CODEPINK makes progress to bring antisemitic politics into K–12 classrooms

 CODEPINK, the activist group known for anti-war protests, is now turning its attention to American schools. And that should alarm every parent.

On June 16, 17, and 18, CODEPINK held three workshops targeting K–12 education. The sessions laid out ways to remove ADL materials and partnerships from public schools, challenge Holocaust education, pressure school boards, mobilize teachers and parents, and create high school activist clubs.

The goal was clear: bring CODEPINK’s politics into classrooms and shape what children are taught.

The most disturbing part is how openly the workshops framed Jewish institutions and Holocaust education as the enemy. The CODEPINK site said the workshop aimed to teach attendees “how the ADL uses Holocaust education to justify state violence and silence the Palestinian movement.”

That is not a small accusation. It tells teachers, parents, and students to view Holocaust education as propaganda. It tells them to distrust one of the country’s best-known Jewish civil-rights organizations. It turns Jewish memory into something suspicious.

Holocaust education exists because students need to understand what antisemitism is, how it spreads, and where it can lead. Presenting it as a political weapon weakens one of the clearest tools schools have to fight anti-Jewish hate.

Marcy Winograd, campaign coordinator for CODEPINK’s “Drop the ADL” campaign, made the strategy even clearer. She called for “collective civil disobedience on the part of teachers,” including “refusing to take down the Palestinian flag” and “just outright refusal.”

Teachers have enormous influence over children. When an activist group encourages them to resist school rules and bring political messaging into classrooms, parents should be deeply concerned.

The workshops also pushed student activism. A high school teacher and sponsor of an SJP club said, “Any action we take, doesn’t matter what the action is, it's in the right direction if it's for Palestinian rights and freedoms. Period. End of story. Doesn’t matter.”

No teacher should tell students that “any action” is acceptable if it serves a political cause. Schools are supposed to teach responsibility, judgment, and respect for others. They should not train students to believe that activism excuses everything.

Winograd also described Holocaust education as “teaching teachers how to teach the Holocaust to legitimize the necessity of a Jewish ethnostate and to conflate criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism.” She encouraged teachers to resist and challenge participation in Holocaust education training.

The target is clear: weaken trust in Holocaust education, weaken trust in Jewish organizations, and push schools toward CODEPINK’s political worldview.

This is how antisemitism can enter schools under the cover of curriculum reform.

It does not always arrive with slurs. Sometimes it arrives as a lesson plan. Sometimes it appears as a workshop for teachers. Sometimes it is framed as “liberation,” “equity,” or “student voice.” But when the message teaches children to view Jewish institutions as manipulative and Holocaust education as propaganda, the result is dangerous.

Jewish students already face rising hostility in American schools and colleges. They are asked to answer for political events they did not cause. They are excluded from social spaces. They are pressured to distance themselves from parts of their identity. They are told that Jewish safety concerns are really attempts to silence others. CODEPINK’s workshops would make that climate worse.

Parents should know when outside activist groups are trying to influence what their children are taught. School boards should know when teachers are being encouraged to defy policies. Jewish families should know when Holocaust education is being attacked as propaganda.

Students can learn about difficult issues. They can learn about suffering, conflict, history, discrimination, and human rights. But they should not be fed one-sided narratives that teach suspicion toward Jewish institutions or undermine Holocaust education.

CODEPINK’s campaign is dangerous because it targets children before they are old enough to understand the complexity of what they are being taught.

If these ideas take root in elementary and high schools, they will not stop there. They will follow students onto college campuses, into student organizations, into protests, and into public life.

Parents, school boards, and education leaders should take this seriously before CODEPINK’s agenda spreads any further.

Anna Miller is the spokesperson for Protect Our Campus, a non-partisan organization documenting extremism, antisemitism, and institutional failures in education and campus spaces.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2026/06/codepink-makes-progress-to-bring-antisemitic-politics-into-k-12-classrooms/

The Information State: Its Impact On Freedom

 by Janet Levy

In his many articles for Tablet and other outlets, Jacob Siegel, a journalist and war veteran, has focused on how rulers and elites use digital tools to calibrate information and control people. His new book, The Information State: Politics in the Age of Total Control, traces the evolution—from 9/11 to the advent of AI—of a mammoth alliance between government and Big Tech that subverts our constitutional republic and enslaves Americans.

