Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents busted three illegal aliens accused of raping children in Massachusetts just days after the state’s Democratic governor said she would not be assisting with federal efforts to deport illegal aliens.
ICE agents based in Boston, Massachusetts, arrested three illegal aliens, each of whom have been charged or convicted with raping children, just after Democrats in the state voiced their opposition to President-elect Donald Trump’s plan to deport illegal aliens en masse.
NEW VIDEO: “No, absolutely not,” @Maura_Healey responded when MSNBC’s anchor Lawrence O’Donnell asked if she would allow the State Police to assist in the deportations. #mapolipic.twitter.com/k2ou6n3Sch
One of those individuals, Alexandre Romao De Oliveira, was previously convicted in his native country of Brazil for raping a child in 2022. He illegally crossed into the United States in 2022 before being arrested this week in Methuen, Massachusetts.
ICE also arrested Guatemalan national Mynor Stiven De Paz-Munoz, who was charged with forcibly raping a child and held by the Great Barrington Police Department. ICE says that the detainer placed on Paz-Munoz was ignored and he was not transferred to federal custody.
“Mynor Stiven De Paz-Munoz stands accused of horrifically victimizing a Massachusetts child and represents a significant threat to our neighborhoods,” acting Field Office Director Patricia H. Hyde of Boston’s Enforcement and Removal Operations noted.
BREAKING: ICE Boston announces the arrests of three alleged illegal alien child rapists in Massachusetts, two of whom are charged w/ forcibly raping MA children, and another who was convicted of raping a child in Brazil in 2022, but was hiding in MA as a fugitive after he was… pic.twitter.com/OaDNOETTJU
There’s also Colombian illegal alien Billy Erney Buitrago-Bustos, whom ICE took into their custody after he was arrested by the Great Barrington Police Department for forcibly raping a child. The Berkshire County Jail honored ICE’s detainer for the illegal alien.
The arrests come just after Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey said that the state police will “absolutely not” cooperate with federal immigration enforcement agents as they attempt to carry out President-elect Donald Trump’s mass deportation agenda.
Healey also explained how Democrat states like hers might fight back against Trump’s deportation agenda in the courts.
“Some realities need to be noted and that is in 2016, we had a different situation in the courts, and I am sure there may be litigation ahead, there is a lot of other ways people are going to act and need to act for the sake of their states and residents,” the governor stated. “There’s regulatory authority and executive powers and the like, there’s legislation also within our state.”
“So I think the key here is that, you know, every tool in the tool box has got to be used to protect our citizens, to protect our residents and protect our states and to hold the line on democracy and the rule of law as a basic principle,” Healey added.
After Donald Trump’s first successful presidential campaign, back in 2016, it quickly became clear to everyone that Democrats and Republicans have very different approaches to getting things done in the world of politics. Democrats immediately launched criminal investigations of Trump’s campaign. They started talking about impeachment before Trump was even sworn in. They united as a party to do what their voters wanted them to do, which was to sabotage the democratically elected president at every opportunity. They were coordinated and therefore effective.
Meanwhile, many Republicans in Congress took the opposite approach. They decided to ignore what Republican voters wanted. They failed to repeal Obamacare. There were disputes over border wall funding and other aspects of the budget, as well as Trump’s travel ban. This infighting wasn’t particularly surprising: The speaker of the House at the time, Paul Ryan, had publicly stated just a month before the election that he wouldn’t defend Trump anymore. He abandoned his party’s nominee entirely, which was unprecedented in modern politics. That was the divide back in 2016: establishment Republicans were very resistant to change, even as Republican voters wanted a lot of it.
That’s one of the reasons we should all pay attention to the drama that unfolded in Congress yesterday. It’s one of the first clear signs we have that, this time around, things might be different. We now have a clear indication that Republicans finally understand what their voters are demanding — and that, like Democrats, they won’t be afraid to act on those demands. We have our first sign that Republican lawmakers are getting something resembling a spine, finally, maybe.
Admittedly, it was a rocky start. At a press gaggle early in the day, the speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, was asked whether an incoming lawmaker from Delaware, who uses the name Sarah McBride, is a man or a woman. In case you’re not familiar with this person, McBride is being touted as the first transgender lawmaker in Congress. He previously used the name Tim before he decided in college that he’s really a woman.
In the vast pantheon of questions that Mike Johnson could’ve been asked, this one should’ve been pretty easy to dispense with, for about a million different reasons. Here’s three of them: Mike Johnson is a Christian. He understands basic biology. And he’s familiar with the results of the most recent election, which showed that Americans overwhelmingly reject gender ideology, across party lines. So by all accounts, in every respect, this was the biggest softball that could’ve been lobbed Mike Johnson’s way. And yet, Mike Johnson whiffed. Watch:
Q: "Is freshman-elect Sarah McBride a man or a woman?"@SpeakerJohnson: "Look, I’m not going to get into this…We treat all persons with dignity and respect. We will. I'm not going to engage is silly debates about this. There's a concern about uses of restroom facilities…" pic.twitter.com/fMtlV3hYxW
In a way, it’s fitting that this spectacle took place on the same day that SpaceX was launching another starship into orbit. On the one hand, we have geniuses who are solving some of the most complicated physics problems known to man, in order to change the future of humanity for the better. And on the other hand, we have a prominent congressman who is too afraid to invoke maybe the most fundamental principle of biology, which is that men are not women. He just kind of smiles and delivers some platitudes about being nice to people. As far as contrasts go, it’s not a flattering one.
If this kind of thing had happened back in 2016, no one would’ve batted an eye. Everyone understood back then that congressional Republicans were following the Mitt Romney school of thought. The idea was pretty simple: don’t make Democrats angry. Whatever you do, don’t hurt their feelings. If you don’t make them mad, maybe they’ll be nice to you. This was the genius political theory that animated the Republican Party for decades. It didn’t matter that voters had just defied every poll in existence, and sent Donald Trump to the White House. All Republicans cared about in 2016 was making sure that Democrats weren’t going to call them bigots. So if Democrats wanted to deny basic biology and claim that men can become women, who are we to stand in their way? That was the prevailing sentiment.
That’s not the political reality anymore. Now, when members of Congress try something like this, Republican voters don’t let them get away with it. Within minutes of Mike Johnson’s non-answer, there was blowback, both inside Capitol Hill and all over social media. So about two hours later, Johnson called reporters back to deliver this clarification:
"Let me be unequivocally clear. A man is a man, and a woman is a woman. And a man cannot become a woman." – Mike Johnsonpic.twitter.com/MsNSISDn9W
That’s still not a direct response to the original question, which is whether McBride is a man or a woman. Johnson could’ve come right out and answered that by stating the truth, which is that McBride is obviously a man. But as a basic statement of biological reality, what Mike Johnson said here is obviously correct. It’s a massive improvement over his original answer. And logically, it rejects any claim that McBride is a woman.
In other words, Johnson took the temperature and found out that he’d better plant himself firmly on the side of sanity. That’s the winning political hand, and also the morally right one. Gender ideology is an affront to biology, it’s an affront to Christianity, it’s an affront to logic, it’s an affront to common sense. So now you can be on the side of truth, justice, common sense, and God Almighty — while also remaining on the winning political side. Or you can stand against all that is right and good in the world, and also your own political interests. That really shouldn’t be a difficult choice. There is literally no advantage at all to kowtowing to gender ideology. No benefit. It doesn’t even require courage to stand against it anymore. It did, maybe, five years ago. But not now. Now it’s the obvious play. And also, again, the correct one.
Over in the Democrat Party, however, gender ideology is still a centerpiece. In fact, it’s so potent on the Left that it’s the entire reason this incoming lawmaker, “Sarah McBride”, has risen to fame in the Democrat Party. Like most trans activists, McBride is, among other things, rather one-note. His entire political agenda and identity centers around being trans. On top of that, he’s of course extraordinarily disingenuous. Here for example was McBride arguing against a bill that would keep boys out of girls’ sports. This was his line of questioning. See if you can spot the logical fallacies here. Watch:
3/ McBride even wants boys to be able to compete against girls in sports. When a lawmaker brought up the unfairness faced by @Riley_Gaines_ against Will “Lia” Thomas, Tim evaded the obvious injustice by complaining that the Republican didn’t respect Thomas’s preferred pronouns. pic.twitter.com/bosMpXLuFa
McBride’s argument is that, because some women are better at sports than other women, there’s no point in keeping men out of women’s sports. There’s a form of “inequality” that already exists in women’s sports, so why not destroy women’s sports entirely? That’s the logic. And of course McBride delivers this line of questioning with total confidence and sincerity. He really thinks he has something here.
It might be a compelling argument if you don’t understand the concept of sports, and if you’ve never watched a sporting event in your life. But for everyone else, the problem is pretty obvious. The entire idea of competition is to establish a category, and then explore the variation and skill within that fixed category. Otherwise the competition would be unwatchable and one-sided. That’s why we have heavyweight and welterweight divisions in boxing. It’s why NFL teams don’t compete against high schoolers. And it’s why men don’t compete against women. Sex differences are by far the most predictive factor to consider when you’re trying to maximize competitiveness within a category.
That’s why, the moment a group of so-called “trans men” (otherwise known as biological females, otherwise known as just females) decided to form a soccer team in Spain to play against actual men, they lost their first game by a score of 19 to 0. It’s why, when two male athletes decided to compete in women’s track in Connecticut, they promptly broke 17 track meet records and won 15 state championship titles. It’s why a team of boys under the age of 15 soundly defeated the Women’s national soccer team by a score of 5 to 2. Everyone intuitively knows what’s going on here. Men inherently are stronger and faster and therefore more competitive in athletics than women.
And now, because Democrats insist on denying this, Republicans are about to codify the truth. This shouldn’t be remotely necessary, but it’s necessary now, apparently.
Congresswoman Nancy Mace of South Carolina has just introduced a rule that would keep males like McBride out of women’s bathrooms on Capitol Hill. This rule would affirm that men and women are not the same thing, and that men cannot transform into women. It is also, again, an easy political win. The vast majority of Americans support it. It was only a question of which Republican lawmaker would be smart enough to seize the moment here and take this stand. Turns out it was Nancy Mace. Watch:
Rep. Nancy Mace puts her foot down on sharing a bathroom with Congressman McBride, a man who thinks he's a woman, inside the Capitol:
"If being a feminist makes me an extremist, I'm totally here for it…I'm not going to stand for a man, someone with a penis, in the women's… pic.twitter.com/gTSMCEinfJ
You’ll notice that all of the Left-wing activists who were behind the Me Too movement are completely silent about this. None of them are taking Nancy Mace’s side. None of them care that she was raped, and that she’s worried about being assaulted again by a man in a private space. If you needed more evidence that the “Me Too” movement was a complete fraud, there it is. They have always cared about just one thing, which is advancing the interests of the Democrat Party. So now it falls to Republicans like Mace to actually advance the interests of women.
Later on, a reporter with ABC News tried again to shame Mace into backing down. (This was a theme for the day — reporters kept trying to badger her into changing her mind). Watch:
🔥🔥🔥 @NancyMace just made this ABC reporter rethink his entire career when he approached her about the new tr*ns congress member using women's restrooms 😂 pic.twitter.com/85WPZgzFui
They keep hitting Mace with this claim that her bill is “targeting” a particular member of Congress, when they know that’s not true. A bill can be motivated by the actions of one person, without targeting a particular person. These reporters all know that — or at least, they should know it. But because they’re all reading from the same talking points from the DNC, they just keep repeating the same claim. And Nancy Mace keeps demonstrating that they have no idea what they’re talking about.
By the way, when she mentions death threats, she’s talking about social media posts like this, where trans activists openly threaten to murder her. Watch:
This is the exact type of man I don’t want in the women’s restroom with me.
He says he’s going to 🚨Grab my ratty looking f*****g hair 🚨Drag my face to the floor 🚨Repeatedly bash my head until blood everywhere 🚨And kill me pic.twitter.com/WnbMgGYId4
So this person isn’t praying in front of an abortion clinic, which is usually how you get noticed by Merrick Garland’s DOJ. But he does seem pretty unstable, and he’s making a clear threat to murder a sitting congresswoman. So hopefully someone at the DOJ takes a look into this, but of course we can’t count on that. There was an industrial-grade paper shredding truck outside of the DOJ yesterday, so they probably have other things on their mind. Here’s what that looked like:
🚨PAPER SHREDDING TRUCK AT DOJ🚨
We have maintained a physical investigative presence by the @TheJusticeDept, which also is more convenient for cooperating sources.
As you can see, the DOJ is apparently focused on destroying as much evidence as they can before the new administration discovers what they’ve been doing for the past four years. So maybe all the people threatening Nancy Mace aren’t a priority right now.
Obviously this person is unhinged, but the truth is, he’s not that far removed from how most trans activists behave. And everyone knows it. Without exception, proponents of gender ideology are aggressive, unhinged and unstable. And as Marjorie Taylor Greene pointed out — in response to yet another hostile inquiry from the media — people are sick of it. They’ve had enough. They’re not putting up with it anymore. That’s what the last election was about. And this time around, Republicans in Congress are going to honor what their voters want. Watch:
I support banning men from women’s restrooms in the Capitol, but that isn’t enough. Men should be banned from women’s restrooms in every federal building paid for by taxpayers.
The American people delivered a mandate on November 5th. They said they’re sick of this lie.
By the end of the week, every single reporter on Capitol Hill will have asked an indignant question about this. They’re all outraged that women would possibly want to exclude men from women’s bathrooms. They can’t articulate why, but they’re outraged by it. And one by one, they’re being told the truth, which is that Americans want this insanity to end. And so it’s going to end.
Several Republican members of Congress, in addition to Nancy Mace and Marjorie Taylor Greene, have made that clear. Tennessee congressman Tim Burchett, for example, wrote on X, “He is a dude in a dress,” referring to McBride. And of course Burchett says he’ll support Mace’s rule banning men from entering women’s spaces.
That should be the baseline expectation for every member of Congress going forward. Any Republican who doesn’t support a measure to keep men out of women’s bathrooms should be shamed, humiliated, and voted out of office. This is as easy as it gets. Every Republican must be on board, no exceptions. This is a question of whether the incoming Congress will operate within the bounds of reality, or if they’re willing to suspend reality for the sake of catering to the most radical elements of Left-wing ideology. The correct choice is clear and obvious, and it’s time every Republican made it.
As I’ve outlined many times before, the alternative would be disastrous. Once you agree that reality is subjective, you have no basis to object to anything. You forfeit all of your rights. You can’t make any kind of rational argument. You have to accept the whims of Left-wing activists, who will do whatever they can to destroy you and your family.
This is not a hypothetical. It’s happening right now. This week we learned that a California judge has apparently given the go-ahead for the castration of the 12-year-old son of a man named Jeff Younger, who we’ve talked about on the show many times over the years. Younger’s ex-wife moved with the child from Texas to California, a so-called “sanctuary state” for trans-experimentation on children. Now Younger has lost all parental rights and access to his son, all because he wouldn’t affirm his son’s alleged gender identity.
This is where all of the supposedly “humanitarian” arguments in favor of gender ideology always end up. They lead to the most inhumane, authoritarian outcomes possible. But even if they didn’t — even if there were no consequences whatsoever to embracing this demented ideology — it would still be wrong to embrace it because it’s fundamentally untrue. It has always been untrue. And one of the many reasons to be optimistic about the next four years is that finally, even Republicans in Congress are willing to say that out loud.
If there is one thing common to President Trump’s Cabinet picks, it is Newton’s third law of motion, which suggests that for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.
Newton’s third law holds true in politics. For example, if you corrupt the DOJ, then President Trump is going to unleash Matt Gaetz. Or, if you corrupt HHS, he’s going to unleash Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
This political reactivity is leading to a bit of introspection on the part of the people who backed Kamala Harris, people who hate Donald Trump. The result is a wide variety of theories as to why exactly Democrats and the Left have lost their way in the United States.
One of the most prevalent theories is being brought out by David Brooks, a former pseudo-conservative columnist for the New York Times who ended up turning toward the Left. He famously suggested that he liked Barack Obama because he liked the crease of his pants or some such nonsense. But he’s also been responsible for some interesting social theories.
He has a piece on the cover of The Atlantic this week titled, “How the Ivy League Broke America.” In it, he discusses the death of meritocracy and suggests one of the reasons outsiders like Donald Trump, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., or a wide variety of other figures have come into positions of power is a result of the failures of the so-called meritocracy. This is because Brooks has a perverse view of what meritocracy actually is.
Brooks does not believe that people who have merit ought to rise to the top in the natural evolutionary process by which people rise to the top. Instead, he is, like many members of the traditional Left, a technocrat. He believes in trying to construct systems in order to make the world a better place, rather than believing in living with the evolved systems of, say, free markets and free government. Instead, he considers himself an expert who can set up a system that will rule over hundreds of millions of people.
This is the actual plague of Western civilization. Over the course of the last century and a half, the movement from evolutionary structures of government and markets have moved toward a technocracy — a self-appointed coterie of elites — who are going to fix all problems.
In his essay, Brooks explains what he sees as the problem with the so-called meritocracy. But the problem he discusses isn’t meritocracy. He does not understand what a true meritocracy actually is. And very few people in politics, it seems, actually do.
The actual problem we are experiencing right now is the transformation of meritocracy — the idea that anyone can get ahead if they have merit — into a technocracy, ruled by an elite who reconstruct the entire society in their image. For Brooks, he isn’t solving the problem; he’s making it worse. Brooks wants to “better manage” the better managed system.
It turns out that systems organically evolved to maximize actual merit, but we overthrew them in the name of a “better managed” system. Free markets maximize productivity and innovation; communitarian church systems maximize virtue and social bondedness. Government is a substitute for neither.
This is why colleges have collapsed. They were created in order to maximize both productivity and virtue.
The purpose of Columbia University was clear when it was founded as King’s College in 1754: according to its first president, William Samuel Johnson, “The chief Thing that is aimed at in this College is to teach and engage the Children to know God in Jesus Christ, and to love and serve him, in all Sobriety, Godliness, and Righteousness of Life, with a perfect Heart, and a willing Mind; and to train them up in all virtuous Habits, and all such useful Knowledge as may render them creditable to their Families and Friends, Ornaments to their Country, and useful to the public Weal in their Generations … that they may be qualified to make orderly and tractable Members of this Society.”
In short, Columbia University was designed to teach eternal truths; to pursue knowledge of Nature and Nature’s God; to create good citizens and good men.
Now Columbia exists not to teach either productivity or Godliness, but to teach an elite set of values that confers membership of a self-appointed aristocracy.
Brooks is not wrong in identifying a problem, but what he is railing against is not the failure of meritocracy; it is the failure of a technocracy that has been established over the course of the last century and a half — and it has failed the American people.
