This year’s midterm elections aren’t just about who wins in November; they’re about who wins fights over gerrymandering taking place right now. Nowhere is the battle fiercer than in Virginia, a state where voters just six years ago approved a constitutional amendment to take partisanship out of congressional redistricting.

Now Democrats want to make an exception to the rule Virginia voters approved by a nearly two-thirds majority in 2020: They want this year’s congressional map to be drawn up by their own state legislators, erasing the districts set up by the bipartisan board established by the amendment just a few years back.

It’s no surprise when a state like Texas or California that leans overwhelmingly toward one party indulges in partisan gerrymandering. But Virginia is a purple state, and its congressional representation—six Democrats, five Republicans—currently reflects that.

Yet, if Democrats get their way on April 21, they’ll be able to seize 10 of Virginia’s 11 congressional seats for themselves, in the most brazenly unjust reapportionment seen anywhere in decades. This isn’t about making a blue state bluer or a red state redder; this one’s an effort to manufacture a virtual monopoly for one party, depriving millions of the other party’s voters of their representation.

One thing the sheer audacity of this move suggests is that Democrats nationwide aren’t quite as confident as they pretend to be about winning the midterms fair and square. If they expect voters coast to coast to repudiate Trump’s GOP in a landslide, why resort to such extreme measures in a place like Virginia?

Either Democrats are more worried than they let on, or they want to do more than just win—they want to annihilate their competition. They’re proving far more ruthless than Republicans, who balked at the opportunity last year to redraw Indiana’s congressional map from a 7-2 partisan split to a 9-seat GOP sweep.

What Democrats are attempting in Virginia is tantamount to legalized election theft, if voters are unwise enough to approve the amendment they’re pushing. There’s a political cost for this attack on small-d democracy: Gov. Abigail Spanberger, for one, is paying a price in her polling.

She was elected by a whopping 15-point margin last year and was soon touted as the Democrats’ new face of moderation, which is why she was the party’s choice to respond to President Donald Trump’s State of the Union address this year. Yet her approval ratings are already poor, with a Washington Post survey at the end of March finding 47 percent of those polled gave her a passing grade, while 46 percent disapproved of her performance in office so far.

The numbers are similar to polling on the amendment to give Virginia’s Democrat-controlled legislature the power to draw the congressional districts for the midterms: 50 percent say they approve, 47 percent disapprove. The amendment can pass with a simple majority, but if the polls are right, Democrats have no margin to spare, and early voting reports so far indicate there’s particularly strong turnout in Republican areas of the state.

The early vote is outpacing early voting in last year’s gubernatorial election, too. Arguably, the amendment shouldn’t be on the ballot at all: it’s faced several legal challenges, with the state Supreme Court ultimately deciding the April 21 election can proceed even while doubts about its legality remain to be settled later.

The very wording of the amendment is illegal, Republicans contend, since state law specifies the text accompanying the measure “shall be limited to a neutral explanation,” while the amendment itself is tendentiously worded as an attempt to “restore fairness.”

Who wouldn’t vote to restore fairness?

The campaign for the amendment has been a master class in deceit and manipulation, with even news outlets in the deep-blue D.C. suburbs of Northern Virginia noting the copious use of “pink slime” techniques by the “Yes” side. Those techniques involve propaganda disguised to look impartial—like a made-to-purpose publication branded as The Virginia Independent, which the Arlington-based news site ARLNow.com describes as “a partisan newspaper advancing Democrats’ arguments.”

That slime has been flooding into voters’ mailboxes, including mine. Maybe my blue suburb hasn’t been a target of whatever efforts the Republicans are making—though the other possibility is that the GOP just isn’t trying as hard.

Texas kicked off the latest wave of redistricting ahead of the midterms, as Republicans there looked to widen their advantage over the Democrats. Yet as the divergent examples of Indiana and Virginia show, it’s the Democrats who are more hellbent on winning, even if they have to turn state constitutions into confetti to do it.

Politics is a test of wills-and if Republicans fail this one, they’ll almost certainly fail in November, too.

COPYRIGHT 2026 CREATORS.COM

April 6, 2026By Daniel McCarthy

Source: Virginia: A New Extreme in Gerrymandering – Chronicles

‘Mental Heath’ And Progressive Propaganda: A Deeply Controversial Agenda In Schools That Should Alarm All Parents

Illinois lawmakers’ obsession with getting in children’s minds is getting creepier, with multiple controversial bills in the legislature this session targeting students in the state.

From mandated “social-emotional” indoctrination to more forced “mental-health education,” Big Pharma-funded lawmakers appear to believe that doing more of the same thing will somehow achieve different results for Illinois children. It will not.

