May 22, 2026

Photo credit: NurPhoto / Contributor / NurPhoto via Getty Images

For years, extremists have been exploiting the U.S. nonprofit system. Florida illustrates how deep the problem runs.

In 1992, the Al-Qassam Mosque was incorporated under Florida law as the Islamic Community of Tampa, Inc. It listed Sami Al-Arian as its Registered Agent in 1995. Al-Arian was later convicted, in 2006, for conspiring to support Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ).

The Islamic Community of Tampa’s 501(c)(3) board of trustees included Ramadan Abdullah Shallah, who was, at the same time, serving as secretary-general of PIJ. He appeared on the FBI’s Most Wanted list, and the U.S. Treasury classified him as a Specially Designated Terrorist.

Hatem Fariz became the new director of the Al-Qassam Mosque after he was released from prison in 2010 for pleading guilty to conspiracy to provide material support to PIJ.

All of these details appear in court records. And yet, the network is still active. “Enforcement is slow for good reason,” Lt. Gov. Jay Collins, Joel Finkelstein, and Colin Wright explain. “Federal designations require due process. States face real constitutional limits, especially when religion and free speech are involved. The result is a gray zone that well-organized networks can and do exploit, sometimes for decades.”

Read more.

Last week, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani released the latest draft of his $125.8 billion budget. By late June, he will negotiate with the city council to finalize it.

It’s a business-as-usual budget, Nicole Gelinas argues. Mamdani wants to show that democratic socialism can work, but, like every mayor before him, she writes, “he can’t figure a way out of the constraints imposed on him by public-sector unions and existing welfare programs.”

Indeed, the cost of the city’s workforce is growing. Rather than get a handle on it, Mamdani has supported union efforts to undo pension savings achieved earlier with steps such as raising the retirement age. Social-services spending keeps rising, too. This year alone, the city will spend $1.5 billion of its own tax funds on welfare.

Read more about the budget and the challenges the new mayor will face.

Launched in 2014, the children’s search engine Kiddle holds outsize influence in the information space, with schools and libraries linking to it and the International Society for Technology in Education recommending it. The site appears prominently in Google searches, and its top traffic referrer is an online homeschool curriculum. Indeed, Kiddle bills itself as a trusted resource for kids.

There’s just one problem: it disseminates biased and ideologically framed information.

“Foreign terrorist organizations, like Hamas and Hezbollah, are whitewashed,” Ashley Rindsberg explains. “Russia’s war on Ukraine is downgraded to a ‘military operation,’ mirroring Kremlin language, while Joseph Stalin’s role in Russian history is reduced to his success in building a ‘strong, modern nation.’”

Read more about how the site softens extremist movements and authoritarian regimes.