Steve Hilton wants to get smartphones out of kids’ hands.

And come November, if voters elect him to be California’s next governor, he said he would do that in a unique way: inverting the social pressure so many parents succumb to when they get their kid a phone.

Hilton told a crowd of supporters in Irvine on Monday, Aug. 31, that he would require schools to ask parents to sign a “Wait Until 8th” contract. Wait Until 8th is a national campaign aimed at getting parents to promise they won’t give their child a smartphone until they enter high school. And if parents need a way to stay in touch with their kid, the campaign encourages them to get their kids a basic cell phone.

Hilton said he intends to require schools, early childcare providers and state-funded organizations that work with kids — like youth groups, sports programs and after-school clubs — to promote the campaign and ask parents and their kids to join. The ultimate goal, he said, is to create a new social norm for kids and teens across California: that children should not be given smartphones until they reach high school.

The national campaign has gotten more than 155,000 parents to sign on across the country.

“We are not against technology; we’re the tech capital of the world. But when it’s kids we’re talking about, we need to protect childhood, unplug the children (and) free our kids from the feed,” Hilton said to a group of about two dozen supporters outside a Verizon storefront in The Market Place shopping center, many who held signs that read “unplug the children” and “free our kids from the feed.”

“I don’t want to ban anything. I don’t want to tell parents what to do. I want to help parents do what they want to do anyway,” said Hilton, who prides himself on never owning a smartphone.

Parents often succumb to social pressure and get their kids a smartphone because they don’t want them to be the only one among their peers without one, Hilton said. But if enough parents refrain from getting their kids smartphones until they’re entering high school, then the kids who do have a smartphone will be the odd one out, he said.

The progressives have used various greenhouse gas mandates to eliminate industry in our state, while the DSA wants to take over control of industry outright

By Andy Caldwell, September 1, 2026 10:40 am

There is no denying the fact that the affordability crisis is real. Our housing costs are beyond the reach of most citizens, especially young adults, and food, fuel, electricity, and even water, are more expensive than in other states too. However, if capitalism was the cause of the affordability crises, as young people have been led to believe, then why does it cost 2-3 times more to live in CA than the rest of the country?

Things cost more in CA because government costs more here, and government costs more in CA because government has served to create artificial shortages rather than abundance. This all started in Jerry Brown’s first term when he coined the phrase “less is more”.

The cost of gasoline, for instance, is now nearly double that in other states because our government has made it nearly impossible to drill for oil and produce affordable gasoline. Additionally, of course, we went all in with solar and wind, which costs more and delivers less power per dollar spent. These higher costs for fuel and electricity increase the cost of everything else.

Housing is more expensive here because most land in Santa Barbara County, some 90%, is off limits to development. That, plus the regulations, especially California’s Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) and various zoning machinations developers must go through, is extremely expensive and time-consuming and these costs are passed onto home buyers and renters. For instance, the homes in the Richards Ranch project in Orcutt will cost $100,000 more per unit, or more, than originally estimated, because of Machiavellian delays in getting the project approved and contrived water shortages by way of government fiat.

Younger voters, who have never been taught economics, are nonetheless, being led to believe the affordability crises is a function of capitalism. The truth remains, however, that unhindered capitalism, due to competition, ultimately serves to drive prices down, as competing businesses compete for consumer dollars while creating abundance.

Democrats are planning to do a lot of radical things if given control of Congress this fall. But at the top of that list is none other than to destroy the U.S. Supreme Court.

Throughout the past several days, leading Democrats have espoused support for varying measures aimed at targeting the high court’s conservative justices and the court’s makeup.

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., kicked things off on Saturday while speaking to Iowa Democrats in Des Moines alongside Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., a major proponent of packing the Supreme Court. Throughout his roughly 15-minute diatribe, the Ocean State’s junior senator said that he and Raskin — both leading Democrats on the House and Senate Judiciary Committees — are already colluding on how to maximize their investigative power, and that one of their main targets will be the high court.

Stan Kroenke announced Tuesday morning that he has purchased the Angels from Arte Moreno.

