President-elect Donald Trump announced on Friday that he has named Karoline Leavitt to be his new White House press secretary.
“Karoline Leavitt did a phenomenal job as the National Press Secretary on my Historic Campaign, and I am pleased to announce she will serve as White House Press Secretary,” Trump said in a statement.
Trump said that Leavitt “is smart, tough, and has proven to be a highly effective communicator.”
He continued, “I have the utmost confidence she will excel at the podium, and help deliver our message to the American People as we, Make America Great Again.”
Hollywood star and filmmaker Justine Bateman said the results of the 2024 election marked the end of the woke era, which she said happened when President-elect Donald Trump won back the White House.
During the 58-year-old actress’ appearance on Thursday on Fox News’ “Jesse Watters Primetime,” Bateman celebrated that Americans were no longer going to be punished for what they said or how they thought.
“The political correctness, the woke era is over because you need mob mentality momentum in order to keep that going,” Batman told the host. “In order to threaten people if they are not thinking and talking the way you do.”
“To threaten their lives, threaten their careers, threaten their place in society,” she added. “You need that momentum in order to do that, and when Trump won [the] presidency again, that cut that momentum off. So, this whole woke era is over.”
Later, she talked about the “spiritual shift” she’s felt in the culture, saying there’s been a “stagnation” and that things “haven’t been moving forward” for the last four years or more.
“It started a little bit when Elon Musk bought Twitter and turned it into X,” Bateman said. “And it really changed when Donald Trump won his presidency. I can feel it. For the last four years … there’s been kind of a pressing down, limiting what people can say and what happens, too, is you limit what can even occur in society.”
She later broke down her appearance on Watters in a hilarious film critique as part of her ongoing #SocialMediaVideoCritique series on X, in which she reacts to those posting meltdown videos about Trump’s win. Rather than pointing out things like poor messaging or simply mocking their outbursts, Bateman has some fun focusing instead on the backgrounds, lighting, and camera angles.
“An interesting piece in which two scripts are occurring at the same time,” Bateman wrote. “While the audible dialogue is heard, the ‘woman’ character on the right is sending morse code messages to the ‘man’ character on the left. The director could have done this with a tapping or a knocking, but instead it is done with the blinking of the eyes.”
“As the morse-code-eye-blinking is happening, you can see the [male] character is in a meditative ‘receiving state,’ while he pulls in the morse code message,” she added, noting the good lighting and location. “The tops of skyscrapers at night gives the viewer a feeling of freedom. It is as if the two characters are hovering 50 ft above the ground. Fin.”
In another another brutal yet funny film critique, Bateman took on Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s (D-NY) latest video lamenting Trump’s victory, as The Daily Wire previously reported.
It’s no secret that, as Americans, we mostly focus on domestic politics in our own country. Unlike, say, Canadians, we don’t obsess over the daily comings-and-goings of other nations. It’s virtually impossible to find a single American who can name a Canadian Supreme Court justice or member of parliament, for example. I know I certainly can’t. By contrast, Canadians can tell you all about Clarence Thomas and Matt Gaetz and so on. This is a well-established phenomenon and it makes sense, because the United States is a lot more important than any other country.
But even with that in mind, every once in a while, something happens in the parliament of a foreign country that’s hard for us to ignore here in America. Maybe a lawmaker in Taiwan steals a bill and runs away with it, in order to prevent it from being passed into law. That’s something that happened, and was hilarious. Or maybe a member of parliament in India pepper-sprays his colleagues when they don’t vote the right way. Or maybe Italy’s parliament descends into a bench-clearing brawl, which requires one politician to leave the chamber in a wheelchair. These are all well-documented incidents that may not always have a lot of direct relevance to us, but more often than not, at the very least, they’re entertaining to watch. It’s a whole genre on YouTube, actually.
The viral moment that just took place in the parliament of New Zealand, on the other hand, does have relevance for Americans. It’s one of the more important political stories of the year, even though it’s taking place thousands of miles from our borders. In case you missed it, several politicians in New Zealand just broke out in a primal, stone-age war dance called the “Haka,” to protest a piece of legislation that’s working its way through parliament. They won’t stop doing the chant, and eventually parliament has to be shut down. Watch:
This dance is very dangerous because it may cause everyone in the vicinity to die of secondhand embarrassment. It’s hard to watch this video and not have the same reaction that the speaker of parliament has. It’s painful to sit through. Thankfully a few people have dubbed the audio in various ways. There’s one remix that turns it into a jazzy little piano number from 1925. It actually works surprisingly well.
Because it’s a Friday we might as well play it. Plus, it shows you another angle, so we can justify it that way. Watch:
It’s a lot less cringe when you dub in some real music, instead of the prehistoric grunting. Now, it’s a little hard to see in all the pandemonium, but they’re getting in the face of a politician named David Seymour, who introduced a bill they don’t like. The people doing the screeching identify as “Maori,” meaning they see themselves as the allegedly indigenous people of New Zealand. They’re chanting like barbarians and making gun gestures at David Seymour while saying something that apparently translates to “evil.”
Before I get into the specifics about this vote and what it’s about, it needs to be reiterated that this whole “Haka” thing is silly and embarrassing. Maybe you’re not supposed to say that, but it’s obviously true. Everyone who sees it knows that and feels the same way. Yes, we’re supposed to pretend we find it somehow powerful and cool because it’s part of a non-white culture. We’re not allowed to have any negative opinions about anything that a non-white culture does. Even if it’s lame and stupid as hell, and we all know it.
But the truth is, these people are embarrassing themselves. Always and everywhere, in every context, the “Haka” is cringeworthy to an immeasurable, painful degree. Here for example was the “Haka” that New Zealand’s basketball team performed at a tournament in 2014, just before getting blown out by double-digits by Team USA. Just look at the reactions during this:
There’s nothing like a fearsome war chant before a basketball game where everyone looks at you like you’re crazy. And then you get completely destroyed. Honestly, it just doesn’t work. You can’t do a fearsome war dance on behalf of a conquered people, and then get conquered some more. It’s just sad at this point. The Maori have been doing this dance for centuries and just getting beaten every time, in every context, in every type of battle they’ve ever been in. I think it might be time to hang it up and call it a day.
In any event, back to the viral clip everyone’s talking about. The so-called “indigenous” people had a meltdown in parliament over a bill. What you may not have seen is what preceded that moment. David Seymour laid out some rational and calm arguments in favor of his legislation. And then the so-called “Maori” politicians launched into a volley of personal attacks. Watch:
Already, this is how you know these people have no argument. They’re only capable of shouting “shame” and resorting to personal attacks, to the point that they repeatedly get thrown out of parliament. Meanwhile David Seymour is sitting there calmly, saying he wants equality.
Admittedly, I’m not an expert on the finer details of New Zealand politics. So I went looking through some New Zealand outlets to try to get as complete a picture as I could.
It turns out that the concept of “equal protection under the law” is actually extremely controversial in New Zealand.
Here’s the background. Hundreds of years ago, around the late 13th century, Polynesian settlers arrived by canoe in New Zealand. They became the “Maori” people. Depending on who you ask, they were either the first to arrive, or they massacred everyone else who was there. In any event, before long, the Maori wiped out a different tribe called the Moriori, who were pacifists living in the Chatham Islands in the east. They got enslaved and beheaded and cannibalized by the Maori, because apparently that’s what civilized cultures do.
And to be clear, this kind of thing wasn’t out of character for the Maori. The Maori routinely enslaved and brutalized their enemies. The moment they acquired muskets from European traders, they fought a series of battles among themselves called “the Musket Wars,” which led to tens of thousands of deaths and even more slavery. These are wars that, of course, the Maori now blame the British for. They also bartered with severed heads, which they called “Toi moko.” They would cut people’s heads off, tattoo them, and then use them for trading. This is what Maori culture was all about. Cutting heads off and cannibalizing each other.
Eventually the British came in and provided some stability with something called the Treaty of Waitangi. The idea was that New Zealand would become a British colony, but that the Maori would have their rights protected. They could keep their land and so on, to the extent that was possible. Then in 1975, New Zealand recognized this treaty in law for the first time. But there was still a big gray area as to what exactly this treaty required. It established tribunals and led to a lot of “rulemaking” by judges, but parliament mostly stayed out of it.
With this new bill, David Seymour is trying to change that. He’s proposing concrete legislation that will clarify that everyone in New Zealand — whether they’re “Maori” or not — is entitled to the full protection of the law. He also wants to make it clear that New Zealand is self-governing. The Maori are not a nation within a nation. Here’s how one New Zealand station describes the proposed clarifications:
These are clarifications that, if you want to live in a modern civilization — instead of a backwards, third-world tribal hellhole — seem pretty reasonable. But it does mark a change from what’s happening at the moment.
Right now, New Zealand explicitly provides reparations to people who identify as Maori. In addition to affirmative action, they just announced a quote “financial redress of $30 million plus interest” to Maori tribes, along with a fund of more than a million dollars to assist with “cultural revitalization.” New Zealand politicians also regularly give lengthy apologies to the tribes, like this one. Watch:
This kind of thing has been going on for decades in New Zealand. They fly the Maori flag, they apologize to them, they pay them millions of dollars. And in the end it’s not enough. The demands keep coming. As a result, now their news reports are barely comprehensible, because they’re all speaking a foreign language.
Here for example is how that New Zealand television station explains what the Maori are so upset about:
Yes, one of the main criticisms of the bill is — whatever that is. They have to translate it so that people in New Zealand can understand what’s even going on. So it turns out that the Maori want the ability to remain autonomous from New Zealand, which in a democracy seems pretty questionable. The opposition wants to put that up for a democratic vote, and of course the Maori are refusing. They don’t care what the people of New Zealand think about what should happen in New Zealand.
But the people of New Zealand should care. And we should care as well. What’s happening over there is a case study that we should pay attention to. New Zealand has bent over backwards apologizing for the alleged evils of “colonization.” They’ve paid out reparations and flown the Maori flag and everything. They’ve centered their whole society around “land acknowledgments” and so on. And now there are pagan chants breaking out in the middle of parliament. The Maori are explicitly campaigning against autonomy and equal rights. They’re threatening politicians who don’t agree with them. This is the sort of “enrichment” that western societies can expect when they start apologizing for their own existence.
And as Douglas Murray has pointed out, none of this makes any sense given the Maori’s history. If we’re going to play the game of generational guilt, they should be apologizing to all the people their ancestors have enslaved. Watch:
So the Maoris were a violent, brutal people. They practiced cannibalism and many other forms of horrific brutality. But just because they made it to New Zealand a few hundred years before Europeans, we are supposed to see it as some great tragedy that the Europeans took over. In fact we’re supposed to blame Europeans for engaging in violent conquest over people who themselves engaged in even more violent conquest.
Keep this absurd, debasing spectacle in mind whenever you hear about “reparations” in this country, or about how oppressed some “indigenous” group allegedly is. Even if you give these people what they want, for decades, they will always want more. No matter how much you apologize to them and pay them millions of dollars, it doesn’t matter. The moment you suggest withdrawing some of their privileges, they will revolt. They will descend into primal chants on the floor of parliament. They will turn your entire government into an international laughing stock.
That is why the only approach to dealing with people like this — the one that New Zealand should have adopted a long time ago — is to deny them any special privileges in the first place. As the saying goes, “When you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression.” At this point, now that stone-age war chants have broken out in parliament, it’s probably too late for New Zealand to correct their mistake. And that should be a pretty big clue to everyone in this country that — unless we also want to return to the stone age — we should take a very different approach.
We should affirm the greatness of western civilization. We should take pride in our heritage and our culture. We should reject false narratives about our history. That’s how you neutralize the grievance mongers and the guilt-merchants so that they have no power. They can do their stone-age chants in the shower. The rest of us will be doing what New Zealand is apparently now incapable of: We’ll be living in a functioning, self-governing democracy.
And if there’s one lesson from these bizarre and embarrassing clips out of New Zealand, it’s that no one should ever take that for granted.
Pennsylvania Democrats are openly defying a judge’s orders ahead of a recount in the state’s senate race in what appears to be a last-ditch effort to deliver victory to incumbent Senator Bob Casey.
Casey has yet to concede to Republican Dave McCormick, who was winning by more than 26,000 votes as of Thursday, with 99% of the vote counted. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court blocked an effort to count mail-in ballots with incorrect or missing dates on the outer envelopes. But that hasn’t stopped Democrats in the Bucks County Office of Commissioners from pushing for exactly that.
On Thursday, 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, Democrat Diane Marseglia, the chair of the commission, 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.”
“With all due respect, our law department’s goal is to stay out of any kind of court because they’re supposed to do that, but we might — some of us might want them to go to court on this,” Marseglia said in response.
“I think the law department’s advice has been consistent, at least since I’ve been here: to follow the current state of the law,” Bucks County Deputy Solicitor Daniel Grieser responded. “And I know that that’s changed in the last three years. But the current state of the law in this area is that these, y’know, unless it’s signed by the voter in two places, that we shouldn’t count these. That’s the current state of the law. And that’s been consistently our advice is to follow the law at the time.”
Marseglia and the second Democrat on the commission, Robert Harvie, voted to count the disqualified ballots.
They also discussed how in 2020 they counted ballots that only had one signature, rather than two, which is now illegal. pic.twitter.com/wkKuGfR3Ei
Republicans have asked a Bucks County Common Pleas judge to reverse the Bucks County Board of Commissioners decision. “The board’s baffling decision not to enforce the date requirement and to count noncompliant ballots thus directly contravenes binding Pennsylvania law,” the GOP’s appeal of the Board’s decision stated.
“As of 4 p.m. on Thursday, Casey received 48.53% of the vote with 3,359,086 votes and McCormick had 48.90% with 3,385,115,” CBS News reported, adding, “Counties must begin the recount by Nov. 20, the announcement says. Counties must finish the recount by noon on Nov. 26 and report the results to the secretary of the commonwealth by Nov. 27 at 12 p.m.”
In Pennsylvania, a recount is triggered if a candidate wins by less than a 0.5% margin — but former election officials say a recount “might not change the outcome by more than a few hundred votes,” the AP reported.
“Senator-Elect McCormick’s lead is insurmountable, which the AP made clear in calling the race,” McCormick spokesperson Elizabeth Gregory stated. “A recount will be a waste of time and taxpayer money, but it is Senator Casey’s prerogative. Senator-Elect McCormick knows what it’s like to lose an election and is sure Senator Casey will eventually reach the right conclusion.”
As Senator John Fetterman of Pennsylvania says, Donald Trump is doing some “God-tier level trolling.” Many of the picks he is currently making are both hilarious and kind of wonderful.
Yesterday, Trump made a bunch of controversial picks. His most controversial pick, however, was Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to lead the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).
RFK Jr., of course, ran as a Democrat in 2024, and then was basically ousted from the primaries in favor of Joe Biden. Because the Democratic Party said, “No. No one will run against Joe Biden. He’s too great and important a president.” And then, of course, they took Biden and tossed him off the back of a train when he died on stage in a debate versus Donald Trump.
So, RFK Jr. immediately flipped. First, he became an independent, and then he finally ended up endorsing Trump. Now, he’s the leader of the so-called “Make America Healthy Again” (MAHA) movement, which is a great purpose for RFK Jr.
We had him as a guest on our show The Sunday Special and he talked extensively about his purpose in making America healthy again. He said, “Listen, many of the biggest issues facing the American people are issues that none of our politicians talk about. Our politicians will talk about tax policy. They’ll talk about whether to drill or not to drill, but then never talk about the fact that the American people are increasingly unhealthy.”
RFK Jr. went on to say, “If I were in government, my number one job would be to make the American people healthy again. There are a bunch of substances that are in our food and our drink that are banned in Europe and that are replete in all of our products, and they are making us fatter.”
And, by the way, he’s not wrong about this.
Today, The New York Times published an article titled “Three-Quarters of U.S. Adults Are Now Overweight or Obese.”
This has some downstream effects. Because, as it turns out, when you hear statistics about American life expectancy flatlining, about the fact that people are getting high rates of chronic diseases in the United States, that’s because of what we are eating, what we’re drinking, and because we never exercise. There are comparable places around the Earth that have higher life expectancies than we do, and that is not because of our medical system.
It is not because American doctors are worse or American hospitals are worse or anything remotely like that. When somebody in Europe has cancer, they’re coming to the United States for treatment. The reality is that it’s not our medical system, per se, that’s broken. Our medical insurance system is broken. Our medical system is not broken. The thing that is broken is our health care system.
Nearly three-quarters of U.S. adults are overweight or obese, according to a sweeping new study. The findings have wide-reaching implications for the nation’s health and medical costs as it faces a growing burden of weight-related diseases.
The study, published on Thursday in The Lancet, reveals the striking rise of obesity rates nationwide since 1990 — when just over half of adults were overweight or obese — and shows how more people are becoming overweight or obese at younger ages than in the past. Both conditions can raise the risk of diabetes, high blood pressure and heart disease, and shorten life expectancy.
Without aggressive intervention, they forecast, the number of overweight and obese people will continue to go up — reaching nearly 260 million people in 2050.
The paper defined “overweight” adults as those who were age 25 and over with a body mass index at or over 25, and “obese” adults as those with a B.M.I. at or over 30.
Now, again, there are a number of things the pharmaceutical industry is attempting to do in order to walk that back. Ozempic would be the most obvious example. But if you can take preventative measures so kids aren’t obese at age seven — and if that means that we look for different solutions inside the FDA or inside the NIH or inside HHS — generally, that’s a good thing.
Here, for example, was RFK Jr. talking about the sort of products and services that are available to Americans that are not available in other places, because, as he says, the food industry has a giant lobbying arm, which is true.
The Democrats, who claim to be all about health care have stood by watching other countries ban these poisons that make our kids sick. Enough is enough. President Trump and I are going to stop the mass poisoning of American children. pic.twitter.com/Rf04MrF9e8
So, there’s nothing wrong with the general mission there. How it actually gets applied in real life is going to be the big question. I’m sure much of that will come up in a confirmation hearing. How much power should the HHS have to outright ban things in your food? How much power should the HHS have, for example, to hold up new drugs?
