The Justice Department's Weaponization Working Group released a report Monday concluding that former Attorney General Merrick Garland's Oct. 4, 2021 school board memo grew out of pressure from the Biden White House and turned the department's law enforcement powers on parents.
The report describes how DOJ officials under President Joe Biden looked for ways to bring federal cases against parents and protesters who addressed school boards and school officials during the COVID-19 pandemic. It also contains the Working Group's formal acknowledgment that the prior administration's actions "chilled the exercise of parental and free speech rights, parents who lawfully exercised their parental rights and freedom of speech were often targeted by members of the educational establishment."
Garland addressed the memo to the FBI director, the assistant attorney general for the Criminal Division, the director of the Executive Office for U.S. Attorneys, and U.S. attorneys nationwide. The memo told its recipients that "in recent months, there has been a disturbing spike in harassment, intimidation, and threats of violence," even though, according to the report, he had seen very little evidence of actual violence or violent threats against school administrators or at school board meetings when he signed it.
The Working Group traces the memo's ideological origin to a letter the National School Boards Association sent to Biden on Sept. 29, 2021, five days before Garland acted. That letter asked the federal government to consider that "these heinous actions" "could be equivalent to a form of domestic terrorism and hate crimes."
Records cited in the report show that leadership at the Biden White House and the DOJ pressed for a memo that would locate a federal "hook" for prosecuting parents and charging protesters with federal crimes.
"Among the most egregious findings, exhibits show that individuals in the Biden White House and Attorney General Garland's advisors wanted to involve federal law enforcement and prosecutors in matters involving parents and school boards," a DOJ press release explains.
Further, the Memo established a task force to find federal enforcement options for investigating and prosecuting parents, and the FBI opened 25 "Guardian assessments" on parents. One FBI whistleblower disclosed that a mother was investigated because she "is a gun owner" and belonged to a "right-wing mom's group."
Internal communications and investigative records show that more than a dozen DOJ and FBI personnel raised concerns about the memo and its directive. "Stupid, stupid, stupid," one employee wrote. Another wrote that "they might as well rename the damn thing the Anti-MAGA Task Force." Several of the objections centered on the law. One staffer warned that the directive was "challenging from a First Amendment perspective," and another said it placed the department on "potentially dangerous ground." Other employees focused on how the directive would reflect on the department. One wrote that the memo "look[s] political." Another called it "a partisan exercise aimed at those who do not support the Administration," and a third cautioned that it would "tarnish reputation as an apolitical law enforcer." One described the effort as "very messy and political." Shorter reactions in the record include "ridiculous," "horrible," and "confusing."
Emails cited in the report show that Garland issued the memo over those objections and that White House officials influenced his decision.
The department announced a series of remedial steps alongside the findings. Parents and other school board meeting participants who became subjects or targets of a Guardian assessment because of the memo will have the opportunity to review their assessment. The FBI has closed or discontinued most of those files, and each one will now carry a disclaimer stating that the memo raised serious constitutional concerns and that readers should treat the assessment with caution.
The DOJ will also review the file of every person investigated under the memo. Where reviewers identify a constitutional violation, the department will issue a formal apology and adopt internal controls intended to prevent a recurrence.
Leaders of the DOJ and the Department of Education sent letters on parental rights to the attorneys general of all 50 states. The department said Attorney General Todd Blanche and the Trump administration have made securing parental and First Amendment rights a top priority.
Tyler Durden Tue, 10/06/2026 - 18:00Authored by Noosheen Hashemi via RealClearMarkets,
At the White House on Tuesday, President Trump, Speaker Mike Johnson and leaders of America's major AI companies emerged with a voluntary accord calling for robust internal controls, independent auditing and safeguards against AI systems accessing technical systems in unintended ways. The agreement is limited and its implementation will matter. It also offers a useful example of government bringing fierce competitors together around a concrete problem while leaving competition intact.
