics complaint, arguing that the policy was unethical and could expose the company to legal liability, but management insisted. “Our HR counsel told me that while this may present business risk, it was the ‘less[e]r of two evils.’”

One driving force behind Lockheed’s discriminatory policy, according to our source, was La Wanda Moorer, the director of human resources. When the whistleblower asked Moorer, who did not respond to a request for comment, what would happen if the team could not find enough minorities to replace white workers on the bonus list, Moorer responded forcefully. “[T]he preference is for you to get there,” Moorer wrote. “If you are coming back and saying you can’t get there and it’s unnatural than [sic] I think that changes the conversation as a business area what risk are we willing to assume, and should we get into a situation where there is legal activity that takes place then you will be part of that process . . . . We haven’t ever been in a situation where we haven’t gotten there.”

Moorer’s last comment is worth highlighting. It suggests this wasn’t the first time Lockheed had engaged in a secret, post hoc process to strip bonuses from top performers and instead award them to employees who checked diversity boxes. And in the preceding sentence, Moorer seems to acknowledge that such policies, which are inherently discriminatory, could violate the law. Apparently, the company’s commitment to “diversity” trumped any other consideration.

In the end, the whistleblower followed the order and “swapped” 18 whites for 18 minorities, solely on the basis of race. A few months later, our source left the firm and penned a resignation letter to colleagues.

“I, at the direction of Lockheed, have actively discriminated against higher performing individuals, denied them higher pay they earned, denied them the opportunity to be motivated as a top performer,” the letter read. “Not only does this force a violation of my conscience that forces me to leave, but we could have 18 valid individual claims with associated public embarrassment and lost customer trust.”

A Lockheed spokesperson responded to our request for comment, insisting that “Lockheed Martin is a meritocracy” and is “committed to recognizing performance, rewarding excellence, and upholding the principles of merit and fairness.” The spokesperson claimed that our reporting “raise[s] concerns that we are taking seriously and investigating.”

Nevertheless, a reckoning may be coming. Earlier this year, President Trump signed an executive order prohibiting federal contractors from maintaining discriminatory DEI programs. His administration has signaled interest in prosecuting cases of anti-white discrimination. Though Lockheed quickly shuttered its DEI initiatives after Trump’s executive order, its actions earlier in the post-George Floyd era cannot be erased. As the whistleblower warned, racial discrimination is illegal—and the company could pay a heavy price.

One hopes that it will. For decades, companies could deliberately discriminate against white men without consequence. But that calculus is changing. The Department of Justice Civil Rights Division, now led by conservative super-lawyer Harmeet Dhillon, has sought to return the civil rights regime to its original mission: to enforce the law equally for individuals of all racial groups.

Dhillon might initiate this policy with a high-profile target—perhaps the nation’s largest defense contractor.

Photo by Orjan F. Ellingvag/Corbis via Getty Images

Regulatory Reform from Nixon to Biden: Politics, Economics and Law, by John D. Graham (Edward Elgar, 562 pp., $220)

If one compares American government before 1968 with today’s, the three biggest changes have been the growth in entitlement spending, the expansion of the federal debt, and the advent of what policy analysts call “social regulation.” This term refers to the explosion of stringent mandates for the environment, occupational health and safety, highway safety, public access for the disabled, consumer protection, and race and gender.

In Regulatory Reform from Nixon to Biden, John Graham provides a magisterial consideration of social regulation, providing detailed accounts of the reforms undertaken by each of those presidents. Graham is especially qualified to take on this task, since he is among the most renowned analysts of regulatory reform as well as an important practitioner, having served as director of the Office of Management and Budget’s Office of Information and Regulatory Analysis under President George W. Bush.

His key finding: “the administrative state” is a misleading metaphor. If the term implies a fourth branch of government, there is no such thing. It does not exist in its progressive form—a set of science-driven institutions run by impartial technical experts. Nor is there the politically unaccountable “swamp” that features in populist rhetoric.

Rather, the key force in shaping social regulatory policy is the president. From Nixon to George W. Bush, presidents expanded social regulation. This was even true of Ronald Reagan, who initiated regulatory reforms in immigration, hazardous waste management, pesticides, toxic chemicals, and more. Even when executive agencies initiate and formulate new policies, they go forward only if the president adopts them.

