HOMESCHOOL: Maryland school district asks 11-year-olds to define trans terms like ‘gender expression’ and ‘sex assigned at birth.’

The worksheet, revealed by the group Defending Education, defined “gender identity” as referring “to a person’s internal sense of being male, female, or transgender… How you feel. Girl, boy, both or neither.” The definition for “transgender” read: “When your gender identity (how you feel) is different than what doctors/midwives assigned to you when you were born…”

The matching definition for “sex assigned at birth” stated, “when a baby is born, a doctor or midwife looks at the baby’s body/anatomy and says they are a girl, boy, or intersex.”

The lesson was part of a “family life” instruction conducted last month for middle school students in the district, ages 11-12.

The revelation of this lesson comes despite the fact that Montgomery County Public Schools has faced scrutiny recently for its emphasis on radical gender and LGBT ideology.

Groomers gotta groom.

JAMIE K WILSON: The Shape of Joy: How Beauty Once Defined Us and Can Define Us Again. “Beneath the practicality lies something cultural. The old exuberance came from confidence, a belief that life was good and getting better, that the future belonged to the brave and the inventive. Today’s restraint comes from anxiety. We design for safety, not splendor; for approval, not expression. The boldness that once marked prosperity has been replaced by a kind of managerial caution. Our world looks the way it feels: competent, optimized, and joyless.”

SCHUMER SHUTDOWN UPDATE: U.S. will reduce airline traffic by 10% at 40 locations beginning Friday due to shutdown.

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy and FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford said the federal government would reduce airline traffic by 10% at 40 locations beginning on Friday if the shutdown continues. The reductions are aimed at reducing the stress on air traffic controllers who have continued to work without pay.

“We’ve identified 40 high-traffic-environment markets,” Bedford said, adding that the list would be released later. “We have decided that a 10% reduction in scheduled capacity would be appropriate to continue to take the pressure off of our controllers. And as we continue to see staffing triggers, there will be additional measures that will be taken in those specific markets.”

Bedford said the reductions are being driven by “issues of fatigue that our flight controllers are experiencing,” as evidenced by “voluntary safety disclosure reports coming in from commercial air transport pilots.” Those reports have allowed regulators to focus on throttling traffic on specific markets, and not the country as a whole, Bedford said.

For now, that is.

BECAUSE OF COURSE: Biden Admin Gave Trump’s Government Phone to Jack Smith.

VENEZUELAN MISSILE CRISIS: Moscow Just Gave Venezuela Air Defenses, Not Ruling Out Strike Missiles.

A high-ranking Russian lawmaker claims his government recently sent Venezuela air defense systems and could provide ballistic and cruise missiles in the future. The comments, to an official Russian media outlet, are a response to the ongoing buildup of U.S. forces in the region aimed at narco-traffickers and Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro. Meanwhile, the U.S. Navy aircraft carrier USS Gerald R. Ford is now in the Atlantic, heading for the Caribbean, which you can read more about later in this story. You can catch up with our latest coverage of the Caribbean situation in our story here.

“Russian Pantsir-S1 and Buk-M2E systems were just recently delivered to Caracas by Il-76 transport aircraft,” Alexei Zhuravlev, First Deputy Chairman of the State Duma Defense Committee, told Gazeta.Ru earlier this week.

“Russia is actually one of Venezuela’s key military-technical partners; we supply the country with virtually the entire range of weapons, from small arms to aircraft,” Zhuravlev added. “Russian Su-30MK2 fighters are the backbone of the Venezuelan Air Force, making it one of the most powerful air powers in the region. The delivery of several S-300VM (Antey-2500) battalions has significantly strengthened the country’s ability to protect important installations from air attacks.”

The delivery of Pantsir-S1 systems would appear to be a new development; however, without visual proof, we cannot independently verify Zhuravlev’s claim.

Previously: Kerry Makes It Official: ‘Era of Monroe Doctrine Is Over.’

While surely many of our troubles long predate the Obama administration, I can’t think of one his administration didn’t make worse.

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Virginia Election Results Prove DOGE Has a LOT More Work to Do. “The only thing that part of the country produces is new ways to fleece the American taxpayer. Sadly, business is booming.”

CIVIL RIGHTS UPDATE: Trump’s DOJ Moves to Back Second Amendment Rights in the Courts.