That example matters because much of the federal machinery is already in motion. The White House AI Action Plan spans more than 90 federal actions across innovation, infrastructure and international policy. The American AI Exports Program is organizing full-stack offerings that include chips, cloud infrastructure, models, cybersecurity and applications. A June executive order created an AI cybersecurity clearinghouse and a voluntary framework for frontier-model security while expressly declining to authorize mandatory federal licensing, preclearance or permitting. This week, America.gov put advanced AI directly into federal service delivery, while the new U.S.- China Super Intelligence Dialogue created a bilateral channel for incidents related to advanced AI. Taken together, these efforts show how much activity is already underway.
The phrase "AI race" is too singular for the competition now unfolding. The United States and China are competing across at least seven fronts, and leadership in the most capable model does not guarantee leadership across the other six.
Frontier intelligence.The most obvious contest is over who develops the strongest systems in reasoning, coding, science, agents and robotics. Frontier capability still matters enormously because breakthroughs at the top eventually propagate through products, research and the wider economy.
Capacity.AI is digital, while its limits are increasingly physical. Chips, advanced packaging, networking, data centers, electricity generation, transmission, interconnection, cooling and skilled labor all determine how much intelligence can actually be trained and deployed. The administration already treats infrastructure as a core condition of AI leadership, and its June national-security directive also calls for next-generation high-security computing capacity. National-security AI directive.
Industrial AI.The strategic question reaches far beyond model benchmarks. It includes how rapidly intelligence moves into factories, robotics, logistics, healthcare, energy systems and supply chains. A country can extract enormous economic and strategic value from capable AI if it deploys that intelligence broadly and compounds the productivity gains across its industrial base.
Global diffusion.The technology stack that becomes easiest to buy, finance, integrate and operate can shape markets and dependencies for years. America's export program recognizes this as a full stack competition. China is pursuing another form of diffusion through inexpensive and open models. The U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission reported this year that Alibaba's Qwen ecosystem had produced more than 100,000 derivatives on Hugging Face, creating a feedback loop in which adoption drives iteration and iteration drives further adoption. USCC analysis.
National security and control.Advanced AI increasingly touches cybersecurity, intelligence, critical infrastructure, autonomous systems and the security of the models themselves. Tuesday's White House accord sits squarely in this lane, as does the June security order. The emerging challenge is to build credible safeguards while preserving the competitive pressure and speed that drive technical progress.
Productive power at home.The country that invents the most capable AI and the country that absorbs AI most effectively throughout its economy may end up capturing very different amounts of value. Productivity depends on deployment across businesses, workers, science, healthcare and government. America.gov is a visible example of the federal government putting AI directly into service delivery, alongside private-sector adoption.
The information layer.AI is becoming an intermediary between people and knowledge. Increasingly, users will ask a model a question and receive an answer instead of navigating dozens of links. Accuracy, provenance, language coverage, resilience to manipulation and trust therefore carry strategic significance well beyond conventional software competition.
These fronts interact constantly, which is where the current architecture becomes harder to read. A decision about advanced-chip exports can affect national security, the economics of American semiconductor companies, the cost of frontier development, the attractiveness of the U.S. stack abroad and the incentive for other countries to build around Chinese alternatives. A rule written for frontier safety can also change fixed compliance costs and market structure. A transmission bottleneck can delay a data center, constrain compute, slow industrial adoption and alter the economics of exporting American AI. Each policy lane has its own logic, but the competitive effects travel across lanes.
The missing capability is a better operating picture across the machinery already in place. Three questions would make the existing architecture much more legible. The first is whether we have a real scoreboard across all seven fronts. GAO has already built a framework for assessing U.S. AI competitiveness across science and technology, human capital, governance and the economy. The next step is a current view of frontier capability, compute, energy, cost, industrial adoption, global deployment and productivity, so policymakers can see where America is actually gaining or losing ground.
The second question is what a major decision on one front does to the other six. That discipline would make tradeoffs visible before they become unintended consequences. Export controls, open-weight policy, safety standards, data-center rules and federal procurement can all improve one objective while changing incentives somewhere else in the system.
