• August 2, 2026
"This judicial activist’s obstruction of the people’s will must be stopped. Judge Burroughs must be impeached," he says
At the end of May, the New York State Assembly introduced Assembly Bill A11509. The proposal would permanently prohibit anyone born after December 31, 2007, from purchasing tobacco or nicotine products for the rest of their lives.
In practice, the State is claiming permanent ownership over the autonomy of part of its population. It is deciding today that these individuals will never be considered capable of making their own choices. The distinction it creates is not based on any assessment of individual responsibility or capacity. It rests solely on an arbitrary date of birth.
This variety of age-based smoking ban has become a growing trend around the world. New Zealand was the first country to attempt it in 2022, introducing the world's first nationwide generational tobacco ban. It reversed course in 2024 after concerns the policy was fueling the black market, strengthening organized crime, and reducing tax revenue.
Assembly Bill A11509 has received its first reading in the Assembly and has been referred to the Health Committee. It is unlikely to advance during this legislative session, but that should not lead anyone to dismiss it, as it reflects a broader trend already visible in other states. Similar proposals have been introduced in Hawaii, Indiana, and Tennessee.
Although none have passed at the state level, the movement has gained considerable momentum locally in Massachusetts. Brookline became the first municipality in the United States to adopt a generational tobacco ban in 2020, a measure upheld by the state's Supreme Judicial Court in 2024. More than 20 municipalities have followed suit, including Newton, Hopkinton, and South Hadley.
In the United Kingdom, a nationwide generational tobacco ban has already become law. The Tobacco and Vapes Act made the country, in April 2026, the second in the world after the Maldives to introduce a generational ban on tobacco sales. Beginning in January 2027, anyone born after January 1, 2009, will never be able to legally purchase tobacco anywhere in the UK and will never be recognized as a free adult capable of making that decision.
Political opposition has already emerged. Nigel Farage’s Reform UK has pledged to repeal the lawif it comes to power, citing concerns over personal liberty, the impact on small businesses, and the same issues that led New Zealand to abandon its own ban, including the expansion of the black market.
This paternalistic impulse extends well beyond tobacco. The same protective logic is increasingly being used to justify regulating social media, food, and beverages, all based on the assumption the State knows better than individuals what is good for them.
A generational ban is fundamentally different from a conventional age restriction,
which simply establishes the point at which citizens become adults and can be trusted to make their own decisions, a threshold everyone eventually reaches.
A generational ban never grants that freedom. The number of people permanently prohibited from making a legal purchase grows every year as more individuals are born after the cutoff date. As a result, the illicit market created by such a policy is likely to expand exponentially. When the State bans a product people continue to want, the product does not disappear. It changes hands, becomes more valuable, and creates new opportunities for organized crime.
In Australia, a report by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) estimates that 80 percent of the tobacco consumed in the country originates from illicit markets. This July, authorities seized 20 million cigarettes and 38.4 tonnes of tobacco leaves and cut tobacco after dismantling two international criminal networks based in Spain.
Rather than imposing blanket prohibitions that create second-class citizens and boost gang-run black markets, a more effective approach would focus on education and accurate information, allowing responsible adults to make their own choices while distinguishing products according to their actual level of risk. A generational ban ignores these distinctions. It treats tobacco products and vapor products the same, including cigarettes, vapes, and electronic cigarettes, and imposes a single, permanent solution on a problem that requires nuance.If Assembly Bill A11509 moves forward, Albany will join an alarming pattern already taking shape in London, Wellington, and more than 20 municipalities across Massachusetts. It will not protect public health more effectively than harm reduction already does, but it will create a generation of adults who are never considered fully responsible for their own bodies and choices in the eyes of the State.This week, New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill revealed that more than 6,600 noncitizens ended up on its voter rolls, with nearly 400 of them casting ballots between June 2023 and June 2024.
Despite saying the situation is unacceptable and claiming that she is being proactive to fix it, her administration has also begun steering the same noncitizens toward taxpayer-funded legal help.
Sherrill promptly blamed the software vendor, IDEMIA, for the problem.
Authored by Steve Watson via Modernity News,
A Liberal Democrat council has secured a High Court injunction that effectively bans the unauthorised display of the St George's Cross and Union Flag on lampposts and public highways across an entire English county.
What began as a grassroots campaign to raise the colours of the nation has been declared a threat to community safety, with the full force of the courts now deployed against it.
Oxfordshire County Council, run by the Liberal Democrats, won its landmark case after months of legal action against the Raise the Colours campaign.