One of the big problems in the United States is that it is very difficult to get a new pharmaceutical product approved and very expensive. That’s the reason why pharmaceuticals are so expensive when it comes to the consumer level, because it’s not just the R&D you have to do to develop a drug. It’s also that you then have to go through an extraordinarily rigorous process that very often is replete with red tape. So there are a bunch of problems inside FDA, inside NIH. Many of the studies that are being promulgated by NIH are just crap. They’re terrible. There’s a lot to do. There’s a lot of deadwood to clear out right there.
It’ll be fascinating to see how RFK Jr. does all of that. Obviously, he’s a trial lawyer and very often the mentality of a trial lawyer is to find the vulnerability of a particular product to cause causation of a health problem. So if there’s even a remote causative effect of some sort of product on somebody’s health, then you can sue based on that and you make a lot of money if you’re a trial lawyer.
However, is that enough of a standard to ban it, or are we going to get more advisory opinions? Right. None of this is particularly clear at this point.
What is clear, though, is that refocusing America on being healthier while also allowing for more innovation in a lot of these areas would definitely be a good target goal.
ABC host Whoopi Goldberg complained during a recent broadcast that she had been unable to get her favorite birthday treat from a local Staten Island bakery — and she claimed that her political views were likely the reason for the alleged snub — but the bakery owner said otherwise.
Goldberg had ordered a trifle-like dessert called the Charlotte Russe — with layers of sponge cake, Bavarian cream, and fruit — but Holtermann’s Bakery, a 145-year-old establishment in Staten Island, initially stated that they could not fill the order due to problems with a boiler.
Goldberg claimed on the air that her political views were a more likely reason, however, saying so during Wednesday’s broadcast of “The View.”
“My birthday dessert today was one of my mom’s favorites from when she was a kid, she talked about these all the time, they’re called Charlotte Russe. It’s a sponge cake with whipped cream and a cherry on top. I should tell you, Charlotte Russe has no political leanings. The place that made these refused to make them for me,” Goldberg began. “No, let me explain. They said that their ovens had gone down, but folks went and got them anyway, which is why I’m not telling you who made them. It’s not … because I’m a woman, but perhaps they did not like my politics. But, that’s okay, because you know what, listen, this is my mother’s celebration. Pick these up and celebrate with me and my mom. Thank you everyone for celebrating my birthday today.”
Goldberg did not initially reveal the name of the bakery — but Entertainment Weekly tracked down the shop based on the packaging the treats had come in, and reached out to the bakery.
“They’d asked us and we were having trouble with our boilers,” bakery owner Jill Holtermann told the outlet, explaining that she had initially denied Goldberg’s order because her boiler was not working properly, and she did not want to accept an order that she might not be able to fill.
“I said to Whoopi, ‘I can’t do it right now,'” she explained, saying that politics had never even entered into her thoughts. “We have so many things going on with my boiler,’ because the building is from 1930, so, when she called me, I had no idea [if we could] be baking everything.”
On the day of the broadcast, a staffer from the show went in to the bakery and was able to purchase the treats because Holtermann had been able to bake them after all.
Staten Island Borough President Vito Fossella gave a press conference in defense of Holtermann’s Bakery, calling on Goldberg — although not by name — to apologize to Jill Holtermann for defaming her on the air.
“Not everybody wakes up every day and thinks about politics,” he said. “A good business person doesn’t care about anybody’s politics.”
WATCH:
Whoopi Goldberg lied, again, claimed a bakery refused her service over leftist views.
The bakery’s owner, Jill Holtermann and Staten Island Borough President, Vito Fossella responds. pic.twitter.com/lPYFlzPsCj
Variety magazine says Daily Wire podcaster Matt Walsh is a “hypocrite” for daring to submit his hit documentary “Am I Racist?,” the top-grossing documentary in a decade, for Academy Award consideration.
Writer Clayton Davis said the submission of the film, which made $12.3 million at the box office, was nothing but an example of “alt-right commentators” making it their “mission to ridicule the entertainment industry’s awards circuit.”
The Variety contributor downplayed the significance of “Am I Racist?” performing well at the box office, citing Marvel movies as examples of why films that do well financially shouldn’t necessarily win or even be considered for awards.
“The real story here is the apparent contradiction: conservative voices denounce ‘woke Hollywood,’ while actively seeking its approval,” Davis wrote.
“And as award season progresses, if (or when?) ‘Am I Racist?’ doesn’t receive the recognition its backers believe it deserves — or doesn’t appear on Variety’s inevitable ‘snubs and surprises’ list — the outcry will likely follow the same script,” he went on.
“In an era where conservatives champion the rhetoric of former president Donald Trump, perhaps they remember his famous line: ‘When you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything.’ Sorry, baby. You’re not a star.”
Walsh shot back at the critic on X, calling it “one of the most insane articles” he’s ever read.
“We have the most successful film in its genre this decade, but we are somehow ‘hypocrites’ for suggesting that it deserves any awards recognition at all,” Walsh said. “Conservatives are supposed to stay in their ghettos.”
This is one of the most insane articles I’ve ever read. We have the most successful film in its genre this decade, but we are somehow “hypocrites” for suggesting that it deserves any awards recognition at all. Conservatives are supposed to stay in their ghettos. https://t.co/IdrR2Cvt43
Walsh announced on October 29 that the film had officially been submitted for Academy Award consideration.
The film “Am I Racist?” featured Walsh going undercover in the world of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) to expose the grift of the race hustlers profiting off people’s emotions through deception. It has a 96% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes with more than 2,500 verified reviews. Despite the overwhelming popularity of the movie, mainstream critics have largely ignored it.
If you missed the theatrical release of “Am I Racist?” or if you want to watch the film again, you can do so now by becoming a DailyWire+ member.
Internet sensation Peanut the Squirrel’s story got the attention of those in the highest court in the land after Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch gave the animal a shoutout while speaking about government overreach.
During Gorsuch’s appearance on Thursday at the Federalist Society’s annual dinner, the conservative SCOTUS justice referenced the story of the little grey squirrel who last month was seized by New York State authorities from his guardian’s home and euthanized, along with his pal Fred the Raccoon, to be “tested for rabies,” The Hill reported.
“I’ve just seen too many cases like that. You have just the other day, some of you might have seen one in the newspaper, if the newspapers are to be believed,” Gorsuch told the crowd at the Washington Hilton’s ballroom. “Yes, I’m speaking of P’nut the squirrel.”
Reports have since surfaced that call into question the death of the little animals, showing that the squirrel and raccoon were reportedly marked for euthanasia more than a week before they were seized in a raid at guardian Mark Longo’s home.
Chemung County Executive Christopher Moss told the New York Post that the rabies test for both animals came back “negative” after they were seized on October 30 by officials with the the Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) and then euthanized.
DEC officials initially said they had received numerous calls about the animals living in the house. The department then got a warrant to search the home for the animals in what Longo described as a drug dealer-type raid at his home, as previously reported.
At the time, the Associated Press reported that the DEC took both animals from the Longos’ home. The agency reportedly said it received complaints that wildlife was potentially at risk and being kept illegally. The Longos told TMZ that they have had Peanut for seven years, after rescuing the squirrel when its mother was killed.
The DEC also said in a statement that Peanut bit an investigator on the hand while the squirrel was being confiscated, sparking the need to test for rabies and “both animals were euthanized…” according to WETM. In order to test for rabies, decapitation is required so subjects’ heads can be opened and their brains sampled.
However, the Post reported that as far back as a week earlier, a timeline for euthanasia doesn’t match up and the animals were advised to be euthanized by state officials before the raid. One email from the DEC dated October 22 said it recommends “these animals be tested for rabies as a precaution for human safety.”
The State Department of Health letter to the county on October 23 then read, “Wildlife cannot be confined like domestic animals, and if there was an exposure, the animals would need to be tested for rabies,” WBNG reported.
It’s been just over a week since President-elect Donald Trump trounced his Democratic opponent Kamala Harris in what’s been described as the greatest comeback story in American history.
Enthusiasm is still running high as Trump’s supporters – who were forced to contemplate a censor-heavy, cackle-filled four years of Kamala – realized that their fears would never come to fruition. Trump is back, and he’s ready to deliver on all his campaign promises.
This unbridled feeling of glee extends far beyond elated X users and “garbage” people living in suburbs who are sick of paying $7 for a pound of butter. In a tangible sense, Trump’s big win is affecting financial markets, with The Dow Jones Industrial Average soaring to a record high and closing up more than 1,500 points on the Wednesday after the election, per NPR.
The Nasdaq and S&P 500 each rose by more than 2% on Wednesday, hitting new highs as Wall Street investors looked forward to a favorable future business market with tax cuts and fewer regulations.
The prices of Bitcoin and cryptocurrency stocks also skyrocketed in the post-election haze, thanks in part to President-elect Trump vowing to turn the United States into the “crypto capital of the planet” at a rally this summer.
Investors, bitcoin advocates, and Wall Street are all ecstatic about Trump’s win. But the benefits of a Trump economy will extend far beyond those parameters as every citizen realizes that this nation is about to get a long-overdue overhaul that is all but guaranteed to bring more prosperity to all.
Daily Wire Editor Emeritus Ben Shapiro touched on this during a speech he delivered this week at Vanderbilt University.
“For the first time in a long time, I really feel like we are entering the best days of America,” Shapiro said at the start of his speech. “It does feel like we are entering a new golden age for the country for three specific reasons, because there are three things that make a golden age for a country or a civilization or even an individual in their life: liberty, strength, virtue.”
“I don’t think the election so much was about President Trump – obviously, he’s a singular figure in American history – as much as it was about the American people who were just done,” Shapiro continued. “We were just done. We were done with the age of stagnation. We were done with the age of moral confusion. We were done with an age that suggested that weakness was a substitute for strength, and that foolishness was a substitute for virtue, or that regulation was a substitute for liberty.”
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President-elect Donald Trump nominated North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum on Friday for two positions in his new administration.
Trump said Burgum was joining the administration “as both Secretary of the Interior and, as Chairman of the newly formed, and very important, National Energy Council, which will consist of all Departments and Agencies involved in the permitting, production, generation, distribution, regulation, transportation, of ALL forms of American Energy.”
“This Council will oversee the path to U.S. ENERGY DOMINANCE by cutting red tape, enhancing private sector investments across all sectors of the Economy, and by focusing on INNOVATION over longstanding, but totally unnecessary, regulation,” he continued. “With U.S. Energy Dominance, we 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 that the Democrats’ war on American energy has hurt America’s allies around the world by forcing them to buy from adversaries, like Iran and Russia, that in turn use the profits to fund war and terrorism.
“As Chairman of the National Energy Council, Doug will have a seat on the National Security Council,” he said. “As Secretary of the Interior, Doug will be a key leader in ushering in a new ‘Golden Age of American Prosperity’ and World Peace.”
Trump said that unleashing American energy production was one of the keys to reducing the national debt that the U.S. is burdened by.
“We will also undo the damage done by the Democrats to our Nation’s Electrical Grid, by dramatically increasing baseload power,” he added. “This will reduce the cost of Electrical bills that continue to skyrocket for Citizens and Small Businesses under Biden-Harris, and ensure that America has the power to serve all of our needs without the devastation of blackouts and brownouts, and to WIN the battle for A.I. superiority, which is key to National Security and our Nation’s Prosperity.”
Opening statements were made on Friday in the trial of Jose Ibarra, an illegal immigrant accused of killing 22-year-old nursing student Laken Riley in February.
Ibarra, 26, waived his right to a jury trial and will instead leave his fate in the hands of a judge, CNN reported. Ibarra is charged with 10 counts, 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.
“On Feb. 22, Jose Ibarra put on a black hat, a hoodie-style jacket, and some black kitchen-style disposable gloves, and he went hunting for females on the University of Georgia campus,” prosecutor Sheila Ross said in her opening statements on Friday, according to Fox News.
“When Laken Riley refused to be his rape victim, he bashed her head in with a rock repeatedly,” Ross added.
Ibarra and his brothers, all illegally in the country from Venezuela, lived just half a mile from the park where Riley was running on the day she was killed.
Ibarra’s defense attorney, Dustin Kirby, said during his opening statements that there was not enough evidence to conclude beyond a reasonable doubt that Ibarra is the man who murdered Riley.
“We waived a jury trial in this case, with the hope and trust that despite the nature of this evidence that you could come to a verdict that was not just a way of of easing this family’s suffering, but it was based on an impartial and honest assessment of the evidence in this case,” Kirby said, according to Fox. “If that happens and the presumption of innocence is respected, there should not be enough evidence to convince you beyond a reasonable doubt that Mr. Ibarra is guilty of the crimes charged.”
Later on Friday, with Laken Riley’s mother crying uncontrollably, the 911 call that captured her daughter’s final moments alive was played in court, the New York Post reported. A male voice can be heard briefly on the muffled audio.
“Clark County 911. Hello, Clark County 911. Can anyone hear me?” the 911 operator repeated during the phone call, which lasted less than a minute. The operator attempted to call back, but no one answered, Ross said on Friday.
The 911 call was placed at 9:11 a.m. on February 22, 2024, just eight minutes after Riley left her home to begin her jog.
Snapchat photos from Ibarra’s phone show what he was wearing on the day of Riley’s murder, and a mixture of Riley’s and Ibarra’s DNA was found on a dark blue jacket Ibarra allegedly threw away soon after Riley’s murder. The hair on that jacket was also “consistent” with Riley’s, though that doesn’t mean it was a DNA match.
Riley’s murder sparked a national outcry and led to the passage of the “Laken Riley Act” by the Republican-controlled House of Representatives, a bill requiring federal officials to arrest illegal immigrants charged with theft, as Ibarra had been before Riley’s murder.
President-elect Donald Trump filled two important positions of his incoming administration on Friday, elevating two longtime loyalists to key White House roles.
“Steven Cheung and Sergio Gor have been trusted Advisors since my first Presidential Campaign in 2016, and have continued to champion America First principles throughout my First Term, all the way to our Historic Victory in 2024,” Trump said. “I am thrilled to have them join my White House as we, Make America Great Again!”
Trump announced that Cheung “will return to the White House as Assistant to the President and Director of Communications.”
Cheung served as the director of communications for the 2024 Trump campaign and previously served in the Trump White House as Director of Strategic Response.
Trump named Gor, who ran a pro-Trump super PAC and a conservative publishing firm, to serve as Assistant to the President and Director of the Presidential Personnel Office.
Trump official Tim Murtaugh celebrated Cheung’s being selected for communications director.
“@StevenCheung is a Class A communicator and top notch choice for White House communications director,” he posted on X. “No one could defend & promote President Trump, the America First agenda & MAGA principles more ably & aggressively.”
“This is well deserved, and the President will be well served,” he added.
Donald Trump Jr. responded to the news about Gor by posting on X: “Awesome news. Sergio will be great!”
Sen. John Thune (R-SD), who will take over as Senate Majority Leader starting in January, said during an interview on Thursday that the U.S. Senate will provide fair hearings to all of President-elect Donald Trump’s nominees.
Thune made the remarks during a Fox News interview with Bret Baier when asked about Trump selecting Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to lead HHS and former Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) to lead the DOJ.
“The American people want change in this country,” he said. “They’re tired of the Biden-Harris-Schumer agenda, and they want President Trump to fix some things. And he wants to get a team in place that can do that, and we’re going to work with him to see that he gets his team installed as quickly as possible so he can implement his agenda.”
Thune said that all the nominees have a process they must go through and that Senate Republicans would not allow Democrats to “obstruct or block President Trump and the will of the American people.”
He also noted that using recess appointments is a possibility but that to get to that point, Republicans would effectively have to all vote to go to recess, meaning that if some Republicans had a problem with a specific nominee, they could vote against going into recess at which point recess appointments would be off the table.
Thune said that Senate Republicans would take advantage of how Democrats weaponized the use of the budget reconciliation process during the Biden administration to ram through unpopular legislation with a simple 51-vote majority.
He said the Senate was focused on fixing the border, strengthening the economy, boosting the military, cutting regulations and taxes, and dominating energy.
Republicans have a mandate from the American people to enact change, and our work starts now.
Actor, producer, and writer Allen Covert says he spent his “entire adult life” working at Happy Madison, the Adam Sandler shingle that gave us “Happy Gilmore,” “Grown Ups” and more comic hits.
“It’s the only real job I’ve ever had,” said Covert.
Now, following his 60th birthday, he’s decided it’s time to branch out on his own. Covert has a new Hollywood goal after breaking free from Happy Madison – bring back the bawdy comedy.
Covert’s expansive credits include “Little Nicky,” “The Wrong Missy,” “Murder Mystery,” “Hubie Halloween” along with his many comic cameos in Sandler smashes like “The Wedding Singer,” “Happy Gilmore,” and “The Waterboy.”
Allen Covert, Adam Sandler, and Drew Barrymore in “The Wedding Singer.” (1998). Juno Pix. New Line Cinema. Robert Simonds Productions. IMDB.
Covert’s comedy resume speaks for itself, but he also has a focus group of four to fall back on. His children.
“They watch old comedies. They literally say to me, ‘Why don’t they make movies like this anymore?’” he said.
They can’t blame Daddy for the comedy drought. Even though fans tell him how much they love his comedies, Covert says, “Not one studio is making one right now. They’re not making comedy, period.”
It’s an exaggeration, but only a slight one. Big-screen comedies are on the decline, with most of the funny stuff heading straight to streaming. Think this year’s “Ricky Stanicky” (Prime Video) or the upcoming “Dear Santa” (Paramount+).
Allen Covert and Doris Roberts in ‘Grandma’s Boy’. Photo Credit: Darren Michaels. TM and copyright 2005 Level 1 Entertainment LLC. All rights reserved. Twentieth Century Fox. Happy Madison. IMDB.
Covert grew up on bawdy teen comedies like “Fast Times at Ridgemont High.” Their rebellious shtick made Covert and his pals howl. It also gave them a common cultural touchpoint. Now, the veteran film producer laments that Gen Zers lack a similar release valve.
“My daughter just graduated high school. [Her generation] hasn’t had a single comedy that’s theirs. Four years of high school. Not one movie they can look back on and go, ‘Remember when we all saw, ‘Can’t Hardly Wait?’ Now, they get ‘Kissing Booth.’”