The third question is ownership when a strategic bottleneck crosses institutional lines. Global deployment can involve Commerce, State, financing agencies, cybersecurity authorities and private companies at the same time. Infrastructure can involve Energy, permitting agencies, states, utilities and capital providers. Many institutions can perform their assigned tasks well while an outcome that spans them remains nobody's job to deliver.
Tuesday's White House meeting offers one possible operating habit. A specific problem was defined, the companies with the relevant capability were brought together, responsibilities were made more explicit, and competition remained intact. The accord will ultimately be judged by what the companies implement. The method is worth applying more broadly when problems fall between established lanes.
China's centralized system gives Beijing a natural view across infrastructure, industrial policy and national strategy. America is built around distributed power, private capital, competing firms, universities and experimentation, an architecture that has produced extraordinary technological dynamism. The work now is to add visibility across the system while preserving the forces that make it move quickly.
Seven fronts are moving at once, and every major decision changes the position on more than one of them. Seeing those interactions early would help the United States compound its strengths, expose tradeoffs before they become expensive, and clear bottlenecks while they are still solvable. America already has extraordinary companies, capital, universities, infrastructure programs and diplomatic tools. The advantage now is to see them as one strategic picture and move at AI speed.
We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of ZeroHedge.
Tyler Durden Tue, 10/06/2026 - 17:40Quebec's separatists are returning to government with a promise to take the province out of Canada, reopening a battle over the country's future while Ottawa is already locked in a trade war with Washington.
Paul St-Pierre Plamondon took a moment to speak to anglophones in the province, saying that all Quebecers face the same challenges, and that he looks forward to solving problems together.Monday's victory for the Parti Québécois puts the independence movement back in power for the first time since 2014. Its leader, Paul St-Pierre Plamondon, has promised another referendum on separation. And he used his victory speech to remind Canadians exactly what he intends to achieve.
"The courageous battle of Francophones to protect their language and culture will succeed when they have their own country," he said, according to Politico.
Hours later, writing in French, he framed the night less as a mandate for a breakup than as a recovery of confidence. The government, he said, would "extend a hand." He would be "the premier of ALL QUEBECERS, without exception." He closed with Gaston Miron: "It cannot always not happen."
Je veux vous partager l’immense sentiment de fierté qui m’habite. Les mots me manquent pour vous dire à quel point, ce soir, je suis fier d’être Québécois.
Ce qui me rend le plus fier, au terme de cette extraordinaire campagne que nous avons menée, c’est de voir que nous avons redonné le goût de l’avenir et le goût du Québec à des centaines de milliers de Québécois qui avaient cessé d’y croire. Juste ça, juste retrouver l’espoir et l’optimisme, ça fait vraiment du bien.
Aux quatre coins du notre grand pays, j’ai aussi vu des gens qui, malgré toutes les raisons du monde qu’on leur a servi pour les convaincre de céder à la peur, ont plutôt choisi l’espoir et le changement.
J’ai vu des Québécois qui ont fait le choix de croire en eux-mêmes, qui ont fait le choix de se faire confiance.
Être élu premier ministre du Québec est un énorme privilège et une énorme responsabilité, que je prends avec beaucoup de modestie.
Le Parti Québécois formera un gouvernement qui tendra la main. Je serai le premier ministre de TOUS LES QUÉBÉCOIS, sans exception.
Il y a quatre ans, lors de cette même soirée électorale, nous nous étions laissés sur les mots de l’un de nos plus grands poètes, Gaston Miron. Je vous avais dit que nous étions « arrivés à ce qui commence ».
Aujourd’hui, je veux à nouveau citer Gaston Miron, le cœur rempli d’espoir, en vous disant la chose suivante :
« Ça ne pourra pas toujours ne pas arriver. Nous entrerons là où nous sommes déjà, car il n’est pas question de laisser tomber notre espérance ».
