Authored by Steve Watson via Modernity News,
Every week millions of ordinary Brits buy a National Lottery ticket hoping for a life-changing win. What most never realise is that a chunk of that money has been systematically channelled into pro-migrant activist charities that push open borders and far-left ideology.
A GB News exclusive has revealed that the National Lottery has handed more than £140 million in donations to these organisations.
The figure draws on the Lottery's own Good Causes data showing over 2,500 projects and organisations have collectively received more than £143 million to support refugees since 1994, alongside a detailed five-year audit of Community Fund grants that identified £114.7 million flowing into refugee, asylum and migrant projects between July 2021 and June 2026.
EXCLUSIVE: 'When you buy your lottery ticket every week, were you aware that millions of pounds were going to left-wing migrant activist charities?'@MartinDaubney.
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Presenter Martin Daubney put it bluntly on air: "When you buy your lottery ticket every week, were you aware that millions of pounds were going to left-wing migrant activist charities?"
Commentator Rafe Heydel-Mankoo went further, describing the situation as institutional capture. "We're talking about the capture of these institutions by far-left ideology that should have no place in the charitable world."
'We're talking about the capture of these institutions by far-left ideology that should have no place in the charitable world.'
Rafe Heydel-Mankoo fumes as a GB News exclusive reveals the National Lottery has given more than £140million in donations to pro-migrant charities. pic.twitter.com/eFyMPNxJt9
The recipients are not neutral soup kitchens. Among the largest beneficiaries in the recent audit were Refugee Action (£3.21 million), the British Refugee Council (£2.97 million), the Scottish Refugee Council (£1.75 million), Task Force Trust / Action Asylum (£1.62 million) and the Refugee and Migrant Centre (£1.10 million).
Smaller but telling grants went to groups running yoga and English classes for refugee women, comedy workshops branded "Comedy Asylum," alpaca encounters led by asylum-seeker women, and projects explicitly framed around anti-racism and the "fundamental right to move."
Refugee Action's own language is unambiguous. One statement captured in the coverage declares the goal of building "a future rooted in the fundamental right to move, underpinned by a commitment to anti-racism." The Scottish Refugee Council has pushed MSPs to "detoxify" the immigration debate. These are political positions dressed up as charity.
The timing of the spending is striking. Funding identified in the audit ran at £16.1 million in 2021/22, rose, then jumped sharply to £43.3 million in 2024/25 alone - more than double the earlier annual figures - before adding another £19.6 million in the most recent period. London and the North West alone accounted for more than £43 million of the total.
This is public money in all but name. Roughly 23 pence of every pound spent on a National Lottery ticket goes to charitable causes. The distributing bodies are public institutions with obligations of political neutrality. Yet year after year the cash has flowed disproportionately toward organisations whose core mission is to expand and defend mass migration at a time when Channel crossings, hotel costs, crime and community tensions remain at crisis levels.
The irony is impossible to ignore, given the organised theft of charity clothing banks across Britain and Ireland.
Migrants and organised groups have been emptying donation bins in broad daylight, selling the clothes at car boot sales or shipping them abroad, and fly-tipping the rest. Charities that depend on those donations to fund genuine local need have lost revenue while police often treat the thefts with shrugs about "need."
So the same communities that see their donated clothes stolen by migrants are, through their lottery tickets, helping bankroll the activist infrastructure that campaigns for still more arrivals. The circle is complete: public generosity is extracted at both ends.
National Lottery Good Causes material celebrates the funding as life-changing support for people forced to flee. In practice a significant portion has gone to groups that treat borders themselves as the problem and British public opinion as something to be managed or "detoxified."
The Charity Commission guidance even notes that charities may engage in political activity where it advances their purposes - an opening many of these organisations have driven a coach and horses through.
British families struggling with the cost of living, veterans' charities, children's hospices and community groups serving the indigenous population receive a fraction of the attention. Players who thought their tickets were supporting Olympic athletes, heritage projects or local youth clubs have instead been underwriting an ideological project they never voted for.
The Lottery is currently under public review of its Good Causes priorities for the first time in more than twenty years. That review arrives not a moment too soon. When an institution charged with distributing the public's spare change becomes a reliable cash machine for open-borders activism, the social contract that sustains it begins to fray.