The latter is a Netflix original. Covert has no problem with the streaming giant, having worked repeatedly with the platform in recent years. He says nothing can replace the theatrical experience.
“There’s something very bonding about sitting in a room with strangers and laughing your a**es off,” he said. “It’s different than sitting at home with three of your friends.”
Allen Covert and Beefy act in a scene from “Little Nicky.” (Photo by M. Aronowitz/New Line/Newsmakers)
The veteran comedy producer (“Grown Ups”) and occasional star (“Grandma’s Boy”) wants to do something about it.
So, where did all the comedies go? Covert points the finger at several culprits, including the invincible Iron Man.
“IP and big-budget blockbusters,” he said. “Everyone is like, we want Marvel films where we can create our universe and every movie makes $500 million to a billion dollars,” he said. “Comedies fell by the wayside at studios.”
The Hollywood groupthink stifles genres that fall out of favor, or as he put it, a “small group of people who pick what gets bought.”
Another reason for the big screen comedy vacuum is obvious to most cultural observers. The new woke rules prevent certain jokes and topics from making the final cut.
“That’s 1,000 percent true,” Covert said without hesitation.
THE TONIGHT SHOW WITH JAY LENO — Episode 3062 — Pictured: (l-r) Comedian Allen Covert during an interview with host Jay Leno on December 16, 2005 — (Photo by: Paul Drinkwater/NBCU Photo Bank/NBCUniversal via Getty Images via Getty Images)
That explains why some comedy actors, like Will Ferrell and Jonah Hill, have apologized for their jokes in recent years.
“If you made a really horrible joke in the past that’s blatantly racist and discriminatory everyone should apologize for that,” he said. “If you made a comedy that’s maybe gotten a little less palatable to the community over time, who cares? I’ll never apologize for a joke.”
“If you do something wrong you get your ass out there and apologize,” he added.
Covert is that rare Hollywood conservative, but he’s been able to produce, write, and co-star in films for years without punishment.
“I’ve never experienced any type of, ‘He’s a conservative. We can’t work with him.’ I was never the lead guy … I was part of a company that was hugely successful,” he said of Happy Madison and his longtime collaborator, Sandler. “My experience in Hollywood as a conservative is probably different than others.”
MALIBU, CA – SEPTEMBER 28: Actors Adam Sandler and Allen Covert attend Rock4EB, Malibu, with Jackson Browne & David Spade sponsored by Suja Juice & Sabra Hummus at Private Residence on September 28, 2014 in Malibu, California. (Photo by Christopher Polk/Getty Images)
Covert has several scripts in near-ready shape for his new endeavor, but he’s still meeting some resistance behind the scenes.
“’What’s the hook?,’ they ask. ‘It’s kids having fun in high school. That’s the hook,” he said. “Kids need this … kids are depressed and anxious. Everyone’s telling them the world’s ending. I wanna tell kids, ‘Have fun … worry about the world ending when you’re 25.”
He still faces an uphill battle despite his comedy resume.
“A lot of people are ready for this. I just don’t think the people in charge are right now,” he said, noting the swirling winds of change in Hollywood haven’t helped. “It’s such a confusing upheaval time in the business. I don’t think they’re able to concentrate on what people wanna see.”
Covert, whose cult hit “Grandma’s Boy” has him recognized in places as far away as South Africa, said he’s ready to meet the pent-up demand for the next great teen comedy.
“I make raw, crazy movies. I make sweet movies — whatever kind of movie needs to be made.”
* * *
Christian Toto is an award-winning journalist, movie critic and editor of HollywoodInToto.com. He previously served as associate editor with Breitbart News’ Big Hollywood. Follow him at HollywoodInToto.com.
The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.
The editor-in-chief of Scientific American announced Thursday that she would leave the publication days after facing backlash for profanity-laced social media posts about President-elect Donald Trump’s supporters.
Laura Helmuth, who claimed that Generation X was “full of f***ing fascists” as Trump defeated Vice President Kamala Harris last week, said she would be moving on from the publication. Helmuth previously apologized for the comments, which she said did not reflect the views of Scientific American, the nation’s oldest continuously published magazine.
“I’ve decided to leave Scientific American after an exciting 4.5 years as editor in chief,” Helmuth posted on the social media site Bluesky. “I’m going to take some time to think about what comes next (and go birdwatching).”
Under her post announcing her resignation, Helmuth posted links to several articles published under her leadership, including one that claimed “gender-affirming care for trans kids is good health care.”
Exit polls showed that Trump performed best with Generation X, generally considered those between the ages of 45 and 64. One exit poll from NBC showed that Trump defeated Harris 54%-44% in that age range. Polling from ABC showed that Trump defeated Harris 50%-48% among those ages 40-49 and 56%-43% among those ages 50-64.
Her resignation comes after she posted on Bluesky asking for “advice for what workplaces can do to help people who are devastated by the election.”
In other posts, she said, “I apologize to younger voters that my Gen X is so full of f***ing fascists” and “Solidarity to everybody whose meanest, dumbest, most bigoted high-school classmates are celebrating early results because f*** them to the moon and back.”
“Every four years I remember why I left Indiana (where I grew up) and remember why I respect the people who stayed and are trying to make it less racist and sexist. The Moral arc of the universe isn’t going to bend itself,” she said in another post.
On November 7, Helmuth posted an apology for the posts after criticism from figures like Tesla CEO Elon Musk, commentator Lex Fridman, and historian Michael Shermer.
“I made a series of offensive and inappropriate posts on my personal Bluesky account on election night, and I am sorry. I respect and value people across the political spectrum,” she posted. “These posts, which I have deleted, do not reflect my beliefs; they were a mistaken expression of shock and confusion about the election results.”
Scientific American President Kimberly Lau thanked Helmuth in a statement to The Washington Post.
“We thank Laura for her four years leading Scientific American during which time the magazine won major science communications awards and saw the establishment of a reimagined digital newsroom,” Lau said in a statement. “We wish her well for the future.”
Federal authorities have arrested and charged a 28-year-old Muslim man in Texas with attempting to provide material support to ISIS.
Anas Said was arrested in Houston last week after the FBI executed search warrants on his residence, vehicle, and electronic devices.
“Analysis of the seized devices ultimately revealed Said’s activities relating to the creation and dissemination of propaganda on behalf of ISIS,” the Department of Justice said in a statement.
The propaganda was found on “multiple social media accounts” linked to Said, which contained “messages and posts that allegedly revealed that Said supported ISIS and the violent attacks carried out in its name.”
If convicted, Said faces up to 20 years in federal prison and up to $250,000 in fines.
His attorney, Balemar Zuniga, downplayed the charges and the claim that his client was planning an attack, saying: “The indictment only alleges that he supported a terrorist group through the production of videos and propaganda.”
However, after being taken into custody, the FBI said that the suspect admitted to researching how to conduct an attack on local military recruiting centers, offering his home as safe sanctuary to ISIS operatives, bragging he would commit a “9/11-style” attack if he had the resources, and attempting to produce ISIS propaganda.
#BREAKING FBI Houston SAC Douglas Williams announces the arrest of 28-year-old Anas Said. He is accused of attempting to provide material support to ISIS, and, by his own admission, planning a #terrorist attack on U.S. soil – all from his apartment in far west Houston. #HouNewspic.twitter.com/o8TnNwRkLn
Anas Said was arrested last week at the apartment complex where he lived.
We stopped a potential terrorist attack from happening right here in Houston! Any day we can publicly say that is a good day. #HouNewspic.twitter.com/9QUkhu20JM
The report said that he allegedly began supporting ISIS after he and his family returned to the U.S. from Lebanon around 2015.
Meta informed federal law enforcement that Said had 11 Facebook accounts that he was allegedly using to support ISIS.
Said’s family members had “expressed their concerns” about his activities in interviews with law enforcement, the report said.
When the FBI executed its search warrant last week, he allegedly refused to comply and tried to destroy his phone, the report said.
“I am grateful for the swift and diligent work of @FBIHouston and other local law enforcement agencies to arrest Anas Said who was planning, researching, and recruiting to execute a terrorist attack in Houston,” said Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX).
“Let his arrest be an example: We will find you and prosecute you to the fullest extent of the law,” he added.
The former Marine who taught Daniel Penny how to apply a chokehold was called to testify at his trial on Thursday.
Joseph Caballer was not present when Penny, a 26-year-old Marine veteran, placed Jordan Neely in a chokehold on a New York City subway car last year. On the stand, Caballer referred to photos and videos of the incident to make his assessment that Penny incorrectly performed the chokehold he taught him, which cuts off the oxygen to the brain in about eight seconds, The New York Times reported.
Caballer testified that the videos and images he saw appeared to show Penny holding Neely for several minutes, though Penny has denied that he was applying pressure to Neely’s neck the entire time. Caballer testified that, as Neely shifted against Penny, the original chokehold could have become an “air choke,” which can “cause injury to the trachea or windpipe” and is not taught by the Marines.
Also on Thursday, jurors were shown Penny’s videotaped interrogation with police following the incident on the train. In the video, Penny tells two detectives that he wasn’t “trying to kill the guy,” referring to Neely.
“I wasn’t trying to injure him. I’m just trying to keep him from hurting anybody else,” Penny said in the video, according to the New York Post.
“That’s what we are taught in the Marine Corps,” Penny added, referring to his attempt to protect other people from Neely’s alleged threats.
One of the detectives present during this interrogation, Brian McCarthy, testified that he didn’t tell Penny that Neely had died at that time.
Multiple witnesses have testified that they were afraid of Neely, who entered the train car and allegedly began ranting that someone was going to die that day and that he didn’t care if he went back to jail. These witnesses have all said they feared for their lives, with some even thanking Penny for stepping in, The Daily Wire reported.
In one recording from a police body cam, Alethea Gittings recalled what she heard Neely saying prior to Penny’s intervention.
“I heard the young man that’s on the floor saying, you know, ‘hey, I’m willing to die. You know, I’ll do anything. I’ll go to jail. I don’t care. I don’t care,’” Gittings said.
Gittings testified last Friday that she thanked Penny for his actions.
“The guy in the tan did take him down like, very respectfully and just like held. He just held him. Yeah, yeah, He just held him. He didn’t choke him,” Gittings told officers in the footage played in court.
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.
The mayor of the small Florida town where FEMA relief workers skipped over homes with Trump signs after Hurricane Milton wants those involved held accountable.
Lake Placid Mayor John Holbrook told The Daily Wire that he was “very much surprised” that FEMA supervisor Marn’i Washington instructed relief workers to “avoid homes advertising Trump” while canvassing his community. Whistleblowers told The Daily Wire that at least 20 homes were skipped because of the guidance, which Washington later said was due to “political hostility.”
”We’ve always had a great relationship with FEMA and that’s what is surprising about this,” Holbrook said. “However far it goes, I hope it’s taken care of and the people are prosecuted the way they should because you know as well as I do that the American people deserve better treatment than this. Nobody should be penalized or discriminated against on who they vote for.”
The part-time mayor, who also manages a local hardware store, said that tornadoes caused by Hurricane Milton did major damage to his community. He said that around 30 homes were taken out in the Tropical Harbor mobile home park, saying that many were out of town when the storm came through. He also said the tornadoes “cut a swath” through a nearby Duke Energy solar farm.
Holbrook said that he expected FEMA to be focused on other parts of the country that were hit harder by the hurricanes, and only learned the agency had come to Lake Placid after The Daily Wire report.
“We really haven’t had much interaction with FEMA like a lot of people have,” he said. “I do understand that FEMA is in the area now and they have foot soldiers on the ground and they’re going into a lot of the subdivisions and they’re going house to house to just check with everybody and make sure that they are being properly taken care of, which I got to give FEMA credit for that.”
Most of the clean-up from the tornadoes caused by Milton in Lake Placid has been done by city and county officials. Holbrook said that Lake Placid and Highlands County staff had already moved some 600 cubic yards of debris with close to 10 loads left. He said he was very proud of how the town had come together to clean up, saying it was a very “close knit” community.
The guidance from Washington triggered a wave of investigations, including from the House Oversight Committee and the state of Florida. Florida Attorney General Ashley Moody sued FEMA Administrator Deanne Criswell and Washington on Wednesday, accusing them of conspiring to deny aid to Trump supporters.
Holbrook, a registered Democrat, said that there should be no political discrimination coming from the federal government.
“We need to let the trees fall where they may and if there’s more involved then they should be held accountable,” he said. “We have to depend on our government to help us out in times of need like this.”
Oprah Winfrey has responded to claims that she was paid to campaign for Kamala Harris after it was revealed that the talk show host’s company, Harpo Productions, received a $1 million payment from campaign funds.
The payment was made by the Harris campaign on October 15 after Winfrey hosted a town hall event in September, per a report from The Washington Examiner.
Oprah was also featured at Harris’ final campaign rally in Philadelphia just days before the election, where she warned voters to get to the polls instead of being tempted to “sit this one out.”
The 70-year-old celeb was confronted by TMZ on Monday regarding the report, which at the time she said was “not true.”
“I was paid nothing. Ever,” Oprah told the cameraman.
Later in the week, the billionaire TV host clarified her remarks in an Instagram post from The Shade Room. She was replying to a follower who wrote, “Y’all thinking Oprah’s support can be purchased is beyond me.”
“Thank you so much for saying this,” Oprah wrote in response. “I want to high five you and give you a hug. Usually I am reluctant to respond to rumors in general, but these days I realize that if you don’t stop a lie, it just gets bigger,” her reply continued.
“I was not paid a dime. My time and energy was my way of supporting the campaign,” Oprah wrote. “For the live-streaming event in September, my production company Harpo was asked to bring in set design, lights, cameras, microphones, crew, producers, and every other item necessary (including the benches and chairs we sat on) to put on a live production. I did not take any personal fee. However the people who worked on that production needed to be paid. And were. End of story.”
Oprah’s explanation sparked some pushback on social media, with several users questioning how the event could cost that much, or why Kamala’s campaign did not cover the costs.
“This is highly irregular,” Megyn Kelly wrote in response on X. “The subject of the interview does not pay for the set/production costs (the interviewer does) & even more shocking when said costs are $1Mil. Esp shady when it’s a presidential candidate. This is grossly unethical.”
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) received fewer votes and a lower share of the votes on Election Day in Massachusetts than failed presidential candidate Kamala Harris.
Warren, however, won her race in the deep blue state, while Harris lost the presidency, even with Massachusetts’ electoral votes. Harris received 2,074,446 votes in the Bay State, while Warren only received 1,988,453 – meaning Warren received 85,993 fewer votes than Harris, with more than 95% of the votes counted, according to Decision Desk HQ.
Harris also received a higher percentage of votes than Warren. Harris won Massachusetts with 61.3% of the vote, while Warren received 59.3% in her re-election bid – a slight difference of two percentage points.
CNN gave Warren even worse numbers, showing her nearly 500,000 votes behind Harris, although the news outlet based that on data showing just 76% of the votes in.
Senate races tend to get less attention than presidential ones, but the vote differences between President-elect Donald Trump and Tim Sheehy, who defeated incumbent Jon Tester (D-MT), are much smaller. Trump received 351,783 to Sheehy’s 319,432 – a difference of 32,351, or less than half the difference in raw vote totals between Harris and Warren. But Montana is a less populated state, so the percentage of votes shows a larger gap between Trump and Sheehy, 58.1% to 52.6%, respectively, according to CNN’s numbers.
Rhode Island, another deep blue state that borders Massachusetts, also showed closer margins between Harris and the Democrat Senate candidate in that state. Harris won the state with 282,915 votes, or 55.5%, while incumbent Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) won with 293,265 votes, or 59.9%. Whitehouse performed better than Harris in his re-election bid, according to CNN’s election results.
Despite performing worse than one of the poorest-performing Democrat presidential nominees in decades (Harris lost ground with nearly every demographic across the country), Warren doesn’t seem to have humbled. On her campaign account, she accused her political opponents of being “extremists.”
“The far right wants us to feel powerless,” Warren posted on X on Thursday. “Extremists are counting on apathy, cynicism, & heartbreak to be their rocket fuel. They are counting on us to point fingers at each other & lose trust in our ability to make change. I absolutely refuse to give them the satisfaction.”
The far right wants us to feel powerless. Extremists are counting on apathy, cynicism, & heartbreak to be their rocket fuel. They are counting on us to point fingers at each other & lose trust in our ability to make change.
I absolutely refuse to give them the satisfaction.
Warren also insulted Trump’s pick for Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, by ignoring his 20 years of military service and boasting that she’s on the Senate military personnel panel despite never serving.
“A Fox & Friends weekend co-host is not qualified to be the Secretary of Defense,” Warren said. “I lead the Senate military personnel panel. All three of my brothers served in uniform. I respect every one of our servicemembers. Donald Trump’s pick will make us less safe and must be rejected.”
A Fox & Friends weekend co-host is not qualified to be the Secretary of Defense.
I lead the Senate military personnel panel. All three of my brothers served in uniform. I respect every one of our servicemembers.
Warren’s poor showing compared to Harris could be due to her being the architect of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, a government bureaucracy that has made it more difficult for people to get credit, according to The American Consumer Institute. The pinch has been felt especially since inflation rose under the Biden administration.
President-elect Donald Trump announced on Thursday evening that he has nominated one of his top former allies from the House of Representatives to serve as the head of Veterans Affairs.
“I am pleased to announce my intent to nominate former Congressman Doug Collins, of Georgia, as The United States Secretary for Veterans Affairs (VA),” Trump said. “Doug is a Veteran himself, who currently serves our Nation as a Chaplain in the United States Air Force Reserve Command, and fought for our Country in the Iraq War.”
“We must take care of our brave men and women in uniform, and Doug will be a great advocate for our Active Duty Servicemembers, Veterans, and Military Families to ensure they have the support they need,” he continued. “Thank you, Doug, for your willingness to serve our Country in this very important role!”
Collins defended Trump during the two impeachments that he faced during his first term in office and against allegations that his 2016 campaign colluded with the Russian government.
In a statement, Collins said that he was “honored to accept @realDonaldTrump’s nomination as Secretary of Veterans Affairs.”
“Our heroes deserve the best care and support,” he said. “We’ll fight tirelessly to streamline and cut regulations in the VA, root out corruption, and ensure every veteran receives the benefits they’ve earned.”