In The Atlantic, David Brooks writes:
In trying to construct a society that maximized talent, [James Conant] and his peers were governed by the common assumptions of the era: Intelligence, that highest human trait, can be measured by standardized tests and the ability to do well in school from ages 15 to 18. Universities should serve as society’s primary sorting system, segregating the smart from the not smart. Intelligence is randomly distributed across the population, so sorting by intelligence will yield a broad-based leadership class … eventually Conant’s vision triumphed and helped comprehensively refashion American life. If you control the choke points of social mobility, then you control the nation’s culture. And if you change the criteria for admission at places such as Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, then you change the nation’s social ideal.
Would we necessarily say that government, civic life, the media, or high finance work better now than in the mid-20th century? We can scorn the smug WASP blue bloods from Groton and Choate—and certainly their era’s retrograde views of race and gender—but their leadership helped produce the Progressive movement, the New Deal, victory in World War II, the Marshall Plan, NATO, and the postwar Pax Americana. After the meritocrats took over in the 1960s, we got quagmires in Vietnam and Afghanistan, needless carnage in Iraq, the 2008 financial crisis, the toxic rise of social media, and our current age of political dysfunction.
Brooks goes on to identify six sins of the so-called meritocracy.
The first sin: “The system overrates intelligence: The bottom line is that if you give somebody a standardized test when they are 13 or 18, you will learn something important about them, but not necessarily whether they will flourish in life, nor necessarily whether they will contribute usefully to society’s greater good. Intelligence is not the same as effectiveness.”
He is correct in that the system overrates technocratic bureaucratic intelligence. And we’ve tried to fix that by expanding the circle of the technocratic bureaucracy by saying that everyone should go to college. The problem is not elitism in this sense; the problem is the attempt to extend technocratic bureaucratic intelligence across the entirety of the American body politic. Markets would not make this mistake. The reality is that markets didn’t overrate intelligence. They adjusted for the differential qualities of all human beings. No man-made system can do that.
The second sin: “Success in school is not the same thing as success in life: Success in school is about jumping through the hoops that adults put in front of you; success in life can involve charting your own course.”
This is, yet again, true. But markets solve for that — which he continuously omits.
The third sin: “The game is rigged: The meritocracy was supposed to sort people by innate ability. But what it really does is sort people according to how rich their parents are. As the meritocracy has matured, affluent parents have invested massively in their children so they can win in the college-admissions arms race.”
Why is the college-admissions arms race what matters most? Realistically speaking, in a free market system, it isn’t. One of the great lies that people tell about economics in the United States is that there’s no income mobility, that everybody is stuck where they started. That isn’t true. But the free market system must be left alone for this to be true.
The fourth sin: “The meritocracy has created an American caste system: After decades of cognitive segregation, a chasm divides the well educated from the less well educated … The whole meritocracy is a system of segregation. Segregate your family into a fancy school district. If you’re a valedictorian in Ohio, don’t go to Ohio State; go to one of the coastal elite schools where all the smart rich kids are.”
Again, this is actually not the problem. It is, however, linked to his next point.
The fifth sin: “The meritocracy has damaged the psyches of the American elite: The meritocracy is a gigantic system of extrinsic rewards. Its gatekeepers—educators, corporate recruiters, and workplace supervisors—impose a series of assessments and hurdles upon the young. Students are trained to be good hurdle-clearers. We shower them with approval or disapproval depending on how they measure up on any given day. Childhood and adolescence are thus lived within an elaborate system of conditional love. Students learn to ride an emotional roller coaster—congratulating themselves for clearing a hurdle one day and demoralized by their failure the next. This leads to an existential fragility: If you don’t keep succeeding by somebody else’s metrics, your self-worth crumbles.”
He’s not talking about the right sort of psychic damage. The reality is not that our students are petrified of losing out in the college admissions game. The reality is that, again, the false meritocracy — the technocracy that’s been created — leads people who succeed to believe that they are members of a higher moral caste. They have a different set of values that if you put she/her pronouns in your bio; this makes you part of the coterie of the elite who are to rule society.
The sixth sin: “The meritocracy has provoked a populist backlash that is tearing society apart: Many people who have lost the meritocratic race have developed contempt for the entire system, and for the people it elevates. This has reshaped national politics.”
The fake meritocracy Brooks is discussing has created an American system, but not economically; rather, it has done so culturally. He’s making an economic critique rather than a cultural one, which is the actual major problem.
He says, in the end, we should redefine merit to include “curiosity, a sense of drive and mission, social intelligence, and agility.” He goes on, saying, “If the meritocracy had more channels, society would no longer look like a pyramid, with a tiny, exclusive peak at the top; it would look like a mountain range, with many peaks. Status and recognition in such a society would be more broadly distributed, diminishing populist resentment and making cultural cohesion more likely.”
This was called the free market. The problem in the United States is that we don’t have a true meritocracy anymore because people who believe they are smarter than everyone else constructed a system and then shoved people into that system.
Brooks concludes, stating that it is “your desires” that are “at the core of a person” — to which I argue that it is not just your desires. It is your duties. It is what you do in the world that should drive you to help others and contribute to your community — and your nation.
U.S. men’s soccer star Christian Pulisic has been hit by writers with major news outlets after he celebrated making the first goal in the team’s victory against Jamaica by rocking the viral “Trump” dance move following President-elect Donald Trump’s victory.
After the game, Pulisic confirmed that it wasn’t political when he did the “Trump Dance,” which he said “everyone’s doing” and he thought was “funny.“ However, writers with Forbes and The Athletic attacked him for it and wrote that he might come to “regret it.”
Forbes columnist Ian Nicholas Quillen suggested Pulisic should keep the focus on the game rather than draw attention to Trump and questions about other teammates’ eligibility given where the president-elects stands on immigration.
“But all things being equal, Pulisic and his American teammates would probably rather the focus stay on the soccer they play,” Quillen wrote. “On Monday night, their captain made that tougher.”
Tim Weah and Yunus Musah qualify for the team based on birthright citizenship, Fox News noted.
Christian Pulisic when asked about his ‘Trump Dance’ celebration after scoring against Jamaica 🎙️
“I saw everyone doing it yesterday in the NFL, I saw Jon Jones do it, and we were just having a bit of fun. I thought it was a pretty fun dance.
The Athletic writer Jeff Reuter wrote that the soccer captain should “consider how their actions will be perceived by their teammates and others.”
“He may not realize how Trump’s views on immigration could impact his dual-national teammates and their families,” Reuter wrote. “Regardless, this is a case where a dance conveys a meaning well beyond a simple gesture. With his nation co-hosting the World Cup in 2026, having the captain and face of the USMNT paying homage to Trump carries outsized subtext, intended or not.”
“It doesn’t matter if Pulisic wants that responsibility to consider perception. That comes with being a leader,” he added. “He can cite eagerness to embrace that type of role but in light of Monday’s dance move, he’d be wise to consider what that distinction truly entails.”
Pulicic made headlines on Monday night at the Concacaf Nations League Quarterfinals in St. Louis after he kicked the ball over the goalkeeper’s head to land it in the back of the net and take the U.S. up 1-0 in the game.
After the soccer star made the goal, he ran out of the goalie box and back out onto the field, where he stopped and did the “Trump” dance — making two fists and twisting his hips — which has become a viral sensation.
It became a trend on social media after supporters made videos of themselves doing the same dance moves that Trump often did when he danced to the Village People’s “Y.M.C.A.” at his numerous campaign rallies.
NFL players from across the league have also started celebrating their individual victories by doing the dance.
President-elect Donald Trump is calling on Republicans to show up for votes on Wednesday after several skipped a vote this week that allowed Senate Democrats to appoint a leftist judge to a lifetime position on the federal courts.
Senators confirmed Embry Kidd to the Atlanta-based 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in a 49-45 vote after five Republican senators, including his closest allies — Sens. JD Vance (OH), Mike Braun (IN), Marco Rubio (FL), Steve Daines (MT), and Bill Hagerty (TN) — did not show up for the vote.
“The Democrats are trying to stack the Courts with Radical Left Judges on their way out the door,” Trump posted on X. “Republican Senators need to Show Up and Hold the Line — No more Judges confirmed before Inauguration Day!”
The Democrats are trying to stack the Courts with Radical Left Judges on their way out the door. Republican Senators need to Show Up and Hold the Line — No more Judges confirmed before Inauguration Day!
Senate Minority Whip John Thune (R-SD), who was recently elected to be the Senate Majority Leader when the new Congress takes over in January, initiated a plan this week to slow down how many judges Senate Democrats would be able to confirm in their finals days in the majority.
The plan involves invoking “procedural maneuvers” on the Senate floor that will “significantly delay votes” on the judges during the final days of the 118th Congress, Fox News reported.
The move will limit the number of judges that Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) is able to ram through before the new Congress is sworn in on January 3, 2025.
“If Sen. Schumer thought Senate Republicans would just roll over and allow him to quickly confirm multiple Biden-appointed judges to lifetime jobs in the final weeks of the Democrat majority, he thought wrong,” Thune said in a statement.
The statement from Trump comes after prominent Republicans such as Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and the Wall Street Journal Editorial Board called out the senators for not showing up and opposing the nominees.
“This leftist judge would have been voted down and the seat on the important 11th circuit would have been filled by Donald Trump next year had Republicans showed up,” DeSantis posted on X.
“Now, the leftist judge will have a lifetime appointment and the people of FL, AL and GA will suffer the consequences,” he added.
The Wall Street Journal Editorial Board slammed the senators, saying that their “main value” for the remainder of the lame-duck session was “blocking bad legislation and stopping President Biden’s judicial nominees when possible.”
“A few good GOP excuses can mean a lifetime on the bench,” they wrote. “Republican Senators have a duty in the lame duck to show up for these votes. Any judicial vacancy that goes unfilled now will be Mr. Trump’s to nominate someone to fill.”
WOW – WSJ Ed. Board with harsh words for Republican Senators missing votes and allowing Schumer to ram through terrible Biden judges.
There are some truly bad activists in the pipeline if R’s don’t show up to stop them.
Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC) said that when Republicans do not show up to vote, “we lose.”
“I don’t care what the reasons were,” he said. “We have fewer than 15 scheduled legislative days. You have to show up. Period. End of story. There’s nothing more important.”
Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA), when asked about how frustrated he was over what happened, said: “On a scale of 1 to 10, a 12.”
“Because a number of President Biden’s nominees, particularly at the courts of appeal, they think they’re qualified to be a federal judge if they’ve seen ‘My Cousin Vinny,’ and I don’t agree with them,” he said.
“Their performance in committee demonstrated that none of them were Oliver, Wendell, or Scalia,” he continued. “They did horrible jobs in committee, and we had the votes to prevent them from being confirmed, but some of the folks on our side couldn’t be here, and it’s frustrating.”
The first rule of marketing is simple: know your audience. The second apparently needs to be a lot more basic, maybe something like: including the product in the pitch. The British luxury car brand Jaguar has violated both rules egregiously with their new ad spot and brand re-launch.
A colorful and strange commercial began circulating on social media this week and was met with derision almost immediately. The ad includes avant-garde people dressed in vibrant, outlandish outfits. The characters can be seen grabbing sledgehammers, painting over the camera lens, and striking poses as the music plays.
Disjointed phrases such as “create exuberant,” “live vivid,” “delete ordinary,” “break molds,” and “copy nothing” appear on the screen.
Tesla founder Elon Musk responded to the ad by echoing what so many others were saying, writing, “Do you sell cars?”
The official Jaguar X account replied to his question and many others by striking the same vague, cooler-than-thou tone. Some of their responses included, “The story is unfolding. Stay tuned,” “We’re shifting gears, not our purpose,” and “Consider this the first brushstroke.”
Customers were confused and dismayed that Jaguar would move in such a woke direction even as other brands pulled back from this type of advertising. It seemed obvious that no one was auditioning to be the next Bud Light train wreck.
Jaguar, meanwhile, is just days into their brand overhaul and is already facing heaps of criticism.
“Bye Jaguar, it was nice knowing you, to think, you were once the pinnacle of British motor engineering,” one person wrote.
“I’m not sure you all heard, but we aren’t doing that liberal artsy bullsh** anymore. Read the room,” a second person agreed.
Another reply said, “Didn’t you get the memo? Woke is dead. (And so is Jaguar, by the look of this turd).”
It’s also quite telling that Jaguar posted a tagline alongside the ad campaign that says “copy nothing.” The truth is, besides looking like a 90s United Colors of Benetton ad, this campaign is like every other woke product launch trying to look edgy. Petitioning to become crowned the wokest of them all is the opposite of unique – it’s tired, it’s played, and it’s especially puzzling now, at a time when so many brands have pulled back their overtly woke messaging as they realize it’s just not working.
Jaguar has a host of problems that a brand re-launch probably can’t fix. But one way to reconnect with their customers is a return to what made the car brand covetable in the first place. It wasn’t androgynous models wielding sledgehammers; it was fast, attractive sports cars.
Jaguar has already announced plans to phase out all gas-powered cars in favor of electric vehicles by 2025, so maybe the death knell is inevitable. If only they had called Black Jeremy to ask for advice before launching this laughingstock campaign.
Compare that kaleidoscope of nightmares to Jeremy’s debuting their redesigned 2nd Gen Razor with the “2nd Greatest Commercial Ever” – a follow-up to 2022’s “Greatest Commercial Ever.” It’s immediately obvious that Jeremy’s knows their audience and yeah, they even managed to mention an actual product during the ad. Both of these ads have been viewed millions of times and launched Jeremy’s Precision 5 Razor.
The video features Daily Wire’s co-CEO and god-king Jeremy Boreing, Editor Emeritus Ben Shapiro, plus cameos from hosts Matt Walsh, Andrew Klavan, and Michael Knowles, taking aim at modern advertising tropes by introducing a new face for the e-commerce brand: Black Jeremy.
Played by actor and conservative personality Siaka Massaquoi, Black Jeremy replaces Jeremy Boreing as Daily Wire CEO to secure the purchasing power of liberal, white women at the urging of advertising “experts” giving the Jeremy’s Razors brand a DEI makeover.
Boreing joked on X at the time, “Woke corporations spend all of your money on DEI. We spent it on a better razor (and a blacker Jeremy). Introducing the Second Generation Jeremy’s Razor – radically redesigned so you can shave like a man, not a manifesto.”
The whole commercial is a parody of wokeness, unlike the Jaguar ad, which embarrassingly enough for them, seems to take itself very seriously despite looking like nothing but a joke.
Jeremy’s Razors just launched its NEW Women’s Razor with the hilarious ad below. Notice, the ad is not woke, and features the NEW Women’s Razor. Even better, it has a 25% off deal right now, so you can purchase and save today, or get the perfect gift of a Women’s Deluxe Bundle, which includes a non-slip textured handle + five 5-blade razor refills infused with aloe & Argan oil, Moisturizing Shave Cream with Coconut Oil & Shea Butter, Moisturizing Body Wash with Coconut Oil & Shea Butter, Moisturizing Lotion with Collagen & Retinol, and 2 sticks of Aluminum-Free, Natural Deodorant in scent Waterlily & Minerals. Or stock up for a year’s worth of shaving at a 50% discount with Jeremy’s 1-Year Bundle!
Democrat Pennsylvania election official Diane Ellis-Marseglia admitted that she was wrong to defy the state Supreme Court’s ruling to count faulty ballots in the 2024 election ahead of a recount in the state’s Senate race.
On Wednesday during a heated county meeting, the Bucks County commissioner pleaded with the voters to forgive her — though Ellis-Marseglia said last week that “we all know that precedent by a court doesn’t matter anymore in this country, and people violate laws any time they want” as she called for others to join her in violating the law, CNN reported.
“The passion in my heart got the best of me and I apologize again for that,” the county commissioner told the crowd.
“I made a mistake, and because I am an elected official, I am held to a far higher standard than everybody else,” she added. “So, to the citizens I serve, I apologize, and I will continue to work hard for you and endeavor to not make such a mistake again.”
Diane Ellis-Marseglia, Bucks County, PA, who said she will violate the law and count illegal ballots, now, nearly in tears, says she made a mistake.
Sen Steve Daines: “She didn’t just make a mistake, she broke the law, they have to go in and arrest her for breaking the law.” 🎯 pic.twitter.com/NR44h26moG
The race for the Senate seat in the swing state is close enough that it has triggered an automatic recount as Senator Bob Casey refuses to concede to Republican Dave McCormick, after multiple outlets, including the Associated Press and Decision Desk HQ, called the race for McCormick.
The Pennsylvania Supreme Court previously blocked an effort to count mail-in ballots with incorrect or missing dates on the outer envelopes — but that didn’t stop Democrats in the Bucks County Office of Commissioners from pushing for exactly that.
Last week, Gene DiGirolamo, the sole Republican on the three-person panel, introduced a motion to reject the attempt to count what the GOP called “noncompliant” ballots. In response, Marseglia dismissed the proposal out of hand.
“Not going to second that, mostly because I think we all know that precedent by a court doesn’t matter in this country and people violate laws any time they want,” she said. “So for me, if I violate this law, it’s because I want the court to pay attention to it.”
Marseglia and the second Democrat on the commission, Robert Harvie, voted to count the disqualified ballots.
Pennsylvania Democrat Governor Josh Shapiro, considered one of the favorites for the 2028 Democrat presidential nomination, took the side of the court that ruled against Democratic officials who defied state law — but condemned such actions by officials after the court’s ruling.
On Monday, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled once again that counties must reject undated and misdated ballots after Democrat election officials openly defied the order.
Following the court’s decision, Shapiro wrote, “As we move forward, I want to be clear: any insinuation that our laws can be ignored or do not matter is irresponsible and does damage to faith in our electoral process. The rule of law matters in this Commonwealth, and as I have always said, it is critical for counties and officials in both parties to respect it with both their rhetoric and their actions.”
The House of Representatives just took a big step towards purging diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) from the federal government.
On Wednesday, the House Oversight Committee passed Texas Rep. Michael Cloud’s “Dismantle DEI Act” on a party line vote, sending the bill to a full vote. The 48-page bill, which The Daily Wire first reported on in June, would not only target federal offices and personnel but also contractors, training, education, grants, and more, and “ensure equal protection of the law, to prevent racism in the Federal Government.”
Sen. JD Vance (R-OH) introduced the Senate version of the bill before joining president-elect Donald Trump’s campaign.
“DEI initiatives falsely claim to promote fairness but instead institutionalize division, inefficiency, and discrimination,” Cloud told The Daily Wire on Wednesday. “These policies waste taxpayer dollars while eroding the merit-based principles that have been the cornerstone of America’s success.”
“The Dismantle DEI Act strikes at the heart of this harmful ideology, ensuring that our government is driven by excellence and equality—not divisive identity politics,” he argued. “It’s time to root out these discriminatory practices and restore a system that serves all Americans equally. I look forward to advancing this bill and challenging Congress to stand against this betrayal of our nation’s foundational values.”
