By STAFF This week’s report covers political, world, cultural, market, and sci-tech news from July 17-24, 2026 This report contains…
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Catherine Herridge has been covering the efforts by progressives in the Trump administration who appear to have committed acts of treason by knowingly omitting and altering intelligence reports on China to protect China from Trump’s scrutiny.
Herridge claimed, “They had to save President Trump from his own instincts, from his own tendencies, and that there was very much a globalist view. And they had to preserve a globalist view. So, whether it was downplaying or suppressing intelligence about the threat from China, whether it was giving a pass and calling the Hunter Biden laptop Russian disinformation, there was this level of a bureaucracy, a kind of conspiracy that was making decisions about the kind of information that should be reaching policy makers and ultimately the commander-in-chief.”
Catherine Herridge Exposes The Forces Working Against Trump From Within Intel Agencies– trendingpoliticsnews.com
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Veteran investigative reporter Catherine Herridge reported during an appearance on NewsNation’s “Katie Pavlich Tonight,” that a senior member of former Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard’s Director’s Initiatives Group, known as the DIG, described a pattern in which intelligence community officials acted on the belief that they needed to protect a globalist perspective by limiting certain information provided to policymakers, including President Donald Trump.
Herridge’s comments came amid discussion of recently declassified federal documents related to intelligence assessments from 2020 concerning China’s election influence operations. Those records, which were released in connection with a primetime address by President Trump the prior week, included internal communications indicating that some intelligence reports had been edited to remove references linking China’s activities to the 2020 U.S. election.
One November 20, 2020, email from a Strategic Intelligence Analyst in China and North Korea Strategic Assessments stated that officials had “deliberately massaged our one pending PDB (President’s Daily Brief) to avoid any direct links to the election.”
Herridge noted that she had reviewed the materials and found consistency with earlier whistleblower allegations that intelligence about China’s multi-domain influence efforts—aimed at impeding then-President Trump’s re-election and denigrating him as a candidate—had been suppressed or altered. In the same interview, Herridge connected these developments to broader observations shared by a source within Gabbard’s investigative team.
A panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals of the Ninth Circuit ruled 2-1 that a Christian teacher in a public school cannot show students any material that contradicts the school’s supremacist LGBTQ plus ideology. This ideology compels forced acceptance of belief, including gender fluidity and transitioning children, which is an existential challenge to American Rule of Law, where no entity, government or private, can compel belief or speech.
The dissenting Judge, Lawrence VanDyke, wrote, “Could public school administrators establish a policy allowing office decoration with partisan political messages deemed sufficiently ‘compassionate’ but prohibit—as inherently ‘hostile’—any political speech that did not align with the Democratic Socialists of America platform?…
If your instinctual answer to each of these questions is ‘No!’… you might be an everyday American. But according to the majority today, you vastly overestimate the First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech in our nation’s schools. In a decision that is irreconcilable with Supreme Court precedent, the majority announces an expansive new rule that all expression by public-school employees that might be observed by students is necessarily government speech, and not the personal speech of an American citizen—even when any reasonable observer would perceive the speech as the employee’s own personal expression.”
Ninth Circuit Upholds Ban on Christian Employee’s Books– www.standingforfreedom.com
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In completely ignoring the Supreme Court’s landmark free speech ruling in Kennedy v. Bremerton, the federal appellate court insists that staff who express beliefs that don’t align with a school’s established orthodoxy can be fired.
[UPDATE] On Tuesday, a panel of judges for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled that Oregon social worker Rod Theis has no free speech right to display books in his public school office that disagree with radical gender ideology — and that his firing was justified.
Theis, a devout Christian, used to work as an education specialist for InterMountain Education Service District, which required him to travel to different district schools to administer standardized tests to students. He was not a teacher and rarely had contact with most students but did have office space in two of the districts’ schools.
Many InterMountain district staff, including teachers, are allowed to decorate their classrooms and offices with various posters, flags, and books that promote Black Lives Matter, LGBTQ messages, pride flags, political candidates, views on political and social topics, and more. While still employed there, Theis followed their lead by displaying three children’s books — Johnny the Walrus, He is He, and She is She — in his offices. The three books teach the biblical view that sex is unchanging and that children should accept themselves as the sex they were born.