For Prime Minister Mark Carney, the stakes extend well beyond a difficult relationship with another provincial premier. A government committed to leaving the federation will now have the premier's office and a public platform from which to make its case. Disputes over immigration, economic assistance and provincial authority could become arguments over whether Quebec belongs in Canada at all.
The timing compounds the problem. Alberta is also approaching a vote this month on whether to hold a separation referendum. The two movements have different roots, but both challenge Ottawa's effort to present a united country while confronting Donald Trump's tariffs.
That contrast was immediate on social media. One widely shared reaction congratulated Carney for a civil note to the new separatist premier, then asked why Alberta's signature campaign for its own vote has been treated as disloyalty.
⚜️🗳️👏🇨🇦 : Mark Carney congratulates Paul St-Pierre Plamondon & the separatist Parti Québécois on their victory in the Quebec election last night.
Albertans who collected the legally required number of signatures to have a referendum on Alberta separation, have been called traitors to Canada.
The Alberta referendum on Oct, 19th will be non binding. Unlike all the previous Quebec separation referendums.
If there ever was proof of how abusive Canada is to Alberta & how much of a double standard there is for Quebec, this is it.
Quebec has handed the separatists the opportunity to build support for a breakup. They still have to win that argument.
St-Pierre Plamondon's party took roughly 28% of the vote and 59 seats, five short of a majority in the 127-member National Assembly. Polls put support for independence at about 30%, according to the BBC. The incoming premier has a minority government and a central political objective most voters have yet to embrace.
That vote share is not a rounding error. It is, by one Montreal account, the lowest ever recorded by a party forming a Quebec government. The seat map tells the same fractured story: Liberals doubled their caucus, the Conservatives entered the National Assembly for the first time, Québec Solidaire held nine seats, and the outgoing Coalition Avenir Québec was wiped out.
The PQ won the election with just 28% of the popular vote — the lowest in Quebec history cultmtl.com/2026/10/the-pq…
#polqc
Good morning! Quebec returned to the polls yesterday to elect members of its National Assembly. The sovereigntist Parti Québécois won the election, though short of an outright majority.
The second-place Liberal Party doubled its seat total from 2022, mainly through gains in the Montérégie and Laval regions. The Conservative Party will make its first appearance in the National Assembly, winning 19 seats from the Capitale-Nationale and Chaudière-Appalaches regions.
These gains came at the expense of the left-wing Québec Solidaire, which lost support in every region except Montréal. The governing Coalition Avenir Québec will no longer have any representation in the National Assembly. In 2022, the party won roughly 70% of the seats and 41% of the vote.
But the confrontation with Ottawa need not wait for a referendum.
St-Pierre Plamondon has vowed to resist federal pressure for increased immigration. He has also promised to "abolish the monarchy in Quebec," proposing to redirect funding from the lieutenant-governor's office toward social causes such as homelessness.
"We are going to do what we have to do to get the monarchy out of Quebec, repatriate those funds, and send them to social causes," he told reporters during the campaign.
The lieutenant-governor represents King Charles III and provides royal assent to provincial legislation. Trying to strip funding from that office would invite significant legal challenges, the BBC reported. St-Pierre Plamondon has said he is prepared for a legal battle.
Such a clash could give the separatists a way to argue that even Quebec's decisions about its own institutions remain subject to a constitutional arrangement it should escape.
OCTOBER ONLY.$10 OFFYOUR NEXT ORDER.$30 min. Ends Oct 31. One per customer.GET MY $10 OFF →Signs you up for ZeroHedge Store emails. Can't be combined. Every order helps support ZeroHedge.That is the strategy anticipated by André Pratte, chair of the Quebec Liberal Party's policy committee. In an opinion column, he argues that the PQ will use confrontations with Ottawa to cultivate nationalist sentiment and demonstrate that federalism cannot serve Quebec's interests.