“Together, we’ll make the VA work for those who fought for us,” he added. “Time to deliver for our veterans and give them the world class care they deserve.”
Honored to accept @realDonaldTrump nomination as Secretary of Veterans Affairs. Our heroes deserve the best care and support.
We’ll fight tirelessly to streamline and cut regulations in the VA, root out corruption, and ensure every veteran receives the benefits they’ve earned.… pic.twitter.com/StWK0XcYAm
Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA) on Friday demanded that FEMA Administrator Deanne Criswell respond to allegations that the agency has a widespread policy of avoiding “politically hostile” homes during disaster relief operations.
Grassley, citing reporting from The Daily Wire, asked Criswell to produce records related to now-fired FEMA supervisor Marn’i Washington’s guidance for relief workers in Lake Placid, Florida, to “avoid homes advertising Trump.” Whistleblowers said that at least 20 homes were bypassed during the response efforts after Hurricane Milton due to the guidance that was given verbally and in a group chat message.
Grassley said he wants all records of conversations at FEMA that include any of the following words: “Trump,” “Republican,” “conservative,” “politics,” “MAGA,” as well as “germane variations thereof.”
“Every year, Americans affected by natural disasters receive assistance from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA),” Grassley wrote in a letter first shared with The Daily Wire. “FEMA employees have reportedly selectively chosen who is worthy of receiving this assistance and Trump supporters don’t make the cut.”
The Iowa Republican added that the “politically partisan selection of aid is unacceptable and contrary to FEMA’s taxpayer supported mission.”
Grassley, the ranking member of the Senate Committee on Budget, asked Criswell to respond to Washington’s claims that FEMA officials approved her instructions and that similar guidance has been followed in the Carolinas.
“FEMA always preaches avoidance first and then de-escalation, so this is not isolated,” Washington said earlier this week during an interview with Roland Martin. “This is a colossal event of avoidance not just in the state of Florida, but you will find avoidance in the Carolinas.”
FEMA has not responded to multiple requests from The Daily Wire for comment on Washington’s claims about the agency’s policies.
“To know if this claim is substantively true, especially considering FEMA’s terminating her for inappropriate conduct, FEMA must produce responsive records to Congress,” Grassley wrote.
The letter asks FEMA to produce by November 28 incident reports from the last five years that include references to Trump or politics and what official policies FEMA has in place for deciding what homes and properties can be skipped. The senator requested FEMA produce records on what rationales have been given in the last five years for marking “not able to access property” when surveying neighborhoods after a disaster.
“Politicization of who receives FEMA assistance is unacceptable, especially as the people affected by these disasters attempt to put their lives back together,” Grassley wrote. “The American people deserve a more robust and detailed explanation of this problem and FEMA’s plans to fix it.”
Other Republican senators have also demanded answers from Criswell, including Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO), Sen. Katie Britt (R-AL), and Sen Rand Paul (R-KY).
Criswell, who announced Washington’s firing last Saturday, has maintained that the situation in Lake Placid was isolated. She is set to testify on Tuesday before the House Oversight Committee.
A spokesperson for ABC has denied rumors that “The View” is hunting for a pro-Trump panelist to help balance the one-sided views that have helped define the show.
“This report is not true,” publicity director Lauri Hogan told The Daily Wire in a statement. “‘The View’ is an opinion-based show featuring a diverse panel of women with different points of view – the current panel is clearly resonating with audiences given that the series just had its highest rated episode in more than a decade and hit a 4-year high in total viewers.”
The denial comes days after a report from The New York Post featuring claims from an unnamed source that ABC execs were scrambling to add pro-Trump individuals to some content following the president-elect’s landslide victory over Democrat nominee Kamala Harris this month. One show mentioned in particular was “The View,” which currently includes six women known for their disdain of President-elect Trump.
“The View is facing pressure from higher-ups,” the source told The Post. “Viewers can expect some major changes including bringing in new panelists that can bring in a pro-Trump perspective.”
“Everyone on ‘The View’ endorsed Kamala Harris. They lost. They are out of touch with America,” the insider added. “For a show about different perspectives, ‘The View’ doesn’t seem to have any when it comes to Trump. ABC bosses don’t want to alienate the pro-Trump demographic.”
Conversations on “The View” are almost always dominated by far-Left viewpoints from co-hosts like Whoopi Goldberg, Joy Behar, Sunny Hostin, and Sara Haines. Token Republican voices have been from anti-Trumpers, such as Ana Navarro and Alyssa Farah Griffin.
Hostin blamed “uneducated white voters” for Trump’s win on the first episode of “The View” following the election, claiming that racism had played a major role in the 2024 presidential campaign. She said she was “profoundly disturbed” over Kamala’s defeat.
Co-host Navarro agreed that racism and sexism drove the results. Meanwhile, Goldberg said that even though Trump had won, she’s not giving up her former vow never to utter his actual name.
“He’s now the president. I’m still not going to say his name. That’s not going to change,” she said. Goldberg also claimed, “Too many people that I know died trying to vote.”
ABC may have denied the rumors of adding a Trump-friendly panelist to “The View,” but if that changes, at least two Daily Wire podcast hosts have offered to join the show. In response to the original Post article, Ben Shapiro replied with a “Hunger Games” GIF that said, “I volunteer!”
“Am I Racist?” star Matt Walsh also responded to the rumors on X, writing, “I would be happy to serve my country in this post.”
President-elect Donald Trump has announced his choice to be the next Secretary of the Interior: two-term North Dakota Republican Gov. Doug Burgum.
“If confirmed by the Senate, Burgum would manage the more than 500 million acres of federal land as well as the fossil fuels and minerals that lie beneath the surface — making him a critical component in Trump’s promise to boost oil and gas output,” POLITICO noted, adding, “North Dakota is the third-largest oil-producing state in the country and also has more than 4 million acres under federal oversight.”
“He’s going to be announced tomorrow for a very big position,” Trump said at Mar-a-Lago Thursday night. “We’re going to do things with energy and with land, Interior, that is going to be incredible. … He’s going to head the Department of the Interior and he’s going to be fantastic. … We’ll make the formal announcement tomorrow.”
Last May, Trump said Burgum, who ran for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination but dropped out before the Iowa caucuses and endorsed Trump, “probably knows more about energy than anybody I know.”
In July 2023, after the Biden administration’s federal Bureau of Land Management (BLM) proposed regulating onshore oil and gas leases on federal lands, increasing the minimum lease bond to 15 times the previous amount, reducing areas available for leasing, and raising the minimum bid amount to five times the previous amount, Burgum stated:
These proposed changes are just the latest in the Biden administration’s long list of misguided policies that discourage domestic energy production. By raisings costs for oil and gas producers who want to develop minerals on federal lands, BLM will drive away producers and drive up energy costs for consumers, who will be forced to pay higher prices for fuels imported from countries that don’t produce energy as cleanly as the United States. We should be selling energy to our friends and allies instead of buying it from our adversaries and putting our country’s economy, energy security and national security at risk.
Even some environmental activists praised the choice of Burgum as Interior Secretary; Collin O’Mara, CEO of the environmental group National Wildlife Federation, stated, “I think he’ll be a very strong champion of the energy dominance agenda. But in North Dakota, he tried to find some level of balance to make sure that important conservation areas, important areas for tourism, weren’t harmed in the process.”
President-elect Donald Trump’s transition team is reportedly pushing to scrap a $7,500 tax credit for electric vehicles.
Wealthy oilman Harold Hamm and North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum are spearheading energy policy on Trump’s transition team. The pair are favoring scrapping the Biden administration EV tax credit to offset other tax breaks and reductions that Trump wants to make permanent, according to Reuters.
The EV tax credit benefits the sector of one of Trump’s biggest supporters, tech mogul Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla Motors, the largest electric vehicle manufacturer in the United States and the second largest globally. Musk has previously supported killing the tax credit, however, because as much as its recension would hurt Tesla, it would hurt Tesla’s competitors even more, according to the Tesla CEO.
“I think it would be devastating for our competitors and for Tesla slightly,” Musk said in a July earnings call, according to Business Insider. “But long term probably actually helps Tesla, would be my guess.”
Musk has called to scrap “all government subsidies, including those for EVs, oil and gas” and create a more competitive market with less government intervention.
The electric vehicle subsidy is a key part of President Joe Biden’s signature Inflation Reduction Act legislation. On the campaign trail, Trump repeatedly promised to roll back Biden’s policies on electric vehicles and Trump’s energy team is eyeing repealing the tax credit to build a case in support of extending Trump’s 2017 tax cuts, which are set to expire next year.
Trump’s electric vehicle agenda will also likely involve repealing tailpipe emissions limits Biden’s administration has placed on vehicle manufacturers. The Biden rule has already been targeted by Republicans in the House.
“The EPA’s latest tailpipe emissions rule is not really about reducing air pollution. It’s about forcing Americans to drive electric vehicles,’’ Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers of Washington, the GOP chair of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, said earlier this year.
The “unreasonable” rule is “just another example of how the Biden-Harris administration’s rush-to-green agenda is handing China the key to America’s energy future, jeopardizing our auto industry and forcing people to buy unaffordable EVs they don’t want,” she said.
Taylor Swift kicked off her Toronto concert Thursday night with a “land acknowledgment” a common practice among left-wing activists who believe they live on “stolen land.”
“We acknowledge that we are performing today at Rogers Centre, located on Treaty 13 lands,” read a graphic projected on stage before Swift’s performance. “We acknowledge the First Nations, Inuit, and Metis peoples whose original and treaty territories we stand upon.”
Taylor Swift put out a Native American land acknowledgment at her concert tonight. She has single handedly solved injustice. You go girl ✊🏿 pic.twitter.com/q95fTDtf8O
Treaty 13 refers to the Toronto Purchase of 1805, in which the British government purchased the land that is now Toronto from the Mississauga tribe. Swift has become increasingly political in recent years, endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris and praising Minnesota Governor Tim Walz for being pro-abortion.
Once a feature of far-left organizations, land acknowledgment have become popular among liberals in recent years. The 2024 Democratic National Convention in Chicago opened with a statement that the convention was taking place on land where a Native American tribe had been “forcibly removed”
The Daily Wire reported earlier this year that over 100 public school districts in the United States have “land acknowledgement statements,” many of which say the United States was built on “stolen land” and committed genocide.
Young star Sydney Sweeney hit back at the claim that women are “empowering” each other in Hollywood and said “it’s all fake.”
Speaking to Vanity Fair, the 27-year-old actress was asked about recent comments by Jennifer Lawrence and Anne Hathaway who said female performers have a tendency to knock down women at their professional peak. It came after a film producer, earlier this year, attacked Sweeney’s talent and looks.
“It’s very disheartening to see women tear other women down, especially when women who are successful in other avenues of their industry see younger talent working really hard—hoping to achieve whatever dreams that they may have—and then trying to bash and discredit any work that they’ve done,” Sweeney said. “This entire industry, all people say is ‘Women empowering other women.’ None of it’s happening. All of it is fake and a front for all the other sh*t that they say behind everyone’s back.”
“I mean, there’s so many studies and different opinions on the reasoning behind it,” she added. “I’ve read that our entire lives, we were raised—and it’s a generational problem—to believe only one woman can be at the top. There’s one woman who can get the man. There’s one woman who can be, I don’t know, anything.”
Sit back, relax, and have a cheese break with @sydney_sweeney.
“So then all the others feel like they have to fight each other or take that one woman down instead of being like, Let’s all lift each other up. I’m still trying to figure it out,” Sweeney continued. “I’m just trying my best over here. Why am I getting attacked?”
The “Euphoria” star recently called out the paparazzi and admitted she feels unsafe at her home due to them and overzealous fan appearances there, Glamour reported.
“[Photographers] said, ‘If you tell her to just come outside in a bikini, I’ll take pictures and then I’ll leave you alone,’” Sweeney said, adding that some critics started saying she had called the press herself to gain attention.
“Why would I call the paparazzi to take pictures of me at my own house when my baby cousins and family are there and I’m in my backyard? Why would I ever want that?” she added. I” have pictures of these guys in kayaks hiding in bushes in the ocean. They got there at 8 a.m. and wouldn’t leave until 4 p.m. I should be able to be in my home and feel comfortable and safe.”
“When those photos go out, then my actual safety is at risk,” Sweeney continued. “Everyone knows where I am. Now there’s boats that go by, and I literally hear them say, ‘This is Sydney Sweeney’s house.’ It becomes a star tour in my front yard.”
On Wednesday, Donald Trump returned to Washington. He began by going to the House of Representatives, where he was met with raucous applause; everyone was really excited. And they had good reason to be; his coattails helped retain the House majority, which is incredibly slim.
Then, he went to the White House — and he was only the second happiest man in the room.
I’m not sure I’ve ever seen Joe Biden this happy. It’s so good. It’s so good.
Let’s take the time machine back to 2016, when President Trump beat Hillary Clinton and then had to go to the White House and meet Barack Obama. Obama was clearly deeply perturbed by meeting with Donald Trump.
The opposite was true on Wednesday. Why?
Because Joe Biden despises Kamala Harris. Despises her. So does Jill Biden.
There is no question that Joe and Jill voted for Donald Trump. I have no doubt in my mind that they both voted for Donald Trump.
Sitting next to a roaring fire — these two new best friends straight from the resort city of Zihuatanejo — Trump and Biden sat next to one another and joked around.
It’s almost as though Joe Biden didn’t actually believe that Trump was Hitler. It’s almost as though all of that stuff about Donald Trump being Hitler was crap and Biden knew it.
Joe Biden looked excited to be there. Trump was joking with him. And behind them, the roaring fire enjoying a crisp Washington, D.C. morning.
Al Drago/Bloomberg via Getty Images
If you saw the scene, you heard the media yelling about President Trump, and the camera panned over to Biden, with a big smile on his face, super happy. What a glorious time he was having. They did release a photo of Jill and Joe with Trump, all grinning broadly.
No one in America is happier that Kamala Harris lost than Joe Biden, who was stabbed in the back by Kamala Harris, who then replaced him and lost. And then everybody blamed Joe Biden anyway.
So, Biden is super happy that Donald Trump won. The pictures are just hilarious and the memes have been extraordinary.
For Trump, it marked a triumphant return to an office where he sat for four years, a week after decisively winning an election by relentlessly attacking Biden’s mental capacity and then by casting the Biden administration as a disaster. “Congratulations,” Biden said at the start of the meeting, during the brief time reporters were in the room. He added that he hoped it would be a smooth transition.
“Politics is tough, and in many cases it’s not a nice world,” Trump responded. “But it is a nice world today.” The meeting stretched for nearly two hours, longer than the one Trump had eight years ago with President Barack Obama. … White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre called it a “substantive meeting and exchange of views.” She said that she spoke with Biden after the meeting ended and that he wanted to emphasize that Trump “was gracious” and that he came to the meeting with a detailed list of questions.
So, once again, Trump has a new best friend.
Maybe Donald Trump will not only pardon Hunter Biden, perhaps he’ll appoint Joe Biden to a position in his administration. You never know.
What the heck, Joe Biden — “The only garbage I see floating out there is his supporters”— was one heck of a loyal supporter of Trump during the latter part of Trump’s campaign.
Shortly after Donald Trump’s upset election victory in 2016, official State of Texas business brought me to two ICE immigration detention centers in South Texas. I ran an intelligence group for the Texas Department of Public Safety’s Intelligence and Counterterrorism Division. What I learned there has informed my beliefs about illegal immigration ever since.
Back then, part of my routine was to help the feds interview apprehended aliens from Pakistan, Syria, Somalia, and Afghanistan and collect intelligence about potential Islamic terrorism. The South Texas Processing Center in Pearsall, Texas, some one hundred miles from the Mexican border, was always filled to the brim with detainees.
But to my surprise, for the first time, it was as empty as a football stadium in baseball season. The same was true of ICE’s larger, ever-packed-to-capacity Port Isabel Service Processing Center near Brownsville, Texas.
“Where is everyone?” I asked the ICE intelligence officers, separately, at both facilities.
The same surprising answer went something like this: People throughout Latin America heard Trump on the campaign stump vowing illegal immigration crackdowns, and they decided to stay home rather than risk smuggling money for nothing. If the perceived odds of successfully getting in and staying a long time to earn money is high enough, they’ll come. If the perceived odds are higher that they’ll be blocked and deported, they’re sheltering in place.
It was the first time I’d heard such a thing, although it seemed so obvious.
The number of Border Patrol apprehensions, however, proved it. In November of 2016 there were 63,361 border apprehensions but by March of 2017 that number dropped to 12,193, the lowest count in decades.
Qian Weizhong/VCG via Getty Images
After interviewing migrants south of the border, some in the U.S. media also noticed. They began to call the link between the candidate’s rhetoric and deterring impact on migration plans “The Trump Effect.”
Well, act two of The Trump Effect is now in play.
While it’s too early for data to prove it, my recent pre-election interviews with immigrants in deep southern Mexico struck a very familiar chord.
“If after election day [Kamala Harris] is elected, we know that everything is good, then we can enter,” one Ghanaian man told me in Tapachula, Mexico’s downtown plaza. Otherwise, he stated, he would stay put in Mexico for years if necessary. That sentiment was ubiquitous in mid-October.
“We know that if Donald Trump wins, all the migrants will be kicked out of the United States,” a middle-aged Venezuelan man in the plaza said. “We hope that he doesn’t win.”
But border hawks should not get complacent. The Trump Effect’s sustainability over time is hardly guaranteed.
The first Trump Effect showed that real action must follow campaign rhetoric. It didn’t last, as Liberal groups challenged every one of Trump’s policies and bogged them down in court.
“No president has been sued over his immigration policies as much as Donald Trump,” one November 2019 Forbes article pointed out.
In 2021, a National Bureau of Economic Research study concluded that Trump’s rhetoric and policies led to a “large, abrupt decline in apprehensions beginning around January 2017.”
“We would argue this was one of the more important changes in the U.S. immigration space in recent years,” wrote researchers Mark Hoekstra and Sandra Orozco-Aleman of their discovery that political communications by politicians do influence immigrant decisions.
Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images
But they too noticed that The Trump Effect didn’t last long. By May 2017, apprehension rates began to increase and had returned to pre-election trends by the summer of 2018. It just got worse before it got better.
By late 2018, with litigation and political opposition of every stripe bogging down Trump’s best laid plans, hundreds of thousands of migrants were pouring in and would do so until mid-2019 when the administration came up with some policy innovations enabling major crackdowns –and court decisions that eventually went Trump’s way.
But today, the whole world will be watching for Trump to follow through with a promised mass deportation program, fast removals of every immigrant caught illegally crossing, and the dismantling of Biden-era open border policies.
And once again, aspiring migrants will rely on their many allies inside the United States to bog things down.
The New York Times recently reported that battalions of immigration lawyers are preparing to battle Trump in court again.
“We literally have a blueprint of what they are planning to do, and so we had months and months to figure out how to protect people,” Becca Heller, founder of the International Refugee Assistance Project, told the paper. “The Trump team might think they are ready, but so are we.”
Expect some large-scale test charges on Border Patrol between ports of entry and on the U.S.-Mexico bridges before and after Trump’s inauguration.
The hundreds of thousands of immigrants caught downstream by the U.S. election result will be glued to their cell phones and encrypted social media apps, paying close attention to what becomes of those up-trail — those who test the Trump administration’s will to stop and deport them. How Trump handles them will matter greatly.
Credit: Photo by John Moore/Getty Images.
For border hawks and anyone who wants to see an end to four years of unimpeded mass migration, however, there are silver linings in that 2025 is not 2017. For starters, many of the policies that Trump 2.0 will bring back are already court-battle tested, such as Remain in Mexico, which allows the Border Patrol to instantly return border-crossers back to Mexico to await the years of their asylum claim adjudications.
But mainly, Trump 2.0 is unlikely to have to weather high political heat for closing the border down after the nation saw and felt 11 million apprehensions over the last four years.
Every poll for the last year, plus the overwhelming re-election of Trump on his illegal immigration shutdown plans shows the American public strongly supports them.
The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.
Correction: A previous version stated, “the courts upheld a Trump 1.0 policy allowing denial of asylum claims by people who passed through a perfectly safe third country…” The United States and Mexico do not have a “safe third country’ agreement.
Collegiate women’s volleyball players filed multiple lawsuits on Wednesday against the Mountain West Conference over the inclusion of trans-identifying male players in their sport.
A dozen women have cited violations of their First Amendment rights and Title IX protections in response to San Jose State University’s biologically male star player Blaire Fleming’s participation in the MWC, prompting four schools in the conference to forfeit games against SJSU, OutKick reported.
Several of Flemings’ SJSU teammates, like Captain Brooke Slusser and two former Spartans — along with female athletes from four other colleges — are part of the suit against the conference, its commissioner and SJSU officials over the conference’s adoption of the “Transgender participation policy” in September after the first school, Boise State, forfeited its game.
The suit said that the policy is “intended to chill protests and other expressive conduct, including boycotts, on a women’s rights issue” of women athletes in the MWC. It also claims that the trans policy was adopted outside the “normal course of MW rules and procedures” and that it was an effort to prevent schools from exercising their First Amendment Rights, the outlet noted.
This is HUGE. Female volleyball players in the Mountain West conference drop a bombshell lawsuit against the @MountainWest citing First Amendment & Title IX violations.
Several of his SJSU teammates signed on as well. This is the way. Hold the line!!! 👏🏼https://t.co/Co6bFPUfEo
“Recently, the MWC, SJSU, and the other Defendants have collectively manipulated MWC rules, diminished sport opportunities for women, spread inaccurate information, used their positions to chill and suppress speech with which they disagree, and punished dozens of female collegiate volleyball student-athletes for taking a public stand for their right to compete in a separate sports category, all in a concerted effort to stamp out debate over women’s rights in sport,” the lawsuit read.
“The NCAA, Mountain West Conference, and college athletic directors around the country are failing women,” Bill Bock, lead attorney for the plaintiffs and the pro-woman organization Independent Council On Women’s Sport (ICONS), which is funding and backing the lawsuit, said.
“Because the administrators don’t have the courage to do their jobs, we have to ask the federal courts to do their jobs for them,” he added.
The lawsuit requests emergency injunctive relief in advance of the MW women’s volleyball tournament in Las Vegas, which starts on Nov. 27. It also calls on either disqualifying SJSU and Fleming from competing in the tournament and/or removing the losses from the records of teams who forfeited SJSU games and therefore the wins from SJSU.
Five schools have forfeited playing SJSU in protest of the biologically male star player on the CA team. Those schools include Southern Utah University, Boise State University, the University of Wyoming, Utah State University, and the University of Nevada.
“The View” cohost Sunny Hostin admitted that in her attempt to give Vice President Kamala Harris a softball, it actually backfired and might have been one of the things that resulted in the VP’s loss in the election to President-elect Donald Trump.
During the show’s “Behind the Table” podcast, Hostin said even she was surprised with the answer after she asked Harris if there was anything “she would have done differently” from President Joe Biden in the last four years.
Harris’ response — “there is not a thing that comes to mind” — was immediately used in Trump campaign ads across the country.
“I followed up because I was surprised at the answer,” Hostin admitted. “Look, I think it wasn’t so much about the question, but it was really more about the answer. The reason I followed up was because that wasn’t a gotcha question. That was a layup, really.”
Hostin said she thought the question was a chance for Harris “to explain to all the people who are saying ‘I want a change agent’” that she was that person based on things like having a different “lived experience” from Biden.
“And I thought she would then say, ‘I would build on the wins we’ve had,’ and I had a laundry list of wins in my head, and she didn’t answer it that way, she said not a thing comes to mind,” Hostin explained, adding that it showed Harris’ loyalty to Biden.
Sunny Hostin admits that she tried giving Kamala a softball question… but then it backfired and might be why she lost pic.twitter.com/WNGimcmdAn
Hostin said she wasn’t going to “opine” now whether the VP’s answer was right or wrong, but she does admit it surprised her.
“I will just say I was surprised at the answer because it was a question that really could have inured to her benefit, it was a question that could have been a change maker,” the ABC host said.
“But again, it was not planned to tank her run,” she added, shutting down claims from people on the Left, like James Carville, that she had some kind of power to influence the election.
Hostin was a staunch Harris supporter during the election, even downplaying evidence in polls that the VP was losing ground with certain parts of the electorate, as well as an NBC poll that showed that any lead the vice president had garnered from the September 10 debate has since evaporated, as previously reported.
“Look, I think that Kamala Harris has been running a flawless campaign,” the host said, arguing that she would not have been able to raise $1 billion if there was no real momentum behind her. “I think it’s because people believe in her, and I think people are showing that by the amount of money that they are willing to give to the campaign.”
“I think we have the press to blame for a lot of this,” she added. “Whoopi, you always say that you don’t believe in polls. I’m with you now, because I’m reading the press. First it was, ‘Kamala’s not doing enough press.’ Then she goes on this huge press tour, she was here, with us, I thought she was fantastic.”
Popular radio host Charlamagne tha God weighed in on President Joe Biden’s cordial meeting with President-elect Donald Trump at the White House on Wednesday, and he admitted to having a hard time wrapping his head around how that all went down.
During his Thursday morning broadcast, he recalled how Biden — along with the rest of his party and a whole host of media talking heads — had been referring to Trump as a “fascist” or suggesting that he was the second coming of Adolf Hitler just days earlier. What he didn’t understand, he said, was how Biden had pivoted so easily from calling Trump an “existential threat” to inviting him into the White House for a pleasant conversation.
WATCH:
Charlamagne on Biden welcoming Trump to White House: "What happened to the threat of democracy talk? What happened to the fascist talk? … I'm just trying to figure out, how do you go from, 'He's an existential threat to democracy' to 'Welcome back'?"@DailyCallerpic.twitter.com/b8a9jfvhGJ
“I just don’t understand the White House visit,” he began. “Granted, I’m glad there’s a peaceful transition of power, but what happened to the threat of democracy talk? What happened to the fascist talk?”
“By the way, I know I’ve said those things about Trump as well,” he continued. “But I’m not talking about me. I’m talking about his political opponents like President Biden. When they say it, it holds way more weight than me. I’m just trying to figure out, how to you go from ‘He’s an existential threat to democracy’ to ‘Welcome back’?”
DJ Envy, Charlamagne’s cohost, weighed in then, noting that Biden had looked happy during the meeting and had been “cheesing” for the cameras.
Charlamagne went on to say that he understood Biden held himself up as an advocate for certain political “norms,” but still couldn’t quite make it all make sense in his mind.
By the end of the segment, he appeared to give up entirely, saying, “I’m gonna stop minding white people’s business.”
The popular host had broached the subject earlier, asking last Friday why prominent members of the Democratic Party had suddenly stopped referring to Trump as a “threat to democracy.”
“Don’t y’all find it strange that now that he’s won, they’re not calling him a threat to democracy? They’re not calling him a fascist. I mean, damn, on Monday, they was just calling him that. I would think that, you know, if you really believe that, then somebody’s speech would be about how America ‘effed up and how things are about to be really bad. It just makes you wonder how much of it did they really believe, or how much of it was just politics. That’s all,” he said at the time.
Obama administration alum Jeh Johnson defended two of the people President-elect Donald Trump has chosen to serve in national security-related positions in his incoming administration: former Hawaii Rep. Tulsi Gabbard as Director of National Intelligence and decorated U.S. Army veteran Pete Hegseth as Secretary of Defense.
While Johnson made it clear — during his Thursday appearance on CNN News Central — that he was not a fan of Trump’s choice for Attorney General, he was willing to give a little grace on some of the others. He even defended Gabbard and Hegseth, explaining why they could be solid choices for those specific roles in Trump’s new administration.
Host Sara Sidner raised the question regarding Gabbard first, repeating the preferred Democrat-media narrative that the former Democrat is somehow beholden to Russia.
“She has spread Russian propaganda. She has challenged the intelligence on whether President Assad used chemical weapons, which the intelligence said he had certainly done. And now she’s in this position to potentially head the high intelligence agency over all intelligence agencies. What does this mean? To you?” she asked.
“Well, I’m going to surprise you a little bit. I don’t think that it is an absolute prerequisite that the director of national intelligence be someone of the intelligence community. I also believe that on occasion, it’s a good thing to be skeptical of the intelligence that we’re provided. Those of us who are in a position of making serious decisions, policymakers,” Johnson replied.
“So being skeptical of what the intelligence community produces can be a good thing. And I’m thinking of the intelligence leading up to the Iraq war, for example,” he added.
Sidner then pivoted to Hegseth — a 20-year veteran who received two Bronze Stars and deployed to Iraq, Afghanistan, and Guantanamo Bay — whom she referred to as a “Fox anchor” and only mentioned briefly that he served in the National Guard.
“Let me ask you about another controversial pick, a Fox anchor, Pete Hegseth. He did serve in the Army National Guard, but now he is up for secretary of defense. And, you know, he said a few things. He has lobbied for people who are accused of war crimes in Afghanistan. He recently said that women do not belong in combat roles. But you have said that you’d give him the benefit of the doubt. Why?”
“I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt,” Johnson said. “Because here’s somebody who was well-educated, obviously intelligent, was in financial services, was in the Wall Street community for a while, could have made a lot of money and chose to leave that, put on the uniform of our country, and see combat. So I give him the benefit of the doubt for that reason.”
Johnson went on to say that both Gabbard and Hegseth would have to appear before the Senate for their confirmation hearings, and he said that he expected the Senate to do its job in vetting them thoroughly.
Democrats in Michigan’s state House are attempting to ram through “radical” sex education changes in the weeks before control of the body flips back to Republicans.
Earlier this week, nearly two dozen Michigan House Democrats introduced HB 6068, which seeks to make major changes to the Revised School Code Act of 1976. The changes range from allowing schools to distribute condoms to giving schools a green light to teach students that abortion is a “method of family planning” and “reproductive health.”
One of the biggest revisions proposed in the new bill is to remove a ban on distributing “a family planning drug or device” on public school property. The proposed amendments to the 1976 law would also add leftist gender terms and require that schools “affirmatively recognize that individuals have different sexual orientations and gender identities and, when discussing or providing examples of relationships, be inclusive of various gender relationships.”
While the changes would still allow schools to teach that abstinence is a “responsible and effective method” of preventing pregnancy and infections, the bill would remove a line referring to abstinence as “a positive lifestyle for unmarried people.” The new bill also keeps in place an option for parents to pull their children out of sex ed.
Some Republicans have raised alarms about HB 6068, with Republican state Rep. Jaime Greene calling it “a clear overreach that strips away the foundational emphasis on abstinence, undermining a responsible approach to sexual health education.”
“It introduces sensitive topics like gender identity, sexual orientation, and reproductive rights, which many parents feel are completely inappropriate for young students,” Greene added in a statement.
Greene told The Daily Wire in a phone call on Thursday that “people are tired of partisan politics” and she expects many parents to opt their children out of sex education if the bill passes. Greene stressed that teaching age-appropriate sex education is still important, but said that Democrats’ proposed changes to the 1976 law aren’t in line with the average Michigan resident.
“Sex ed is supposed to be teaching about biology and how your body works, how it makes a baby, not necessarily you’re identity,” she said.
The bill was referred to the Education Committee after it was introduced by state Reps. Rachel Hood, Emily Dievendorf, Samantha Steckloff, Kara Hope, Veronica Paiz, Natalie Price, Jenn Hill, Penolope Tsernoglou, Lauri Pohutsky, Regina Weiss, Felicia Brabec, Jennifer Conlin, Donavan McKinney, John Fitzgerald, Amos O’Neal, Cynthia Neeley, Julie Brixie, Carrie Rheingans, Phil Skaggs, Noah Arbit, Kimberly Edwards, and Helena Scott — all Democrats.
Hood, one of the bill’s strongest advocates, told Bridge Michigan, “Comprehensive sex education takes a wider lens: enabling students to make healthy choices for themselves and their relationships — and lets these conversations begin long before sex or puberty at developmentally appropriate levels.”
Pohutsky, the Speaker Pro Tempore, said the bill “is absolutely a priority” for her to get passed in the lame duck session, which continues until the end of December. Greene blasted Democrats for continuing to push a “radical agenda” in Michigan despite losing the state House in the election.
“Clearly Michigan spoke, and we had a major overturn in a lot of school boards as well just on the transgender issue,” she said. “We’re exploiting children for political gain and for a political ideology that has just taken off in the last couple of years and is not what most people in our country or even in the world actually believe.”
The Daily Wire has reached out to Pohutsky for comment.
Republicans took back control of the state House in the 2024 election and will hold 58 of the 110 seats at the beginning of January. If the sex ed reform bill is passed before then, it would go to the Democrat-controlled Michigan Senate, and then to the desk of Democrat Gov. Gretchen Whitmer.
President-elect Donald Trump announced the creation of DOGE on Tuesday, the “department” will serve Trump’s White House in an advisory role on ways to cut costs and make the government more efficient. DOGE will be led by entrepreneurs Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy.
“We are very grateful to the thousands of Americans who have expressed interest in helping us at DOGE. We don’t need more part-time idea generators. We need super high-IQ small-government revolutionaries willing to work 80+ hours per week on unglamorous cost-cutting,” DOGE posted on X from a new account. “If that’s you, DM this account with your CV. Elon & Vivek will review the top 1% of applicants.”
We are very grateful to the thousands of Americans who have expressed interest in helping us at DOGE. We don’t need more part-time idea generators. We need super high-IQ small-government revolutionaries willing to work 80+ hours per week on unglamorous cost-cutting. If that’s…
Musk, who owns X and several other high profile companies, backed Trump in the election and oversaw a significant part of the Trump team’s ground game in battleground states. Ramaswamy ran against Trump for the Republican nomination earlier this year, and endorsed the former president after dropping out of the race.
Trump said DOGE could “become, potentially, ‘The Manhattan Project’ of our time” in a statement on Tuesday, comparing the efficiency committee to the United States effort to construct the nuclear bomb during World War II.
“I look forward to Elon and Vivek making changes to the Federal Bureaucracy with an eye on efficiency and, at the same time, making life better for all Americans,” Trump said in a statement. “Importantly, we will drive out the massive waste and fraud which exists throughout our annual $6.5 Trillion Dollars of Government Spending. They will work together to liberate our Economy, and make the U.S. Government accountable to ‘WE THE PEOPLE.’”
Musk is a well-known for cost-cutting at his companies. When the tech mogul acquired X, then called Twitter, in a $44 billion deal in 2022, Musk oversaw mass layoffs at the company. Musk said he cut around 80% of X’s workforce, equivalent to about 6,000 people, in his first few months of owning the platform.
The president-elect gave DOGE a deadline of July 4, 2026, the United States’ 250th anniversary, to come up with recommendations.
“DOGE will deliver our nation the birthday gift of a government that’s actually accountable to its people, rather than the other way around,” Ramaswamy said.
America’s 250th anniversary is on July 4, 2026. DOGE will deliver our nation the birthday gift of a government that’s actually accountable to its people, rather than the other way around. pic.twitter.com/40ft9akLmT
Secretary of State Antony Blinken said that President Joe Biden and his administration are “committed” to sending as much funding as possible to Ukraine in the remaining weeks before President-elect Donald Trump takes office on January 20, 2025.
Blinken, speaking at NATO headquarters in Brussels, Belgium, pointed to a recent “profound and incredibly dangerous development” — the movement of North Korean soldiers to aid in Russia’s war on Ukraine — and argued that it was of the utmost importance for the United States to continue supporting Ukraine’s efforts to repel the Russian troops.
Blinken noted that NATO as a whole needed to deliver a “firm response” before pivoting to tout the United States’ role in that response.
WATCH:
BREAKING: Secretary of State Antony Blinken announces "every dollar we have at our disposal will be pushed [to Ukraine] between now and January 20th" when Trump takes office. pic.twitter.com/7m6VLLfTlI
“As we’re working to make sure that Ukraine has what it needs to effectively defend itself, the United States continues to step up. We’ve obligated just recently and pushed out the door another $8 billion in security assistance for Ukraine – that was in September, another almost half a billion dollars just a few weeks ago, and President Biden has committed to making sure that every dollar we have at our disposal will be pushed out the door between now and January 20th,” he said. “We’re making sure that Ukraine has the air defenses it needs, that has the artillery it needs, that has the armored vehicles it needs.”