Back in June, Vance had argued that “the DEI agenda is a destructive ideology that breeds hatred and racial division,” pointing to the many ways in which President Joe Biden’s administration leveraged racea nd sexuality-based employee associations to push left-wing policies throughout the United States.
“It has no place in our federal government or anywhere else in our society,” Vance said at the time.
DEI policies in our federal government have led to divisive, wasteful programs that undermine merit and fairness—principles Americans have fought for over generations.
The Dismantle DEI Act will restore accountability by eliminating DEI offices, removing mandates on federal… pic.twitter.com/0oIlhmL2iT
During Wednesday’s House Oversight hearing, Democrats repeatedly accused their Republican colleagues of ignoring racism, arguing against the idea that many DEI principles are pushing
Democratic Rep. Ayanna Pressley took issue with one of her Republican colleagues quoting Martin Luther King Jr.
“Please keep Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s name out of your mouths,” Pressley said. “Your perversion of his words, and his mission, when his children have asked you to stop invoking his name and perverting his work, when he was a proud and unapologetic black man fighting for equality for black Americans and all marginalized people.”
Rep. Clay Higgins (R-LA) pushed back on Pressley’s claim.
“How DARE a white Republican quote MLK? We actually had a congressman say that just now in this committee,” he said. “We will quote who we please to quote. And we will continue to speak freely.”
During his remarks on Wednesday, Cloud argued that DEI had been implemented “as an ideology within our federal government” that contradicts “fundamental principles of justice and equality.”
“It undermines the progress we’ve made — progress that took generations, hard-fought battles, and even a Civil War to achieve,” he argued. “From the abolition of slavery to the victories of the civil rights movement, Americans have worked tirelessly to right the wrongs of discrimination. Yet DEI policies threaten to codify new forms of discrimination, undoing the very progress that so many have bled and sacrificed to secure.”
Cloud mentioned a recent Do No Harm report that found the Biden administration had pursued over 500 DEI-related actions.
“These initiatives have not only failed to achieve their stated goals but have also resulted in absurd and wasteful programs that drain resources while dividing our nation,” he said. “Worse, they sometimes lead to unqualified individuals being placed in critical roles for the sake of meeting DEI benchmarks, jeopardizing efficiency and public safety.”
“Mr. Speaker, this is not progress,” he argued. “This is a dangerous detour that risks erasing the strides we’ve made toward a more perfect union. By dismantling these harmful policies, we can reaffirm our commitment to the ideals of equality, merit, and justice that make our nation great. I urge my colleagues to support this bill and help restore the principles of fairness and unity in our government.”
An illegal immigrant from Venezuela was convicted on Wednesday for the brutal murder of Georgia nursing student Laken Riley, but a number of major media outlets left one key word — “illegal” — out of their coverage of the verdict.
After the defense opted for a bench trial rather than a jury trial, Judge H. Patrick Haggard found Jose Ibarra, 26, guilty on all ten counts including “malice murder.” But despite the fact that Ibarra’s immigration status — he entered the country illegally in 2022 — is well known, it was left out of a number of reports.
John Hasson shared screenshots from The Washington Post, The Associated Press, and The New York Times where Ibarra was referred to as a “Venezuelan national,” a “man,” and a “Venezuelan migrant” respectively.
“[They] all refuse to describe Laken Riley’s murderer as an illegal immigrant,” Hasson noted. “Simply infuriating.”
.@washingtonpost, @AP, and @nytimes all refuse to describe Laken Riley’s murderer as an illegal immigrant
From The Washington Post: “Breaking news: Venezuelan national Jose Ibarra was found guilty of murdering Laken Riley, a 22-year-old University of Georgia nursing student. Ibarra was found guilty on all charges, including the most serious counts of malice murder and felony murder.”
Breaking news: Venezuelan national Jose Ibarra was found guilty of murdering Laken Riley, a 22-year-old University of Georgia nursing student. Ibarra was found guilty on all charges, including the most serious counts of malice murder and felony murder. https://t.co/vGDKUBvbhE
In a follow-up post, the outlet raised the point that Riley’s death had sparked a national argument about illegal immigration — particularly under President Joe Biden’s administration — but did not go so far as to accurately label Ibarra an illegal immigrant.
“A Venezuelan national was found guilty of murdering Laken Riley, a 22-year-old Augusta University nursing student whose February killing inflamed the immigration debate that became a central theme of this year’s presidential election,” the second post read.
A Venezuelan national was found guilty of murdering Laken Riley, a 22-year-old Augusta University nursing student whose February killing inflamed the immigration debate that became a central theme of this year’s presidential election. https://t.co/bugNgkLPwb
The Associated Press also noted that the case had sparked debate over illegal immigration, but gave no indication as to how that was connected to “a man” being convicted for Riley’s murder.
“BREAKING: A man was convicted of murder in the killing of Georgia student Laken Riley, a case that fueled the national immigration debate,” the post read.
BREAKING: A man was convicted of murder in the killing of Georgia student Laken Riley, a case that fueled the national immigration debate. https://t.co/p9qySbVcjy
The New York Times offered a similarly-disconnected framing, posting, “Breaking News: A Venezuelan migrant was convicted of murdering Laken Riley, a Georgia nursing student whose killing became a flashpoint in the immigration debate.”
Breaking News: A Venezuelan migrant was convicted of murdering Laken Riley, a Georgia nursing student whose killing became a flashpoint in the immigration debate. https://t.co/PJTai04HZw
The push to hide Ibarra’s immigration status is nothing new — even President Biden was forced to walk it back after he told the truth during his 2024 State of the Union Address. In an interview shortly after the address — during which he also mispronounced Riley’s name — Biden said he regretted calling Ibarra “illegal.”
🚨📷 Joe Biden says he regrets calling Laken Riley's murderer an "illegal." Joe Biden cares more about criminal aliens than American citizens. pic.twitter.com/B8qdZek632
The trans-identifying congressman at the center of a Capitol Hill bathroom battle has agreed not to use the women’s facilities following a mandate from House Speaker Mike Johnson.
Sarah McBride, a newly-elected representative from Delaware who identifies as a transgender woman, issued a statement on Wednesday saying that he will abide by Johnson’s Wednesday directive that “all single-sex facilities in the Capitol and House Office Buildings — such as restrooms, changing rooms, and locker rooms — are reserved for individuals of that biological sex.”
“It is important to note that each Member office has its own private restroom, and unisex restrooms are available throughout the Capitol,” Johnson said Wednesday. “Women deserve women’s only spaces.”
Johnson was responding to backlash on Capitol Hill over Republican South Carolina Rep. Nancy Mace’s resolution banning men from women’s facilities in Congress. That resolution specifically said that “allowing biological males into single-sex facilities, such as restrooms, locker rooms, and changing rooms designed for women, jeopardizes the safety and dignity of members, officers, and employees of the House who are female.”
Left-wing media and lawmakers argued Mace was targeting or bullying McBride. But Mace repeatedly emphasized that, as a survivor of sexual assault, she believes in protecting the integrity of women’s spaces.
“There’s no amount of bullying and threats on my life that they’ve made this week that’s going to stop me from this,” Mace said Wednesday morning on the Michael Knowles Show.
“Sarah McBride’s promise to abide by Speaker Johnson’s policy is a step toward acknowledging the rights of women everywhere—something we’ll continue to demand without compromise,” the congresswoman told The Daily Wire on Wednesday afternoon.
When McBride backed down Wednesday, he said in a statement: “I’m not here to fight about bathrooms.”
(Photo by Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)
“I’m here to fight for Delawareans and to bring down costs facing families,” McBride said. “Like all members, I will follow the rules as outlined by Speaker Johnson even if I disagree with them. This effort to distract from the real issues facing this country hasn’t distracted me over the last several days, as I’ve remained hard at work preparing to represent the greatest state in the union come January.”
I’m not here to fight about bathrooms. I’m here to fight for Delawareans and to bring down costs facing families. pic.twitter.com/bCuv7pIZBY
“Serving in the 119th Congress will be the honor of a lifetime,” the trans-identifying congressman continued, “and I continue to look forward to getting to know my future colleagues on both sides of the aisle. Each of us were sent here because voters saw something in us that they value. I have loved getting to see those qualities in the future colleagues that I’ve met and I look forward to seeing those qualities in every member come January. I hope all of my colleagues will seek to do the same with me.”
As lawmakers disputed which bathroom a trans-identifying member of Congress should use, Senator John Fetterman (D-PA) weighed in on the argument, tweeting, “There’s no job I’m afraid to lose if it requires me to degrade anyone,” before offering McBride his own office bathroom.
There’s no job I’m afraid to lose if it requires me to degrade anyone.
If that’s a defining issue for a voter, there will be a different candidate.
We have a bathroom in my office that anybody is welcome to use, including Representative-elect Sarah McBride. pic.twitter.com/Y8ZZbzFVq6
The Daily Wire first reported Wednesday morning that Mace was following up her Capitol Hill bathroom resolution with yet another effort to protect women’s spaces — a bill banning men who identify as transgender women from using women’s facilities on any federal property.
The “Protecting Women’s Private Spaces Act” would “prohibit individuals from accessing or using single-sex facilities on federal property other than those corresponding to their biological sex.” It also forbids anyone from accessing facilities on federal property that do not correspond with their biological sex, and it provides precise definitions of what it means to be female or male.
Dr. Jordan B. Peterson’s newest book, “We Who Wrestle With God: Perceptions of the Divine,” became the best-selling book on Amazon shortly after hitting shelves on Tuesday.
“We Who Wrestle with God” was published on the back of Peterson’s worldwide lecture series of the same title. The best-selling book “analyzes the Biblical accounts of rebellion, sacrifice, suffering, and triumph that stabilize, inspire, and unite us culturally and psychologically.” Peterson’s newest book is the #1 best-selling book on Amazon, ahead of “Cher: The Memoir” and “Melania.”
“Thanks to all my readers, viewers and listeners,” Peterson wrote on X alongside a screenshot of his book at the top of the best-seller list.
We Who Wrestle With God Is Amazon's bestselling book In all categories
A clinical psychologist, Peterson approaches the Bible both “scientifically and spiritually,” offering new insights into well-known biblical stories like that of Cain and Abel, the Tower of Babel, and Moses leading the Israelites out of Egypt.
Peterson argues that the Bible is a story of sacrifice, which he holds up as the proper model for human life. He holds the biblical narrative up in contradistinction to the “self-defeating” story around which people frequently order their lives, one of “hedonistic self-gratification or nihilistic collapse.”
“There’s no difference between work and sacrifice, because work is the sacrifice of the future to story, the sacrifice of the present to the future, and the sacrifice of the narrow self to the community,” Peterson told Daily Wire Editor Emeritus Ben Shapiro on the most recent “Sunday Special.”
“If it’s all about me in the most narrow way, then there’s no community, right? There’s only the immediate gratification of my whim … and I have to impose those whims on other people using power, because they’re not going to cooperate voluntarily if it’s all about me.”
“We Who Wrestle with God” is now available on Amazon.
Along with his latest best-selling book, Peterson has also recently released a new series on DailyWire+. Peterson’s “Mastering Life Collection” is available to stream now. The series includes “Masculinity,” “Marriage,” “Vision & Destiny,” “Depression & Anxiety,” “Negotiation,” and “Success.”
Peterson, who has long drawn on biblical stories in his writings and lectures, takes his exegesis to the next level in “We Who Wrestle With God,” as well as in his forthcoming series “The Gospels,” which will be available to stream on DailyWire+ December 1.
President-elect Donald Trump released a statement on Truth Social and X Wednesday afternoon after Laken Riley’s killer was convicted.
Jose Ibarra, a 26-year-old Venezuelan with ties to the Tren de Aragua gang, was found guilty on 10 charges, including murder, kidnapping, and aggravated assault with intent to rape Riley. The illegal immigrant attacked and killed Riley while she was running at the University of Georgia campus in Athens on February 22, 2024. Trump said he hopes the conviction will “help bring some peace and closure to [Riley’s] wonderful family.”
“JUSTICE FOR LAKEN RILEY! The Illegal who killed our beloved Laken Riley was just found GUILTY on all counts for his horrific crimes. Although the pain and heartbreak will last forever, hopefully this can help bring some peace and closure to her wonderful family who fought for Justice, and to ensure that other families don’t have to go through what they have,” Trump wrote. “We love you, Laken, and our hearts will always be with you. It is time to secure our Border, and remove these criminals and thugs from our Country, so nothing like this can happen again!”
JUSTICE FOR LAKEN RILEY! The Illegal who killed our beloved Laken Riley was just found GUILTY on all counts for his horrific crimes. Although the pain and heartbreak will last forever, hopefully this can help bring some peace and closure to her wonderful family who fought for…
Riley called 911 before she was kidnapped and murdered by Ibarra, but when the dispatcher answered, there was no response. During Ibarra’s trial, prosecutor Sheila Ross summarized the brutality of the illegal immigrant’s violence against the young woman.
“[H]e put huge holes in her head with a rock and he did it more than once. There is no reason for him to do that except to silence her forever,” Ross said, according to the New York Post.
It was also revealed during the trial that Ibarra was flown to Georgia at the taxpayers’ expense.
Before holding a rally in Georgia in March, Trump met with Riley’s “beautiful mother and family backstage.” During his rally, Trump discussed Riley’s tragic death, saying, “We vow to keep Laken’s memory alive for as long as we are here on this Earth and we take comfort that she is now home with God in Heaven.”
He also blasted the Biden administration’s border policies, saying, “Biden has implemented a formal policy that illegal aliens who intrude into the United States are granted immunity from deportation. Thus, when this monster showed up, at our border, he was set free immediately under the program that Crooked Joe created.”
A “bomb cyclone” billed as one of the strongest storms on record to hit the Pacific Northwest is slamming Washington, Oregon, Northern California, and British Columbia in Canada with a medley of severe weather conditions this week.
The storm, featuring a so-called “atmospheric river,” unleashed strong winds and rain that knocked down trees and reportedly caused power outages for hundreds of thousands of people. Local residents were also warned of the potential for flash floods, blizzard conditions, rock slides, and debris flows.
🌧 ❄ A significant AR is ongoing across parts of the Northwest. Here is a list of some rain and wind reports so far. For additional information, please refer to our storm summary (which will be updated every 12 hours through the event): https://t.co/mSj0gRYjKEpic.twitter.com/HuKWcd0JIg
At least two people have been killed by the bomb cycle. The Bellevue Fire Department in Washington said on X that a tree fell onto a home and killed a woman. And South County Fire in Washington, a regional fire authority, reported a “large” tree fell on a homeless encampment in Lynnwood and killed a woman in her 50s.
Reporters from local news stations shared images of the destruction on X, including video of a large tree that fell onto a car that prompted Seattle Fire Department crews to rescue one person who was trapped inside.
The National Ocean Service says a “bomb cyclone” forms through a process called bombogenesis in which “a midlatitude (the latitudes between the tropics and polar regions) cyclone rapidly intensifies, or strengthens, over a 24 hour period.” It can happen “when a cold air mass collides with a warm air mass, such as air over warm ocean waters.”
"BOMB CYCLONE" cranking up right now with pressures comparable to a Category 3 or 4 hurricane (944 mb) off the coast of the Pacific Northwest. This storm will continue to bring an atmospheric river to California, Oregon, Washington and British Columbia with heavy rain, feet of… pic.twitter.com/PQqswC0lWp
With pressure low enough to match that of a powerful hurricane, the “bomb cyclone” that formed this week developed a massive swirl off the Pacific Northwest coastline, as shown in satellite imagery.
In a post to X, the National Weather Service (NWS) pointed to the swirl and said that some “of the most powerful winds with the strong low pressure offshore are often in a region called the ‘Sting Jet’ (not a Police tribute band). Also known as the ‘Poisonous Tail’ – it’s where strong winds form as colder dense air rapidly descends and dries.”
Some of the most powerful winds with the strong low pressure offshore are often in a region called the "Sting Jet" (not a Police tribute band). Also known as the "Poisonous Tail" – it's where strong winds form as colder dense air rapidly descends and dries. #wawxpic.twitter.com/2kMTtu0nvc
A separate area of low pressure was expected to develop and quickly strengthen off the Northwest coast on Friday, helping to “amplify the atmospheric river streaming into northern California through Friday morning, exacerbating the flooding threat,” the NWS Weather Prediction Center said in a discussion post on Wednesday.
Noting there is a risk of intense rain and “another round of strong winds” from the second low-pressure system into the end of the week, the Weather Prediction Center added: “Residents and visitors residing or traveling between northern California and Washington are advised to check road conditions before venturing out, listen to advice from local officials, review emergency plans, and have multiple ways of receiving warnings.”
Washington Post opinion columnist Jennifer Rubin warned Democrats that if they wanted to get through to voters, they would have to deliver their message in a way that would resonate.
“You have to boil it down to nuts and bolts and you have to be pithy,” she said on a recent episode of her podcast, Jen Rubin’s Green Room. She then offered an example of what she meant by “pithy” when she added, “Republicans want to kill your kids. It’s actually true.”
WATCH:
WaPo Opinion columnist Jen Rubin on how Democrats should be messaging to people who don’t follow politics:
“You have to be pithy, what do I mean by pithy? How about this, Republicans want to kill your kids. It’s actually true.” pic.twitter.com/T45OJUhTi0
“For people who don’t get political news, who never pick up a newspaper, who never turn on CNN, who never even bother with Fox News, those people really have no idea what’s going on,” she said, arguing that Democrats had to do everything they could to make sure that they were at least able “to communicate the basic facts.”
“You don’t have a vaccine because, you’re not getting a child tax credit because,” she continued. “All the good things that are happening at the state level, they have to know why they’re getting those things. Oh, you have a chip manufacturing plant because a Democratic president put that into effect and a Democratic governor went out and solicited bids. And now you have X number of thousands of jobs. It’s that simple.”
Rubin went on to say that the way they communicated was important as well, arguing that it couldn’t just be true, it also had to resonate.
“You can’t talk broad themes. You have to boil it down to nuts and bolts and you have to be pithy. What do I mean by pithy? How about this? Republicans want to kill your kids. It’s actually true,” she claimed. “If you’re going to oppose vaccinations, if you’re going to stop breakthrough medical research, if you’re going to allow minors and all sorts of people to get semi-automatic weapons, which they use to shoot up schools, well then you are responsible for kids’ health and death, unfortunately. It has to be that simple and that direct, and it has to be over and over and over again.”
A number of social media users on X were not impressed with Rubin’s take and said so.
“The Washington Post should be dismissed as a legitimate or serious publication for willfully platforming this deranged individual for the last decade,” The Federalist’s Mollie Hemingway said.
The Washington Post should be dismissed as a legitimate or serious publication for willfully platforming this deranged individual for the last decade. https://t.co/OpF7B4yz7y
“Every once in a while it’s worth reminding ourselves that the Washington Post pays this woman to share her thoughts with the world,” GOP communications strategist Matt Whitlock added.