According to Siegel, the foundation of the information state is a “whole-of-society” approach to governance that aligns “the most powerful institutions behind the dictates of the state.” Tech platforms, NGOs, academia, and even individuals are enlisted to enforce government policies, creating what he calls a “360-degree police force” comprising the companies you do business with, civic organizations, and even your neighbors.

This top-down method, now preferred over building grassroots support by appealing to voters, originated in aid organizations' efforts to modernize Third World countries. It entered our political system during the post-9/11 global war on terror, and the Obama administration reshaped it into a community-led initiative—read surveillance via social media—to counter violent extremism. In practice, though, it evolved into leftist activism that seeks to control minds and behavior, promoting certain ideologies and suppressing or censoring others.

The most recent and pernicious advance has been the so-called war on misinformation and/or disinformation, launched in full force after the COVID pandemic and the prevailing narrative were questioned. Anything that opposes what the government and its technocrats want you to believe can be labeled disinformation and squashed through algorithmic intervention by the social media giants aligned with the government.

Is there any room left for genuine dissent? How did this come about? These are among the questions that Siegel seeks to answer, making his book an important and much-needed work of research, argument, and brave honesty.

No doubt, 9/11 left America shaken and determined not only to punish the perpetrators but also to prevent future attacks. But the “intelligence failure” blamed for 9/11 created an opportunity to expand the federal government’s power and the reach—without accountability—of intelligence agencies. Along with the global information systems that collated intelligence from multiple agencies, bureaucracies gained greater authority to supervise and punish ordinary Americans.

Enacted soon after 9/11, the USA Patriot Act granted the government the power to spy on foreign terrorists and American citizens alike. It weakened protections afforded by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), allowing the government to collect phone and internet data, conduct warrantless surveillance of terror suspects, monitor financial accounts, target individual citizens, and freeze funds. In 2002, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) was created, adding another layer of surveillance and further undermining constitutional rights.

Seigel calls the Patriot Act “the greatest assault on American civil liberties since the Espionage Act of 1917.” He provides background in the opening chapters, describing the Great War as the first in American history in which information control and the winning of public opinion were key elements in the quest for victory.

A year after the Great War began, President Woodrow Wilson—whose campaign slogan was ‘He kept us out of the war’—had manipulated a reluctant public into accepting that America must enter the war. To sustain this opinion and the belief that victory was certain, Wilson created America’s first large-scale propaganda machine, the Committee on Public Information (CPI), staffed by journalists, filmmakers, cartoonists, intellectuals, and artists. Through posters, films, public speeches, and other media, the committee boosted morale and encouraged public sacrifice.

Simultaneously, Wilson imposed restrictions on the media and encouraged people to report those who were disloyal, lacked sufficient loyalty, or were pessimistic about an American victory. The Espionage Act of 1917 made it illegal to say, write, or publish anything against the government. “The authority to exercise censorship over the press…is absolutely necessary to the public safety,” he said.

Wilson was not too enamored with our founding fathers’ ideas about liberty and believed that the separation of powers and checks and balances hindered effective government. With Wilson, the Platonic idea of a ruling intellectual aristocracy—as opposed to the public, who could not be trusted with the complexities of self-government and needed guidance to reach the right conclusions and beliefs—took root in American government. In effect, Wilson nationalized individual belief and conscripted public opinion into a shared commodity.

The CPI was dissolved in 1919, but Wilson’s legacy endures in the way propaganda, censorship, and secrecy became embedded in government operations; in the belief that faith in experts was crucial to solving problems; and in the media’s role as a partner in shaping opinion and manufacturing consent.

Barack Obama—another progressive, like Wilson—drew on this legacy and leveraged the technological advances of the internet age to build the infrastructure for all-encompassing, ever-expanding digital control that has replaced or greatly diminished our civil liberties. Impressed by the reach and power of social media, Obama—whom Siegal calls the Silicon President—forged a partnership between the Democratic political class and tech giants to advance his vision of shaping people’s opinions through the “right” information.

Circumventing the legislature, Obama could work through tech companies to get people to endorse policies already decided for them by unelected experts and administrators; to regulate countries’ access to digital networks and, in turn, their leverage in foreign policy; and to deploy social media platforms to coordinate large-scale demonstrations (such as the Arab Spring) to push for regime change. In fact, Obama launched the first political campaign on Facebook.

