Pete Buttigieg, the former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, is eyeing a 2026 Michigan Senate run. (He coincidently moved his family to Traverse City in 2022.) So far, critics from both parties have focused on his status as a carpetbagger. But Buttigieg now has larger issues to contend with, starting with his avowed support for taxpayer-funded sex change surgeries for federal inmates and illegal immigrants.
Like Harris, Buttigieg filled out the 2019 American Civil Liberties Union candidate survey. And like Harris, Buttigieg told the organization that, if elected, "he would use executive authority to ensure that federal inmates and illegal immigrants have access to 'comprehensive treatment associated with gender transition, including all necessary surgical care,'" Free Beacon editor in chief Eliana Johnson reports.
"I would direct my HHS Office of Civil Rights and Department of Justice to vigorously enforce all federal laws against discrimination based on gender identity, including ensuring the provision of all medically necessary care for transgender Americans," Buttigieg wrote in his survey response. "This includes medical care for transgender individuals incarcerated in federal prisons and under immigration detention."
"Buttigieg's responses are newly relevant given his interest in jumping into the Michigan Senate race, certain to be one of the most hotly contested races of the midterm election cycle in the wake of Democratic incumbent Gary Peters’s announcement that he will not run for reelection," writes Johnson.
"But Buttigieg’s left-wing social views may prove problematic in the swing state, which President Donald Trump—as well as the state’s Democratic Senate candidate, Elissa Slotkin—carried in November."
When Donald Trump laid out his plan to "own" Gaza and relocate its inhabitants, mainstream media outlets like ABC News rushed to the war-torn strip to interview elderly residents of so-called refugee camps, all of whom said they would never leave. But others are offering a different view. Believe it or not, they’re eager to get out of the territory Hamas has turned into a living hell.
That's according to a new video from the Center for Peace Communications, a New York nonprofit that produces on-the-ground videos throughout the Middle East. The group interviewed Gazans in the 36 hours that followed Trump's Feb. 4 speech outlining plans to make the strip the "Riviera of the Middle East."
One young man, sporting a backward cap, made a direct plea to the Don: "I'm asking Trump himself to relocate us as he suggested, and I'll be the first one to go," he said. Others called on Arab nations like Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia to take in fleeing Gazans. Another predicted that his neighbors would ultimately "accept reality" and leave the strip if given the opportunity because "they want to live."
The interviews align with a Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research poll taken just before Hamas's terror attack, which found that 44 percent of Gazans between the ages of 18 and 29 were considering emigrating. Joseph Braude, president of the Center for Peace Communications, told us that number has "undoubtedly" risen to a majority "over the course of the war and … over the weeks of this recent ceasefire when Gazans had a chance to tour the north and see what happened to their homes."
Read more and watch the full video here.
On Friday, the Trump administration made a first move in its efforts to defund DEI, canceling $15 million in federal grants used to underwrite diversity programs at three universities. On Monday, a fresh lawsuit provided the administration with a blueprint on how to charge forward.
The suit, first reported by our Aaron Sibarium, accuses the University of Illinois Chicago of engaging in illegal race discrimination through a slew of race-based hiring programs that called on departments to hire people of color. The plaintiff, former professor of public administration and data science Stephen Kleinschmit, says he was fired for raising concerns about those programs.
Kleinschmit's complaint "argues his firing was both a form of retaliation and race discrimination," writes Sibarium. "Though UIC claimed he was being fired due to budget cuts—which did not result in any other layoffs—those cuts came as his department was seeking to hire a scholar 'from a community of color.'"
While discrimination complaints have focused in large part on admissions processes, student privacy laws shield admissions files from public view, making such cases difficult to win.
"The faculty hiring process, on the other hand, tends to produce a paper trail that is accessible through litigation and, at public universities, subject to public records requests. That could make programs like UIC’s easy pickings for private litigants and federal agencies amid the legal siege promised by the Trump administration, which has issued a series of executive orders targeting universities and DEI."
Away from the Beacon:
- A former IDF soldier says that, on a patrol of an undisclosed village, he found sniper rifles, anti-tank missiles, explosives—and care packages marked "USAID." Is that what Democrats call lifesaving aid?
- Congrats, Washingtonians: Donald Trump is set to issue an executive order that would increase criminal penalties and clear homeless camps in D.C.
- Days into the Trump administration's second "Maximum Pressure" campaign, Iran's currency plunged to an all-time low, falling 75 percent from the same period in 2024, according to the Foundations for Defense of Democracy.