The Santa Barbara, CA Unified School District Board met the evening of June 9, 2020 to consider demands for mandatory ethnic studies courses at the local high school level. Those demands are coming largely from the children of the Santa Barbara Unified school district, who overall have racked up some fairly abysmal scores in basic academic achievement: their test scores for the 2018-2019 school year show a mere 54% are proficient in reading and only 45% are proficient in math. Minority students – Hispanic and African American – lag badly behind both Asian and white students as well as the proficiency standards themselves.

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Countries around the world slowly are beginning to open back up again, as the coronavirus pandemic begins to abate. The revival of economic activity means that, after a disastrous period in the first quarter of 2020 that shut down businesses and industry almost everywhere, pent up demand for goods and services finally is being met with growing availability on the supply side. The global oil market is a key indicator of that revival and is starting to rebound in a significant way. If, as expected, this trend continues into the third and fourth quarter of 2020, the U.S. is poised to make a solid economic comeback. Likewise, the Saudis should be able to begin easing off austerity measures and perhaps even revive their ambitious Vision 2030 plan. The Russians, on the other hand, will face some tough decisions about continuing foreign adventures in places like the Middle East.

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The FBI has released a new edition of its anti-terror video game, Don't Be a Puppet, that conforms to demands from the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) to exclude Islamic jihad from a list of potential terror threats.

In the game, a player is asked to work through a series of numbered boxes, beginning with "What is Violent Extremism?" and finishing with "Who [sic] Do Violent Extremists Affect?" Completing the activities in each box — watching short videos, reading through short texts, taking a quick quiz — allows the player, string-by-string, to free the puppet.

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For far too long, United States foreign policy, especially in the critical region of the Middle East and North Africa, has been pursued with apparent scant attention, much less priority, given to core, compelling U.S. national security objectives in the fight to defeat the Global Jihad Movement. This paper, therefore, offers a blueprint for a counterjihad security architecture for America that identifies those objectives and outlines the measures necessary to provide for the common defense of our Constitution, Republic, and society in this existential struggle of our time.

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Both gunmen identified in the May 3 attack against the "Draw Muhammad" event at the Curtis Culwell Center in Garland, Texas, attended the Islamic Community Center of Phoenix, according to news reports. Elton Simpson and his roommate, Nadir Soofi, both were known to mosque leadership dating from 2006, although Usama Shami, chairman of the mosque's board of trustees, claimed they stopped attending recently.

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