Pratte is a partisan opponent of the separatists. But the dilemma he describes is real enough: cooperation gives Carney an opportunity to show that Canada works; confrontation gives the PQ an opportunity to argue that it doesn't.
Canadians have seen how far that argument can travel.
Quebec rejected sovereignty in 1980 and again in 1995. The second referendum brought the country within a narrow margin of a vote for separation: the No side won 50.58% of valid ballots, prevailing by just 54,288 votes.
A future Yes victory would open a difficult negotiation rather than automatically create a country. Canada's Supreme Court held in 1998 that a clear majority on a clear secession question would create an obligation to negotiate. Quebec could not unilaterally dictate the terms of its departure.
For now, the immediate economic pressures give both governments reasons to cooperate.
An August 24 analysis by National Bank estimated Quebec's average U.S. tariff burden at roughly 11%, the highest among Canadian provinces, compared with about 6% nationally under the measures it examined. Its exposure to metals, manufacturing and forestry makes the trade conflict particularly painful.
Carney emphasized that immediate agenda on Tuesday, saying he had spoken with St-Pierre Plamondon about infrastructure funding and support for workers hit by U.S. tariffs, the Associated Press reported.
"This is not a time to wait for something a few years down the road. It's the time to act," Carney said.
He had already put the same offer in writing overnight, congratulating the premier-designate and steering the conversation toward tariffs, jobs, homelessness and housing. The referendum did not appear in the note.
Congratulations, Premier-designate @PaulPlamondon, on your election victory.
Building a stronger Québec is core to our mission of building a stronger Canada. I look forward to working with you to support Québec’s businesses and workers impacted by tariffs, create more good jobs, work to end homelessness, and get more homes built across Québec.
Thank you, Premier @CFrechette, for your service to Québec and to Canada. We got a lot done together — from Churchill Falls to one of the largest infrastructure investments in Québec’s history. I wish you all the best in what comes next.
PM Carney speaks with reporters ahead of Cabinet meeting about the Quebec election: "It's a crucial time for Quebec. It's a crucial time for our country. This is not a time to wait for something a few years down the road. It's a time to act. It's a time for boldness."
— Scott Robertson (@sarobertson_) October 6, 2026The PQ, meanwhile, must persuade voters that independence would improve their prospects while businesses are already struggling with uncertainty across the American border.
And the election that brought the separatists back was also a devastating repudiation of the government they are replacing.
The Coalition Avenir Québec, in power since 2018 after winning consecutive majorities, failed to win a single seat. Replacing François Legault with Christine Fréchette in April could not rescue it. Fréchette lost her own riding.
Voter fatigue, troubled health care reforms and bungled government investments helped destroy the CAQ's standing, Politico reported. The PQ, which won just three seats in 2022, capitalized on that collapse.
Quebec's fragmented five-party race allowed it to win with roughly 28% of the vote, a share the Globe and Mail described as the lowest ever for a winning party in the province's electoral history.
Still, there is a potential parliamentary path to a referendum. The left-wing, pro-independence Québec Solidaire won nine seats. Together with the PQ's 59, that would make 68, above the 64-seat majority threshold.
The provincial Liberals, who won 40 seats, have drawn a firm line. Leader Charles Milliard said they could support the incoming government on various issues, but "there is no way we will collaborate on a potential referendum," the BBC reported.
PQ supporters are pointing to the roughly 40% combined vote for their party and Québec Solidaire. But support for parties offering a range of policies cannot simply be counted as support for secession.
St-Pierre Plamondon has also pledged to wait until Trump leaves office before holding the referendum, saying it requires "conditions that allow for an informed and serene debate." That points to a possible vote in 2029 or 2030, provided his government survives long enough to deliver it.
Before asking voters to create a country, he will have to pass budgets, retain parliamentary support and run a province whose previous government was just annihilated at the ballot box.
Carney's task is to show that staying in Canada delivers for Quebec. St-Pierre Plamondon's is to persuade Quebecers that they need a country of their own.
Tyler Durden Tue, 10/06/2026 - 17:20