The initiatives are disguised as efforts to improve the social, emotional, and mental wellbeing of children. But in reality, the bills are yet another foundational step toward a national system for psychological conditioning and manipulating children’s attitudes, beliefs, and worldview. The language being used to support the rollout is merely a mask to conceal a deeply controversial agenda that should alarm all parents.

SEL Indoctrination

One of the schemes, HB 4855, purports to require that every school district in Illinois force every child to receive direct instruction in “social and emotional learning” (SEL) throughout the year.

Introduced by Democrat State Rep. Janet Yang Rohr, the legislation amends the Children’s Mental Health Act to force SEL into everything. First, it mandates direct SEL instruction four times per year. But it also forces teachers to reinforce the SEL programming by intentionally integrating it into curricula and classroom activities.

Under the bill, school districts are required to provide “professional development” to help educators align their teaching with SEL principles. The SEL indoctrination, which focuses on giving children government-approved attitudes and beliefs on a wide range of issues, must be aligned with the Illinois Learning Standards for Social/Emotional Learning.

Those SEL standards were developed in partnership with the Bill Gates-funded Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL). The organization has publicly boasted about using SEL to turn children into “global citizens” and activists for “social justice.”

But perhaps even more troubling, CASEL admitted on its website that the whole idea came from a New Age institution deeply tied to the occult known as the Fetzer Institute. The institute’s leading luminary on SEL, Professor Linda Lantieri of Columbia University, has openly acknowledged in webinars getting insights from spiritual beings she claims to communicate with.

Earlier this year, lawmakers in Utah considered a bill to ban SEL in government schools. The legislation did not pass. But many more bills are expected nationwide next year.

“Mental Health Education”

Another bill being considered by Illinois lawmakers, HB 2960, orders schools to incorporate “mental health” instruction into their “health education” courses. The legislation includes a broad range of required topics, including “symptoms” of alleged mental problems, supposed “services” to deal with those problems, and more.

Introduced by State Rep. Laura Faver Dias, a Democrat whose campaign was lavishly funded by Big Pharma interests, the legislation will mainstream Big Pharma’s highly profitable understanding of “mental health” among students. The bill also brings in all manner of progressive propaganda on race, gender, sexual orientation, socioeconomic status, and more.

Big Pharma and Big Psychiatry

Even a brief analysis of the effort reveals the unchallenged assumption that the secular Big Pharma-backed view of “mental health” is unquestionably true and good. But even many leading psychiatrists and psychologists have rejected that notion as absurd. Legendary Harvard-trained psychiatrist Dr. Peter Breggin, whose work exposing everything from lobotomies to Prozac has led to profound changes in the industry, blasted the schemes of Illinois lawmakers.

There is a long history of collaboration between “organized psychiatry and the pharmaceutical industry” to “make a market out of children” by reaching them through schools, he explained.

The bills come as government schools prepare to begin mandatory “mental health” screenings of all children soon as part of an edict passed last year.

“The idea of screening school children for mental problems is equivalent to screening them for the drug market,” Breggin said when the bill was being considered. “This will stigmatize increasing numbers of children, lead many of them to taking dangerous psychiatric drugs, and push some into a lifetime ‘career’ as mental patients.”

“Nothing is worse than telling a child they have a mental problem, first because it demoralizes them, and second because the problem, if there is one, is corrected by improving how we relate to them,” added Breggin.

Psychiatry and the pharmaceutical industry have “much too narrow an approach” to dealing with children’s problems, he told IFI. Instead of pushing drugs and social engineering on the children via “mental health” programs, Dr. Breggin argued for other approaches. “Their ‘problems’ may disappear with a different teacher or a different school,” he said, adding that many so-called “mental problems” are really spiritual or emotional in nature.

Mental Health Crisis?

It is true that there is a so-called “mental health crisis” afflicting not just Illinois students, but children across America. In fact, according to the latest data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), some 40 percent of high-school students report persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness.

Even more alarming: one in five U.S. students in public schools “seriously considered suicide,” and about 10 percent actually attempted suicide just in the last year. Perhaps even more insidiously, children in Illinois are being used as props to advance the Big Pharma’s “mental health” agenda.

“I think something that we’re seeing on a day-by-day basis throughout middle and high schools is that education is unable to address this issue,” argued Abhinav Anne, an Illinois high-school student who is supposedly involved in pushing the legislation.

“Bullying, anxiety, how to combat depression,” continued Anne. “We teach students how to recite tables and memorize every state and country on a map, but we’re not really teaching students these fundamental issues…we’re seeing this gap in knowledge.”

Just this month, the Illinois Senate Behavioral and Mental Health Committee unanimously approved a bill to promote a deeply controversial “suicide prevention” hotline to students. The hypersexualized “hotline” has become infamous for promoting LGBT ideology and for grooming children, even directing children to the horrifying “Trevor Project.”

Ironically, the mandatory “suicide prevention” demanded under the bill has been known to plant seeds in children’s minds.