A release from Kroenke Sports & Entertainment said the company “has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire a controlling interest in the Los Angeles Angels Baseball Club from the Moreno family. The transaction is expected to close in the first quarter of 2027, subject to customary closing conditions and approval of Major League Baseball.”

Kroenke, who owns the Los Angeles Rams, also has ownership interests in the Denver Nuggets, the Colorado Avalanche, the Colorado Rapids, and Arsenal of the Premier League.

“The Angels are a storied franchise anchored in a great market. We look forward to an exciting future with the Angels organization,” said Kroenke in the release.

Moreno has owned the Angels since 2003, when he purchased the team for $184 million. A purchase price was not announced on Tuesday morning.

“The Angels Organization is pleased to announce this transaction with Kroenke Sports & Entertainment. The Moreno Family has been honored to steward the Angels for 23 years and we believe with KSE’s experience and success they are the best next owner for the franchise. The Angels Organization looks forward to continuing its commitment to the fans, our employees, the players and our business partners,” said Moreno in the release sent by Kroenke’s company.

Another summer has come and gone, which means that the U.S. Supreme Court is gearing up for yet another blockbuster term.

Like those before it, this year’s docket is piling up with cases touching on some of the biggest policy issues in American society. From religious liberty to parental rights, here is a breakdown of the biggest legal battles set to be argued before the high court during its 2026-2027 term.

A survey conducted by Georgetown University’s William English found that Americans own approximately 60 million guns that fall into the Democrats’ category of “assault weapons.”

The abstract of the survey shows it was conducted with a “nationally representative sample of 51,398 individuals” during the months of July and August 2026.

Ammoland published the body of the survey and it shows Americans own roughly 40 million AR-15-style rifles. Moreover, Americans own another 20 million guns that Democrats seek to ban when they target so-called “assault weapons” as a category.

These numbers are in step with the growth witnessed between 2020 and January 2026.

The Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has taken custody of an adult illegal alien who was convicted of groping multiple girls at Fairfax High School in Fairfax County, Virginia.

As Breitbart News has chronicled, Israel Flores Ortiz of El Salvador was convicted in April on nine counts of groping girls at the high school. Ortiz had crossed the United States-Mexico border in 2024 and was released into the nation’s interior by the Biden administration.

After serving less than 140 days, Ortiz was released from jail and turned over to ICE agents, who had placed a detainer on him.

“On August 31, ICE officers arrested Israel Flores-Ortiz following his release from the Fairfax County Adult Detention Center,” an ICE spokesperson told ABC7 News. “On Aug. 10, a Justice Department immigration judge ordered Flores-Ortiz removed from the United States. Flores-Ortiz will remain in ICE custody pending his removal from the country.”

In March, about a dozen girls at the high school came forward to accuse Ortiz of groping them in the hallways of the school. School officials knew of the groping incidents for more than two weeks before they alerted parents of students at the high school to the issue.

Without treatment, it’s going to be a long few years for Rep. Huffman

By Katy Grimes, September 1, 2026 8:14 am

Every so often a politician makes a statement so ridiculous, so absurd, that it must be addressed.

Like any contagious virus, Trump Derangement Syndrome is thriving in many Democrats.

Rep. Jared Huffman (D-San Rafael), who has a lengthy, seemingly incurable case of Trump Derangement Syndrome, had a hissy fit after the Supreme Court allowed construction on White House ballroom to continue.

“This ruling is a disgrace and a masterclass in judicial sycophancy,” Huffman said in a statement. “Once again, this extremist MAGA majority on the Supreme Court has proven it functions as little more than a rubber stamp for Trump, letting him roll out his vanity projects and bulldoze the White House for his own glorification through a project Congress never approved and the American people never asked for.”

In July, Huffman accused the President of hijacking America’s 250th Anniversary celebration, declaring financial misconduct, data harvesting, and political favoritism of the very wealthy taking advantage of the American people.”