High Court approves injunction to BAN Britons hanging Union and St George's flags on lampposts. https://t.co/jWvRfTdcjK
— GB News (@GBNEWS) August 1, 2026
Justice Dexter Dias granted the order prohibiting unidentified persons from attaching England or Union flags to highway infrastructure or painting flag imagery on roads. Breach carries the risk of imprisonment, unlimited fines, or asset seizure.
Council leader Tim Bearder celebrated the outcome, stating "This is a welcome judgement. We're very pleased with the result," adding "This sets a legal precedent and will hopefully deter people in not just Oxfordshire but around the country from partaking in this criminal activity."
He described those involved as "very challenging people, not patriots."
The council claims the flags created highway safety risks, trespass, and obstruction. It spent roughly £80,000 removing them and a further £40,000 on legal fees, costs it now intends to recover.
Staff tasked with taking the flags down reportedly faced hostility, to the point that some were instructed to wear face coverings and check their vehicles for tracking devices after one worker's home address was published.
The judge noted that maintenance teams had been "working in fear" and that people directed by the council had been obstructed "to the extent that at times they have simply given up on the removal." He concluded there was "little prospect absent an injunction that it will stop."
The new order does not prevent flags on private property, and the council insists it flies both the Union Flag and St George's Cross at County Hall.
This is the same Oxfordshire authority that earlier issued formal stop notices branding the widespread installation of national flags an "act of intimidation and division."
The pattern is now familiar. English councils have repeatedly treated the national flag as a problem to be managed rather than a symbol to be celebrated. FOI requests previously revealed at least £70,000 spent removing Union Jacks and St George's Crosses from lampposts, with some local politicians openly calling the expenditure "money well spent" to combat supposed far-right agitation.
In Essex, staff were offered emotional support if they felt "discomforted" by the mere sight of the national flag in their communities.
A leaked government social cohesion strategy went further still, describing how the "extreme right has tried to turn symbols of pride into tools of hate," framing the Union Flag itself as a potential instrument of exclusion and intimidation.
The phenomenon has a name: vexillophobia - the irrational fear of the flag. Britain has reached the point where flying the St George's Cross is treated as a form of aggression while other political symbols face no such institutional hostility.
During the recent World Cup, English people were warned not to fly flags, the reasoning being that it could intimidate migrants and non-English people.
The selective nature of the discomfort is hard to miss. When rows of Pride flags lined streets in such density that even a prominent television presenter described them as "oppressive," the institutional response was silence or defence. National colours, by contrast, trigger injunctions, safety briefings, and high court orders.
Raise the Colours began as a simple act of public expression - covering Britain in its own flags. In Oxfordshire it has now been met with the full machinery of the state.
The High Court has drawn a line: the English flag may be flown on private property, but the public highway is a neutral zone where the nation's colours are treated as a potential hazard.
The precedent is set. Other councils are watching. The message to ordinary people who simply want to see their country's flag in public spaces is clear. In 2026 Britain, that desire is something the authorities feel compelled to police.
One of the most egregious fantasies promoted by liberals over the past several decades is the worshipful image of the desperate and grateful third world asylum seeker. We see it constantly in movies television and popular media; the narrative of the "huddled masses, yearning to breathe free..." This narrative has become so ingrained in western culture that it is absolutely world shattering when people find out how entitled and arrogant most migrants really are.
The flood of over 60,000 Muslim migrants from Morocco to the Spanish enclave of Ceuta has dashed a lot of progressive delusions in the past week, with migrants fresh from the beaches already looting businesses, raiding homes, attacking locals and setting fires. European officials are reluctantly admitting that the invasion is a problem that must be corrected.
The video evidence on social media is a crushing blow to the multicultural agenda, so much so that Ursula von der Leyen, head of the European Commission, complained about the optics of the images coming out of Ceuta on social media.
Spanish officials have attacked the negative response of some European leaders as "selfish" and "prejudiced", stating that the European Union would be harmed by the "polarizing" rhetoric.
But isn't this migrant horde exactly what European elites have been enabling for the past decade? Yes, it is, but the Cueta incident is happening too quickly and gaining far too much public attention. They usually prefer a "frog in a boiling pot" strategy over blatant barbarian pillaging plastered all over international news.
But it gets much worse for the multicultural cabal, because interviews with these migrants are hitting the mainstream. What these people have to say about their stay in Ceuta so far is mind blowing. The entitlement is unprecedented. Third worlders thought they were marching into a free buffet with easy access to amenities, jobs and westerners bowing at their feet.
Instead, the illegals were met with closed businesses (for safety), prices they could not afford, no jobs and hostility from other migrants who came to Ceuta legally.