Big Picture

The state and its schools are aiming to sideline and ultimately replace parents on these critical issues. It is true that children are suffering badly today. But it is not due to a lack of SEL and “mental health” schemes. In fact, for centuries, children were thriving without any such programming. What they had was faith and family.

Remember, the government’s own data prove its schools cannot even teach reading, writing, or math properly. Clearly, government and its “educational” institutions are not cut out to serve as parents, therapists, mental health counselors, or anything of the sort.

Even if well intentioned, lawmakers should recognize the danger of these SEL and “mental health” schemes.

Children need God, truth, parents, and families — not occult-themed SEL, dangerous “mental health” indoctrination, and psychotropic drugs. Unfortunately for those still in government schools, that is not an option.

Alex Newman is an award-winning international journalist, the Founder of Liberty Sentinel, and a Contributor to Harbinger’s Daily.

Source: ‘Mental Heath’ And Progressive Propaganda: A Deeply Controversial Agenda In Schools That Should Alarm All Parents – Harbinger’s Daily

EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin walked onto the Heartland Institute’s climate summit on Wednesday and did something the radical left can’t tolerate: He told the truth about the climate racket.

He blasted the fear merchants, defended American energy, and made it clear that the days of handing blank checks to climate zealots are over. For the left, which has treated climate alarmism like a religion, to hear that from the EPA administrator has to sting.

For years, the climate crowd has treated every weather event, every policy debate, and every energy decision like a prelude to apocalypse, requiring billions of dollars to stop it. How many times have we heard “We only have X years to prevent” stop some devastating climate event, only for that event never to come to pass?

I’ve lost track.

And Zeldin called it out. He said that mentality has warped U.S. policy and pushed Europe into a mess of higher costs, weaker security, and dangerous dependence on foreign energy sources. That’s what happens when “save the planet” becomes a slogan for self-inflicted economic sabotage.

He also put his finger on the political shift that changed everything. The Trump victory in 2024 ended the era of speculative, expensive, self-harming climate policies getting a free pass from Washington. As Zeldin put it, “Now, if the election didn’t go the same way, in November of 2024, I’m pretty confident that whoever would be in this position instead of me might not have been here [at the conference] this morning.”

That line may seem trivial, but it’s not. It tells you exactly how much these people counted on power, not persuasion. “I’m pretty confident that instead of grants getting canceled to the tune of tens of billions, instead the grift would be continuing,” Zeldin said. And that’s the whole game in one sentence. Billions in wasteful grants, endless alarmism, endless pressure… it was all about stoking fear and empowering those who elect Democrats.

Zeldin went even further, describing how climate policy was captured by elites who decided they alone could define science. “What happened for years and decades in this country is that the elite, the ruling class, the people who had run the agencies, the people who have decided that they are in charge of the science, the politicians, the biggest grifters — there would be a cabal that would decide exactly which model is the chosen model, which methodology is the higher methodology.”

And we all know how that worked out.

That’s the part the media can’t stand. They call these gatherings “climate deniers” because they don’t want the public asking whether the so-called consensus has been used as a political weapon. Which, of course, it has.

And then came the line that will drive the alarmists into full meltdown mode: “It’s controversial that we won’t sign up for the script that the world is imminently about to end.”

That is exactly why this speech matters so much. It rejects panic as policy. It chooses science over fear.

Zeldin also pointed to Europe as the cautionary tale. The “sky is falling” crowd pushed leaders there to weaken their own energy systems and security, and now European nations rely far more on foreign energy sources. That dependence is not a virtue signal. It is a vulnerability, especially given how much of their oil passes through global chokepoints like the Strait of Hormuz.

I should point out that there is nothing wrong with wanting to be a good steward of the environment. Conservatives have said that for years. But being a good steward means realism, not panic theater, and it certainly does not mean kneecapping your own economy while pretending the sky is about to fall. Democrats have been pushing that for years, and it doesn’t accomplish anything but lining the pockets of their donors.

The reason Zeldin’s speech matters so much is that he spoke like someone who understands the difference between environmental protection and ideological crusading. He didn’t apologize for American energy. He made it clear that the EPA should follow the law, not invent authority because the latest doomsday script demands it.

And frankly, it was refreshing to hear an EPA administrator say it.

Full Video of Event

Matt Margolis  | 9:29 AM on April 09, 2026

Source: This Is the Best Thing You’ve Heard an EPA Administrator Say – PJ Media

Matt Margolis is a conservative commentator and columnist. His work has been cited on Fox News and national conservative talk radio, including The Rush Limbaugh Show, The Mark Levin Show, and The Dan Bongino Show. Matt is the author of several books and has appeared on Newsmax, OANN, Real America’s Voice News, Salem News Channel, and even CNN. You can also subscribe to his newsletter for free!