April 9, 2026

Now, on to the news…

Photo credit: picture alliance / Contributor / picture alliance via Getty Images

Created in 1973, California’s In-Home Supportive Services Program pays family members to care for loved ones or other individuals at home. The program has since expanded dramatically, with more than 800,000 such caregivers in the state and a price tag of nearly $30 billion a year.

Unfortunately, IHSS is rife with fraud, losing between $6 billion and $12 billion annually to scammers. And home-care unions collect close to $150 million in membership fees, which then get diverted to support California Democrats. Our reporting has found that the program is responsible for more than 40 percent of the net jobs created during Governor Gavin Newsom’s administration.

“The system itself seems designed to prevent accountability,” Christopher Rufo and Kenneth Schrupp write. “Governor Newsom is responsible for all the main components of the IHSS operation: he oversees the program, the enforcement, and, effectively, the Public Employment Relations Board.” The governor “has no incentive to crack down on a program that is enriching his most powerful allies,” Rufo and Schrupp observe.

Read more from their investigation.

“Black trans pleasure.” “Trans liberation in an age of fascism.” “Widening the Arc of Trans History.” These are just a handful of the topics the Mellon Foundation funds via its investment in “trans studies.” John Sailer, who acquired a trove of grant proposals, grant announcements, and job advertisements through public records requests, calls these investments the foundation’s “most striking attempt at ‘transforming the academy.’” And he warns that universities “should be much more skeptical toward funders like Mellon that traffic in pseudo-disciplines like transgender studies.” Universities’ survival will depend on it, he argues.

Read more here.

America has an unfortunately long-running tradition of neglecting its most talented students. New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani wants to end gifted and talented admissions for kindergartners. San Francisco and Cambridge, Massachusetts are “detracking” math courses. Virginia once considered abolishing advanced high school math courses. And federal education policy has prioritized reducing racial achievement gaps and helping the lowest-performing students while ignoring the nation’s brightest.

“The result has been a persistent failure to identify and nurture exceptional talent—the ‘lost Einsteins,’ as economist Raj Chetty and his colleagues have described such children,” Robert Bellafiore Jr. writes. “Equity-based education policies are undermining future 1 percent geniuses and their potential achievements. Amid the ongoing AI race and mounting geopolitical tensions, identifying and supporting America’s next top scientist is essential.”

Read more.

“Has there ever been a more absurd assertion than that a man can become a woman (or vice versa) simply by saying it is so? Choose any long-term member of Congress and try to find where they advocated for transgenders decades ago — you won’t find any because liberals hadn’t invented transgender yet.”

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Tom W, commenting on the Supreme Court’s recent transgender rights rulings