More recently, Pirro has determined another D.C. firearms statute can’t be reconciled with the Second Amendment: the city’s blanket ban on possession of so-called large capacity feeding devices. This statute arbitrarily limits the capacity of a firearm magazine to 10 rounds or fewer, well below the factory-specified capacity for many common guns.

Last month, the United States filed a motion to vacate an appellant’s conviction under D.C. Code §7-2506.01(b) for possession of a large capacity feeding device. According to the filing, it is “the United States’s view that a complete ban on large capacity ammunition feeding devices as defined in D.C. Code § 7-2506.01(b) cannot survive constitutional scrutiny,” and, “As a result, the United States is not prosecuting violations of §7-2506.01(b) …” The filing further acknowledged the Department of Justice’s past defense of the statute but noted it “has changed its position as to the validity of the statute under the Second Amendment.”

If this keeps up, Trump 47 will go down as the most 2nd Amendment-friendly administration since… I don’t even know when.

ICYMI: Trump Just Gave the Finger (Again!) to the Space Establishment.

WALTER RUSSELL MEAD: Trump’s New World Order.

While the storm Mr. Trump unleashes is chaotic, there is a certain logic to his path. He really does believe that the U.S. is in trouble. From his perspective, stupid Democratic and Republican policies since the end of the Cold War have left the country divided and exposed to dangers overseas. A poorly designed globalization strategy hollowed out the middle class, gutted the defense industrial base, and fueled China’s rise. Clueless elites alienated Americans in pursuit of nonsensical utopian goals. An incompetent American foreign-policy cadre failed to win wars, advance democracy or build peace.

That leaves Mr. Trump with a difficult task. On the one hand, decades of failure, foolishness and shortsighted elite greed have eroded the trust between Americans and the political and administrative mandarins. On the other, the immense efforts required to address the internal challenges and the external threats to the U.S. can be mobilized only on the basis of renewed trust between the national government and the public at large.

Setting the domestic agenda aside, to build that trust and public support for the global struggle, Mr. Trump needs to educate his base without directly challenging some of their core beliefs. Venezuela is a godsend from this point of view. As a leading source of both drugs and illegal migrants, it represents the kind of threat that the Trump base most worries about. And even most isolationists applaud strong American action in the Western Hemisphere.
…
Those who still think of Mr. Trump as a restrainer or isolationist should watch his “60 Minutes” interview. This president isn’t retreating from the world. He aims to reshape it.

Read the whole thing.

ST. PAUL IS A MAJOR CITY… FOR NOW: Illegal Immigrant Wins Mayoral Election in Major City.

ONE HUNDRED MILLION BROKEN EGGS, AND NOT A SINGLE OMELETTE:

Mamdani had a CASH BAR at his victory party. If you can’t get a free vodka from this guy something tells me the free food and buses ain’t coming. Congrats, suckers.

— Jimmy Failla (@jimmyfailla) November 5, 2025

ICYMI: NYC: Begun, the Meme Wars Have.

CONTRITION?

NEW: Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts told staff during an all-hands meeting today, “I made a mistake, and I let you down. I let down this institution. Period. Full stop,” according to the Free Beacon. https://t.co/kMQI7aHcfR

— Open Source Intel (@Osint613) November 5, 2025

The apology only counts if it’s as public as the offense.

Finally, here’s a reminder that whatever infighting is going on between conservatives and Groypers, it’s been going on a lot longer than conservatives even noticed.

BEST NEWS OF THE DAY: Trump Just Gave the Finger (Again!) to the Space Establishment.

WELL PLAYED, AT&T: Major phone carriers reveal Jack Smith’s subpoenas for Republican senators’ records. “When AT&T raised questions with Special Counsel Smith’s office concerning the legal basis for seeking records of members of Congress, the Special Counsel did not pursue the subpoena further, and no records were produced.”

JAMIE K WILSON: The Missing Hero’s Journey: Why Our Culture Can’t Grow Up. “This isn’t about politics. It’s about process. Our culture rewards arrival but skips the journey. We crown heroes who never faced the dragon.”

REGIME CHANGE? Trump Weighs Options, and Risks, for Attacks on Venezuela. “President Trump has yet to make a decision about how or even whether to proceed. Officials said he was reluctant to approve operations that may place American troops at risk or could turn into an embarrassing failure. But many of his senior advisers are pressing for one of the most aggressive options: ousting Mr. Maduro from power.”

HEH: Trump Mocks JD Vance to His Face, and It’s Hilarious.

If you work for Donald Trump and you don’t have a sense of humor, he might just give you one.