“Every American should be outraged by what Trump has done to our nation’s 250th birthday celebration. What should have been a once-in-a-generation moment to unite the country has been turned into another vehicle for division, propaganda, and political gain. We uncovered how he hijacked America 250 – watch to see how:”

“The GOP Is Panicking Over Noncitizen Voting. It’s Imaginary,” read a headline in New York Magazine this past February. The article maligned Republican efforts to pass the SAVE America Act, which would require documentary proof of citizenship to register to vote. New York Magazine accused Republicans of focusing on a “phantom menace of noncitizen voting.”

Fast forward seven months and New York Magazine has gone from claiming that noncitizen voting is “imaginary” to asking “Why is noncitizen voting so terrifying?”

NY Magazine’s Zak Cheney-Rice focuses his latest piece on New York City’s Local Law 11, which would have allowed noncitizens to vote in local elections before it was shot down by the state’s highest court. The legislation would have made roughly 800,000 noncitizens eligible for voting for offices like council or mayor. Those eligible would have included lawful permanent residents and others authorized to work in the United States who had been living in the city for at least 30 days.

This law was in no way an “imaginary” change. In fact, it was a real point of contention that had been around long before New York Magazine’s February article dismissing noncitizen voting as “imaginary.” Had the law gone into effect, noncitizens could have constituted a significant part of the Big Apple electorate and could have exceeded margins of victory in tight local races — not an “imaginary” problem by any means.

Nine more companies have joined President Donald Trump’s most-favored-nation drug pricing agreement, one of the president’s most highly publicized affordability initiatives to bring down the cost of prescription drugs.

The president signed an executive order in May 2025 directing his administration to work toward securing most-favored-nation pricing with large pharmaceutical manufacturers. Most-favored-nation pricing means a manufacturer has agreed to sell some of its products in the U.S. at no higher a price than the lowest price among its economic peers. Since the order’s signing, the administration has announced deals to that effect with 26 of the largest pharmaceutical manufacturers in the world, as of Monday.

Monday’s group were more mid-sized pharmaceutical companies, according to the White House, though some can still be found on Drug Discovery & Development’s list of the 50 largest pharmaceutical companies. They are Alcon, Astellas Pharma, BeOne Medicines, BridgeBio, CSL, Kyowa Kirin, Sun Pharma, Teva Pharmaceuticals and UCB.

Trump said the deals would collectively save Americans hundreds of billions of dollars on prescription drugs and that there were more to come.

“In total, these agreements are projected to save Americans more than $600 billion over a very short period of time,” Trump said.

Americans voters say local governments should have the most say on whether data centers are approved, according to a new poll.

The Center Square Voters’ Voice Poll found that 50% of those surveyed want local governments to have the most power, 21% think it should be state governments, 11% think the federal government should decide and 7% believe it should be the private companies building the data centers that decide. Twelve percent were not sure.

The results come from a poll conducted by Noble Predictive Insights from Aug. 12-16 that surveyed registered voters nationally via opt-in online panel and text-to-web cell phone messages. The sample included 2,533 respondents comprised of 930 Republicans, 930 Democrats, and 673 Independents. Among independent voters, 330 respondents were classified as true independents, which are individuals who do not lean toward either major party when given the choice.

New York Attorney General Letitia James has run her office like a mob boss, using taxpayer money to fund political vendettas. The DEI Democrat campaigned for the office in 2018 on a platform of going after President Donald Trump.

Now, a new bombshell email appears to show just how deep the corrupt attorney general’s office is willing to go to get their man and his allies.

It’s exhibit A of why New Yorkers “should be embarrassed, disappointed, and disgusted by their chief law enforcement officer,” one government watchdog attorney tells The Federalist. ‘Target Trump Himself’

As the Albany Times Union first reported, New York Assistant Attorney General Daniel Wiesenfeld on Friday morning blasted out an email to his 2,000 colleagues about how he has been pressured to get Trump and his allies.

Wiesenfeld, assigned to the agency’s Investor Protection Bureau, wrote in the email that his supervisor, Shamiso Maswoswe, had told him to “find and pursue crimes committed by specific individuals and organizations affiliated with Donald Trump.” He said he was to “target Trump himself, Truth Social, Hewlett Packard (DOJ approved merger) … without having a credible reason for targeting this organizations and individuals.”