The urgency with regard to sending aid to Ukraine has been ratcheted up not only with the appearance of North Korean fighters in Russia, but with President-elect Trump’s landslide victory on November 5th, as many currently in power are concerned that Trump would not continue to send aid — particularly in the amounts that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has requested.
Trump has said on a number of occasions that he could put an end to the war in as little as one day — and has also insisted that if he had been president at the time, Russian President Vladimir Putin would not have invaded Ukraine in the first place.
President-elect Donald Trump has nominated Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to lead the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) after he is sworn into office in January.
“I am thrilled to announce Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as The United States Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS),” Trump said in a statement. “For too long, Americans have been crushed by the industrial food complex and drug companies who have engaged in deception, misinformation, and disinformation when it comes to Public Health.”
“The Safety and Health of all Americans is the most important role of any Administration, and HHS will play a big role in helping ensure that everybody will be protected from harmful chemicals, pollutants, pesticides, pharmaceutical products, and food additives that have contributed to the overwhelming Health Crisis in this Country,” Trump continued. “Mr. Kennedy will restore these Agencies to the traditions of Gold Standard Scientific Research, and beacons of Transparency, to end the Chronic Disease epidemic, and to Make America Great and Healthy Again!”
I am thrilled to announce Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as The United States Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS). For too long, Americans have been crushed by the industrial food complex and drug companies who have engaged in deception, misinformation, and disinformation when it…
Kennedy launched a campaign for president as a Democrat in April 2023. Six months later, he ended his bid for the Democrat nomination and switched to running as an Independent candidate.
Kennedy dropped out of the race in August 2024, endorsed Trump, and promised to investigate chronic health issues and what he believes is corruption within America’s health and food ecosystem.
Chronic diseases like diabetes, cancer, and heart disease are the leading causes of death in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — and the “leading drivers of the nation’s $4.5 trillion in annual health care costs.” Close to 30% of American teens are prediabetic, more than 18% of young adults have nonalcoholic fatty liver disease, and cancer rates among young people are rising.
Experts have predicted that by 2030, almost half of United States adults will be severely obese, and data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination survey found that 93% of Americans are metabolically unhealthy.
Federal prosecutors last week indicted three people on charges of staging a hate crime involving the n-word and a burning cross to help a left-wing candidate get elected mayor of Colorado Springs.
Prosecutors say Derrick Bernard, Ashley Blackcloud, and Deanna West, who were affiliated with a self-styled “minority-owned independent broadcasting and multimedia organization,” wrote the racial slur on a campaign sign for black candidate Yemi Mobolade, erected and ignited a cross in front of it,photographed it, and sent it to the media in order to boost Mobolade’s candidacy.
The hoax came after Mobolade and Wayne Williams, a white Republican, nearly tied in an April 2023 election, triggering a runoff election the following month. Public opinion changed significantly before the runoff, with local news calling it a “stunning turn of events” that Mobolade won with 58%. He is now mayor of Colorado’s second-largest city.
After Mobolade won the runoff election, Bernard allegedly texted him saying “we got you through it all brother.” He texted Blackcloud suggesting he expected favors from Mobolade, sending a link to city job openings and saying “I want favors quicker than later.”
A day after the first election, Bernard wrote to Blackcloud “Ima just talk to you bout a few plans,” then texted candidate Mobolade on April 13 to say “I spoke with some of my friends in other places and theirs [sic] a plot amidst,” according to the indictment.
Bernard allegedly texted Blackcloud that “they ain’t tryna let an African win” but “I got a plan.”
Early in the morning on April 23, the trio allegedly staged the hate crime and emailed photographs to Mobolade and media outlets from an anonymous email address. The email attempted to use the fake hate crime to turn out black voters, writing that the “target of any one hate crime is not just the direct victim, but also anyone who shares the victim’s targeted identity.”
At 7:30 p.m. that same night, Bernard texted Mobolade, “I guarantee the finish,” referring to a message saying he needed support to get to the finish line of his campaign, the indictment says.
On April 25, Bernard texted Mobolade, “Brother some foul stuff came up I’m [sic] our email.” The next day, he spoke with him on the phone for five minutes, the indictment notes.
The media bit on the story. KDVR wrote, “in the midst of the tight race, racially charged messaging has surfaced seemingly targeting the West African immigrant.” It quoted an NAACP official, Rashad Younger, saying that the NAACP spoke to Mobolade’s campaign, which said it was “assuming this is a hoax,” but that the NAACP was treating it as real, anyway. Angela Stevens, the president of the Colorado Springs NAACP, said “we are looking at this as voter intimidation…Do we believe that it’s a hoax? Personally, we do not.”
The Daily Wire asked a spokeswoman for Mayor Mobolade whether he was aware of the scheme, what he thought Bernard was referring to when he said he had a “plot amidst,” why he thought Bernard “guaranteed” his victory, what they spoke about on the phone, why his campaign indicated to the NAACP that it was a hoax, why Bernard would think he was owed “favors” by Mobolade, and whether he sought or was given any.
Colorado Springs spokeswoman Vanessa Zink replied with a statement from Mobolade.
“That incident during my campaign led to a very traumatic time for my family, my campaign team, and our community. My knowledge and interaction with Bernard was as a local media personality, and I was not aware at the time that he was suspected of this crime. I appreciate local and federal law enforcement’s work in pursuing justice and sending a message that we will not tolerate such reprehensible behavior.”
The trio is charged with making false statements and threats using interstate commerce, having used the internet to make searches like “contact news about a story,” “kkk email,” and “candidates racist acts during campaign.”
Since allegedly staging the fake hate crime, Bernard was sentenced to life in prison for an unrelated murder in Texas. West is a fugitive, while Blackcloud is in custody.
Far-left MSNBC host Joy Reid joined the leftist exodus from the social media platform X following Trump’s victory last week.
The X profile for her MSNBC show “The ReidOut” still appears active, but the host’s personal account has been deactivated. Reid explained her reasons for leaving the platform in a video.
“Today I finally did something I’ve been meaning to do for a while,” she said in the clip posted to TikTok. “The reason for doing it, and kissing goodbye [to] my 1.9 million followers, is because I haven’t been posting for a long time. I just didn’t want to be contributing content once it was purchased by its present owner.”
The host said she was fed up with “negativity” on X.
“Every so often, I would use it to just look at news that was trending and what’s happening and I would just use it as an aggregator, but I just realized that’s not really worth it,” she added. “Because in order to do the news aggregation and just look at all, you have to wade through a lot of dreck and just abuse and a lot of negativity, and it’s just not worth it.”
Many other leftists have also left X in recent days. The U.K.-based news outlet The Guardian announced this week it will no longer post on X from its official accounts, citing “disturbing content.” NPR also stopped using X after the platform added a “state-affiliated media” tag to NPR’s profile.
Former CNN host Don Lemon said he was leaving the social media platform, claiming it’s no longer a place for “honest” debate following Trump’s big win.
“I once believed that it was a place for honest debate and discussion, transparency and free speech, but I now feel it does not serve that purpose,” Lemon said on Wednesday.
Actress Jamie Lee Curtis also left X this week, but didn’t state a specific reason. “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,” Curtis wrote on Instagram. “Courage to change the things I can. And the wisdom to know the difference.”
Meanwhile, British actor Ricky Gervais posted an announcement of his own, stating, “I’m not leaving here by the way. I’m on Facebook, Instagram, Bluesky & Threads now, but I’ll always be a Twitter guy. (Never calling it X) Cheers!”
We have talked a lot over the years about the decline in the birthrate and the rapidly increasing number of young adults who are refusing to get married and have children. As much as we’ve discussed the subject, we still have not discussed it enough. It is one of the great crises facing our civilization at the present moment. When a society gives up on having children, it has given up on its future, given up on itself.
Of course, plenty of people are still having children. We haven’t entered full on “Children of Men” territory quite yet. Our population is still growing, just as the population of the world is still growing. But that growth is slowing. And we have long since crossed the crucial threshold where our fertility rate is now below replacement level. We are no longer having enough babies to replace older people as they die off. As a consequence, our population itself grows older and more top heavy. All kinds of complications follow form this, and those complications quickly turn into catastrophes.
We have discussed many aspects of this problem. But it’s a problem so deep and all-encompassing that there are always going to be new dimensions to explore. A few days ago, the New York Times, engaging in another random act of journalism (as Rush Limbaugh used to call it), published a piece homing in on a facet of the birth rate decline that, until now, hadn’t gotten much press, if any at all. The article is titled: “The Unspoken Grief of Never Becoming a Grandparent.” The piece, by Catherine Pearson, has gotten a decidedly mixed reaction. Some people — myself included — found it to be a profoundly sad yet very empathetic and very interesting look at a group of people who are suffering in a unique way from our society’s plummeting birth rate. But other people were angry and offended, for reasons we’ll talk about in a moment.
First let’s read a bit of this:
“Lydia Birk, 56, has held on to her favorite copy of “The Velveteen Rabbit” since her three children — now in their 20s and 30s — were young.
She loved being a stay-at-home mother, and filled her family’s home with books. (All of her children could read before they started school, Ms. Birk recalled with pride.) She hoped one day to be a “cool” grandma who would share her favorite stories with a new generation.
But none of her children want to have kids. And though that decision is “right for them,” Ms. Birk said, it still breaks her heart. “I don’t have young children anymore, and now I’m not going to have grandchildren,” she said. “So that part of my life is just over.”
Like Ms. Birk, a growing number of Gen Xers and baby boomers are facing the sometimes painful fact that they are never going to become grandparents. A little more than half of adults 50 and older had at least one grandchild in 2021, down from nearly 60 percent in 2014. Amid falling birthrates, more U.S. adults say they’re unlikely to ever have children for a variety of reasons, chief among them: They just don’t want to.”
The article continues with more anecdotes along these lines. I won’t post them all here. But you should read them for yourself. They’re quite sad. And quite illuminating. There are many older people these days with children who swear they will never have children of their own. The reasons they give for remaining childless are all very similar. They point to the economy, the state of the world, climate change, and so on. None of them feel they have any obligation to have kids and carry on the family name and the bloodline. They are thinking only about themselves and what would make them most comfortable. And they’ve decided that they are most comfortable being childless and alone. Their parents will just have to deal with the loneliness and grief. That’s the general attitude.
It’s also the attitude of many commenters on this article. There’s plenty of sympathy for the would-be grandparents. But there’s also a lot of this sort of thing:
Boo hoo. Get over yourself. I chose not to have children. That is/was my choice, which was clear from day one with my spouse. He married me on those terms. I am not responsible for my parents’ happiness, they are. They tried to guilt me into it during the first few years I was married but eventually gave up. It was never their choice to make.
A similar message in this comment:
I feel it is extremely self centered of any person who expects others to make decisions that will make them happy. Too many parents try to live their lives vicariously through their children. Children do not owe their parents everything. Besides, many of us were forced to babysit our younger siblings. I had 18 years of watching my 3 younger siblings AND having to work in my mother’s day care center! My God, if I had had my own children I would have ended up spending my entire life raising children. My purpose in life is not to watch/raise children. With the recent parental theory/practice of making the oldest child the ‘third parent’ (making them help raise their younger siblings) you can expect that more people will reject parenthood when they become adults.
I have to clarify one thing here. It is a not a “recent theory” that older children should help care for their younger siblings. This is in fact how all human societies have worked since the dawn of our species. This commenter is suggesting that “more people” are rejecting parenthood because they were raised in the same way that billions of humans have been raised since time immemorial. This is a common theme. People with absolutely no understanding of human history have decided that the challenges they have faced are utterly unprecedented, when in fact they haven’t dealt with a single thing that billions of other people haven’t also dealt with. And those billions of people had families in spite of it.
In any case, this article also went viral on X. The commentary there was very similar.
A couple of examples:
Unspoken? my parents never shut the f up about wanting grandkids. dont f up the economy for your children and then get surprised when they can’t afford kids.
Another one says:
These grandparents should have built enough generational wealth so their kids would feel financially secure enough to start a family. “The unspoken grief of not being a trustfund nepobaby who can easily support a family.”
Obviously we hear this excuse constantly. We’re told that people aren’t having kids today because “the economy” makes it impossible. This person blames the brith rate decline on a lack of “generational wealth.” Let me reiterate a point I made on Twitter/X, which seems to have upset a lot of people. Now I’ll upset them again. The economy is not preventing anyone from starting a family or having children. I am not denying that the economy is in poor shape at the moment. But that is not a good reason for a society to give up on the family. If anything, it’s all the more reason not to give up.
You don’t need “generational wealth” to start a family. I didn’t have any generational wealth when I started mine. Many of you are familiar with my story. I was broke when I got married. The economy wasn’t exactly humming at the time either. We were just climbing out of the Great Recession. I was living in an apartment on a meager salary. So broke that I frequently had to pay for gas with the spare change in the cupholder in my car. We weren’t in much better shape when we had our first two kids. We didn’t buy our first house until we already had three kids. You do not need to be rich to start a family. You do not need to come from a rich family. You do not need a strong economy. Economies ebb and flow. They go up and they go down. If you ever have kids, it is guaranteed that you will have kids during a weak economy. It may be strong now, but you’ll still be a parent ten years from now when it dips again. It may be weak now, but you’ll be a parent ten years from now when it’s stronger. This is how economies work.
It’s why you can’t wait around for the economy to permit you to move on with your life and do the things that you are meant to do as a human being.
I share my own story as an example because it’s my story, but because I want you to know that I’ve actually done the thing I’m advocating for. But of course even at my brokest point I was still “rich” compared to the vast majority of humans who have ever lived on Earth. You, right now, no matter what your financial situation, are richer than almost everyone who has ever lived. People with fewer resources than you have been reproducing since the beginning of human civilization. Literally billions of people have done the thing that we are now told can’t be done unless you have $100,000 in savings. If people had this attitude in the past, the human species wouldn’t exist anymore.
So, you can’t afford to start a family? How can that be? How can it be that you can’t afford it, and yet billions of people have afforded it with less? How is it that you “can’t” do something that has been done under more difficult circumstance billions of times? I am often told by younger people that the situation now is just too difficult, everything is too expensive, I just don’t understand, I can’t relate. It’s like they think the history of the world started 45 minutes ago. If you think the challenges you face today are so unprecedented that they mean we should stop reproducing as a species then you simply have no understanding of world history. You don’t know what the world was like. You don’t know what your ancestors had to deal with. You don’t even know what people ten years older than you had to deal with.
People have been through recessions, depressions, famines, wars, catastrophes of all kinds. And they continued having children. They continued building families. Sure, fertility rates have gone up and down over the years and decades. But there has never been a time when mass amounts of young adults have simply sworn off parenthood altogether. That has never happened until now.
Do you really think you face greater hurdles than your great great grandparents did during the Great Depression? Do you really think it’s harder to have a family now than it was when the Black Death was wiping out a third of the population of Europe? Yes, these days young families may struggle to buy a starter home. I did, too, in my early 20s. If there was ever a time when it was easy for someone in their 20s to afford a nice home, that time lasted for like 30 seconds 40 years ago. It was never like that before, and hasn’t been like it since. Get over it. Most people in the history of Earth could never dream of living in any kind of home at all. In fact, for most people who’ve ever lived, the greatest challenge in starting a family was that half of their kids wouldn’t live past infancy. And yet they still started families. They still forged on.
The truth is the economy isn’t stopping anyone from having kids. It’s not that they can’t afford it. It’s that they don’t want to make the sacrifices it requires. They’d have to give up a certain measure of comfort in order to start a family, and they don’t want to do that. For most of the people who say they can’t afford kids, that’s what they mean. That’s how we can end up in a situation where someone “Can’t afford kids” even though they are wealthier and more comfortable than billions of people who somehow could afford kids.
What they really mean to say is they can’t afford the same level of luxury and comfort while also having kids. This is not a matter of affordability. It’s a matter of priority. A lot of people today prioritize their own pleasure and enjoyment over anything and everything else.
The irony, of course, is they so often end up with far less pleasure and enjoyment than people who don’t prioritize it. The truth is you can start a family and have kids and then down the line end up far richer than you were when you were childless. I’m a testament to that. Millions of other examples are available. But one of the most basic realities of life is that if you want more, you have to be willing to risk what you already have. You have to put your chips on the table. If you won’t do that, you’ll be stuck in exactly the spot you’re in right now forever. Until eventually you lose that too.
That brings me to the final point I want to make. We heard those responses to the New York Times article from people who insisted, quite indignantly, that they don’t owe it to anyone to have kids. But actually, you kind of do. Nobody will tell you this.
Nobody will talk about the obligation to start a family. The idea that any of us have any obligations at all is of course anathema to the modern mind. We are deeply distressed by the thought that we owe anything to anyone, ever. But you can be distressed all you want. I’ll say what no one else will say to you: You do actually owe it. You have a duty. There are exceptions. Some people are called to a life of service apart from biological parenthood. Some people simply can’t have kids. There are other vocations human beings can have. But most of us are called to start families. And for those of us who are called, we do owe it, we do have a debt to pay.
Your ancestors suffered and bled and died to build the civilization you live in now, and give you all of the comforts and luxuries you take for granted. They lived lives that were, by our standards, brutal and short and impoverished. They built their lives by hand, from scratch. They built this civilization from scratch. You think you can’t afford children. You have a grandfather not all that far back in your lineage who built a one bedroom cabin by hand and shared it with your grandmother and 8 kids, one of whom gave birth to the person who gave birth to the person who gave birth to you. You experience more comfort and luxury in a single day then that man did in his entire life. His life would have been easier if he never had kids. But he had them, because he wanted you to exist. He was actually thinking 100 years into the future — 200 years, 300 years. You come from a long line of people who actually cared about what the world would look like in the distant future, even as you only care about what you’re going to have for lunch this afternoon.