Every once in a while it’s worth reminding ourselves that the Washington Post pays this woman to share her thoughts with the world. https://t.co/R5iRE4pxMu
The stepdad of murdered Georgia nursing student Laken Riley read one of her final journal entries in court after her illegal immigrant killer was convicted on Wednesday.
Venezuelan Jose Ibarra, 26, was found guilty on 10 charges, including murder, kidnapping, and aggravated assault with intent to rape Riley. Riley, who was attending Augusta University, was killed by Ibarra while she was running near the campus of the University of Georgia on February 22, 2024.
Riley’s murder sparked outrage across the country over the Biden administration’s border policies, and during the trial, it was revealed that Ibarra, who has ties to the Venezuelan Tren de Aragua gang, was flown to Georgia at the taxpayers’ expense.
Shortly after the guilty verdict and before Ibarra’s sentencing, Riley’s stepdad read a journal entry the 22-year-old nursing had written on December 17, 2023, just two months before she was murdered.
Riley began the entry, “To my future husband, as silly as I feel writing this, my old small group leader once recommended it, and so here I am. To my future husband, I want you to know that I am thinking about you and working every day to become the best wife I can be and working through my current relationships to best prepare me for ours and our kids one day. I’m focusing on God and what he defines as a faithful Christian wife, and so that I can best embody those characteristics.”
“I pray that you know it is with my full faith and trust in God that I know this relationship has been handcrafted by him,” Riley added. “I pray that we continue to glorify the Lord and prioritize him in every aspect of our lives and raise our future family to be God-fearing Christians as well. And pray God is the center of our relationship as it is a gift from him. I thank him for you before I even know you and can’t wait to love you in the best way I know how for the rest of our lives.”
“I pray you know and feel the importance of my love and hopes for our relationship,” the journal entry continued. “No matter what challenges we face, I pray that our trust in God and love for one another overrules the obstacle. May our relationship last forever. Your future wife, Laken.”
Laken Riley’s stepdad just read one of Laken’s final journal entries, where she prays for her future husband & family.
This is the heartbreaking reality of an open border, and it’s precisely why Donald Trump was elected — to ensure this never happens to an American family again. pic.twitter.com/AYtggWHaZc
Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) urged his fellow senators on Wednesday to avoid joining an “angry mob” during the confirmation process of Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) for attorney general.
Graham met with Gaetz and Vice President-elect JD Vance on Wednesday morning. Vance took Gaetz and Defense Secretary nominee Pete Hegseth around Capitol Hill to meet with key senators ahead of their confirmation hearings. Both Gaetz and Hegseth have been viewed as controversial picks, with some Republican senators publicly expressing their concern over Gaetz being tapped to head the Justice Department.
Gaetz, who has been one of President-elect Donald Trump’s most ardent supporters, was the subject of a DOJ sex trafficking investigation, but no charges were brought against him. The House Ethics Committee is also investigating the Florida Republican for alleged sexual misconduct. Gaetz resigned from Congress immediately after being nominated for attorney general, effectively ending the probe.
For the upcoming confirmation hearing, Graham asked his colleagues to neither “rubber stamp” Gaetz nor “be driven by a lynch mob.”
“I had a very good meeting with President Trump’s nominee for Attorney General, Matt Gaetz, and Vice President-elect JD Vance. I am committed to allowing the process to go forward in a manner consistent with past practices and fundamental fairness. This process will not be a rubber stamp nor will it be driven by a lynch mob,” Graham posted on X. “My record is clear. I tend to defer to presidential cabinet choices unless the evidence suggests disqualification. I fear the process surrounding the Gaetz nomination is turning into an angry mob, and unverified allegations are being treated as if they are true. I have seen this movie before.”
“I would urge all of my Senate colleagues, particularly Republicans, not to join the lynch mob and give the process a chance to move forward. After years of being investigated by the Department of Justice, no charges were brought against Matt Gaetz. This is something we should all remember,” the South Carolina senator added. “I would also urge my colleagues to go back to a time-tested process, receive relevant information, and give the nominee a chance to make their case as to why they should be confirmed. This standard – which I have long adhered to – has served the Senate and country well.”
The House Ethics Committee is reportedly gathering on Wednesday afternoon behind closed doors as some on Capitol Hill call on the committee to release what it has on Gaetz. The committee chair, Rep. Michael Guest (R-MS), has not said if he supports releasing any report. Assuming all Democrats on the committee vote to release the information on Gaetz, only one Republican would need to approve, The Hill reported.
“There’s not enough money in the world to pay me to serve on the Ethics Committee right now,” one House Republican said, according to The Hill. “Those members are definitely in an unenviable position.”
Trump nominated the 42-year-old Gaetz for attorney general last week, calling him a “deeply gifted and tenacious attorney, trained at the William & Mary College of Law, who has distinguished himself in Congress through his focus on achieving desperately needed reform at the Department of Justice.”
“Matt will root out the systemic corruption at DOJ, and return the Department to its true mission of fighting Crime, and upholding our Democracy and Constitution,” Trump added. “We must have Honesty, Integrity, and Transparency at DOJ. Under Matt’s leadership, all Americans will be proud of the Department of Justice once again.”
House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) announced on Wednesday that people who use restrooms in the House of Representatives must use the one that matches their biological sex.
“All single-sex facilities in the Capitol and House Office Buildings – such as restrooms, changing rooms, and locker rooms — are reserved for individuals of that biological sex,” Johnson said in a statement.
“It is important to note that each Member office has its own private restroom, and unisex restrooms are available throughout the Capitol,” he added. “Women deserve women’s only spaces.”
When asked by a reporter if the policy would be enforceable, Johnson said, “Like all House policies, it’s enforceable.”
“And we have single-sex facilities for a reason, and women deserve women’s only spaces,” he noted. “And we are not anti-anyone and we are pro-woman. I think it is an important policy for us to continue. It’s always been an unwritten policy and now it is in writing.”
The announcement comes after Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC) introduced a bill this week that banned “Members, officers, and employees of the House from using single-sex facilities other than those corresponding to their biological sex, and for other purposes.”
Mace later tweaked the bill, naming it the “Protecting Women’s Private Spaces Act,” and provided it exclusively to The Daily Wire.
The bill prohibits “individuals from accessing or using single-sex facilities on federal property other than those corresponding to their biological sex.”
I asked the speaker if this would be enforceable and he said:
“Like all House policies, it’s enforceable. And we have single sex facilities for a reason, and women deserve women’s only spaces. And we are not anti anyone and we are pro-woman. I think it is an important policy for… pic.twitter.com/usCfmnhRD9
Mace told Daily Wire host Michael Knowles that her legislation should not be controversial, arguing that independent voters and even Democrats are “with us” when it comes to “forcing this crazy gender ideology down the throats of our children and other Americans across the country.”
“I’m going to do everything I can to protect women and girls here on the hill, but also across the nation,” she said on “The Michael Knowles Show,” where she first unveiled the bill. “This is a question that needs to be answered. Do women have rights or not? Are we going to allow these men to bully us into submission? And I say, no, no more. I’m done with this.”
“There’s no amount of bullying and threats on my life that they’ve made this week that’s going to stop me from this,” she added, promising to “fight like hell” for the protection of women and girls.
EXCLUSIVE: @RepNancyMace announces a new bill to protect women on ALL federal property from men who seek to invade female spaces. pic.twitter.com/ZLkWTVfO2m
CNN Republican commentator Scott Jennings was unconvinced — and amused — when fellow panelist Brian Stelter claimed on Tuesday that the hosts of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” had opted to meet with President-elect Donald Trump out of fear of “retribution.”
Stelter and Jennings sparred briefly on the topic during “CNN NewsNight” with host Abby Phillip as they discussed the fallout from a Friday meeting between Trump and “Morning Joe” hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski.
WATCH:
NEW: @ScottJenningsKY's reactions are priceless as Brian Stelter ‘reports’ that Joe/Mika met with Trump because they feared retribution:
"I mean, isn't it possible too that they're just two people who are so full of themselves, so full of self-aggrandizement that they would feel… pic.twitter.com/Ecr6QItBq3
Scarborough and Brzezinski announced during their Monday morning broadcast that they had met with Trump, explaining that they had felt the need to reopen the lines of communication ahead of a second Trump administration. But according to Stelter, the meeting had been requested at least in part because the longtime morning show hosts were concerned that the Trump administration might “target” them for harassment or even prosecution.
“Right. Detente, appeasement. I don’t know what to call it. You know, Joe and Mika didn’t say much about it today, but according to my sources, they believed … they credibly were concerned that they faced governmental and legal harassment with this incoming administration, essentially, that they feared retribution. And that’s partly why they sought out this meeting,” Stelter said.
“And to be fair, to Brzezinski and Scarborough, they’re not the only MSNBC hosts or the only – the word journalists is complicated because they’re more like personalities – but there are a number of journalists at places like the [Associated Press] and other big news outlets that are concerned about retaliation in the coming months. Anything from IRS audits to lawsuits and things like that. There are media outlets bulking up on lawyers, thinking about having more libel insurance, those sorts of things,” Stelter continued. “Now, I don’t know exactly what the specific concern Joe and Mika had was or wasn’t. But they’re not the only MSNBC personalities worried about retaliation. However, they are the only ones to go down to Mar-a-Lago and have a meeting.”
Jennings wasn’t buying it, however, and he said so: “I mean, isn’t it possible too that they’re just two people who think [they] are so full of themselves, so full of self-aggrandizement, that they would feel like that they would be personally —”
Stelter interrupted, arguing that the “Morning Joe” hosts were not alone in their fears.
“Well, I just, first of all, I can see why. Second of all, if that’s what happened and if that’s what they truly believed, why didn’t they go on TV and say that? ‘We went down there to meet with the president to tell him that, hey, anyone who’s been critical of you, you know, you should treat us like journalists and not like the enemy,'” Jennings replied. “They didn’t go on TV and say that, they went on TV and portrayed it much differently. So what I hear you saying in your reporting is they had a motive that they weren’t willing to disclose to their audience, which I think should get them more scorn today than they were already getting to begin with.”
Scarborough and Brzezinski caught flak from both sides of the political aisle for meeting with Trump, with many on the Left claiming that such a meeting would legitimize the incoming administration. On the right, critics asked why Trump would give them the time of day after Scarborough and Brzezinski had happily joined the other media talking heads who called him a fascist, a Nazi, and worse.
“Hitler getting a lot more meeting requests than I would’ve thought,” Jennings said at the time.
The Southern Poverty Law Center is out with a statement after it came under fire for exposing the identities of anonymous writers for Not The Bee, saying its decision to highlight their identities was made because it’s “dedicated to protecting the safety of trans and genderqueer individuals.”
The left-wing organization published a piece on Tuesday afternoon that highlighted the identities, hometowns, and even professions of writers published under pseudonyms on Not The Bee. The non-satirical partner website of The Babylon Bee publishes news stories that seem too absurd to be true to highlight the absurdity of the Left.
The website’s leadership, Seth and Dan Dillon, took aim at SPLC as a “smear factory” that was “doxxing” its writers “because they’re left-wing activists masquerading as journalists.” The SPLC confirmed as much in its statement, which uses left-wing talking points to justify its actions.
“The SPLC is committed to transparency and is dedicated to protecting the safety of trans and genderqueer individuals when they are publicly attacked,” the SPLC said in a statement to the Montgomery Advertiser. “Hateful content like the material created by Not the Bee writers works to dehumanize transgender individuals, the entire LGBTQ+ and immigrant communities, and people of color. This divisive commentary has no place in our society.”
Seth Dillon said on Wednesday morning that the statement was an admission that SPLC’s “dox-and-smear campaign against us wasn’t actually journalism, but an attempt to censor speech they don’t like.”
The SPLC has put out a statement admitting their dox-and-smear campaign against us wasn’t actually journalism, but an attempt to censor speech they don’t like. pic.twitter.com/oxlqc1LAh7
The SPLC story revealed the identities of six authors from Not The Bee from around the country who contribute to the site. SPLC published their names, where they lived, and their professions, which ranged from fitness instructor to high school teacher.
The stated justification for exposing the identities of the writers in the article was the content they produced. One writer who was published under the name “Planet Moron,” for example, was exposed because he’s a “prolific writer on culture-war issues,” the SPLC stated.
The SPLC is well-funded, taking in hundreds of millions of dollars to carry out attacks for the Left. That funding has been the source of controversy, with tax forms showing much of its money stored in overseas tax havens.
According to its 2022 tax form, it took in $170 million that year, and had about $700 million stashed away as “private investment funds.” $26 million was stored in “Central America and the Caribbean.” The Free Beacon reported in 2019 that tax documents from 2014 showed it transferring millions of dollars to the Cayman Islands, a tax haven.
SPLC now functions as a smear factory, allowing reputable groups like legacy media outlets to call center-right groups extremists without engaging in defamation because they attribute it to SPLC, a nominal expert, instead of saying it themselves. In 2012, a left-wing gunman stormed the conservative think tank Family Research Council because he saw it listed as “anti-gay” by SPLC. He was later convicted of terrorism for the attack.
In 2018, SPLC’s insurance company paid British activist Maajid Nawaz $3.4 million because the group falsely named him an “anti-Muslim extremist.” Last year, a judge ruled that a defamation suit from the Dustin Inman Society could proceed after SPLC called it an “anti-immigrant hate group… vilifying all immigrants,” when the Society says it simply opposes illegal immigration.
Kansas Senator Roger Marshall on Wednesday introduced a bill taking aim at the core tenants of transgender ideology by defining “male” and “female” in terms of “biological truth.”
The “Defining Male and Female Act of 2024” would enshrine in law the biological differences between men and women. The proposed legislation, which is backed by a handful of conservative organizations, says the definition is required to combat “increasing confusion about the definition of sex as a biological truth.”
Marshall reiterated that goal to The Daily Wire.
“As a physician who has delivered over 5,000 babies, I can confidently say that politicizing children’s gender to use them as pawns in their radical woke agenda is not only wrong, it is extremely dangerous. I didn’t think we would need legislation to tell us that there are only two sexes: male and female, but here we are,” Marshall said.
Marshall is the latest Republican to introduce legislation on this issue. Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC) this month introduced a measure to keep men out of the women’s bathrooms in the U.S. Capitol. That bill would ensure that incoming Democrat Rep. Sarah McBride (DE), a man who identifies as a woman, could not use the same bathrooms as his female colleagues.
Marshall’s bill notes that “every individual is either male or female” and that “in no case is an individual’s sex determined by stipulation or self-identification.” It defines a female as “an individual who naturally has, had, will have, or would have, but for a congenital anomaly or intentional or unintentional disruption, the reproductive system that at some point produces, transports, and utilizes eggs for fertilization.”
It defines a male as: “an individual who naturally has, had, will have, or would have, but for a congenital anomaly or intentional or unintentional disruption, the reproductive system that at some point produces, transports, and utilizes sperm for fertilization.”
This makes a “man” an “adult human male” and a “woman” an “adult human female.”
Marshall’s legislation is backed by Idaho Republican Sens. James Risch and Mike Crapo and Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith (R-MS). Rep. Mary Miller (R-IL) is set to introduce a companion bill in the House. Conservative groups including Heritage Action, Family Research Council, Concerned Women of America, and Alliance Defending Freedom also support the proposal.
“We must codify the legal definition of sex to be based on science rather than feelings,” Marshall told The Daily Wire. “With our legislation, we can fight back against the Biden-Harris Administration’s assault on our children.”
“The View” cohost Sunny Hostin was visibly angry on Tuesday when she was forced during a recent broadcast to read a legal disclaimer stating that President-elect Donald Trump’s choice for Attorney General, former Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL), has staunchly denied all allegations against him and has never been charged.
Hostin, a former federal prosecutor, had repeated several allegations against Gaetz — minus the disclaimer — earlier in the show.
“Within the Department of Justice, you know, you have the sex crimes unit, which is what I was a part of. Child sex crimes and child trafficking. How could you nominate someone with allegations of child trafficking or trafficking across state lines and having sex with a 17-year-old?” Hostin asked, adding that even according to the allegations, the sexual relationship was halted once it was revealed that the minor was 17 years old.
Cohost Whoopi Goldberg weighed in as well, saying, “I’m saddened by it because all of those women who will have to get some defense of what’s happened to them, that’s who they’re going to, and this is someone who will just say, ‘It’s not a big deal.’ All of those little kids who, you know, get abused, they got no recourse now because this is what’s in charge.”
Despite the fact that Gaetz has been investigated and still has never been charged, Hostin was clearly annoyed at the prospect of being forced to share that information with the audience.
WATCH:
Sunny Hostin looks like she’s about to rip the heart out of her producer as she’s forced to issue a correction on Matt Gaetz.
“Sunny, you have a legal note,” cohost Whoopi Goldberg prompted her.
“I do have a legal note. Thank you, Whoopi,” Hostin said flatly. “Matt Gaetz has long denied all allegations, calling the claims, quote, ‘invented,’ and saying in a statement to ABC News that ‘this false smear following a three-year criminal investigation should be viewed with great skepticism.’ The DOJ investigation was closed with no charges being brought.”
Leftist activist and TV personality Rosie O’Donnell expressed her fury over MSNBC hosts recently traveling to Florida to meet with President-elect Donald Trump.
The comedian vented about the meeting on TikTok. “Turn off the TV, because it’s like, impending doom, impending doom,” O’Donnell says in the clip. “But without a warning, they’re just like, ‘Well, Trump nominated so and so.’ Not like, ‘Holy s***, people. You’re not gonna believe this. We gotta do something.’ That’s what the newscaster should be saying. But they’re not. Hopeless.”
She continued, “So Mika [Brzezinski] and Joe [Scarborough] went down to Mar-a-Lago to kiss the ring. So, last time I ever watch ‘Morning Joe,’ period. End of statement. Unreal, unreal. For months you were telling us he’s the worst thing that could happen to this country and democracy. And then you go kiss his ring. Despicable. Despicable you; both of you.”
O’Donnell was referencing the meeting Brzezinski and Scarborough had with Trump on Friday, which has generated a lot of criticism from Democrats. That meeting was the first time they had spoken face to face with Trump in seven years, The Daily Wire previously reported, and it was done in an effort “to restart communications.”
“Morning Joe” co-hosts Scarborough and Brzezinski, who are married, said they talked to Trump about several controversial issues, from immigration to abortion, and did not agree on much but stressed that having open communication was the main goal.
“For those asking why we would go speak to the president-elect during such fraught times, especially between us, I guess I would ask back – why wouldn’t we?” Brzezinski said. “Five years of political warfare has deeply divided Washington and the country. We have been as clear as we know how in expressing our deep concerns about President Trump’s actions and words in the coarsening of public debate.”
“But for nearly 80 million Americans, election denialism, public trials, January 6, were not as important as the issues that moved them to send Donald Trump back to the White House with their vote,” she continued. “Joe and I realize it’s time to do something different, and that starts with not only talking about Donald Trump, but also talking with him.”