The prosecutor, who has worked in the AG’s office for seven years, was placed on administrative leave, according to the news outlet. His email was quickly deleted from the office’s servers and disappeared from the employees’ inboxes. Staff then received a follow-up email from one of James’ executive assistants asserting that Wiesenfeld’s damning email was an “internal” matter and that agency employees were not “in danger,” individuals familiar with the message told the Albany newspaper.

Massachusetts’ highest court just handed the ACLU a powerful new tool for scrubbing religious references from public life, and it did so by inventing an injury nobody has suffered.

The Supreme Judicial Court blocked Quincy, Massachusetts, from installing two bronze statues of St. Michael the Archangel and St. Florian outside its new public safety building, not because the city coerced anyone into worship, funded a church, or discriminated against a resident, but because the statues are new, large, and “closely affiliated with a particular religion.” That’s the entire violation: bronze that might make someone think of Catholicism. If that reasoning survives, it won’t stop at two statues in Quincy.

Quincy spent $850,000 building the statues to honor the police officers and firefighters who serve the city. Mayor Thomas Koch chose St. Michael and St. Florian because they capture something ordinary civic plaques cannot: courage that runs toward danger rather than from it, patrons those professions have invoked for centuries. The court didn’t dispute that. It ruled the statues could still convey “implicit government support” for Catholicism and, as a result, “subordination of other religions,” reviving in substance the very faulty inquiry the U.S. Supreme Court has spent the last several years dismantling under the federal establishment clause.

As dire as circumstances seem across the country, the United States can fix most, if not all, of the problems facing the average American family through mass deportations and expropriation of the property of anyone associated with the illegal alien invasion. This means dramatically increasing taxes on remittances, confiscating the property of deportees, and imposing escalating fines on businesses that incentivize and profit from mass illegal migration. Then the government must use the acquired funds to fuel the ongoing deportation efforts and improve the socioeconomic conditions of the American worker.

Before the angry cries of the libertarians and the leftist GOP establishment class reach a fever pitch, I’d like to remind — or, perhaps, inform for the first time — such detractors about this great American tradition. During the first American Revolution, American patriots had a problem: Tories, or Loyalists, acted as a fifth column that was aligned with a foreign power and that stood against the independent American people.

A major taxpayer-funded study initiated in 2015 to observe the effects of puberty blockers and opposite-sex hormone therapies was finally released. The results are anything but shocking.

While the authors were hoping to demonstrate that these unsupported therapies would prove beneficial, the study confirmed what every other credible study has shown: These drugs do not deliver the promised positive health outcomes for minors.

The long-delayed findings from the NIH-funded Trans Youth Care study led by Dr. Johanna Olson-Kennedy have now been reported. It is notable that the final report was released only after the Oversight Project sued. Without these efforts, this data might still be buried.

The study followed roughly 95 youth ages 8 to 16 on puberty blockers and tracked depression symptoms, emotional functioning, and parent-reported behavioral measures over a 24-month period. The results showed no significant improvement. Nada.

The Trump administration is continuing to expose the weaponization of the federal government under the Biden/Harris regime. The latest revelation is about the FBI’s infamous “Richmond Memo” scandal that involved spying on conservative Catholic churches.

When a whistleblower leaked the Richmond Memo to members of Congress, the FBI went into full damage control mode. Then-Director Christopher Wray repeatedly went before Congress and either lied about memo or intentionally misled our elected representatives. This was not the “nothingburger” Wray said it was. This was a serious effort to go after Catholics for their traditional views.

Welcome to September, the final month of the justices’ summer recess. This time next month, we’ll be busy previewing the first oral arguments of the 2026-27 term. At the Court

On Monday, the Supreme Court, by a 5-4 vote, granted the Trump administration’s request to allow construction on the new White House ballroom to continue. Chief Justice John Roberts wrote a dissenting opinion, joined by the court’s three Democratic appointees. For more on the decision, see the On Site section below.