You don’t have just one grandfather like that. Your bloodline was carried on through the centuries by men and women of this type. They carried your family name and your lineage and your history and everything that makes you, you — they carried it on their backs, and suffered for its sake. And now after all of that, after those thousands of years of struggle and strife just to bring you into this world, you’re going to shrug your shoulders and refuse to continue. They ran marathons, handed you the baton, and you’re going to just sit down in a lawn chair and say, “Sorry, you all wasted your efforts. The race ends here. I don’t feel like running.” You’re going to wipe out your lineage and bloodline just so that you have more time to watch Netflix? Thousands of years of toil end with you, by your own choice, because you just can’t be bothered. That is a failure of historic proportions. It is a failure to live up to your obligation. Because yes you have an obligation to the people who built this world — you have an obligation to continue what they built.
I’m not saying this is the most compelling argument. To a lot of people these days, the idea that they should have any respect for their ancestors, much less that have any obligations to them, is totally foreign. I realize that. We are a culture severed from its own past, living a perpetual state of now, as though the past never happened and the future will never happen. That’s how you end up with people who act as though they’re facing unprecedented financial hardships because they can’t afford to buy a three bedroom house at the age of 23. I understand all of that. But what I’m saying is still true, all the same.
So if your parents are sad that you aren’t giving them any grandchildren, this is why. They have every right to be sad. They are mourning not only their own loneliness, but also the fact that you are choosing to squander ten thousand years of work. They are mourning the extinction of their bloodline. And they are wondering what the point of any of this ever was, if it all ends like this, it all ends with you, for no good reason.
President-elect Donald Trump has indicated that he wants to use recess appointments to install Cabinet members, bypassing the typical confirmation process of hearings and votes, even with a Senate that will be controlled by Republicans.
Over the weekend, Trump demanded that the next leader of the upper chamber break with what has become the routine under both parties for years: scheduling pro forma sessions during extended off-periods, essentially keeping the Senate from entering a recess and thus preventing the president from making appointments in their absence.
“Any Republican Senator seeking the coveted LEADERSHIP position in the United States Senate must agree to Recess Appointments (in the Senate!), without which we will not be able to get people confirmed in a timely manner. Sometimes the votes can take two years, or more,” Trump said in a post to X.
“This is what they did four years ago, and we cannot let it happen again. We need positions filled IMMEDIATELY! Additionally, no Judges should be approved during this period of time because the Democrats are looking to ram through their Judges as the Republicans fight over Leadership,” he added. “THIS IS NOT ACCEPTABLE. THANK YOU!”
Sen. John Thune (R-SD), who was elected to be the next Senate majority leader on Wednesday, signaled an openness to recess appointments. But he suggested recess appointments — which have taken place in the past — should only happen when alternative options have been exhausted.
“We must act quickly and decisively to get the president’s Cabinet and other nominees in place as soon as possible to start delivering on the mandate we’ve been sent to execute, and all options are on the table to make that happen, including recess appointments,” he said in a statement obtained by The Daily Wire.
Trump has wasted no time in announcing a host of nominees for top roles in his coming administration, including Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) for secretary of state, South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem for secretary of homeland security, and now-former Fox News host and Army National Guard veteran Pete Hegseth for secretary of defense.
One firebrand pick in particular — now-former Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) for attorney general — has dismayed Democrats and even some members of Trump’s own party.
“I don’t think he’s a serious candidate,” Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) said of Gaetz, according to The New York Times.
“I was shocked by the announcement — that shows why the advice and consent process is so important,” said Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME), adding, “I’m sure that there will be a lot of questions raised at his hearing.”
It remains to be seen whether a nominee like Gaetz can muster enough votes to achieve confirmation in the Senate. A simple majority is needed. If not, the Constitution grants the president the authority to make temporary appointments to fill vacancies when the Senate is in recess.
But a 2014 Supreme Court ruling affirmed the Senate could schedule pro forma sessions — in which a single member essentially just gavels in and no business gets conducted — every few days during long breaks to block recess appointments in a rebuke of then-President Barack Obama’s appointments to the National Labor Relations Board.
Longtime Capitol Hill reporter Jamie Dupree explained in posts to X that the Senate majority leader “has no power” to allow a president to make recess appointments because Congress must approve an adjournment resolution for breaks of more than three days, which could be filibustered in the upper chamber.
One potential workaround, however, is the president using Article 2, Section 3 of the Constitution to adjourn both chambers of Congress if they cannot agree on a time to do it — an idea that Trump actually floated at the end of his last term, noting such an unprecedented move would likely end up in court.
“After 10 days, Trump could then fill any vacant administration posts,” Dupree said of such a scenario. “The downside of that presidential power move is that most of the people getting recess appointments could not be paid (that’s in federal law). And their time on the job would expire on Jan. 3, 2027 – unless the Senate approves their specific nominations.”
House lawmakers overseeing FEMA ripped into Administrator Deanne Criswell on Thursday, demanding answers after one of her employees instructed relief workers to skip the homes of Trump supporters in Florida.
In a letter from 35 Republicans on the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee shared with The Daily Wire, the lawmakers said that Criswell had failed Americans through her handling of relief efforts after Hurricanes Helene and Milton. They demanded Criswell provide a briefing to discuss guidance first reported on by The Daily Wire from now-fired supervisor Marn’i Washington to bypass homes with Trump signs or flags in Lake Placid.
“In reporting that first emerged from The Daily Wire, it was revealed that a FEMA supervisor sent a best practices message to FEMA workers canvassing the Florida area impacted by Hurricane Milton, which instructed the workers to ‘avoid homes advertising Trump,’” the letter said.
The letter was signed by Transportation Committee Chair Sam Graves (R-MO) and Subcommittee on Economic Development, Public Buildings, and Emergency Management Chair Scott Perry (R-PA). They requested a briefing on the incident by December 2.
Whistleblowers told The Daily Wire that around 20 homes were skipped because of the guidance. FEMA responded to the report by saying it was an “isolated incident” and firing Washington.
The Republicans asked Criswell to provide documents on when officials first found out about the guidance and what they did when they found out about it. A whistleblower complaint was filed on the guidance on October 27, and Washington was fired on November 9.
“As the FEMA Administrator, you are responsible for leading the Nation’s efforts to prepare for, protect against, and respond to natural disasters.The Committee is troubled that under your leadership FEMA failed to aid all Americans, regardless of party affiliation,” the letter said.
“Your inability to ensure that FEMA provide relief to all Americans affected by disasters, free of discrimination, represents a substantial failure of leadership. The blatant disregard of President-elect Trump supporters directly contradicts FEMA’s core mission and values,” they added.
The lawmakers said that FEMA’s preparedness and readiness had been degraded because of a focus on equity and climate change. They pointed to stories from North Carolina where residents have said that FEMA has been slow to respond after Hurricane Helene devastated the region.
“It is clear that, under the Biden-Harris Administration, FEMA has been ill-prepared to provide assistance and relief to many Americans in need,” they wrote. “At the briefing, FEMA should be prepared to discuss concerns related to the agency’s failure to aid Americans regardless of party affiliation, including the steps FEMA has taken to assist unaided families, policies implemented to prevent future political discrimination, and the prevalence at which the agency fell derelict in its duty to assist victims.”
Criswell is set to testify before the Subcommittee on Economic Development, Public Buildings, and Emergency Management on Tuesday morning and the House Oversight Committee on Tuesday afternoon.
Ana Navarro, regular cohost of ABC’s “The View,” called on President Joe Biden to issue a handful of pardons — most of them “pre-emptive” — before President-elect Donald Trump takes office in January.
Navarro first said that Biden should go ahead with a pardon for his son, Hunter Biden, who has already been convicted on several gun and tax-related charges — and then claimed that he should offer “pre-emptive pardons” to Vice President Kamala Harris, January 6th Committee members, and former Reps. Liz Cheney (R-WY), Adam Kinzinger (R-IL), and to special prosecutor Jack Smith because she believed Trump was likely to try to have them prosecuted.
Navarro voiced her concerns via X on Thursday, saying, “Dear @JoeBiden, pardon Hunter before these clowns go after him to take revenge on you. And while you’re at it, give pre-emptive pardons to Liz Cheney, Kamala Harris, Adam Kinzinger, Jack Smith … and anybody else who may be on the enemies list of the promised retribution.”
Dear @JoeBiden, pardon Hunter before these clowns go after him to take revenge on you.
And while you’re at it, give pre-emptive pardons to Liz Cheney, Kamala Harris, Adam Kinzinger, Jack Smith…and anybody else who may be on the enemies list of the promised retribution.
Some critics pointed out the fact that a pre-emptive pardon would essentially be an admission that some crime had been committed by the person receiving it, while others commented on the hypocrisy of her pushing for those pardons when she would likely be among those claiming he was violating ethics and norms if Trump were to pardon a friend or ally.
“The ‘principles first’ and ‘but my norms’ crowd are the quickest to ditch them when they don’t get their way,” Newsbusters’ Nicholas Fondacaro posted.
The “principles first” and “but my norms” crowd are the quickest to ditch them when they don’t get their way. https://t.co/zhFcJXNqiN
Navarro had previously called for Biden to pardon Hunter during Monday’s broadcast of “The View,” arguing that because Trump was also convicted of felonies, his election win was like the American people issuing him a pardon of sorts.
“This is what I’m going to tell Joe — Joe, since they’re talking smack about you anyways, you know what? Maybe pardon Hunter. Pardon Hunter because we, basically America just pardoned a criminal who was convicted of felonies,” she said. “He’s probably going to pardon some of the folks from Jan. 6, those insurrectionists. So, you know what? It’s your son. He probably wouldn’t have been prosecuted if his last name wasn’t Biden. Baby, you got 2 1/2 months. I’m good with you pardoning Hunter.”
Florida is suing FEMA for allegedly discriminating against supporters of President-elect Donald Trump after a Daily Wire report revealed a supervisor directed relief workers in the Sunshine State to “avoid homes advertising Trump.”
The suit, from Florida Attorney General Ashley Moody, alleges that FEMA Director Deanne Criswell and now-fired supervisor Marn’i Washington conspired against the civil rights of Trump supporters in Lake Placid, Florida. The suit comes after whistleblowers told The Daily Wire they were directed to bypass the homes of people with Trump flags or yard signs when canvassing homes in Lake Placid to see if they qualified for hurricane assistance after Hurricane Milton.
“While the facts will continue to come out over the weeks and months, it is already clear that Defendant Washington conspired with senior FEMA officials, as well as those carrying out her orders, to violate the civil rights of Florida citizens,” the suit says.
The suit, which cites reporting from The Daily Wire, accuses both Criswell and Washington of illegally depriving Trump supporters of federal aid. Moody filed the suit Wednesday in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida, Fort Pierce Division.
“Hurricane season is not over, and the federal agency in charge of emergency response is embroiled in scandal – caught withholding aid from storm victims in Florida who support President Trump,” Moody said in a statement. “I am taking swift legal action to find out how far this political discrimination reaches and to make sure all Americans who fall victim to devastating storms are served, regardless of their political affiliation.”
The suit also points to an interview Washington gave to Roland Martin, where she said that FEMA has a widespread policy of avoiding “politically hostile” homes. Criswell has claimed the guidance was an “isolated incident” and not in accordance with FEMA policy.
“Defendant Washington says that similar conduct occurred in North Carolina and throughout areas affected by Hurricanes Helene and Milton,” the suit said. “And she represents that senior FEMA officials claiming not to know that the agency was discriminating against Trump supporters are promoting a ‘lie.’”
Moody asked FEMA to award damages to the defendants and for the court to declare that the agency had violated the civil rights of Floridians.
FEMA told The Daily Wire that it does not comment on pending litigation, and pointed to a statement from Criswell condemning the guidance to skip Trump homes.
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis said that he backed the lawsuit and has announced that the state’s Division of Emergency Management is also investigating the incident.
“It’s unacceptable for the federal government to discriminate against Floridians who voted for Trump, and especially egregious in the aftermath of a hurricane,” he said, adding that he has “instructed state agencies to likewise take any action necessary to investigate and ensure those who engaged in this behavior are held accountable.”
Washington did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Daily Wire host Michael Knowles discussed the election victory of Democrat Sarah, formerly Tim, McBride on Thursday after McBride became the first trans-identifying politician elected to Congress.
McBride, a man who identifies as a woman, won the race for Delaware’s at-large district by nearly 16 points over Republican John Whalen. Knowles wrote in a thread on X that McBride’s election presents some pivotal questions for House Republicans.
“McBride is now a congressman. Will Republicans stand firm against this dangerous ideology? Or will they call the man ‘Sarah’ and invite him into the women’s bathroom?” he asked.
1/ A bombshell story few are talking about: Joe Biden, his family, and the state of Delaware have brought us Tim “Sarah” McBride, the first trans-identifying man elected to Congress. pic.twitter.com/UdhKYCKSQp
The congressman-elect was elected to the Delaware state Senate in 2020 and previously worked as a campaign staffer during the late Beau Biden’s 2010 re-election race for Delaware Attorney General. During his time as a state senator, McBride has pushed for allowing boys to compete in girls’ sports and for allowing children to undergo life-altering gender surgeries.
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
Knowles argued in an X thread that McBride received a career boost after identifying as transgender.
“After declaring himself ‘Sarah,’ this otherwise unremarkable former staffer for Beau Biden was appointed to major activist roles and given a platform to address the US Department of the Interior, Department of Justice, Department of Housing and Urban Development, and more,” Knowles wrote.
“Tim was backed by then-Vice President Joe Biden along with Hillary Clinton and the entire Democrat Party establishment, becoming the ‘first trans person’ to speak at the Democrat National Convention,” he added.
Knowles also highlighted McBride’s relationship with “the more typically extreme and lascivious exemplars of transgenderism,” such as Jacob Tobia, a trans-identifying LGBTQ activist.
10/ While Tim appears to make an effort to present a more palatable version of transgender ideology by dressing up like a young Hillary Clinton, off hours he has palled around with the more typically extreme and lascivious exemplars of transgenderism. pic.twitter.com/jsofNPqeCs
Now that McBride is set to be sworn in as a member of Congress in January, Knowles is urging Republicans to take a stand for biological reality.
“This guy, presumably, is going to want to use the women’s bathroom. The Republicans control Congress. Are they going to permit this?” Knowles asked on his show on Thursday.
“So for the GOP leadership, are they going to hold the line on this ideology? Are they going to defend their female members? Are they going to say, ‘Hey Buster, you can pretend to be a woman, I guess, there’s not much we can do about it, but we ain’t gonna let you use the women’s bathroom’? Or are they going to go squishy and say, “Oh this is going to be a big headache. We don’t want to make a big deal of this. Fine, we’ll just look the other way when you use the women’s bathroom’?” he asked. “If they do that, they are implicitly accepting all of trans ideology.”
Women’s sports advocate Riley Gaines responded to Knowles’ thread, writing, “What a WILD & flawed deduction from a sitting member of congress (sic). Since we don’t restrict girls from playing sports based on their height, we also shouldn’t prevent men from competing with women. This logic suggests able-bodied people should compete with disabled people. And 18 yr olds should compete with 12 yr olds.”
“The View” co-host Whoopi Goldberg indicated that she believed a bakery may have refused to make a treat for her birthday due to differing political opinions.
The 69-year-old comedian shared her thoughts during Wednesday’s episode of the daytime talk show. When Goldberg presented the other panelists with one of her favorite desserts, Charlotte Russe, she mentioned having a hard time getting the creamy sponge cake dessert from a Staten Island bakery, also explaining that she had asked for this dessert because it was one of her mother’s favorites.
“Now, I should tell you, Charlotte Russe has no political leanings, and the place that made these refused to make them for me,” Goldberg said, eliciting a gasp from the audience.
Fellow panelist Sunny Hostin replied, “Oh, really?” while Sara Haines spit out the piece she had been eating.
“They said that their ovens had gone down, all kinds of stuff, but folks went and got them anyway,” Goldberg continued, “which is why I’m not telling you who made them.”
She added that the reason for refusing service “can’t be because I’m a woman” and then speculated that “perhaps they did not like my politics.”
“But that’s okay,” Goldberg went on, “because you know what? Listen, this is my mother’s celebration. Pick these up and celebrate with me and my mom. Thank you everyone for celebrating my birthday today.”
The actress refused to name the bakery, but Entertainment Weekly reported the desserts came from Holtermann’s Baker on Staten Island. The owner, Jill Holtermann, told the outlet that her refusing the order had nothing to do with “political affiliations.” She said the bakery was “having trouble with [the] boilers.”
Holtermann said Goldberg had initially asked for the baked treats for a November 6 talk show appearance and her birthday broadcast on Wednesday. The owner said she turned down the orders because she “didn’t want to make a commitment that I can’t carry through.”
“I said to Whoopi, ‘I can’t do it right now,'” she told the outlet. “We have so many things going on with my boiler,’ because the building is from 1930, so, when she called me, I had no idea [if we could] be baking everything.”
The owner confirmed that a woman came into the bakery on the morning of November 13 and picked up 50 Charlotte Russe desserts, which she had been able to make despite the issues the bakery was experiencing.
Rumor has it ABC is scrambling to add a pro-Trump panelist to “The View” in the wake of the president-elect’s landslide victory in the 2024 election.
The anonymous source who reportedly spoke with the New York Post noted how conservatives accused ABC News presidential debate moderators David Muir and Lindsey Davis of tilting the scales against Donald Trump when he faced off against Vice President Kamala Harris in September. Now, the source says company execs are evaluating the network’s heavily biased shows like “The View.”
According to the report, the source said ABC News Group & Networks President Debra OConnell and ABC News President Almin Karamehmedovic have had meetings with various executive producers of network shows. One topic of conversation has been adding a Trump supporter to “The View,” which is almost always dominated by far-Left viewpoints from co-hosts like Whoopi Goldberg, Joy Behar, Sunny Hostin, and Sara Haines. Token Republican voices have been from anti-Trumpers, such as Ana Navarro and Alyssa Farah Griffin.
“The View is facing pressure from higher-ups,” the source told The Post. “Viewers can expect some major changes including bringing in new panelists that can bring in a pro-Trump perspective.”
“Everyone on ‘The View’ endorsed Kamala Harris. They lost. They are out of touch with America,” the insider added. “For a show about different perspectives, ‘The View’ doesn’t seem to have any when it comes to Trump. ABC bosses don’t want to alienate the pro-Trump demographic.”
“The question is what will happen to the Whoopis and the Joys if they bring on a Trumpster?” the source said.