Other MSNBC hosts were also outraged that the meeting happened, with contributor Jennifer Rubin calling it “disgusting” on Bluesky, the social media platform started by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey that’s become popular with leftists.
Host Katie Phang posted on X, “Normalizing Trump is a bad idea. Period.”
Jon Stewart, host of Comedy Central’s ‘The Daily Show,’ answered Brzezinski’s rhetorical question about why wouldn’t they meet with Trump. “Uh…Because you said he was Hitler.”
Even conservatives are questioning the motives of the meeting. Nikki Haley, who lost the GOP presidential nomination to Trump, weighed in, posting on X Monday, “Let’s be clear, Joe and Mika didn’t suddenly see the light, they saw their ratings. They realized they needed Trump for their survival.”
President-elect Donald Trump announced on Wednesday that he has selected former acting U.S. Attorney General Matthew Whitaker to be the U.S. Ambassador to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).
“Matt is a strong warrior and loyal Patriot, who will ensure the United States’ interests are advanced and defended,” Trump said in a statement. “Matt will strengthen relationships with our NATO Allies, and stand firm in the face of threats to Peace and Stability – He will put AMERICA FIRST.”
Trump said that he had full confidence in Whitaker’s ability to represent the U.S. and promote “peace through strength” and freedom around the world.
Whitaker, a former U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Iowa, graduated from the University of Iowa with a B.A., MBA, and J.D.
Whitaker received a Big Ten award while playing college football as a tight end for the Iowa Hawkeyes from 1988-1992.
Whitaker has strong foreign policy views when it comes to Russia, having warned of its attempts to interfere in U.S. elections and that it would continue its war of aggression in Europe unless NATO stands together.
In a 2022 interview with Fox News, Whitaker said that heavy weaponry needed to be sent to Ukraine immediately to assist the country in its fight against invading Russian forces.
The mother of slain cinematographer Halyna Hutchins, who was killed in 2021 when a gun held by actor Alec Baldwin went off while filming the Western film “Rust,” declined an invitation to its premiere on Wednesday.
“Rust” is premiering at the International Film Festival of the Art of Cinematography Camerimage in Torun, Poland, three years after Hutchins was shot and killed. Hutchins’ mother, Olga Solovey, released a statement saying she sees the film’s release as an opportunity for Baldwin to “unjustly profit” from her daughter’s death, the Associated Press reported.
“It was always my hope to meet my daughter in Poland to watch her work come alive on screen,” Solovey began in the statement, referencing the fact that director Joel Souza, who was wounded when the revolver Baldwin held fired, was slated to introduce the film at the festival.
“Unfortunately, that was ripped away from me when Alec Baldwin discharged his gun and killed my daughter,” the statement continued. “Alec Baldwin continues to increase my pain with his refusal to apologize to me and his refusal to take responsibility for her death. Instead, he seeks to unjustly profit from his killing of my daughter.”
“That is the reason why I refuse to attend the festival for the promotion of Rust, especially now when there is still no justice for my daughter,” Solovey said.
A New Mexico judge dismissed an involuntary manslaughter charge against Baldwin for the fatal shooting. The 66-year-old actor currently has multiple civil lawsuits pending, including one by Solovey.
“Rust” armorer Hannah Gutierrez-Reed was also charged with involuntary manslaughter and received the maximum sentence of 18 months in jail.
Baldwin has maintained all along that he was not responsible for the shooting death. In December 2021, Baldwin told George Stephanopoulos in an interview on ABC News that “I didn’t pull the trigger” of the prop gun that fired and killed Hutchins. Baldwin further denied responsibility for Hutchins’ death.
“I feel that someone is responsible for what happened and I can’t say who that is, but I know it’s not me,” Baldwin told the host. “I might have killed myself if I thought I was responsible, and I don’t say that lightly.”
Jordan Neely suffered from paranoid schizophrenia and heard voices, a forensic psychiatrist testified on Tuesday during the trial of Marine veteran Daniel Penny.
Penny’s defense called forensic psychiatrist Dr. Alexander Bardey to the stand on Tuesday after the prosecution attempted to keep the doctor from testifying. Bardey reviewed thousands of pages of Neely’s medical records dating back to 2015, Fox News reported, and told jurors that Neely had been hospitalized more than a dozen times for psychotic episodes and for abusing synthetic marijuana.
Bardey testified that Neely had delusions that deceased rapper and actor Tupac Shakur – who has been dead for nearly 30 years, was using him to “change the world.” Neely also heard the “devil’s voice.”
The defense also called to the stand two Marine sergeants who served with Penny. Nolan Drylie, Penny’s former platoon sergeant, explained that Penny had received a Humanitarian Service Medal for his work during the recovery effort following Hurricane Florence in 2018, WFIN reported. Gunnery Sgt. Nathaniel Dunchie also testified that “discrimination is not tolerated in the Marine Corps,” referring to the prosecution’s claim there is a racial element to Penny placing Neely in a chokehold. Dunchie testified that Penny was an honest man with integrity.
The prosecution rested on Monday after New York medical examiner Dr. Cynthia Harris testified for the third day. Harris testified that Neely died from Penny’s chokehold and that the chokehold caused his death even with the amount of drugs in Neely’s system.
Penny faces up to 15 years in prison if convicted of manslaughter or up to 4 years if he’s convicted on the lesser charge of criminally negligent homicide in Neely’s death.
Multiple witnesses have testified that they were afraid of Neely, who entered the subway train car and allegedly began ranting that someone was going to die and he didn’t care if he went back to jail. These witnesses have said they feared for their lives, with some even thanking Penny for stepping in, The Daily Wire reported.
The illegal immigrant on trial for the murder of Georgia nursing student Laken Riley has been found guilty on all counts.
Jose Ibarra, 26, was found guilty on 10 charges, including murder, kidnapping, and aggravated assault with intent to rape Riley, who was found murdered after she went jogging at the University of Georgia in Athens, the New York Post reported.
Ibarra had previously waived his right to a jury trial, so the verdict came from Judge Patrick Haggard during a bench trial. Haggard rendered his decision just 19 minutes after the prosecution and defense presented closing arguments.
During her closing arguments, Prosecutor Sheila Ross spent 45 minutes summarizing the facts of the case, saying the evidence against Ibarra was “overwhelming.” She noted that Ibarra’s roommates testified that he was guilty, his DNA was found under Riley’s fingernails, and his fingerprint was found on her cell phone.
“Quite frankly: she got him. She scratched him,” Ross said, referring to the injuries that were found on Ibarra’s hands and arms. On Monday, photos of Ibarra’s hands and arms with scratches were shown in court, The Daily Wire reported.
Ross also relayed some of the more graphic details of the crime.
“[H]e put huge holes in her head with a rock and he did it more than once. There is no reason for him to do that except to silence her forever,” she said, according to the Post.
She also reminded the judge that Ibarra was seen on surveillance footage disposing of a bloody jacket.
“He threw away that jacket because he knew exactly what was on it. It was his blood and her blood … so he knew he had to get rid of it,” she said. “He threw away those items because he knew he killed her.”
Ibarra’s defense attorney attempted to blame his brother Diego for Riley’s killing, saying he was the one who wore the hat seen by the man suspected of killing Riley in surveillance footage that eventually led to Jose.
Just a couple hours before the verdict footage of Diego’s police interrogation was shown. Diego, a member of the violent Venezuelan gang known as Tren de Aragua, identified his brother as the man in surveillance footage during the interrogation.
“That’s him,” Diego said, referring to his brother.
“It looks like he’s throwing something in the trash. I’ve seen him in those clothes,” he added.
On Monday, the court also heard testimony from FBI analyst Abeisis Ramirez, who translated a jailhouse phone call between Ibarra and his wife.
“She said that she thinks it’s crazy that they don’t have anyone else’s DNA. They only have his,” Ramirez testified, according to Fox News.
Former “Tonight Show” host Jay Leno explained why he’s walking around with severe black and blue bruises on his face, an eye patch, and a broken wrist.
The 74-year-old late-night icon told “Inside Edition” on Tuesday that he fell down the side of a hill on his way to dinner before a recent stand-up show in Pittsburgh.
“I’m a little beat up,” he told the outlet.” “I fell 60 feet. Boom, boom, boom, boom.”
Leno said the black and blue bruises appeared after he “hit a bunch of rocks” during his tumble. The comedian also said one of the rocks hit his eye, which explains the eye patch. Leno revealed that he also lost a fingernail.
The fall didn’t keep Leno from performing at his scheduled show just three hours later and putting on another show in Beverly Hills over the weekend.
This is not Leno’s first serious accident. In January, he was involved in a motorcycle accident and sustained multiple broken bones. In 2022, he was working to repair a fuel line on one of his vintage cars when a leak caused gasoline to spray over his hands and face. A spark then ignited the gas. Leno underwent a series of treatments, including grafting procedures on both his hands and face. He credited his close friend standing nearby with acting quickly, likely saving his life.
In May, Leno said he was “lucky” to have survived so many accidents which could have been fatal.
“First of all they’re accidents. If they were deliberate, I would be complaining,” Leno said at the time.
He continued, “Look, I’ve been extremely lucky in my life, you know, and even though the accidents weren’t fun, I was still pretty lucky,” he added. “I didn’t lose an eye, I’m not horribly disfigured … well, just regular disfigured.”
“I’ve got a lot to be grateful for,” Leno said. “First of all, in Hollywood – it’s only how you look, nobody cares how you feel like. I mean I still have a broken collar bone, two broken ribs and two cracked knee caps, but I’m getting around.”
Texas has offered to lease the federal government a 1,400-acre ranch to build detention facilities for President-elect Donald Trump’s deportation effort.
Texas Land Commissioner Dawn Buckingham made the offer in a letter to Trump on Tuesday. The land is located about 35 miles west of McAllen, Texas, a border town near the state’s southern tip. The letter offered to lease the land to the Department of Homeland Security, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or the U.S. Border Patrol for law enforcement purposes.
Buckingham would agree “to allow a facility to be built for the processing, detention, and coordination of the largest deportation of violent criminals in the nation’s history,” she wrote in the letter.
Texas bought the ranch from the previous owner, who refused to allow border fencing to be built on it and had blocked Texas law enforcement from accessing the property, the letter said.
Texas and the state General Land Office that Buckingham heads support Trump’s plan to enact a massive deportation effort after millions of illegal aliens entered the United States under President Joe Biden, Buckingham said in an interview with Fox News.
“What I care about is that we have safe communities, and there is no doubt that we are losing too many of our children to these violent criminals that are coming across the border,” Buckingham said. “I am 100% on board with the Trump administration’s pledge to get these criminals out of our country, and we are more than happy to offer our resources to facilitate those deportations of these violent criminals.”
“This election was a resounding referendum on the fact that Americans want safe communities. We want people to immigrate legally and legally only and that the administration’s policies over the last four years have failed every American citizen,” she said.
After Trump’s election win, Buckingham said she began looking for ways to help the president-elect implement his deportation agenda. The offer to lease the Starr County ranch came from discussions with her staff.
“Right now, it’s essentially farmland, so it’s flat, it’s easy to build on. We could very easily put a detention center on there, a holding place as we get these criminals out of our country,” she said. “It’s accessible to international airports as well as a major crossing over the river. And so we’re just happy to get help, do anything we can to get these violent criminals off of our soil.”
Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson is set to headline a conference in Boston this week that will also feature activists who justified Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel.
Jackson will deliver a Thursday keynote address at the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) convention. Representing educators from K-12 to college, the 100-year-old organization adopted a 2017 vision calling on members to “apply the power of language and literacy to actively pursue justice and equity.”
The four-day-long convention, which has the theme “Heart, Hope, Humanity,” will also include Sawsan Jaber and Hannah Moushabeck, two activists who have been outspoken in justifying Hamas’s October 7 attack multiple times.
Jackson faced criticism during her confirmation hearings for her membership in Harvard’s Black Student Association, which invited anti-Semitic speaker Leonard Jeffries to speak during her time at the school. Jackson told Sen. Lindsay Graham (R-NC) that she did not attend Jeffries’ speech and does not share his views.
Mika Hackner, a Senior Research Associate for the Jewish Institute For Liberal Values, said it is “distasteful and unconscionable” that NCTE put Jackson in a position where she will be appearing at an event with anti-Israel activists.
“A Supreme Court justice, a representative of the highest court in our land, charged with protecting the laws and values of our liberal democracy, should not be sharing any kind of engagement or platform with activists who promote the view that Hamas are “legitimate resistance,” Hackner said.
Hackner noted that several sessions as a whole focus on “using education as a tool of social justice activism.”
Conservative justices have faced criticism in recent years for attending events hosted by groups like the Federalist Society, with detractors questioning their ability to remain “apolitical.”
Moushabeck and Jaber will share the stage during a Friday session, “Let’s Talk about Palestine: Voice, Experiences, and Education for Liberation.” During the talk, the pair will “model ways in which teachers can be agents of justice through their roles.” Joining them in putting on the session is Nora Lester Murad, who filmed herself ripping down photos of Israeli hostages last October.
Moushabeck will also speak and present in two additional workshops about “Elevating Voices of Women from the Arab Diaspora” and “Reclaiming the Arab Narrative,” respectively.
Moushabeck has an extensive history of anti-Israel social media activity. Notably, on October 7, 2023, while Hamas was actively massacring, raping, and kidnapping Israeli civilians, she posted a video defending the terror group’s actions.
“When you reframe what’s happening, you understand why people would retaliate, why people would resist,” she stated. “We’ve seen this in history before we’ve seen this happen here on this very land when settlers took over.”
Other posts include a picture of the Palestinian flag with the words “This is the only flag I fly with pride” and a video with her wearing a “fatties for a Free Palestine shirt.”
According to the K12 Extremism Tracker, Moushabeck was involved in a “Queer story time for Palestine” event in Amherst, Massachusetts with a drag queen where toddlers chanted “Free Palestine.”
Jaber has also justified the October 7 attacks, tweeting days after the invasion Palestinians could not be faulted, because they were “fighting for their humanity.”
“That doesn’t make them terrorists,” Jaber said. “It makes them human.”
The day after the attacks, Jaber tweeted that her “heart hurts” as her “people get demonized and massacres [sic] again.”
In a follow-up tweet, she claimed the media “didn’t report fairly” on the Black Lives Matter movement, the American southern border, or the South Dakota pipeline, adding “Why do we believe it would report fairly on Palestine?” She even used the hashtag “#StopTheEthnicCleansing.”
The next day, Jaber condemned school districts sending out pro-Israel statements about the October 7 attack, writing the statements are telling Palestinian students “their lives & lives experiences do not matter.”
When Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar was killed in Gaza, Jabar shared a post mourning him, with the text “resistance never dies” and another stating “ideas are bulletproof,” according to K12 Extremism Tracker.
Jaber is scheduled to speak at an American Muslims for Palestine conference next week. The group is currently under investigation for allegedly funneling funds to the terrorist group Hamas, The Jerusalem Post reported.
Jaber is the Chair of the English Department at Maine West High School, a public school in Illinois. She will also be a presenter in several other social justice workshops including “Beyond Hope: Storytelling, Freedom-Dreaming, and Curricular Design as Pedagogies of Resistance” which will present “pedagogical tactics for bridging literacy, imagination, and activism with youth.”
Jaber will also join “Designing Spaces for Students to Reshape Their Worlds: An Antiracist Pedagogy Workshop.” Participants will learn how to design and assess assignments that guide students’ use of these resources to address the social change they desire.”
Jaber will also present at the “Toward Empowerment, Equity, and Education for Liberation: The Intersections of Critical Literacy and Social Justice” and “Cultivating an Inclusive Classroom: Utilizing Picturebooks to Support Palestinian Identity” workshops.
Jany Finkielsztein, who will be speaking at a poster session for “Multicultural Jewish Children’s Literature” told The Daily Wire it is “deeply concerning” that activists are bringing their ideology into the classrooms.
“It is deeply concerning that activists who glorify the October 7 massacre are attempting to infiltrate our schools with hateful propaganda,” Finkielsztein told The Daily Wire.
Jaber shared a video to her Instagram from writer and activist, Ijeoma Oluo, on Tuesday, that complains that NCTE has a “Palestine problem” and demanded that Finkielsztein’s employer, Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis, be disinvited from the conference.
The video was accompanied by a link to a petition accusing the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis of being a “right-wing pro-Israel group that defames educators and undermines the freedom to teach and the right to learn.”
“How can we be safe at the convention if CAMERA is there surveilling us?” the petition asks. “CAMERA is not only a political organization with which we disagree, but a racist and predatory organization that is dangerous to teachers, schools, and students.”
CAMERA fired back at the petition in an exclusive statement to The Daily Wire, accusing the organizers of creating a “hostile environment for Jewish participants.”
“It is ironic and deeply troubling that those who claim to champion inclusion are actively seeking to intimidate Jewish participants and stifle diverse perspectives,” said CAMERA Communications Director Jonah Cohen. “CAMERA’s presence at the NCTE convention is rooted in our commitment to respectful dialogue, accurate education, and the inclusion of all voices — Jewish, Palestinian, and others.”
Cohen added that he hopes Jackson and other leaders will “step up as the moral voice needed to challenge these dangerous trends.”
Other sessions of the conference taught by other educators include “Disrupting the Canon with LGBTQIA+ Themes, Stories, and Discussions,” which will focus on “incorporating LGBTQIA+ themes and stories in education,” and “the stories of transgender parents in early childhood education.” The “Past and Present of LGBTQIA+ In Elementary Education” will focus on “the importance of humanizing queer and trans content in primary schools.”
Jackson and Moushabeck did not respond to a request for comment. Jaber declined to comment.
A Minnesota hospital issued a profuse apology to staff after failing to abide by its “values of respect and justice” — by giving out free Chick-fil-A.
Essentia Health in Duluth wrote to staff last Tuesday after staff clucked about the free sandwiches available in the St. Mary’s Medical Center’s atrium earlier that day.
“We have received feedback from some colleagues who were concerned or offended by this occurrence, and we value colleagues feeling comfortable expressing their reservations,” Tammy Kritzer, senior vice president for regional operations at Essentia Health wrote in an email to medical staff that was obtained by The Daily Wire.
“We would like to thank our colleagues who had the courage to speak up to widen our lens of inclusivity, and we appreciate all colleagues continuing to live our values of respect and justice,” Kritzer wrote.
Chick-fil-A has drawn the ire of LGBT activists over the years, who have boycotted and staged protests over the company donating to groups like the Salvation Army, which activists claim has “a record of anti-LGBTQ discrimination.” In fact, the company emphasizes that it “values diversity, equity and inclusion” and does not discriminate or tolerate harassment on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity.
The hospital distanced itself from Chick-fil-A in the email, writing that the free lunch was “not intended to endorse a business or business practices,” the email said.