Justice Samuel Alito’s financial disclosure for 2025 was released on Monday morning. Find Amy’s overview of it in the On Site section.

Two Republican groups have asked the court on its interim docket to block a decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit preventing political parties and joint fundraising committees from paying preferential broadcast rates for political ads. For more on the request, see the On Site section.

Also on Monday, a Michigan group urged the court on its interim docket to require Michigan election officials to put on the November ballot its proposal for requiring proof of citizenship to vote in the state. Learn more about the request in the Morning Reads section.

This Friday at 9:30 a.m. EDT, the court will release its third and final summer order list. (We discussed what these lists typically address in our July 13 newsletter.)

Three weeks after D. John Sauer was confirmed as the 49th solicitor general, law professor and podcast co-host William Baude speculated that Sauer might be “either fired or disbarred by the time his term is up.” Baude’s co-host, Dan Epps, was discussing the dilemma that, in their view, Sauer likely faced – navigating the tensions between his obligations as the government’s top lawyer before the Supreme Court and the expectations of Donald Trump, the president who appointed him.

More than 16 months later, Sauer is still on the job. Although the briefs that he has filed and the arguments that he has made before the justices have at times seemed unorthodox – appearing to echo language used by Trump himself – he has largely appeared to pull off a tricky balancing act.

As Stephen Wermiel recently wrote for this blog, when Congress created the role of solicitor general in 1870, it required the occupant of the office to be “learned in the law.” Solicitors general have such a unique relationship with the court that they are sometimes referred to as the “tenth justice”: they not only have an office at the court, but the court often seeks their advice on whether to grant review in cases in which the federal government is not involved – a maneuver known as a “call for the views of the solicitor general.” At his Executive Functions substack, Harvard law professor Jack Goldsmith wrote in April 2025 that, “[b]ecause of the SG’s special role before the Court, the office has traditionally had in practice (though not in law) strong independence from the Attorney General and the president.”

The Minnesota Supreme Court has ruled against GOP candidate Mike Lindell’s request for a full recount of the Aug. 11 gubernatorial primary.

The court stated it was without merit to do a full recount, instead siding with the state-approved partial recount plan.

“Lindell argues that he is entitled to a full recount for both the Democratic and Republican primary races for governor ‘to ensure that there are no anomalies in the ballots, whether the votes cast are for the Democratic or Republican primaries,’ and that this recount must include 'the recording of votes for every candidate,’” said Chief Justice Natalie E. Hudson in the six-page ruling. “But Lindell's focus on alleged anomalies confuses the purpose of a manual recount with an election contest.”

The ruling was released on Saturday. The MyPillow founder said later that day that he would appeal the ruling.

“My name was on 1,100,000 ballots and they all need to be looked at and counted,” Lindell said in an interview.

Lindell was proposing to independently pay the full costs of the discretionary recount, which was estimated at $825,000.

If that had happened, it would have been the largest privately-financed statewide recount in Minnesota history.

Regulate the impact, not the industry

By Tray Abney, August 31, 2026 11:42 am

Nevada has never built its economy by standing still.

From mining and gaming to logistics, advanced manufacturing and renewable energy, our state has repeatedly embraced new industries while finding ways to make them work within Nevada’s unique communities, landscapes and resources. Today, Nevada has another opportunity: becoming one of the nation’s leading locations for the digital infrastructure that increasingly powers the modern economy.

The Nevada Data Center Alliance was created to help make sure we get that opportunity right. We are a coalition of companies, employers, workers and community partners that believe responsible data center development can be an important part of Nevada’s economic future. Our role is not to argue that every project belongs everywhere. It doesn’t.

Our goal is to help policymakers and communities understand this rapidly evolving industry, separate legitimate concerns from misconceptions, and develop predictable, responsible policies that allow good projects to move forward in appropriate locations.

Why data centers — and why Nevada?

Almost everything we do today depends upon digital infrastructure. Every online purchase, video conference, electronic medical record, financial transaction, cloud-based business application and increasingly every artificial intelligence tool depends upon physical infrastructure somewhere.