Surveillance to counter terrorism was expanded to include large-scale collection of data on Americans and their online activities. This was mediated through tech companies that provided data to the National Security Agency (NSA). Social media platforms became integrated with the national security infrastructure; Google, Facebook, and other companies began acting increasingly like branches of government.

With smartphones connecting every aspect of a person’s life to the internet, granular tracking of everything a person does has become possible. And since the exchange of ideas is no longer through conversations in town squares, neighborhoods, and social or hobby clubs, opinions are surreptitiously shaped by algorithms controlled by the government and a select elite that has arrogated to itself the right to teach people what to think and what to do.

With little heed for the numerous deaths, the COVID-19 pandemic was treated by governments as a wargame of censorship, propaganda, and mass control felt at the individual level. Social media companies decided what constituted misinformation, disinformation, or mal-information and suppressed it while elevating the dominant narrative, labeling it authoritative content.

Klaus Schwab, then head of the elitist World Economic Forum, praised the role of information monitoring in shaping public response during the pandemic. Facebook even banned users from discussing the lab-leak theory of the COVID virus. While lockdowns were strictly imposed, leftist and anarchist groups like Antifa and BLM were allowed to organize violent protests via social media.

Conformity to the day's narrative—abortion access, rights for transgender people, racial justice, climate change—was enforced by algorithms, and so-called fact-checking was weaponized to suppress dissent. Freedom of speech was cast as anathema to our republic.

Siegel concludes that the digital age has been catastrophic for America, enabling duly elected governments to behave like authoritarian regimes and leaving citizens without rights, opinions, or freedom. It is hard to disagree.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2026/06/the-information-state-its-impact-on-freedom/

Point of no return

 by Thomas Kolbe

Volkswagen is planning to eliminate up to 100,000 jobs. It is the most devastating blow yet to the stomach of Germany's believers in the green transformation, climate crusaders, and eco-socialists. Whether this shock will be enough to force the country onto a new political course, however, remains an open question.

Volkswagen is far more than just another German automaker. The Wolfsburg-based company symbolizes both the extraordinary heights and the painful decline of modern Germany. It embodies the country's moral failures born of political opportunism during the Nazi era, while also representing its postwar reinvention, economic recovery, and capacity for hope. Volkswagen is Germany Inc. cast into the form of an automobile company, and its current crisis looks less like the beginning of a new chapter than the closing pages of a long story -- a national catastrophe.

What else, if not a biblical economic disaster, should one call management's plan to eliminate 100,000 of its remaining 657,000 jobs over the coming years?

The restructuring will almost certainly have severe consequences for production sites that were already considered vulnerable. Hannover, Zwickau, Emden, as well as Audi's Neckarsulm plant, are now widely expected to face closure. What is unfolding is far more than another corporate restructuring. It marks the beginning of a chain reaction that will spread through suppliers, logistics companies, and Germany's entire industrial ecosystem.

Nor will Chancellor Friedrich Merz's rearmament strategy alter this reality. Volkswagen simply cannot reinvent itself overnight. Whatever Merz and his advisers imagined when they proposed converting civilian automobile production into military manufacturing through debt-financed government programs ignores an obvious truth: military production and civilian industry are fundamentally different worlds. It is rather like expecting a manufacturer of fine porcelain to become a Michelin-star chef overnight. Plates and food may both belong in the same restaurant, yet they require entirely different skills.

Artificially manufactured fear of Russia will not revive German industry either. Industrial output now sits roughly 25 percent below the level it would likely have reached under normal market conditions, absent years of continuous ideological intervention from Brussels and Berlin. Merz's military revival will not even produce the temporary stimulus of a classic Keynesian boom.

The German economy is running on fumes. This lemon has already been squeezed dry.

The mountain of debt that will weigh upon our children will disappear into nothingness, except that it will continue filling the pockets of politically connected beneficiaries and subsidy hunters. That deserves mentioning because it perfectly captures the spirit of our age.

Industry is disappearing while the public sector keeps expanding. Germany has entered a dangerously unbalanced phase, and only a radical return to genuine market economics, accompanied by a dramatically leaner state, offers any realistic prospect of reversing course. Regardless, Germany will have to pass through a painful bottleneck of social and economic adjustment before there is any hope of seeing light at the end of the tunnel.

Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands are losing their jobs. Net investment has turned negative. Yet the federal government continues entertaining the public with increasingly bizarre fairy tales designed to sedate rather than inform.

Germany has exhausted itself. Capital is fleeing what has become Europe's most toxic business location faster than the state can create new public-sector positions to conceal what has already become undeniable reality. Following the devastating news from Wolfsburg, Germany is entering the stage where the crisis can no longer be ignored. The country's political architecture is beginning to fracture. The establishment's so-called firewall cartel will likely close ranks even further. Any remaining differences between the Christian Democrats and the increasingly radical left will continue to dissolve as both sides seek to prevent further gains by the AfD.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2026/06/point-of-no-return/

KUDLOW: Let’s have ‘Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness,’ not Mamdani-ism

 We’re getting close to our July 4th, 250th anniversary. Which means we should all be thinking and talking about the greatest sentence in the English language and probably in all history: "That all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." That sentence is the epitome of freedom and our natural rights. And that we don’t work for government bureaucrats, they work for us. 

Even more, we don’t work for big government socialists, or still worse, we don’t work for big government socialist communist bureaucrats. None of the above. At the moment however, it seems like the Democratic Party is endowed by antisemitic Mamdani socialists or communists.

There’s a New York Post article that Mayor Zohran Mamdani actually admitted on one of the Sunday talk shows that his anti-Israel fervor truly helped secure their New York City election sweep. And then he went on in the interview to repeat his opposition to Israel as a Jewish-led state. Of course he does. His hatred of and bigotry toward Jews is well known. It animates his whole movement. And I believe that movement is also anti-American. 

Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, endowed by our Creator, is exactly the reverse of what Mr. Mamdani is trying to pull off. Our Founding Fathers strove for equality and prosperity through hard work and individual initiative unencumbered by oppressive taxes or monarchical government.

Here’s what President Trump said yesterday: "I think it is a big threat to our nation, actually, because it’s not socialism, it’s really communism." He added that: "They used the word social democrat because it sounds so nice, but it’s really communism you’re talking about. I think it’s the biggest threat to our nation there is, maybe since our founding, that includes World War I, World War II, September 11th. It includes the Pearl Harbor attack."

So this is serious business. The president is completely right. And in case you’ve forgotten, the Democratic Socialists of America wish to abolish the United States Senate, defund the military, defund the police, open borders, and universal amnesty for illegal immigrants. 

They want a national takeover of large companies. Free-government everything including health care and abortion. Criminals can vote. Stack the Supreme Court and confiscatory taxation of wealth and income. And end Israel. And, by the way, persecute Jewish people right here in New York City as well as across the country. July 4th is coming. God bless America. Yet this Mamdani-ism is not life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

https://www.foxbusiness.com/politics/larry-kudlow-lets-have-life-liberty-pursuit-happiness-not-mamdani-ism

Trump approves disaster relief for 5 US states

United States President Donald Trump announced on Truth Social that Florida, Kansas, Mississippi, Idaho and Missouri will receive federal disaster relief funding.

The largest share of financial aid was allocated for Florida, which will receive $415.9 million. Missouri follows with $27.6 million, while Mississippi will receive $11 million, Kansas was granted $5.5 million and Idaho $4.5 million. Talking about the Florida relief, Trump said, "Much of it is going to one of my favorite places in the entire World, the Panhandle!"

The approved funding is meant to help local governments restore damage caused by severe storms, tornadoes, flooding, landslides and winds, according to Trump.

https://breakingthenews.net/Article/Trump-approves-disaster-relief-for-5-US-states/66606715

US FDA approves Orca Bio's blood cancer therapy

 The U.S. Food and Drug Administration today approved Tregzi, the first regulatory T (Treg) cell-based immunotherapy for improving chronic graft-versus-host disease (GVHD)-free survival in adult patients with blood cancers undergoing allogeneic hematopoietic stem cell transplantation (allo-HSCT). It represents a novel approach to allogeneic hematopoietic stem cell transplantation in some adult patients with high-risk blood cancers. It addresses an important unmet need in transplantation, where curing the cancer is often only part of the challenge; avoiding chronic GVHD is equally important for long-term outcomes.