“We respect all we are honored to serve and employ, and situations such as these are an important reminder to consider all viewpoints. As we strive to be thoughtful and inclusive as an organization, we will have learnings along the way,” the email read.
“In the words of Maya Angelou, when we know better, we do better,” the email concluded. “Thank you for giving us grace, as we work to be better, together,” the email read.
Some cities haveprevented Chick-fil-A from opening locations at their airports, including Buffalo, New York, and San Antonio, Texas. The chain famously does not open on Sundays to honor the Lord’s Day, Chick-fil-A’s founderexplained, likely causing it to lose more than $1 billion a year.
While Essentia staff squawked about the free lunch, they have been silent about some of their employer’s other decisions. The hospital, which did not respond to a request for comment, provides cross-sex hormones and more to minors. According to the Stop The Harm database, Essentia has performed at least five sex change operations on minors.
South Carolina Congresswoman Nancy Mace is following up her Capitol Hill bathroom legislation with yet another bill protecting women’s spaces — this time, banning men who identify as transgender women from using women’s facilities on any federal property.
Mace’s bill, the “Protecting Women’s Private Spaces Act,” was obtained exclusively on Wednesday morning by The Daily Wire. It will “prohibit individuals from accessing or using single-sex facilities on federal property other than those corresponding to their biological sex.” It forbids anyone from accessing facilities on federal property that do not correspond with their biological sex, and it provides precise definitions of what it means to be female or male.
EXCLUSIVE: @RepNancyMace announces a new bill to protect women on ALL federal property from men who seek to invade female spaces. pic.twitter.com/ZLkWTVfO2m
Mace sparked a backlash this week when she introduced a bill banning trans-identifying men from women’s bathrooms or facilities on Capitol Hill. The resolution specifically states that “allowing biological males into single-sex facilities, such as restrooms, locker rooms, and changing rooms designed for women, jeopardizes the safety and dignity of members, officers, and employees of the House who are female.”
Liberal media outlets and lawmakers balked at the resolution, arguing that it targets a newly elected member of Congress — Sarah McBride, a man who identifies as a woman.
Mace told Daily Wire host Michael Knowles that her legislation should not be controversial, arguing that independent voters and even Democrats are “with us” when it comes to “forcing this crazy gender ideology down the throats of our children and other Americans across the country.”
“I’m going to do everything I can to protect women and girls here on the Hill, but also across the nation,” she said on “The Michael Knowles Show,” where she first unveiled the bill. “This is a question that needs to be answered. Do women have rights or not? Are we going to allow these men to bully us into submission? And I say, no, no more. I’m done with this.”
“There’s no amount of bullying and threats on my life that they’ve made this week that’s going to stop me from this,” she added, promising to “fight like hell” for the protection of women and girls.
In a statement to The Daily Wire on Tuesday, McBride argued that this is “a blatant attempt from far right-wing extremists to distract from the fact that they have no real solutions to what Americans are facing.”
“We should be focused on bringing down the cost of housing, health care, and child care, not manufacturing culture wars,” said the newly elected trans-identifying member of Congress. “Delawareans sent me here to make the American dream more affordable and accessible and that’s what I’m focused on.”
One top conservative activist argued in a Tuesday memo to Republicans that it is politically popular to block men from entering women’s bathrooms — and that it is also the right thing to do.
“The American people sent Republicans to Washington with a mandate to protect women and children from transgender ideology,” American Principles Project President Terry Schilling wrote in the memo, obtained by The Daily Wire. “There’s no question about that. According to AdImpact data, Republican candidates spent $215 million in campaign ads on the issue, while Democrats struggled to respond. Republicans in the House and Senate should feel comfortable defending their positions not only because they are right and just, but because they are politically popular.”
Schilling argued that “it’s clear that the Democrats have failed to learn anything from their 2024 election defeat,” reminding lawmakers: “The American people voted for a return to normalcy — and they voted against the Democrats’ transgender extremism. But it’s not even December yet, and Democrats are leaning in on defending the ‘right’ of a male member of Congress to hang out in the women’s restroom.”
For the first time in California history, a ballot measure seeking a statewide minimum wage increase has failed.
The ballot measure results were finally called by the Associated Press on Tuesday, two weeks after Election Day. California Proposition 32, which would have increased the minimum wage to $18 an hour by 2026, failed by approximately 240,000 votes, a less-than-2% difference.
The proposition was strongly opposed by the California Chamber of Commerce, which argued that the measure would increase taxes and force businesses to cut jobs, according to the AP. Earlier this year, Democrat-led California instituted a $20-an-hour minimum wage for fast-food workers, a move that caused many restaurants to hike prices and cut back on staff.
“Californians are sending Gavin Newsom and the SEIU a clear message: They’re sick of being lab rats for their pet projects,” said Rebekah Paxton, research director at the Employment Policies Institute (EPI), a conservative think tank. “Voters saw the devastating economic fallout of the $20 fast food minimum wage law, and for the first time in state history, voted against a statewide minimum wage hike.”
An EPI survey of 182 limited-service restaurant operators in California published in July found that 98% of fast-food restaurants in the Golden State increased prices after the minimum wage hike, 89% reduced employee hours, and 70% reduced the size of their staff.
In September, Newsom wrote an opinion piece published by Fox News arguing that the “modest” fast-food minimum wage increase resulted in more fast-food jobs in the state along with “better working conditions, reduced financial stress and greater opportunities for upward mobility.”
“Our commitment to raising the minimum wage is a testament to California’s values,” Newsom wrote. “We believe in fairness, equity and the idea that everyone deserves a chance to succeed. And these results dispel the cynics who say we must choose between protecting workers and growing the economy.”
The broader minimum wage hike that went before voters earlier this month was pushed by unions such as the SEIU and UFCW 770. Kathy Finn, president of UFCW 770, which represents around 30,000 workers, said, “Proposition 32’s failure to pass is disappointing for all Californians who believe that everyone who works should earn enough to support their families.”
California’s minimum wage is already one of the highest in the country at $16 an hour for most workers, and six cities and counties in the state already have an $18-an-hour minimum wage. West Hollywood has the highest minimum wage in the state at $ 19.08 an hour for non-hotel employees, set to increase to $19.65 on January 1.
On Tuesday, House Homeland Security Subcommittee on Border Security and Enforcement Chairman Clay Higgins (R-LA) and Subcommittee on Oversight, Investigations, and Accountability Chairman Dan Bishop (R-NC) ripped into the Biden administration for its policies at the U.S. southwest border that have devastated children.
“We are here today to examine how the Biden-Harris administration’s open border policies have allowed dangerous cartels, criminals, and human traffickers to prey upon the world’s most vulnerable people – unaccompanied children,” Higgins began.
“As the administration’s border crisis continues to spiral out of control, the number of unaccompanied minors arriving at the Southwest border has skyrocketed, turning the situation at the border into a devastating humanitarian catastrophe,” he continued. “In fact, the Biden-Harris administration has encountered nearly 530,000 alien children at the border to date. In comparison, the previous Trump administration had less than half that number”.
“America, ask yourself, ‘Why are so many children arriving at the border alone and afraid and sometimes in the hands of unconfirmed ‘relatives’ with no apparent familial indicators?’” he urged. “These children show up with arbitrary phone numbers and addresses scribbled across their arms as if they are a package arriving at somebody’s doorstep. Some children arrive at the border drugged, preventing law enforcement authorities from questioning them about those they are traveling with. This is a moral outrage.”
“The Biden-Harris administration has touted that they have the most ‘humanitarian’ border policies in history,” he noted. “Yet, there is nothing humanitarian about enabling the cartels to exploit, abuse, and profit from vulnerable children!”
Bishop added:
While CBP is usually the first point of contact for UACs (unaccompanied alien children) who cross the border, the Health and Human Services Department’s Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) is primarily responsible for the care and placement of these children. Much of this work is done in partnership with nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) that provide shelter and services.
Under the Biden-Harris Administration, these NGOs received a windfall of taxpayer money through ORR, whose budget for its unaccompanied children program was 6.9 billion dollars in FY 2023. …
What did we spend all that money on? The Biden-Harris Administration placed political aims above the welfare of unaccompanied migrant children who crossed, or were trafficked across, the southern border, releasing UACs with inadequate vetting and follow-up to avoid the bad optics of crowded facilities. …
32,000 children didn’t show up for their immigration court hearings. Those hearing dates are one of the only opportunities that ICE must engage with unaccompanied children and observe signs of trafficking or exploitation.
What happened to those 32,000 children? We don’t know. We can’t reach them.
This is just the tip of the iceberg. Over 290,000 have been released by HHS without a notice to appear for an immigration court date. There is no way for ICE to monitor the location and status of these migrant children or verify their safety.
The Biden administration was so focused on moving people through the system as fast as it could that it failed to ensure the safety of the children being released. Many of these children already suffered at the hands of criminal cartels on the treacherous journey to the border, only to find themselves exploited again after leaving government custody.
The human cost of this crisis is simply heartbreaking and tragic.
On Tuesday, a Texas father who has spent years fighting his ex-wife’s attempt to trans their son said a California judge had sealed the boy’s fate, allowing the mother to go forward with “gender-affirming care” that would enable her “authority to castrate my son.”
“I lost all parental rights to my sons. Goodbye, boys. Perhaps, we will meet when you are adults. California Judge Juhas gave my ex-wife authority to castrate my son, James,” Jeff Younger posted on X.
I lost all parental rights to my sons. Goodbye, boys. Perhaps, we will meet when you are adults.
California Judge Juhas gave my ex-wife authority to castrate my son, James.
All contact with my boys must be supervised. I won’t do that. I send letters and gifts to my sons. My ex… pic.twitter.com/N7XKj168RV
“My trial in California is finished,” he continued. “The Judge may not like me posting photos of my sons, but so many of you have prayed for and supported my sons. You have a right to see who these young men are. Thank you. I did my best to stop the transgender castration of my son. My expert witness, @Miriam_Grossman, did a superb job explaining the harms of transgender ‘treatments’ on kids.”
My trial in California is finished.
The Judge may not like me posting photos of my sons, but so many of you have prayed for and supported my sons. You have a right to see who these young men are. Thank you.
I did my best to stop the transgender castration of my son.
Younger has been battling his ex-wife, pediatrician Anne Georgulas, for custody of their son James, who is now 12, since 2018, when Georgulas filed a restraining order to prevent Younger from entering James’ school and referring to his son as male. Younger‘s marriage had been annulled in 2016. Georgulas claimed James wanted to be called “Luna” and allowed her son to paint his nails and wear dresses, while Younger said the boy acted like a boy when with his father.
In 2019, Dallas County District Judge Kim Cooks granted both parents full custody. However, in 2020, Judge Mary Brown ruled that Georgulas should be granted full custody, although “gender-affirming care” would still have to be approved by Younger. “Georgulas has the exclusive right to consent to James’ medical procedures except for hormone suppression therapy, puberty blockers, or transgender reassignment surgery,” The Texan noted.
In February 2022, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton issued an opinion in which he stated, “The medical evidence does not demonstrate that children and adolescents from engaging in these irreversible sterilization procedures,” adding that the “’sex change’ procedures and treatments enumerated above, when performed on children, can legally constitute child abuse.” Those procedures and treatments included sterilization through castration, orchiectomy, and penectomy, among others.
In September 2022, California Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom signed Senate Bill 107, which made California a “sanctuary state” for children seeking “gender-affirming care.” In November 2022, Georgulas moved to California.
In February, Georgulas filed a motion in Los Angeles County Superior Court “aiming to dissolve the protective order preventing her from subjecting James to ‘gender-affirming care,’” The Daily Signal reported. In July 2024, Younger claimed California Judge Michelle Kazadi “illegally sealed my case with no public access,” as The Daily Signal added.
“Judge Shelley Kaufman’s court has misrouted orders to the wrong address,” Younger stated. “Judge Mark Juhas denied me access to crucial evidence by setting a too-early trial date. I can’t even get an independent medical exam of my son. The corrupt Los Angeles courts sealed my case to hide their corruption as they castrate my son.”
The Daily Signal reported that Georgulas had quoted psychologist Brigid Mariko Conn’s statements that James “is interested” in “puberty blockers,” estrogen, and “bottom surgery.” “Bottom surgery” refers to the removal of his penis and testicles.
Younger cited Dr. Miriam Grossman, who was featured in The Daily Wire’s “What Is a Woman,” who said James is not suffering from gender dysphoria and that “gender-affirming care” is not an effective treatment for gender dysphoria.
A radical environmental group uses millions of dollars from liberal dark money groups to try and teach climate activists how to talk like human beings.
The organization, Potential Energy Coalition, a 501(c)(3), says it “creates and executes marketing campaigns grounded in deep analytics and human-centric stories that are proven to persuade.”
One of Potential Energy’s projects is the “Talk Like a Human” campaign, an attempt to change messaging on climate change. A slide of this presentation obtained by The Daily Wire shows the group encouraging people not to use words like “climate change” or “warming,” and instead use “extreme weather” and “over heating [sic],” respectively. The group also suggests people no longer use the term “sacrifice” when talking about the subject and instead use words like “enjoy,” suggesting a more positive future than the doom and gloom typically associated with climate change activism.
Potential Energy Coalition slideshow
The organization also features a series of slides telling participants not to exaggerate and explains that while “climate crisis” and “climate emergency” work for people who are already terrified of climate change, it doesn’t work for people who are not. The slides also suggest keeping the phrasing tied to where a person lives rather than globally and talking about fighting pollution rather than climate change.
The organization was once a sponsored project of the Arabella Advisors dark money network’s Windward Fund before it spun off into its own separate nonprofit.
Still, Potential Energy continues to rake in millions of dollars from Arabella-managed groups, including $17.5 million in grants from the Windward Fund between 2021 and 2022, and another $13 million in 2023. The Windward Fund paid Potential Energy nearly $2 million in consulting services between 2020 and 2021.
Also in 2021, Potential Energy joined other dark money groups, Climate Power and League of Conservation Voters, on a more than $10 million advertising campaign to urge President Joe Biden and Congress to pass a spending bill directed toward climate change. In 2022, the Inflation Reduction Act was passed, which allocated billions toward climate change initiatives.
Also in 2022, Potential Energy brought in $38.6 million in revenue, nearly doubling its 2021 revenue. Its spending also nearly doubled.
Despite this effort, polls continue to show people aren’t willing to give up oil and gas. An American Enterprise Institute poll from October asked participants whether they wanted to “use a mix of energy sources including oil, coal, and natural gas along with renewable energy sources” or “phase out the use of oil, coal, and natural gas completely, relying instead on renewable energy sources such as wind and solar power only.” By a 3-to-1 margin, participants backed the all-of-the-above approach.
Two-thirds of respondents in a September New York Times/Siena College poll said they supported a policy of “increasing domestic production of fossil fuels such as oil and gas.” And an NBC poll from October found that 67% of respondents said they were more likely to support a candidate who wanted to expand fossil fuel production.
Historian Allan Lichtman fumed during a heated discussion on Tuesday when he was confronted by “The Young Turks” host Cenk Uygur over botching his call on who would win the 2024 presidential election.
The exchange happened during a segment on “Piers Morgan Uncensored” when Uygur brought up Lichtman’s “13 Keys to the White House” projection that Vice President Kamala Harris would beat Donald Trump.
“Don’t blame the voters,” Uygur told Lichtman. “I think, look, we can get into this discussion, but one, I think you’re blaming the voters. I think that’s a terrible idea.”
“And look, I debated Professor Lichtman before,” he continued. “I told him his theories about the keys were absurd. I was right. He was wrong. I said he’d lose his keys, couldn’t find them before the election.”
Lichtman exploded: “No, you were not right and I was not wrong!”
“And that’s a cheap shot, and I won’t stand for it,” he continued.
When asked who won the election, Lichtman responded: “You should not be taking cheap shots at me.”
“You want to make your point, make your point, don’t make it personal,” he continued.
“You live in a total world of denial,” Uygur responded while giving Lichtman the cuckoo sign while whistling.
Lichtman continued to complain that Uygur was making “personal” attacks against him.
“I’ve only been a professional for 51 years, published 15 books,” Lichtman said. “How many books have you published?”
“Brother, you got it wrong!” Uygur fired back. “You were preposterously and stupidly wrong. So, can I just finish a g*****n thought ever on this show?”
“Don’t call me stupid!” Lichtman snapped. “Who taught you manners? ”
“Hey Allan, you deserve a tall glass of shut up juice,” Uygur responded. “So can you just shut up for a second?”
Lichtman claimed that Uygur’s criticisms were “blasphemy” against him.
“Blasphemy against you? Who the hell are you?” Uygur responded. “Are you Jesus Christ? You loser.”
Tom Homan, who President-elect Donald Trump has tapped to be the border czar come January, said on Tuesday night that no illegal alien in the U.S. is safe from deportation under the new administration.
Homan made the remark during a Fox News interview when asked about Democrat politicians who are vowing to obstruct federal immigration officers from deporting dangerous criminal illegal aliens during the second Trump term.
“Out of the gate, we’re concentrating on public safety threats and national security threats,” Homan said. “What politician, whether you’re a mayor or governor, is saying, ‘No, I want public safety threats to remain in my community’? I mean, give me a break.”
He said that Democrats who create sanctuaries for illegal aliens by not cooperating with federal officials end up harming immigrant communities by releasing criminals back into the communities, which creates dangerous situations.
When ICE shows up to deport the criminals out of the communities, they often end up encountering other illegal aliens who were not on their radar and also end up getting deported.
Homan warned against rewarding illegal immigration by offering mass amnesty, saying that the border crisis will never get fixed.
“This country is showing over and over again that if you don’t have consequences, they’re going to keep coming,” he said. “Amnesty means millions of them are going to come saying, ‘look, I can cross the border illegally, I can lose my case in front of an immigration judge, and I still get to stay.'”
He said that all of the millions of illegal aliens who unlawfully crossed the border committed a crime and needed to be removed.
“The law is clear. We’ll give you a due process,” he said. “You can have your day in court, but when you’re ordered removed, you’re going to leave and we’re going to make you leave.”
“It’s not okay to cross this border. It’s a crime,” Homan later added. “Every illegal alien that crossed that border committed a crime, and it’s not okay for you to be in this country illegally. I don’t go 200 miles an hour to come to this interview tonight because I don’t get a ticket. I don’t lie on my taxes because I don’t want to get tax evasion. Well, it’s not okay to be in this country illegally. So if you’re in the country illegally, you got a problem.”
President-elect Donald Trump announced Tuesday evening that he has selected Linda McMahon to lead the Department of Education.
McMahon, 76, served during Trump’s first term in office as the Administrator of the Small Business Administration.
“It is my great honor to announce that Linda McMahon, former Administrator of the Small Business Administration, will be the United States Secretary of Education,” Trump said in a statement.
McMahon has spent the last four years serving as the Chair of the Board at the America First Policy Institute (AFPI).