People being beaten or killed (if the claims are true) is unfortunate, but then again, it seems to have worked. Large numbers of migrants are reportedly leaving Ceuta on their own because they fear backlash from the locals. There's an important lesson that could be learned her by populations across the western world:
If governments are not going to do their duty and secure national borders from invaders, then the public still has the power to make those invaders leave simply by making the lives of illegal migrants miserable. If their experiences in the west are worse than their experiences in their home country, they will go back.
Of course, the entitlement of migrants is amplified by progressive leaders in the west. Foreigners have been regaled with stories from western media about a land of plenty and a life of ease. All they have to do is make the crossing and the streets will be paved with riches for the taking. It is clear that the majority of migrants entering Ceuta were under the impression that they would be welcomed with open arms and lavished with subsidies.
Instead, the Spanish military is escorting thousands of them out of the enclave. Or, at the very least, the military is making a good show of trying to remove the migrants from the area. Meanwhile, the locals are doing the job that the government should have been doing from the beginning, which is making Ceuta so inhospitable to migrants that they will never want to go back.
The father of a US Marine killed in a hit-and-run crash involving an illegal immigrant is speaking out after federal authorities arrested the man for a third time as he once again faces deportation.
Martin Martinez-Ballinas, 38, a Mexican national, was arrested by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) July 22 after serving a federal prison sentence for illegally reentering the United States.
He now faces his third deportation, according to federal authorities.
Federal officials said Martinez-Ballinas was convicted in a 2017 crash in Maryland that killed 21-year-old US Marine James Ray Walden III.
Comedian and talk show host Bill Maher railed against former National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Dr. Anthony Fauci just days after he invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination 111 times during a Senate hearing over his handling of the COVID-19 pandemic.
During Friday’s episode of HBO’s “Real Time,” Maher called out Fauci for telling “actual lies” about the origins of the virus responsible for over seven million confirmed deaths worldwide following Fauci’s Senate hearing on Wednesday.
“He was caught in actual lies,” Maher said, adding, “The big issue to me is the origin of this, which is very important. How did it start?”
The comedian pointed to Fauci’s previous assertions that the virus originated through animal-to-human contact at a wet marketin Wuhan, China.
“He was telling people up front when it first began [that] it was from the wet markets. It could not — that’s a conspiracy theory — if you say it escaped from the lab,” Maher said.
“And he knew better,” Maher continued. “Because we have him in his diary telling us what he was saying to other scientists, who were saying, ‘No, absolutely.’”
Fox News Digital reached out to Fauci for comment.
Maher went on to point to the controversial theory that the virus was the result of either an accidental or intentional leak from a Chinese laboratory in the same city where the first cases originated.
He also blasted Fauci over the crux of his hearing, in which he was questioned regarding the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases’ funding of “gain-of-function” research in China.
Fox News Digital previously covered Fauci’s vehement denial that the controversial research method — which involves scientists altering the genetics of a virus to better understand and treat it — led to the samples breaking free from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
“I would always have said, don’t do it, but it’s a viable debate,” Maher said, referring to the “gain-of-function” research method. “It’s a reasonable debate — should we soup up something that’s bad, this bacteria, to study it? Maybe if it got out it would be even worse. I think that’s what did happen.”
In June 2025, the World Health Organization released a report in which officials determined “the weight of available evidence … suggests zoonotic spillover … either directly from bats or through an intermediate host.”
Maher then challenged the controversy surrounding the lab leak theory, which has been supported by President Trump, and suggested the outcry surrounding its merit was largely due to social issues — not scientific evidence.
“We could have had that debate in a rational way,” Maher said. “We didn’t want to do that. Because why? Because we make everything about race. And this is one of the repercussions in this.”
Maher added that the pandemic brought a racial stigma surrounding the lab leak theory, creating an unfounded taboo on the topic.
“You couldn’t say it escaped from the lab, because that was the racist point of view somehow — that the entire Asian continent would have been somehow complicit in this because it escaped from the [lab],” Maher said. “It was ridiculous.”
“But that is where they went,” the comedian continued. “You were racist if you said this escaped from a lab. I think we’ve morphed from a place where we want to obviously not be prejudiced against anybody, to where people of color can never do any wrong.”
Maher’s criticism of Fauci marks a notable break from his fellow left-leaning counterparts in media, who have historically stood behind the doctor.
“Once again, Bill Maher is willing to level with the country in a way the liberal, elitist media never would,” Curtis Houck, managing editor of NewsBusters at the Media Research Center, told Fox News Digital. “The press should be capable of calling balls and strikes.”
“But when it comes to most things and their dear Saint Fauci, they must protect him at all costs by either explaining away his damaging diary entries or not covering them at all,” he continued. “The media have made the decision to be joined at the hip with Fauci, even as his credibility has dropped off a cliff.”
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