Ordinary people are entitled to know exactly where their money goes - and to demand that "good causes" start looking a lot more like the country they still call home.
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Tyler Durden Wed, 08/26/2026 - 02:00Authored by Jennifer Kavanagh via Responsible Statecraft,
On August 18, Israel bombed a non-operational Syrian air base, reportedly to derail Turkish plans to deploy military forces to the installation. The move drew swift condemnation from the United States, which did not receive prior notification despite its growing support for Syria, its alliance with Turkey, and the presence of thousands of U.S. military personnel based nearby, in Jordan and other parts of the region.
Is this the behavior of a "model ally"? The Jewish Institute for National Security of America seems to think so.
The group, which promotes "strategic cooperation" between the United States and Israel, tries to defend this position in its new report, "Shifting the Center of Gravity: Transforming the U.S.-Israel Security Partnership." It also lays out an ambitious set of proposals JINSA hopes will be part of a renewed 10-year U.S.-Israel Memorandum of Understanding (the current one expires in 2028). JINSA wants this "final" direct aid package to include $38 billion total and be "paired with new, mostly non-monetary initiatives that deepen and expand the U.S.-Israel partnership."
The recommendations in this report - which also include signing a mutual defense pact, basing U.S. military forces in Israel, and integrating Israeli technology into U.S. homeland defense - should be rejected as threats to U.S. national security. Not only would they cost taxpayers tens of billions of dollars, but the prescriptions would make the United States less safe than it is today, by institutionalizing U.S. military entanglement with (and even dependence on) Israel and increasing the risk of future wars.
Instead the Trump administration should instead let the current MoU expire in 2028 with no replacement. With a strong military and nuclear arsenal, Israel can defend itself.
The JINSA report opens by heralding Israel as "America's most important ally," praising its military prowess, technological capability, and willingness to project military power in pursuit of supposedly shared goals. Missing from its account of Israel's support during Operation Epic Fury, however, is any mention of Israel's role in starting, escalating, or widening the war. These are certainly relevant details if we are judging whether the bilateral relationship is an asset or a liability to the United States.
The report sidesteps these realities and instead moves quickly to a set of 10 proposals that it argues will take the bilateral partnership to the "next level." From the perspective of protecting U.S. national interests, these ideas range from bad to insane.
Among the more worrying recommendations are those that suggest the United States should form a mutual defense treaty with Israel and begin shifting U.S. assets away from current positions in the Persian Gulf to a wider and permanent force posture in Israel - including a new CENTCOM headquarters and a "regional U.S. prepositioned arsenal hub." These would break long-established firewalls in the U.S.-Israel relationship and undermine U.S. interests.
Since 1975, the United States has had a security commitment to Israel, formalized in a memorandum of agreement, that promises "remedial action" should Israel face external threat. In recent years, this commitment has functioned as a de facto security guarantee on par with Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty. Still, the United States has intentionally refrained from signing a more explicit mutual defense agreement with Israel or basing U.S. personnel inside Israel's borders for two reasons.
First, it was Israel's preference. Jerusalem has long prided itself on the fact that only its soldiers directly defend the country and that it could fight its own battles as long as the United States offered military support. Second, Washington feared a more formal defense obligation or forward bases in Israel would increase the risk that the United States would eventually become entangled in Israel's ongoing border skirmishes or complicate relationships with U.S. Gulf state partners, like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, on whom the United States relied to keep oil prices low.
The recommendations by JINSA, which count 43 retired U.S. officers - including 24 generals and nine admirals - on its roster discard these redlines. The mutual defense agreement they describe is framed as a narrow one that would be triggered "by the high bar of existential threat to Israel or Iranian use of weapons of mass destruction against U.S. bases in the region." But history tells us that, for Israel, the "existential threat" threshold is met easily and often.
In recent years, Israel has argued that Iran posed an existential threat while also claiming Hezbollah and Hamas as existential challenges to Israel's security. In other words, signing onto this agreement would all but guarantee U.S. involvement in future Middle East wars against Iran or possibly even Turkey, which some in Israel have already identified as the next target despite the fact that it is a NATO ally.
Of course, this is the goal of the recommendation: to ensure that no matter how far Israel falls in U.S. public opinion, the United States will be obligated to come to its defense, or risk undermining the credibility of its other commitments.