“So proud of my friend and America First Patriot @Linda_McMahon for answering the call to head the Department of Education!” said AFPI Executive Director Chad Wolf.
“As a strong supporter of school choice and parental rights, there is no one better to expel the woke agenda in our education system and put our children first,” he added.
So proud of my friend and America First Patriot @Linda_McMahon for answering the call to head the Department of Education! She did an incredible job leading the Small Business Administration and went on to fearlessly lead @A1Policy alongside @BrookeLRollins and @larry_kudlow. As…
Trump said that as Secretary of Education, McMahon will “fight tirelessly” to expand school choice in every state and “empower parents to make the best education decisions for their families.”
McMahon previously served for two years on the Connecticut Board of Education where she was one of fifteen members who oversaw all public education in the state, the Trump transition team said.
“Linda will use her decades of Leadership experience, and deep understanding of both Education and Business, to empower the next Generation of American Students and Workers, and make America Number One in Education in the World,” Trump said. “We will send Education BACK TO THE STATES, and Linda will spearhead that effort.”
Former NBA player Charles Barkley slammed the Democratic Party in a recent rant about the its losses in the 2024 elections and the subsequent blame-game that it has played in trying to explain why it came up short.
The 61-year-old commentator, who is a staunch defender of transgender rights, made the remarks during a recent episode of “The Steam Room” podcast with his NBA on TNT co-host Ernie Johnson.
He started his rant by congratulating President-elect Donald Trump on his election victory and wishing him success for his upcoming term in office.
“I just want to say this to the Democrats, which I’m an independent who voted Democratic, do me this favor: Shut the f*** up!” he said.
“When you win, you get to say what you want to,” he continued. “When you lose, you need to shut the hell up.”
He chided those who were making excuses by saying things like, “Oh, President Biden, they didn’t get out of the race soon enough,” or “Kamala didn’t do this.”
“We lost because we had no game plan,” he said. “We still haven’t solved the immigration problem, have no viable answers, never addressed inflation.”
He also slammed the Harris campaign and the Democratic Party for focusing its efforts on “bringing all these stupid stars out to rally the vote.”
“Hey, I love Beyonce. What is bringing her out? That ain’t gonna make me vote a certain way,” he said. “Cardi B. I like Cardi B, that ain’t gonna make me vote a certain type of way.”
“You guys lost because y’all stupid,” he added.
Barkley added that he does not believe that “everybody who voted for Trump is racist,” and although he is not a fan of Trump, “he’s the president” and “I’m gonna have to respect the office.”
WATCH:
Sir Charles Barkley on 2024: “I just want to say this to the Democrats…Do me this favor: shut the f**k up! When you win, you get to say what you want to. When you lose, you need to shut the hell up.” pic.twitter.com/6PCCY3riMD
Democrat Senator-elect Elissa Slotkin (D-MI) told her party that “identity politics” needs to end if they want to have a chance to win back voters after losing the White House in 2024 to President-elect Donald Trump.
During a Democrat Senatorial Campaign Committee briefing with Dem candidates who won their election, the soon-to-be senator from Michigan didn’t mince words when talking about why the party lost the White House.
“I personally think that identity politics needs to go the way of the dodo,” Slotkin said, per David Weigel in a post on X. She also said that the party should take language “not from the faculty lounge, but the assembly line.”
At a post-election DSCC briefing with winning Dem candidates.
Elissa Slotkin: “I personally think that identity politics needs to go the way of the dodo.” Dems should take language “not from the faculty lounge, but the assembly line.”
The comments were similar to ones the incoming senator made during her appearance on MSNBC when asked about the party’s recent defeat.
“Any party — and I can only represent the Democratic Party — needs to focus on the things that keep people up at night. That’s their pocketbooks and their kids,” Slotkin said. “There are a lot of issues out there. But you’ve got to start with what keeps people awake, and that is kitchen-table issues, economics.”
“We gotta stay away … we don’t need to obsess about identity politics,” she added. “And by the way, this last election demonstrated very clearly that they don’t stand up.”
Despite Slotkin’s comments about “identity politics,” she voted multiple times against keeping men out of women’s restrooms and locker rooms, the Detroit News noted.
In May 2019, during her first term in Congress, Slotkin voted for the Equality Act, which would, among other things, “prohibits an individual from being denied access to a shared facility, including a restroom, a locker room, and a dressing room, that is in accordance with the individual’s gender identity.”
It was stopped by Republicans in the Senate, then passed again in 2021, with Slotkin voting for it, the outlet noted. In April 2023, Slotkin also voted against the Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act, which “prohibits school athletic programs from allowing individuals whose biological sex at birth was male to participate in programs that are for women or girls.”
Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC) said Tuesday that her push to ban men who identify as transgender women from being able to use women’s restrooms in the House was about protecting women in private spaces.
Mace introduced legislation this week that would force “members, officers, and employees of the House” to use bathrooms that correspond to their biological sex.
“If being a feminist makes me an extremist, I’m totally here for it,” Mace said.
A reporter asked Mace, “Is this effort in response in response to Congresswoman McBride coming to Congress?”
The bill was introduced as Democrats are preparing for their new member, Sarah McBride from Delaware, to become the first transgender member of Congress.
“Yes and absolutely, and then some,” Mace responded. “I’m not going to stand for a man, you know, when someone with a penis is in the women’s locker room, that’s not okay.”
“I’m a victim of abuse myself, I’m a rape survivor,” she continued. “I have PTSD from the abuse I’ve suffered at the hands of a man and I know how vulnerable women and girls are in private spaces.”
“So, I’m absolutely 100% gonna stand in the way of any man who wants to be in a women’s restroom, in our locker rooms, in our changing rooms,” she added. “I will be there fighting you every step of the way.”
WATCH:
Woke reporter asks Rep. Nancy Mace (R) why she wants to exclude men from the female bathroom in Congress.
Iran has dramatically increased its stockpile of near weapons-grade uranium in recent months as it escalates its conflict with Israel, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).
Western officials are becoming increasingly worried that Iran could race to develop a nuclear weapon now that it has the fuel needed to do so, and it appears to have made significant advances in acquiring the knowledge needed, The Wall Street Journal reported.
The IAEA has indicated that it will censure Iran for expanding its stockpile of enriched uranium, to which Iran has responded by saying that it will take more steps to advance its nuclear weapons program.
David Albright, president and founder of the Institute for Science and International Security, says that Iran has enough nuclear material to now produce up to 15 nuclear weapons.
Andrea Stricker, Nonproliferation and Biodefense Program Deputy Director and Research Fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies (FDD), told The Daily Wire that Iran’s actions were self-defeating.
“In a major own-goal, Iran kept expanding its ability to make fuel for multiple nuclear weapons despite Trump’s election,” Stricker said. “The days of America tolerating Tehran’s unchecked nuclear expansion are about to be over.”
Iran has repeatedly tried to assassinate Trump in recent months in retaliation for the death of Qasem Soleimani to prevent Trump from taking power again.
After his election victory, Trump has stacked his cabinet with nominees who are hawks when it comes to dealing with U.S. adversaries, signaling that he will take a hardline approach against the Islamic regime.
The news comes after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu confirmed this week that Israel hit part of Iran’s nuclear weapons program in its retaliatory strike last month in response to Iran firing 180 ballistic missiles into the country.
“It’s not a secret. It was published,” Netanyahu told the Israeli parliament. “There is a specific component in their nuclear program that was hit.”
Multiple U.S. and Israeli officials told Axios that the strike against the facility in the Parchin military complex “significantly damaged Iran’s effort over the past year to resume nuclear weapons research,” the report said.
The strike destroyed advanced equipment that is needed to design sophisticated explosive materials that are required to detonate a nuclear device.
Satellite imagery shows that the facility, which was a previously-declared nuclear weapons facility decades ago, was completely destroyed in the strike.
U.S. and Israeli officials said that Iran was trying to conceal its nuclear weapons research at the facility by presenting it as research for civilian purposes.
The report said only a small number of officials in Iran’s Islamic government knew about what was going on at the facility.
A U.S. official told Axios that the strike was “a not so subtle message that the Israelis have significant insight into the Iranian system even when it comes to things that were kept top secret and known to a very small group of people in the Iranian government.”
WASHINGTON—House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer revealed Tuesday that a whistleblower claimed a FEMA supervisor in Georgia directed a family to remove Trump campaign signage from their home, saying it was not “looked kindly” on by the agency.
Comer made the statements during a hearing where lawmakers grilled FEMA Administrator Deanne Criswell about an agency employee who told relief workers in Florida to “avoid homes advertising Trump.” Criswell has maintained that the guidance was an isolated incident and not the result of agency policy to skip over “politically hostile” homes.
But testimony from Comer and other lawmakers testimony casts doubt on Criswell’s comments.
“My staff made contact with a new whistleblower who provided a credible account that a FEMA contractor visited the home of an elderly disabled veteran’s family around October 10 following Hurricane Helene,” Comer said after the committee came back from recess. “While there he recommended that they remove Trump campaign materials and signs from both their house and yard. He warned the family that his FEMA supervisor does not take kindly to Trump supporters and that they are seen as domestic terrorists.”
🚨BREAKING- Chairman Comer reveals a NEW whistleblower in a different state claims that FEMA purposely avoided the homes ofTrump supporters when providing disaster relief.
“During the recess for votes, my staff made contact with a new whistleblower who provided a credible… pic.twitter.com/HV03qRpXLG
Comer said that the whistleblower claimed FEMA never returned to the family’s home even after they removed their Trump gear.
“The elderly homeowners were so frightened by this, and afraid they would not recover their loss, that they removed all Trump materials and signs,” the Kentucky Republican said.
The Oversight Committee called Criswell to testify after whistleblowers told The Daily Wire that at least 20 homes in Lake Placid were skipped during relief operations after Hurricane Milton because they had Trump flags or signs.
Criswell testified for over six hours on Tuesday, facing questions about the guidance. She said she was “heartbroken” by the guidance and that the investigation into the incident was ongoing.
Photo by Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images.
Her testimony contrasted with statements from Rep. Greg Steube (R-FL) who said during the hearing that over 35 of his constituents reached out to him with allegations that FEMA had discriminated against them. Steube said his office had information on “specific instances, factual instances, where they were either overlooked or specifically discriminated against because of their political affiliation.”
Criswell confirmed during the hearing that she had asked the Inspector General to launch an independent investigation into the guidance, to supplement FEMA’s ongoing internal investigation.
Rep. Lisa McClain (R-MI) told The Daily Wire that she was not happy with Criswell’s answers.
“You have blatant discrimination going on,” McClain said. “She fired the person who sent out the text, fantastic, but what about all of the layers in between who knew that it was going on.”
She said that Criswell was “conveniently” ignorant of details surrounding who was managing Washington and who she answered to.
“There seems to be a lot of unanswered questions with the exception of we fired the person who did it, ” McClain said. “but what enabled, what empowered that person to do that?”
Before testifying before the Oversight Committee, Criswell faced questions from lawmakers on the Subcommittee on Economic Development, Public Buildings, and Emergency Management.
A Pentagon official described on Tuesday a trio of astounding cases involving unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP), formerly described as unidentified flying objects (UFOs), that his team of investigators have yet to solve.
Dr. Jon Kosloski, who recently became the director of the Department of Defense’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), gave testimony to the Senate just days after his crew released their annual report on UAP. The top UFO investigator said there were three cases that “merit analysis” that his team was working on, including one “interesting” example that his team may be in the process of resolving.
Jon Kosloski (New AARO Director) lists the 3 UFO cases that AARO has yet to solve
1) Law enforcement officer saw a large orange orb and saw another object that was black and the black object shot off at an incredible speed with no sound.
“The first one was brought to us by a law enforcement officer out West where he observed a large orange orb floating several hundred feet above the ground, a couple miles away,” Kosloski said. “He went to investigate what was going on with that orb, and as he was pulling up to the location where he thought would be below the orb, about 40 to 60 meters away from some object. The area was well lit. He saw a blacker-than-black object. He said it was about the size of a Prius, 4 to 6 feet wide. And as he got 40 to 60 meters away from the object, it tilted up about 45 degrees, and then it shot up vertically.”
Kosloski said the law enforcement officer claimed the orb moved “10 to 100 times faster than any drone he’s ever seen before. And it did that without making a sound, as far as he could tell from inside of his vehicle. And just as it left his field of view through his windshield, then it emitted very bright red and blue lights that illuminated the inside of his vehicle as brightly as if someone had set off fireworks just outside his vehicle, or street flares.”
“That’s anomalous because of the size of the vehicle with the great acceleration, and when he came back to investigate that area, he found no disturbance of the ground beneath it. So that’s one interesting one,” Kosloski said.
“Another one comes to us from southeast U.S.,” Kosloski continued. “There was a U.S. facility where two cars of government contractors were leaving the facility around 9 o’clock in the morning. They looked up in the sky and saw a large, metallic cylinder about the size of a commercial airplane, and it was stationary. They observed that there was a very bright white light behind or around the object. They saw it stationary for 15 to 20 seconds, and then it disappeared. Obviously, an object that large, stationary, unless it’s a blimp, is unusual, but then disappearing, we can’t explain how that would happen.”
For the third case, which Kosloski also described as “interesting,” the UFO investigator said: “We had an aircraft that was flying parallel to another aircraft, and it was capturing imagery of it, and a small-looking object appeared to fly between the two of them, much faster than them. Through very careful analysis, we think that the object might have actually been farther away than the object that it was videotaping, but it requires very careful analysis to come to those conclusions, and we don’t have the metadata to support that — yet.”
Got a UFO tip worth investigating? Submit it here.
Witnesses on Tuesday told the House Homeland Security about the inhumane conditions faced by unaccompanied migrant children who cross the southern border, many of whom are trafficked before and after entering the country.
Witnesses included a human trafficking expert, the former high-ranking official at an unaccompanied minor site, and a retired border patrol agent. Together, their testimony painted a grim picture.
Ali Hopper, a human trafficking expert, said she visited a path used by migrants lined with what cartels refers to as “rape trees,” areas where minor migrants are forced to perform sexual acts to help pay for their journey. According to Hopper, underwear hung from the branches of one such tree.
Hopper said the pathway was also lined with discarded passports and other IDs, “often burned, torn, or buried,” including the passport of a five-year old Colombian girl. While criminal migrants often enter the country under false names to avoid detection, Hopper said changing children’s identity raises “darker questions.”
“Are they being exploited? What horrors have they endured to reach this point?”
More than half a million children have entered the United States without parents and been sent by the U.S. government to live with “sponsors” in recent years. Sponsors do not have to be related to the children and, because they are typically illegal immigrants themselves, they are not reliably vetted.
“Criminal sponsors are defrauding the U.S. government by using this government program as a logistical chain in their trafficking operation,” Tara Rodas, the former deputy at an unaccompanied minor processing site, told the panel. “These children are not merely victims, they are hostages.”
Rodas said it was “unclear why we’re luring children to the United States to be the white-glove delivery system” for gangs. She called for the government to “implement simple safety measures like DNA testing for children and their sponsors,” and “stringent penalties like prison for sponsors who are unable to produce the children they are in charge of.”
By the time the Office of Refugee Resettlement makes its 30-day follow-up phone call — until recently, the only post-release outreach it made — a third of unaccompanied migrants are missing, according to The New York Times. That means more than 165,000 children could be missing in the country.
President-elect Donald Trump has said locating and rescuing the missing migrant children will be one of his administration’s top priorities. Fraudulent “sponsors” who take custody of children and then lose them could form a list of priority deportees in the Trump administration.
The Biden administration this year temporarily shuttered a program for adult migrants after it became clear that a massive number of “sponsors” were lying about their identity. But the Biden administration has not released information about the minor resettlement program, going so far as ignoring subpoenas.
During Tuesday’s hearing, Rep. Clay Higgins (R-LA), chairman of a border security subcommittee, laid the blame for the unaccompanied minor migrant crisis at the White House’s feet.
“The Biden-Harris administration has stated that they have the most humanitarian immigration policy in history,” he said, “but there’s nothing humanitarian about [this].”
Hopper observed that those who defended the current system were not treating migrant children with the same compassion that they would American children.
“American citizens can’t just deflect from agencies like Child Protective Services and say ‘oh, my kids are fine, you don’t need to check on them,’ you wouldn’t take their word for that,” she said.
Rep. Glenn Ivey (D-MD), the ranking member on the committee’s oversight panel, is one of the few Democrats in Congress who has acknowledged the migrant crisis.
“I actually share in the concerns of my colleagues about the dangers and the horrors that these children face, and that the system has let them down when they get to the United States,” Ivey said Tuesday.
The Democrat said he heard of children forced to work in dangerous factories and other “horrific circumstances.”
“We need to figure out how to work our way out of that,” Ivey said. “It’s gonna be expensive to locate these kids, it’s gonna be expensive to try and put them back in connection with their parents.”
Rep. Lou Correa (D-CA), the ranking Democrat on the border security panel, acknowledged the trafficking and said those profiting off children should be punished. He said “we need more resources for more home visits” of children in the sponsor’s home.
But Rep. Dan Bishop (R-NC) said money wasn’t the issue. He blamed policies that give unaccompanied minors special treatment, which, he says, have the perverse effect of actually encouraging families to split up. This has not only put children in danger, he said, but caused a rise in human trafficking in the United States.
“You have chosen to recreate in the United States to a certain degree the horrific circumstances that are causing people to flee elsewhere,” Bishop said.
“The federal government has precipitated and is facilitating this humanitarian catastrophe,” he added. “The Biden administration was so focused on moving people through the system as fast as possible that they failed to ensure the safety of the children they were releasing,” he said.
“Many of these children already suffered at the hands of criminal cartels on that treacherous journey to the border, only to find themselves exploited again after being released from government custody,” Bishop said. “This impossible-to-understand bad judgment is simply heartbreaking and tragic.”
Well, folks, it’s time for Joe and Mika version 3.0.
On Monday, there was a big announcement on Morning Joe that had a lot of heads spinning. Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski, who are now a married couple (although, when they first started the show, they were married to other people), decided that it was time for a little kiss and make up with Donald Trump.
Let’s take a bit of a trip down memory lane with Joe and Mika to understand just how astonishing and dishonest this is.
In 2015 and 2016, Joe and Mika were largely responsible for Trump receiving the Republican nomination. They had him on the air all the time. They sat with him as primary results came in. They were so close that Joe Scarborough was actually asked by radio host Hugh Hewitt if he would be Donald Trump’s vice presidential nominee.
Then, after Trump got the nomination and he didn’t keep making time for Joe and Mika, they decided they were going to favor Hillary Clinton instead, for political reasons. They became quite vicious about President Trump, and they remained vicious for years.
Here are a few excerpts of what they had to say about President Trump over the course of the next eight years or so:
Donald Trump keeps talking about how America sucks, and before he got elected, America sucked, and then he got elected, suddenly America was great. Then he lost. Now America sucks again. You’re voting for a guy like that?