HMM: Supreme Court justices appear skeptical that Trump tariffs are legal.

Lower federal courts have ruled that Trump lacked the legal authority he cited under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act to impose the so-called reciprocal tariffs on imports from many U.S. trading partners, and fentanyl tariffs on products from Canada, China and Mexico.

Sauer, who is defending the tariff policy as grounded in the power to regulate foreign commerce, said “these are regulatory tariffs. They are not revenue-raising tariffs.”

“The fact that they raise revenue was only incidental,” Sauer said, shortly after oral arguments in the case began.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor, one of the court’s three liberal members, told Sauer, “You say tariffs are not taxes, but that’s exactly what they are.”

“They’re generating money from American citizens, revenue,” Sotomayor said.

She later noted that no president other than Trump has ever used IEEPA to impose tariffs.

Developing…

MORE PLAIN TALK FROM DATA REPUBLICAN:

As an example, look at Indivisible job postings (for context, Indivisible organized NoKings). Their postings speak an entirely different vocabulary of expertise which is foreign to anyone who's working in the private sector. pic.twitter.com/MUoy6cpuzh

— DataRepublican (small r) (@DataRepublican) November 5, 2025

The Right faces hurdles, but ones that can be overcome. Just not if we ignore them.

Related thoughts from Charlie Kirk last year:

Please listen to Charlie. pic.twitter.com/8FyHUOlnVU

— Jammles (@jammles9) November 5, 2025

THERE’S A REPUBLICAN IN THE WHITE HOUSE, SO EXPECTATIONS GET LOW-BALLED AND THE REVISIONS GO UP INSTEAD OF DOWN: The Economy Added More Than Expected Jobs in October.

SOME HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE: Dick Cheney, RIP. “Until Trump broke liberal brains, there were generally only two ways the modern left-leaning press thought of Republican Presidential and Vice Presidential candidates: Evil masterminds (Nixon, Agnew, Dole (to an extent)) or dunces (Ford, Reagan, Bush43, Quayle, Palin, Ryan). If Bush43 was the dunce, then Cheney must be the evil mastermind. Cheney didn’t mind being the heavy, and didn’t seem to care what the press thought about him. (Accidentally shooting a guy in the face on a hunting trip didn’t help either.) Republicans liked Cheney for the same reason; he may have been a sonofabitch, but he was our sonofabitch. Having never been elected to the House or Senate, Bush43 delegated a lot of tasks to Cheney, since he knew the ends and outs of how the sausage got made, which gave rise to the leftwing myth of Cheney being the ‘evil puppetmaste’” controlling 43. This was always bunk.”

Cheney bought plenty of goodwill from me more than 30 years ago, when he canceled the Navy’s overpriced and overweight (and, of course, late) A-12 Avenger II attack jet — contractors be damned. But he spent the Trump years pissing away all that goodwill.

NYC: Begun, the Meme Wars Have.

INDEED:

Western Civilization is doomed, unless the core weakness of suicidal empathy is recognized and actions are taken that are hard, but necessary for survival https://t.co/aIVbe1fRKS

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 5, 2025

JUDICIAL TEMPERAMENT: Justice Jackson Is The Supreme Court’s Mean Girl.

While Sotomayor and Kagan have shown some semblance of restraint in their criticisms of the majority’s decisions, Jackson has held little back, often allowing her personal animus to trickle into her opinions.

Frustrations with Jackson’s antics among her conservative-leaning colleagues appeared to reach a breaking point in the court’s Trump v. CASA case earlier this year. Writing for the 6-3 majority on the scope of nationwide injunctions, Barrett blasted Jackson’s dissenting opinion as “a startling line of attack that is tethered neither to these sources nor, frankly, to any doctrine whatsoever,” and that “is at odds with more than two centuries’ worth of precedent, not to mention the Constitution itself.”

What’s become glaringly apparent, as further indicated by the Times’ story, is that Jackson has completely forgone (assuming she considered it at all) the Kagan approach of building bridges instead of burning them. Rather than forge professional, working relationships and write to convince her colleagues to come around to her side of the argument, she’s opted to pen left-wing “girl boss” fiction for her legacy media fanbase.

That strategy may garner her glowing articles and “news” segments, but it’s not getting her anywhere with her Supreme Court colleagues — conservative or liberal. It simply makes her the school mean girl whom everyone tolerates but can’t stand all the same.

Read the whole thing.