Tregzi uses stem cells and immune cells collected from blood of a closely matched donor to help the body fight cancer while reducing the risk of a serious complication called chronic GVHD — a condition that can occur when transplanted donor blood cells attack the patient's body. Patients receive this treatment after undergoing chemotherapy to prepare their bodies for a bone marrow or stem cell transplant.

"For patients with blood cancers who need stem cell transplantation, chronic graft-versus-host disease has long been one of the most feared and difficult-to-prevent complications," said Karim Mikhail, B.Pharm., M.S., Acting Director of the Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research (CBER). "Today's approval offers a genuine new approach that can help reconstitute the immune system while substantially reducing that risk and reflects the promise of what cellular therapy can deliver for patients."  

Tregzi is a donor-derived cellular immunotherapy composed of three cell components: purified hematopoietic stem and progenitor cells (HSPCs), Treg cells, and conventional T (Tcon) cells, each derived from the mobilized peripheral blood of an 8/8 HLA-matched related or unrelated donor. Treg cells are a type of immune cell that help regulate immune responses and maintain immune tolerance. Tregzi is designed to reduce the risk of chronic GVHD during reconstitution of the patient's blood-forming and immune systems.  

The FDA granted approval of Tregzi to Orca Biosystems, Inc.

https://www.fda.gov/news-events/press-announcements/fda-approves-new-treatment-uses-donor-immune-cells-prevent-serious-complications-blood-cancer

PJM gets green light to push data centers onto back-up power during heat wave

 The nation’s largest electricity grid — which includes Maryland, Washington D.C, and a dozen other states — received a green light from the Trump administration on Tuesday to require data centers and other large customers to turn on back-up generators during this week’s heatwave.

The order, signed by U.S. Secretary of Energy Chris Wright, allows PJM Interconnection to tap into diesel back-up generators, battery arrays and more as a “last resort” to prevent power shut-offs as temperatures climb to dangerous heights in the latter half of the week.

“Currently, there are tens of gigawatts of readily available backup generation that have remained largely untapped,” Wright wrote in his order. “Deployment of backup generation resources … can prevent avoidable blackouts, thereby saving lives and reducing costs to the American people.”

Wright’s emergency order will last through July 3. It does not apply to certain facilities serving a critical need, including hospitals, 911 call centers, water treatment plants, air traffic control towers and defense facilities.

But it does include AI data centers, which have wreaked havoc on PJM’s markets because of their immense energy demands.

PJM also received approval from the U.S. Department of Energy on Tuesday to require power generating facilities to operate to fuel the grid — even if they would surpass pollution limits by doing so.

“Because the additional generation may result in conflict with environmental standards and requirements, I am authorizing only the necessary additional generation on the conditions contained in this Order,” Wright wrote.

It is up to PJM to call upon the power plants to operate and set the parameters, and it must notify the Department of Energy when additional power generation resources are tapped to go beyond its pollution allowances.

Power generators are to comply with environmental regulations, including recordkeeping requirements, to the “maximum extent practicable” during the emergency. According to PJM officials, the order could result in exceedances of sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxide, carbon monoxide, ammonia and wastewater releases. The order expires at 11:59 p.m. on July 3.

PJM is predicting high demand through the weekend, peaking on Thursday, when demand is projected to set a new record for the grid at 166,304 megawatts, surpassing the previous record of 165,563 megawatts, set in 2006.

Throughout Central Maryland, the National Weather Service is predicting high temperatures just below 100 on Wednesday, followed by high temperatures between 102 and 104 degrees Fahrenheit from Thursday through Saturday. 

PJM is operating under a hot weather alert through July 3. For July 1, the grid operator has also issued a “maximum generation alert,” which calls on transmission and generation owners to defer any possible equipment maintenance or testing activities until the heatwave passes.

The grid operator has also issued a “load management alert,” advance warning that it could use demand response programs on July 1, programs that pay customers who sign up to allow for energy reduction during emergencies.

In anticipation of the heat wave, Maryland utilities have been offering customers tips to conserve power whenever possible in order to lower their bills. 

The lists include setting thermostats at higher temperatures such as 78 degrees, using appliances later in the day, cooking outdoors when possible and using fans for cooling, but turning them off when no one is present in a room.

https://marylandmatters.org/2026/06/30/pjm-gets-green-light-to-push-data-centers-onto-back-up-power-during-heat-wave/