Basing U.S military forces inside Israel would only worsen the moral hazard engendered by U.S. support to the country. With U.S. personnel as a tripwire, Israel's leaders would feel assured that any attack would almost certainly drag in the United States, giving them little incentive to act with restraint. The risk that the United States might be ensnared in Israel's future military adventures would be high.
The second major focus of JINSA's recommendations covers the sharing of military technology and joint industrial projects between Israel and the United States. Most of these proposals demand that Israel gain the same level of access to U.S. technology as is enjoyed by the closest NATO allies who have spent years working to meet U.S. security standards. That Israeli officials are suspected of spying on the United States should be warning enough that giving Israel this type of access to sensitive U.S. technology would be a mistake.
The most dangerous of these tech sharing ideas, however, is one suggesting that Israeli technologies should be directly integrated into U.S. air and missile defense, specifically the Golden Dome project. This provision would mean that, if the Golden Dome project or something like it eventually covers the United States, Israeli technology would be part of its foundation, making the U.S. dependent on Israel for its own defense.
The United States tried something similar once before with Israel and the project had to be cancelled. The reason? Israel refused to allow the United States access to the source code needed to integrate the Iron Dome systems it planned to purchase into the U.S. air defense network. Experimenting with this type of cooperation a second time would be an act of self-harm on the part of the U.S. government.
Taken together, then, the JINSA proposals do not advance U.S. interests in the Middle East or elsewhere. In fact, they do just the opposite. They will increase the U.S. security burden and tie the United States down in the Middle East in ways that may quickly become irreversible while also undermining the physical security of the homeland. And they will do so at a cost of $38 billion from U.S. taxpayers in the form of annual military aid.
This outcome should be entirely unacceptable to any American president, regardless of the specific ally or partner in question and especially for a president who ran on promises to put U.S. interests first.
Elsewhere, President Donald Trump is pushing allies to defend themselves without so much (or any) U.S. support. He should do the same with Israel. The endless cycle of MoUs has run its course. The current one should be the last.
Tyler Durden Tue, 08/25/2026 - 23:25Here’s the short version of what it takes for a family of four to live comfortably in 2026 by state:
In Massachusetts, you’d need nearly $330,000 a year - the highest figure in the entire country. Only three states clear the $300,000 mark: Massachusetts, Hawaii, and California. At the other end of the spectrum, Mississippi is the most affordable at about $188,000. That’s a full $142,000 less than what you’d need in Massachusetts.
So… how much does a family of four need in your state?
This map shows the pre-tax income a household with two working adults and two kids needs to live comfortably in every U.S. state.
The numbers come from SmartAsset (as of February 2026). They’re based on the familiar 50/30/20 budget: 50% for necessities, 30% for discretionary spending, and 20% for savings or other goals. These aren’t bare-minimum survival numbers—they’re what it takes to live pretty well while still putting money aside.
And as Visual Capitalist notes, Massachusetts sits at the very top of that list. Massachusetts tops the ranking, with a family of four needing $329,555 per year to meet the 50/30/20 benchmark.
Hawaii follows at $313,165, while California ranks third at $302,682.
Rank State Income needed for family of four (2026)Connecticut, New Jersey, and New York aren't far behind, bringing the number of states with comfortable-income thresholds above $290,000 to six.
Colorado and Vermont Make the Top 10As expected, many of the highest income thresholds are concentrated in the Northeast and along the West Coast.
However, Colorado has the seventh-highest threshold in the country at $283,213, ranking above Washington and Oregon.
Vermont rounds out the top 10 at $280,384, despite having the second-smallest population of any U.S. state. Meanwhile, nearby states like New Hampshire, Maine, and Rhode Island all fall outside the top 10.
Just Six States Come in Below $200,000Despite the wide range in living costs across the country, only six states have a comfortable-income threshold below $200,000 for a family of four.
Mississippi ranks lowest at $187,533, followed by Kentucky. The states of Arkansas, Tennessee, Louisiana, and Alabama also fall below the $200,000 mark.
The gap between Massachusetts and Mississippi exceeds $142,000 per year, meaning the Massachusetts benchmark is about 76% higher.
Tyler Durden Tue, 08/25/2026 - 23:00