What rises to the threat of democracy that we have ever seen in America since the Civil War if what Donald Trump has done over the past four years does not?
Trump is literally crazy on stage and I say it not in a good way. Not well, not fit, not mentally capable.
I mean, you talk to people who served with him … they will tell you now the guy was completely ignorant on policy. It was frightening. It was scary. It was depressing.
It’s going to be very hard for the former president to convince anybody except for diehard MAGA — the types of people who will follow him anywhere — it’s going to be very hard for him to convince most Americans that he had a modicum of sense.
This is what voters know right now: that he is killing us and talking about us women. He is killing us. He is putting us at risk. He is making us afraid to have babies. He is putting our reproductive health at risk. And some women have died already because of this.
They just went on and on and on.
Eight years of “Donald Trump Is Orange Hitler.” Eight years of it. They spent eight long years talking about how he was the threat to the republic. But they were standing in the breach.
Now, after Trump won, it turns out that they want to be friends again.
So Morning Joe’s team apparently went to Mar-a-Lago. And on Monday, they opened their show by recounting their visit to make kissy-face, nice-nice with President-elect Donald Trump.
Mika: Joe and I went to Mar-a-Lago to meet personally with President-elect Trump. It was the first time we have seen him in seven years.
Joe: Now, we talked about a lot of issues, including abortion, mass deportation, threats of political retribution against political opponents, and media outlets. We talked about that a good bit. And it’s going to come as no surprise to anybody who watches this show, has watched it over the past year or over the past decade, that we didn’t see eye to eye on a lot of issues and we told him so.
Mika: What we did agree on was to restart communications. My father often spoke with world leaders with whom he and the United States profoundly disagreed. That’s a task shared by reporters and commentators alike.
They are walking this thing back. And then, of course, they have to maintain that they are just doing this for the sake of their journalistic objectivity.
Joe: Well, of course, you look at the results of the election too, a new approach I think is needed, where, again, we speak truth to power. We push back hard, like we push back hard, whether it was with Barack Obama, whether it was with George W. Bush, whether it was obviously with Donald Trump or Joe Biden.
You didn’t push back hard with Joe Biden. And you just called Donald Trump “Hitler” for eight years.
So what does this say about the legacy media?
This: They are unbelievable garbage liars. They are such liars. How do you go on bended knee to Hitler?
This is the same as Joe Biden sitting in the Oval Office with Donald Trump grinning ear to ear after suggesting not only that Trump was Hitler, but also that his supporters were Hitler supporters. It showed that he was lying that entire time, that it had all been an act of demonization, of demagoguery.
It’s the same thing when it comes to Joe Scarborough, Mika Brzezinski, and so much of the legacy media.
The only entity whose credibility was destroyed in this entire process were the people of the legacy media.
The Left wonders why trust in legacy media has completely cratered?
SpaceX tested its massive Starship rocket for the sixth time on Tuesday as President-elect Donald Trump watched alongside company CEO Elon Musk.
Starship launched from SpaceX’s headquarters, Starbase, in Boca Chica, Texas, at 5 p.m. ET. Musk, the world’s richest man, watched the test flight with Trump — whom Musk helped to elect by investing hefty sums of his own money into the Trump reelection effort and running significant portions of the campaign’s ground operation in swing states.
Trump announced his visit to SpaceX’s Texas headquarters in a post on X, Musk’s social media platform.
“I’m heading to the Great State of Texas to watch the launch of the largest object ever to be elevated, not only to Space, but simply by lifting off the ground. Good luck to @ElonMusk and the Great Patriots involved in this incredible project!” Trump wrote.
I’m heading to the Great State of Texas to watch the launch of the largest object ever to be elevated, not only to Space, but simply by lifting off the ground. Good luck to @ElonMusk and the Great Patriots involved in this incredible project! https://t.co/UVpVSkpEyu
The latest rocket test featured an updated propulsion system to the Super Heavy booster used to launch the rocket. The updates were supposed to ease the booster into the arms of “Mechazilla,” the launch pad that can double as a landing pad – provided the conditions are right. Weather conditions were not optimal on Tuesday, and SpaceX chose to have the booster fall offshore rather than attempt to catch it.
NEWS: Trump has officially arrived in Texas to watch @SpaceX's Starship launch today. He will be the first U.S. President, past or present, to attend a launch of Starship—the most powerful rocket ever built—in person. pic.twitter.com/CHmDKAWYQF
On the previous Starship test flight in October, the SpaceX crew managed to “catch” Starship’s Super Heavy booster in Mechazilla’s arms. The historic effort was nearly aborted, according to SpaceX internal audio that Musk later posted online with gameplay of a videogame.
“I want to be really upfront about scary s*** that happened,” a SpaceX engineer told Musk. “We had a misconfigured stem gas support that didn’t have quite the right ramp-up time for bringing up stem pressure, and we were one second away from that tripping and telling the rocket to abort and try to crash into the ground next to the tower.”
Watch the launch here:
The Daily Wire carries live coverage of SpaceX's sixth Starship test flight. Watch live and witness the next pivotal moment in space exploration. https://t.co/3PbFNC0umM
The NFL has finally weighed in on the viral “Trump dance” that’s sweeping the sports world in honor of President-elect Donald Trump.
In a statement from NFL Chief Spokesperson Brian McCarthy, the league made it clear it has no problem with the players who have celebrated their individual victories on the field by doing the dance, which became a viral sensation during the 2024 election, OutKick reported.
“There’s no issue with celebratory dances such as what took place Sunday or the previous week with the 49ers on November 10,” McCarthy said in an e-mail.
NFL players from across the league have celebrated their victories by doing the dance, which became a trend on social media after supporters made videos of themselves doing the same dance moves that Trump often did when he danced to the Village People’s “Y.M.C.A.” at his numerous campaign rallies.
Las Vegas Raiders tight end Brock Bowers did the Trump-esque dance moves when he scored a touchdown on Sunday, after he caught a 23-yard pass from Gardner Minshew late in the third quarter against the Miami Dolphins.
And while those watching the game live saw Bowers’ dance in the end zone — and then a shot of Raiders’ owner Mark Davis reacting to the TD — the victory celebration seemed to be missing from the post “NFL on CBS” made on X, OutKick noted. The social media post showed the 23-yard catch and then cut straight to the shot of Davis in his suite.
The NFL, through a spokesperson, has confirmed that it has “no issue” with players who do the dance that mimics the moves of President-elect Donald Trump.
“There’s no issue with celebratory dances such as what took place Sunday or the previous week with the 49ers on November… pic.twitter.com/JUTjJIfLC2
But Bowers wasn’t the only NFL player rocking the dance moves. During the Detroit Lions game, Za’Darius Smith and Malcolm Rodriguez celebrated their team’s defensive stop on Sunday against the Jacksonville Jaguars, by doing a series of dance moves that included the funny Trump-esque dance steps.
Tennessee Titans players Calvin Ridley and Nick Westbrook-Ikhine busted out the Trump moves ahead of what appeared to be a touchdown during the team’s game against the Minnesota Vikings.
A week earlier — shortly after Trump’s victory against Vice President Kamala Harris — it was San Francisco 49ers star Nick Bosa who first did the Trump dance moves on the field following a sack of a Tampa Bay Buccaneers player, the Post noted.
Earlier in the day on Tuesday, Hall of Fame football legend Brett Favre was asked about the “Trump dance” and said he didn’t think the league would fine players or institute any kind of ban to get players to stop showing support on the field for Trump.
“I find it hard to believe that the NFL would crack down on this ‘Trump’ dance,” Favre told Fox News. “I really do. I would hope that they wouldn’t.”
The New York Jets announced that the team’s general manager Joe Douglas has been fired, just weeks after the team let go of head coach Robert Saleh amid a struggling season.
In a press release from Jets’ owner Woody Johnson, he said that Douglas would no longer be with the AFC East team, which has a record of 3 and 8 after coming into the season with Super Bowl aspirations.
“Today, I informed Joe Douglas he will no longer serve as the general manager of the New York Jets,” Johnson said in a statement. “I want to thank Joe for his commitment to the Jets over the last six years and wish him and his family the best moving forward.”
“Phil Savage will be the interim general manager for the remainder of the season,” the statement added. “We will begin the process to identify a new General Manager immediately.”
The Jets grabbed Douglas from the Philadelphia Eagles in 2019 and signed him to a six-year contract, which ended with the 2024 season. Under his direction, the New York team has a dismal record of 30-64 and has not made a single playoff appearance.
Since the Jets traded for Aaron Rodgers in 2023, the team has gone 10-28. The team was 20-36 with coach Saleh at the helm.
Saleh was in his fourth season with the Jets, a team that had high expectations for 2024. In its first five games, the Jets lost three games, including a loss to the undefeated Minnesota Vikings in London. Jets Defensive Coordinator Jeff Ulbrich stepped in as the interim head coach following Saleh’s firing.
Some have speculated that since Douglas is the one who brought in Rodgers, the 40-year-old QB most likely won’t be back next year. With a new GM and head coach, the Jets may want to start fresh with their own quarterback.
Colorado has agreed to pay over $1.5 million after violating the First Amendment rights of a graphic designer who took her case to the United States Supreme Court.
The Court ruled in June that the state could not compel Lorie Smith and her design studio, 303 Creative, to create art that violates her religious beliefs. As a Christian, Smith believes that marriage should be between a man and a woman. Though she wanted to design wedding websites, Colorado’s discrimination laws would have required her to create same-sex wedding websites.
Smith, who was represented by lawyers from the Alliance Defending Freedom, asked the Supreme Court to say Colorado’s discrimination law violated her First Amendment rights. Her case followed that of Jack Phillips, a cake designer persecuted by LGBTQ activists in Colorado for over a decade for attempting to only design cakes consistent with his religious beliefs.
“After enduring Colorado’s censorship for nearly seven years, I’m incredibly grateful for the work of my attorneys at Alliance Defending Freedom to bring my case to victory,” Smith said in a statement on Tuesday. “As the Supreme Court said, I’m free to create art consistent with my beliefs without fear of Colorado punishing me anymore. This is a win not just for me but for all Americans—for those who share my beliefs and for those who hold different views.”
(Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)
Alliance Defending Freedom CEO Kristen Waggoner said that the “government can’t force Americans to say things they don’t believe, and Colorado officials have paid and will continue to pay a high price when they violate this foundational freedom.”
“For the past 12 years, Colorado has targeted people of faith and forced them to express messages that violate their conscience and that advance the government’s preferred ideology,” she said. “First Amendment protections are non-negotiable. Billions of people around the world believe that marriage is the union of one man and one woman and that men and women are biologically distinct.”
“No government has the right to silence individuals for expressing these ideas or to punish those who decline to express different views,” Waggoner added. “Political and cultural winds shift, but the freedom to speak without fear of censorship is a God-given constitutionally guaranteed right, essential for a flourishing society and self-governing people.”
In October, the Colorado Supreme Court dismissed a lawsuit brought by the same trans-identifying attorney who has brought cases against Phillips for over 12 years — Autumn Scardina, a man who identifies as a woman. Scardina first contacted Phillips in 2012, calling the cake-maker a hypocrite and a bigot, according to Alliance Defending Freedom. Scardina has requested that Phillips create cakes celebrating gender transitions and “Satan smoking Marijuana.”
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President-elect Donald Trump pledged to purge bureaucrats who push the left-wing the diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) agenda and could otherwise obstruct his policy agenda. Now, following a landslide victory, he’s finally going to get his chance.
The Biden administration launched its whole-of-government approach to DEI with a pair of executiveorders that left no agency unmarred by the left-wing ideology, even capturing institutions essential to America’s defense, intelligence gathering, and foreign policy operations. Federal bureaucrats now expect Trump to sign an executive order shuttering DEI offices and operations throughout executive agencies.
In total, agencies under the Biden administration are believed to have planned or taken an estimated 500 actions intended to embed and promote DEI. An ongoing series of Daily Wire investigations highlighted how the federal government has been captured by the DEI agenda, documenting some of the most extreme ways in which the ideology impacted the operations of the federal government.
DEI officials in each agency enlisted federal employees across the government to form “affinity groups” and “employee resource groups, identity-based employee organizations that effectively serve as far-left activist nodes within America’s executive agencies. The affinity groups had support from the Office of Personnel Management, the federal government’s human resources department, which said that affinity groups “support agency efforts to strategically advance DEI.”
The Trump administration could use these affinity groups to expedite its DEI purge, using membership lists to identify bureaucrats who use their post to advance woke ideology — and who could potentially seek to obstruct Trump’s agenda.
Trump will have the authority to shut down DEI offices throughout the federal government, but formally ending the infrastructure used to push the ideology within the executive branch may not be sufficient on its own to purge the doctrine from the bureaucracy.
Former Trump administration official Ben Carson told The Daily Wire that bureaucrats would often attempt to defy the president’s orders when they personally disagreed with them. “Their tendency would be to try to slow-walk things that they disagreed with,” Carson explained.
The America First Policy Institute’s James Sherk, a former Trump administration official, outlined how bureaucrats worked to block the president’s agenda through a combination of underperformance, obfuscation, and “outright insubordination.”
“Some career employees went beyond withholding information — they actively misrepresented the facts about what agencies could, or could not, do,” Sherk explained in a report for AFPI, adding that other bureaucrats “would flatly disregard political appointees’ directions and instead do what they thought best. Such insubordination and intransigence occurred commonly in some agencies and infrequently in others.”
Former White House Director of Operations for Presidential Personnel James Bacon asserted that bureaucracy’s ability to sidestep the president undermines the will of the American people, who expect those who they elect to have the power to change and enact policy.
“If the policies stay the same no matter who you elect, that’s when democracy is dead,” Bacon contends. “The founders chose Congress and the Supreme Court as the check on executive power, not the president’s staff.”
Media outlets documented this same bureaucratic resistance in the early days of the Trump administration, with Bloomberg News writing that “officials have found it best to simply delay implementation of new initiatives in hopes they may be modified or canceled” in a piece titled “Washington Bureaucrats Are Quietly Working To Undermine Trump’s Agenda.”
The Washington Post reported that Trump faced “resistance from within” as federal agents worked to halt the president’s policy agenda. “Less than two weeks into Trump’s administration, federal workers are in regular consultation with recently departed Obama-era political appointees about what they can do to push back against the new president’s initiatives,” the outlet reported.
The reports from former Trump administration officials and members of the media alike indicate that scrapping DEI on paper may not truly mark the end of the ideology and its influence on the federal government.
But the Trump administration is also expected to conduct a purge of bureaucrats who may otherwise attempt to obstruct the president’s policy agenda and work to maintain the influence of DEI and far-left ideology within the government.
Trump has announced that he will reissue his “2020 executive order restoring the president’s authority to remove woke bureaucrats.” The order in question would reclassify tens of thousands of bureaucrats and make them fireable by the executive.
These bureaucrats work under about 4,000 political appointees chosen by the president in conjunction with his Presidential Personnel Office. But, unlike these appointees, the bureaucrats maintain their employment across presidential administrations — even those they may be hostile towards.
The executive order, which Trump signed but which could not be fully implemented before he left office, would remove civil service protections from those bureaucrats, who some say are excessively difficult to fire.
It is only one of the ways that Trump could potentially ensure that the executive agencies comply with his policies, however. As president, Trump will also be able to work with Congress to rescind funding from agencies he deems bloated or insolent, offering him another lever to use against bureaucrats who he believes may undermine his agenda.
The impending effort from the incoming Trump administration has reportedly already sent shockwaves throughout the administrative state.
“I would say there is a general feeling of dread among everyone,” one bureaucrat said. “We are absolutely having conversations among ourselves about whether we can stomach a round two.”
President-elect Donald Trump announced on Saturday evening that he has tapped Chris Wright to lead the U.S. Department of Energy.
“I am thrilled to announce that Chris Wright will be joining my Administration as both United States Secretary of Energy, and Member of the newly formed Council of National Energy,” Trump said in a statement.
Trump highlighted Wright’s career as a leading technologist and entrepreneur in the industry before being nominated to the position.
“He has worked in Nuclear, Solar, Geothermal, and Oil and Gas,” he said. “Most significantly, Chris was one of the pioneers who helped launch the American Shale Revolution that fueled American Energy Independence, and transformed the Global Energy Markets and Geopolitics.”
Wright said that he was “honored and grateful” for the opportunity to serve in the new administration.
“My dedication to bettering human lives remains steadfast, with a focus on making American energy more affordable, reliable, and secure. Energy is the lifeblood that makes everything in life possible,” he said. “Energy matters. I am looking forward to getting to work.”
The statement said that Wright has known and worked with North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum — whom Trump tapped to be the Secretary of the Interior and Chairman of the National Energy Council — for years.
“This team will drive U.S. Energy Dominance, which will drive down Inflation, win the A.I. arms race with China (and others), and expand American Diplomatic Power to end Wars all across the World,” Trump said.
I am honored and grateful for the opportunity from @realDonaldTrump to serve our country as U.S. Secretary of Energy. My dedication to bettering human lives remains steadfast, with a focus on making American energy more affordable, reliable, and secure. Energy is the lifeblood… pic.twitter.com/IfjMQw9xKi
Actress and Democrat surrogate Eva Longoria said this past week that she’s a “proud American” and didn’t leave the country over Donald Trump’s 2024 election win, despite some headlines saying otherwise.
Longoria’s comments follow backlash over a recent interview she gave to Marie Claire. Notably, the actress dissed “convicted criminal” President-elect Trump and acknowledged her supposed privilege for being able to leave the country, which she classified as “dystopian.” She also revealed that she’s been living outside of the U.S. for three years, citing California taxes and homelessness, The Daily Wire reported.
“Will you please let them know I didn’t move out of the United States because of Trump?” Longoria told “The View” cohost Ana Navarro on Friday, according to Fox News. “I’ve been in Europe for almost three years. That’s in the article, by the way, the article says that. People just grabbed some clickbait stuff to be divisive. Which makes me so sad that everything you say is just meant to be divisive when we can’t be that way right now.”
“I didn’t leave because of the political environment,” Longoria insisted. “I left because my work took me there.”
“I’m a proud American,” the 49-year-old continued. “I’ve always been a proud American. Proud Texan, proud American. I didn’t want it to be taken that I left because of Trump — absolutely not — or because of the elections.”
Longoria struck a different tone when recently speaking to Marie Claire, however. She told the magazine that she’s “privileged” and gets to “escape and go somewhere,” adding, “Most Americans aren’t so lucky. They’re going to be stuck in this dystopian country, and my anxiety and sadness is for them.”
“If he keeps his promises, it’s going to be a scary place,” Longoria added, referring to Trump.
The Hollywood star also complained about the election results. “The shocking part is not that [Donald] Trump won,” she said. “It’s that a convicted criminal who spews so much hate could hold the highest office.”
Longoria endorsed VP Kamala Harris for president this election cycle and spoke at the Democratic National Convention.
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