Until the election of Donald Trump in 2017, presidents only rarely sought to repeal their predecessors’ regulatory actions. This reluctance indicates either that they favored the policies or felt that it was too politically risky to reverse them.

Since Trump’s first election, “ping ponging,” in Graham’s formulation, has become far more common. The first Trump administration reversed several ambitious Barack Obama initiatives, including those involving power plant and tailpipe emissions and “Dreamer” immigration rules. Joe Biden then reinstated each of these.

Graham’s book appeared before Trump’s second election in 2024, so it does not examine the ping-pong tournament now taking place. Leaving aside questions about the wisdom of Trump’s attack on stringent regulations, it’s clear that the presidency is not drowning in an administrative quagmire. A strong measure of political accountability regarding this crucial policy arena has been preserved.

However, political accountability is only one virtue that a democratic republic must maintain. The Framers of the Constitution assigned the primary responsibility for policymaking to Congress. They did so because they rightly feared that even a popularly elected chief executive might act dictatorially. Only the legislative branch, whose representatives come from all the diverse constituencies of the republic, could thwart executive aggrandizement and engage in the deliberation and compromise necessary to knit such a vast country together.

As Graham correctly observes, Congress has not adequately performed its constitutionally mandated tasks. It writes statutes that are too vague to enable ready interpretation, and its members spend too much time virtue-signaling to pay proper attention to their agency oversight role. Thus, Graham believes that the president will retain his regulatory preeminence for the foreseeable future.

He acknowledges, though, that two recent court decisions may point the way to a restitution of the proper role of Congress and the courts. In Chevron U.S.A., Inc. v. Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc. (1984), the Supreme Court gave excessive deference to agencies in determining the meaning of a statute. The agencies had only to show that their interpretation of ambiguous statutory language was “reasonable.”

In Loper-Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo (2024), the Court overturned this interpretation. It ruled that courts must instead exercise their own independent judgment in determining whether an agency rule comports with the statute it proposes to implement. After all, statutory interpretation is what judges are trained to do, and their independence from the executive branch facilitates their ability to do so impartially. If the courts reject “creative” agency interpretations, Congress will be forced to clarify its statutory intent.

In West Virginia v. EPA (2022), the Supreme Court ruled against the EPA’s Clean Power Plan, finding that it lacked clear congressional authorization to implement a “generation-shifting” approach to energy production. The majority cited the major questions doctrine, which holds that Congress must “speak clearly if it wishes to assign to an agency decisions of vast economic and political significance.” Ironically, critics of Trump’s deregulatory agenda are now invoking this doctrine. For example, major-questions claims are appearing in suits that challenge the authority of executive agencies to freeze funding for childhood vaccinations and to end birthright citizenship.

Besides enjoying the president’s backing, executive agencies hold two key advantages over Congress: they can credibly claim greater expertise, and in many cases, they actually have it. Obviously, some overlap occurs between the two, but they are not synonymous.

For example, the CDC advocated school closings, widespread masking, banning live religious services, and shuttering businesses on the basis of its supposed expertise in public health. As it happens, these decisions were based not on science but on the public-health profession’s commitment to minimizing risk. The problem here is that choosing an acceptable level of risk and its associated burdens is a political, not a scientific, decision. Only representatives accountable to the people should weigh the risks of infectious disease spread against the costs of closing down schools, businesses, and churches.

Graham makes many sensible proposals for improving the regulatory process. From a separation-of-powers perspective, his most important is to call for the creation of a Congressional Office of Regulatory Analysis (CORA), the legislative equivalent of the executive branch office he once ran. When Congress decided it was ill-equipped to participate in the budgetary process, it created its own expert agency to rival OMB—the Congressional Budget Office. The CBO has improved Congress’s capacity to scrutinize the president’s budget. If adequately funded and staffed, CORA could similarly enhance Congress’s ability to settle major regulatory questions.

“War is too important to be left to the generals,” Georges Clemenceau said. Likewise, major regulations are too important to be left to the president and his agency subordinates.

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