Though no student or parent ever complained about the books, one teacher in 2024 researched the books online, determined that they promote a “binary view of gender,” and filed a complaint, claiming that the three books are “transphobic” and therefore offensive. In response, InterMountain officials ordered Theis to remove the books. He filed a lawsuit and received an injunction from a district court that allowed him to display the books when students were not present. Soon thereafter, the same hostile teacher sent several students to Theis’s office, asking to see the books, to which he eventually agreed; the staff member caught Theis on video showing the books to the students, and the school district fired him.
In a 2-1 ruling the U.S. Court of Appeals of the First Circuit ruled Christian private schools that take any funds from the state of Maine can legally be required to openly accept and celebrate homonormativity even though it directly contradicts God’s Word.
The court wrote, “Just as combatting religious discrimination qualifies as a legitimate governmental pursuit, so too combatting sexual-orientation and gender-identity discrimination rises to that level.”
The ruling effectively forces Christian schools to withdraw all business with the state. If upheld by SCOTUS, it would create a hierarchy of value of rights that favored sexuality and gender fluidity over religious belief. This would end religious freedom in America, as it has ended, for now, in Maine.
Religious schools that get public funds must follow Maine’s antidiscrimination laws, court rules – Texarkana Gazette
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Private religious schools that receive public funds must follow state laws that prohibit discrimination based on gender identity, sexual orientation or religion, a federal court ruled last week.
The ruling from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit in Boston came after two schools — Saint Dominic Academy in Auburn and Bangor Christian Schools, run by Crosspoint Church — asked for exemptions from the Maine Human Rights Act so they wouldn’t be required to enforce policies that contradicted their religious beliefs, such as admitting students who were openly gay or transgender, for instance, or requiring teachers to use students’ preferred pronouns.
The appeals court largely upheld a lower court’s decision denying this exemption, but it differed in its opinion of the state’s rules around religious expression and asked that the lower court reconsider how that provision applies to religious schools.
The growing human male infertility rate could be offset by growing human sperm in a laboratory’s mini-testes. A group of scientists published a report in the peer-reviewed journal “Cell Stem Cell” claiming to show they are close to growing human sperm in a lab. Researchers are hoping to convert stem cells to sperm cells by exposing them to chemical signals that will do the transforming.
From the report, “… the researchers combined the human or monkey germ cells with supportive cells from mouse fetuses. Together, these cells self-organized into a three-dimensional structure called a xenogeneic reconstituted testis… What grew in this setup closely resembled both the appearance and gene activity patterns of real human germ cells during the early stages of sperm development.”
Scientists Close In on ‘Lab-Grown Sperm’ as Male Fertility Crisis Deepens– slaynews.com
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Scientists have taken a major step toward producing artificial human sperm in a laboratory as collapsing male fertility rates fuel fears that natural reproduction could eventually become impossible.
The breakthrough involved creating early-stage reproductive cells from human and monkey stem cells before growing them inside laboratory-made structures designed to imitate natural testes.
The study, published in the journal Cell Stem Cell, marks an early but significant advance toward the creation of fully developed lab-grown sperm.
Researchers Build Artificial ‘Mini-Testis’
Scientists began with induced pluripotent stem cells, known as iPSCs, taken from humans and rhesus macaques.
These blank-slate cells can be programmed to develop into almost any type of cell in the body.
Researchers exposed the cells to chemical signals that transformed them into primordial germ cell-like cells, which resemble the earliest embryonic cells that eventually develop into sperm.
Science website MedicalXpress explained how researchers then attempted to recreate the biological environment needed for those cells to mature.
A Federal District Court has ruled that the state of Illinois cannot offer in-state college tuition benefits to illegal aliens. Federal law explicitly prohibits states from providing college aid to illegal aliens. The ruling struck down a law passed by the Illinois legislature and signed into law by Progressive Governor J.B. Pritzker.
The Judge ruling in the case wrote, “Put simply,” he wrote, “U.S. citizens or nationals must be treated no worse than illegal aliens.” The state has 14 days
Court Strikes Down Illinois In-State Tuition Benefits for Illegal Aliens– legalinsurrection.com
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In a rebuke to Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker, a federal district court has struck down Illinois laws providing in-state tuition benefits to illegal aliens—a setback to the sanctuary-state governor’s broader immigration agenda.
The ruling also marks the latest win in the Trump administration’s campaign to end taxpayer-funded tuition benefits for illegal aliens, a fight Legal Insurrection has covered from the beginning.
Illinois’ laws allowed illegal aliens to qualify for reduced in-state tuition rates and for other benefits, including scholarships. Meanwhile, American citizens from other states were not offered these same reduced tuition rates or benefits.