The report cited another source who said Trump’s decisive win made ABC execs realize that they should stop ignoring the views of more than half the country. “We are trying to sort out how we cover the next 4 years when everyone inside ABC News is on one side,” the source said of the ABC lineup.
“At the end of the day, these changes aren’t about politics. They are about economics,” the anonymous source explained, per The Post. “Trump got more than half of the vote. TV networks need to find pro-Trump voices and diversify viewpoints to reflect the various perspectives of Americans.”
A spokesperson for the network gave The Daily Wire the following statement on the rumors: “This report is not true. ‘The View’ is an opinion-based show featuring a diverse panel of women with different points of view – the current panel is clearly resonating with audiences given that the series just had its highest rated episode in more than a decade and hit a 4-year high in total viewers.”
Denzel Washington said he filmed a same-sex kiss scene, but it was ultimately cut from his upcoming film, “Gladiator II.”
The 69-year-old Oscar-winning actor stars in Ridley Scott’s historical action film as Macrinus, a wealthy Roman businessman who keeps a stable of gladiators for sport, per Variety.
The “Gladiator II” script says the character had been in relationships with other men in the past. This fact inspired an interviewer for Gayety to ask Washington, “How gay is the Roman empire?”
“I actually kissed a man in the film but they took it out, they cut it, I think they got chicken,” the actor replied. “I kissed a guy full on the lips and I guess they weren’t ready for that yet. I killed him about five minutes later. It’s ‘Gladiator.’ It’s the kiss of death.”
Scott responded to a question from The New York Times about Macrinus’ “hints of bisexuality” by saying, “There’s a twinkle.”
“Also, he’s a gangster,” the director continued. “I think he was clearly a prisoner of war, went to the ring, earned his freedom, suddenly working in a giant bread factory and supplied bread for the Roman army. He maybe eventually took that over, then goes to munitions, so he’s an arms dealer. I thought that was his evolution. He said, ‘Oh, I like that. I’m a gangster.’”
Paul Mescal, who plays Lucius Verus in the upcoming film, said he threw in an unscripted kiss scene and didn’t know how it would be received. The actor told CinemaBlend recently that he sporadically kissed Pedro Pascal, who plays Marcus Acacius, on the forehead during a fight scene.
“I didn’t tell Ridley I was gonna do it. And then I was nervous after we did it because I thought he was going to f***ing hate it,” Mescal told the outlet. “So I nervously go over the radio being like, ‘Ridley? Did you like the kiss on the forehead? Yay or nay?’ And there was this kind of, like, [static] ‘I’m afraid I did.’ So I don’t know where it got lost in the edit, but I trust this man entirely, though. How he cuts his films.”
Scott told the outlet that the deleted forehead kiss scene could make the director’s cut.
“Gladiator II,” the follow-up to a five-time Academy Award-winning historical epic from 2000, is already generating Oscar buzz, specifically for Washington.
A witness admitted that he lied to the prosecution in the case of Daniel Penny, who is on trial for putting Jordan Neely in a chokehold in a New York City subway that allegedly led to his death.
Eric Gonzales, 39, was not charged in exchange for testifying in the trial, Fox News reported. But Gonzales admitted he lied to District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s office when he was first interviewed.
In his initial interview, Gonzales told police and prosecutors that he had been on the subway train with Neely and Penny and that Neely had attempted to hit him. He said this is why Penny put Neely in the chokehold, the Gothamist reported. Gonzales also said at the time that he had helped Penny hold Neely down, and when the two men let go, Gonzales asked Neely if he was okay, and Neely told him, “Yeah.”
But on Tuesday, Gonzales admitted that he had made that story up. Assistant District Attorney Dafna Yoran asked Gonzales why he had lied.
“I was trying to justify my actions for me having my hands on him,” Gonzales responded.
Gonzales wasn’t in the subway car when Neely was making his alleged threats against other passengers. On Tuesday, he admitted that he had arrived after Penny already had Neely pinned to the ground.
“Everybody was frantic and saying, call the cops, call the cops,’” Gonzales said, according to WFIN. “I see those two individuals on the floor, so I assumed one was trying to restrain the other until the cops came.”
Gonzales later testified that he told Penny he could let go of Neely but wasn’t demanding that he do so.
“I said I was gonna grab his hands so you can let go, giving him a different option to restrain him until police came,” Gonzales testified. “If I held his arms down he could let go of his neck. I didn’t think anything of it at the moment, I was just giving him an alternative.”
Gonzales and Penny continued to hold down Neely, and told jurors that at one point he told Penny to loosen his grip on Neely, but later told him to tighten it.
Video of the incident shows Gonzales telling Neely, “We’re not gonna let you go until the cops arrive.”
Multiple witnesses have testified that they were afraid of Neely, who entered the train car and allegedly began ranting that someone was going to die that day and that he didn’t care if he went back to jail. These witnesses have all said they feared for their lives, with some even thanking Penny for stepping in, The Daily Wire reported.
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.
Actress Eva Longoria said she’s “privileged” to have the resources to move her family out of the “dystopian” United States.
The 49-year-old “Desperate Housewives” star made the remarks during a newly published interview with Marie Claire. Longoria, who was born in Texas and is of Tejano descent, is now splitting her time between Mexico and Spain.
“I had my whole adult life here,” Longoria told the outlet of the United States. “But even before [the pandemic], it was changing. The vibe was different. And then COVID happened, and it pushed it over the edge. Whether it’s the homelessness or the taxes, not that I want to s*** on California — it just feels like this chapter in my life is done now.”
The Hollywood star mentioned her disdain for the election results, too. “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.”
“If he keeps his promises, it’s going to be a scary place,” Longoria added.
While reflecting on Trump’s win in the 2016 election, the actress said, “I’ve never been depressed in my life.”
“It was like, ‘Does my vote really matter? Am I really making a difference?’” she told the outlet. “I was so untethered to the core of what I believe because I truly believed in my soul that the best person wins. And then that happened, and I was like, ‘Oh, wait. The best person doesn’t win.’”
The actress had endorsed Kamala Harris for president this election cycle and spoke at the Democratic National Convention. She campaigned for Democrats all summer, specifically focusing on women and Latino voters.
Longoria said she’s “privileged” to be able to leave the country. “I get to escape and go somewhere,” she said. “Most Americans aren’t so lucky. They’re going to be stuck in this dystopian country, and my anxiety and sadness is for them.”
The actress is currently living outside of the U.S. with her third husband, José Bastón, and their 6-year-old son Santiago. Longoria said she travels to Europe and South America for work but does not usually return to Los Angeles.
Even though the Associated Press called the Pennsylvania Senate race for Republican David McCormick a week ago, incumbent Democrat Sen. Bob Casey has refused to concede.
Casey and Democrat attorney Marc Elias publicly contested the election, and the close margin triggered a state recount, though McCormick is still expected to win, Fox News reported. McCormick currently leads Casey by about 29,000 votes. What’s especially interesting about the push to contest the election by Elias is that his website features a link to an article denouncing Sen. Tammy Baldwin’s (D-WI) Republican challenger for failing to concede.
Too perfect. The website of Marc Elias, an attorney for Bob Casey, has this article about how Eric Hovde won’t concede his Wisconsin Senate loss while despite trailing by 29,000 votes. Bob Casey is also down 29,000 votes, and refuses to concede. pic.twitter.com/NREdmIdB7d
In 2020, contesting or questioning the results of the election led to Republicans being called “election deniers,” so The Daily Wire reached out to every Senate Democrat office to see if they believed Casey was an election denier.
Here are their responses.
Current Democrat Senators:
Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-WI)
Sen. Baldwin’s office did not respond to a Daily Wire inquiry.
Sen. Michael Bennet (D-CO)
Sen. Bennet’s office did not respond to a Daily Wire inquiry.
Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT)
Sen. Blumenthal’s office did not respond to a Daily Wire inquiry.
Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ)
Sen. Booker’s office did not respond to a Daily Wire inquiry.
Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH)
Sen. Brown’s office did not respond to a Daily Wire inquiry.
Sen. Laphonza Butler (D-CA)
Sen. Butler’s office did not respond to a Daily Wire inquiry.
Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-WA)
Sen. Cantwell’s office did not respond to a Daily Wire inquiry.
Sen. Ben Cardin (D-MD)
Sen. Cardin’s office did not respond to a Daily Wire inquiry.
Sen. Tom Carper (D-DE)
Sen. Carper’s office did not respond to a Daily Wire inquiry.
Sen. Chris Coons (D-WI)
Sen. Coon’s office did not respond to a Daily Wire inquiry.
Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto (D-NV)
Sen. Cortez Masto’s office did not respond to a Daily Wire inquiry.
Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-IL)
Sen. Duckworth’s office did not respond to a Daily Wire inquiry.
Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL)
“The race is extremely close, and state officials need time to finish counting ballots,” a spokesperson for Durbin’s office told The Daily Wire. “Sen. Durbin believes that every legal vote must be counted and then a winner will be declared.”
Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA)
Sen. Fetterman’s office did not respond to a Daily Wire inquiry, but his team did send out an email asking for donations to help Casey during the recount in Pennsylvania.
“Folks, I’m going to be real with you: Bob Casey needs our help right now,” the email reads. “His race with Connecticut Dave is still too close to call and we need your help to make sure Pennsylvanians’ voices are heard.”
“Bob’s team is working hard while votes are still being counted, but they need the resources to make that happen,” the email continues. “Pennsylvania is now the frontline for standing up to Senate Republicans and I need Bob in the Senate with me to keep up the fight.”
Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY)
Sen. Gillibrand’s office did not respond to a Daily Wire inquiry.
Sen. Maggie Hassan (D-NH)
Sen. Hassan’s office did not respond to a Daily Wire inquiry.
Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-NM)
Sen. Heinrich’s office did not respond to a Daily Wire inquiry.
Sen. George Helmy (D-NJ)
Sen. Helmy’s office did not respond to a Daily Wire inquiry.
Sen. John Hickenlooper (D-CO)
Sen. Hickenlooper’s office did not respond to a Daily Wire inquiry.
Sen. Mazie Hirono (D-HI)
Sen. Hirono’s office did not respond to a Daily Wire inquiry.
Sen. Tim Kaine (D-VA)
Sen. Kaine’s office did not respond to a Daily Wire inquiry.
Sen. Mark Kelly (D-AZ)
Sen. Kelly’s office did not respond to a Daily Wire inquiry.
Sen. Angus King (D-ME)
Sen. King’s office did not respond to a Daily Wire inquiry.
Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN)
Sen. Klobuchar’s office did not respond to a Daily Wire inquiry.
Sen. Ben Ray Lujan (D-NM)
Sen. Lujan’s office did not respond to a Daily Wire inquiry.
Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA)
Sen. Markey’s office did not respond to a Daily Wire inquiry.
Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-OR)
Sen. Merkley’s office did not respond to a Daily Wire inquiry.
Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT)
Sen. Murphy’s office did not respond to a Daily Wire inquiry.
Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA)
Sen. Murray’s office did not respond to a Daily Wire inquiry.
Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-GA)
Sen. Ossoff’s office did not respond to a Daily Wire inquiry.
Sen. Alex Padilla (D-CA)
Sen. Padilla’s office did not respond to a Daily Wire inquiry.
Sen. Gary Peters (D-MI)
Sen. Peters’ office did not respond to a Daily Wire inquiry.
Sen. Jack Reed (D-RI)
Sen. Reed’s office did not respond to a Daily Wire inquiry.
Sen. Jacky Rosen (D-NV)
Sen. Rosen’s office did not respond to a Daily Wire inquiry.
Sen. Bernie Sanders (D-VT)
Sen. Sanders’ office did not respond to a Daily Wire inquiry.
Sen. Brian Schatz (D-HI)
Sen. Schatz’s office did not respond to a Daily Wire inquiry.
Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY)
Sen. Schumer’s office did not respond to a Daily Wire inquiry.
Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH)
Sen. Shaheen’s office did not respond to a Daily Wire inquiry.
Sen. Tina Smith (D-MN)
Sen. Smith’s office did not respond to a Daily Wire inquiry.
Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-MI)
Sen. Stabenow’s office did not respond to a Daily Wire inquiry.
Sen. Jon Tester (D-MT)
Sen. Tester’s office did not respond to a Daily Wire inquiry.
Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-MD)
Sen. Van Hollen’s office did not respond to a Daily Wire inquiry.
Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA)
Sen. Warner’s office did not respond to a Daily Wire inquiry, but his campaign sent out an email asking for donations to support Casey – and Warner.
“Folks, the race is not over in Pennsylvania,” the fundraising email says. “This Senate race is still too close to call, and we need to act fast to make sure Pennsylvanians’ voices are heard. Our team needs your help to keep this work going.”
Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-GA)
Sen. Warnock’s office did not respond to a Daily Wire inquiry.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA)
Sen. Warren’s office did not respond to a Daily Wire inquiry.
Sen. Peter Welch (D-VT)
Sen. Welch’s office did not respond to a Daily Wire inquiry.
Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI)
Sen. Whitehouse’s office did not respond to a Daily Wire inquiry.
Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR)
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Incoming Democrat Senators:
Angela Alsobrooks (D-MD)
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Rep. Lisa Blunt Rochester (D-DE)
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Rep. Ruben Gallego (D-AZ)
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Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA)
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Rep. Elissa Slotkin (D-MI)
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The Associated Press and The New York Times have acknowledged that the Republican Party has control of the House of Representatives, having won at least 218 seats.
The legacy news outlets were days behind Decision Desk HQ, which determined at 7:13 p.m. ET on Monday that Republicans had won enough races to take the House.
Republicans have won 218 of the 435 seats, while Democrats have won 208. That leaves nine races still undecided, which complicates matters as three House Republicans have been announced as President-elect Donald Trump’s picks for other positions, which would leave those three seats temporarily empty. New York GOP Rep. Elise Stefanik has been announced as Trump’s choice for UN Ambassador; Florida GOP Rep. Mike Waltz was announced as National Security Advisor, and Florida GOP Rep. Matt Gaetz as U.S. Attorney General. Gaetz resigned from Congress on Wednesday, which may give Florida GOP Governor Ron DeSantis enough time to appoint Gaetz’s replacement before the House representatives take their oath as new members of Congress on January 3.
If the GOP gains three more seats, the three seats temporarily unfilled would not be an issue, as their 221-seat majority would still be reduced only to 218, leaving them in the majority.
Here are the nine seats still up for grabs and their current results, as reported by AP and The New York Times as of Thursday morning:
In Alaska, the congressional seat-at-large features a race between the GOP’s Nick Begich and the Democrats’ incumbent Rep. Mary Peltola. With 94% of the vote counted, Begich is leading by 9,435 votes, 49% to 45.9%. Two other candidates are competing with a scant percentage of the vote. If no candidate earns more than 50%, the candidate with the fewest first-choice votes will be eliminated, and voters’ second picks are then given to the remaining candidates. That process continues until a candidate reaches 50% of the vote.
In California’s 9th District, with 86% of the vote counted, incumbent Democrat Rep. Josh Harder leads GOP challenger Kevin Lincoln by 8,125 votes, 51.8% to 48.2%.
In California’s 13th District, with 74% of the vote counted, incumbent GOP Rep. John Duarte is leading his Democrat challenger Adam Gray by 3,765 votes, 51.2% to 49%.
In California’s 21st Congressional District, with 82% of the vote counted, Rep. Jim Costa, the Democrat incumbent, leads Republican Michael Maher by 5,187 votes, 51.6% to 48.4%.
In California’s 45th Congressional District, with 93% of the vote counted in an incredibly close race, GOP incumbent Rep. Michelle Steel leads Democrat Derek Tran by 349 votes, 50.06% to 49.94%.
In Iowa’s 1st Congressional District, with 95% of the vote counted in another incredibly close race, Republican Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks leads Democrat Christina Bohannan by only 802 votes, 50.1% to 49.9%.
In Maine’s 2nd Congressional District, with 98% of the vote counted in a third incredibly close race, incumbent Democratic Rep. Jared Golden leads Republican Austin Theriault by only 726 votes, 49.9% to 49.7%. Because neither candidate received 50% of the vote, there will be a ranked-choice runoff starting this week.
In Ohio’s 9th Congressional District, with 99% of the vote counted, incumbent Democratic Rep. Marcy Kaptur leads Republican challenger Derek Merrin by roughly 1,200 votes, 48.1% to 47.8%.
In Oregon’s 5th Congressional District, with 91% of the vote counted, Democrat Janelle Bynum is leading Republican incumbent Rep. Lori Chavez-DeRemer by roughly 10,000 votes, 47.8% to 45.1%.
The close election between Sen. Bob Casey (D-PA) and Republican Dave McCormick is heading for a recount automatically triggered by state law, election officials said on Wednesday.
Fox News reported that the fewer than 27,000-vote margin (0.39 percentage points) requires the state to conduct a recount. State law requires a recount if “vote totals [are] within the one-half of 1 percent.” Multiple outlets, including the Associated Press and Fox News, called the race for McCormick, giving Republicans 53 seats in the Senate, but Casey has refused to concede.
The recount must begin no later than November 20 and finish by noon on November 26, with results published on November 27. Election officials estimated the recount would cost Pennsylvania residents more than $1 million. Since 2004, four automatic recounts have been carried out in Pennsylvania — all of which affirmed the initial results, according to Fox News.
McCormick’s team remains confident that he will win the race, with spokeswoman Elizabeth Gregory saying that Casey’s deficit is too much to overcome. With 99% of the ballots counted, McCormick holds 3,383,676 votes to Casey’s 3,357,191 votes.
“Senator-elect McCormick’s lead is insurmountable, which the AP made clear in calling the race,” Gregory said in a statement. “A recount will be a waste of time and taxpayer money but it is Senator Casey’s prerogative. Senator-elect McCormick knows what it’s like to lose an election and is sure Senator Casey will eventually reach the right conclusion.”
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) initially did not invite McCormick to the Senate orientation. However, after pressure from his colleagues, the Democratic leader reached out to McCormick, and the Republican attended the orientation earlier this week.
Casey, who has served three terms in the Senate, doubled down on waiting for all the ballots to be counted before conceding, saying in a video posted on Tuesday, “My priority has always been standing up for the people of Pennsylvania. Across our commonwealth, close to 7 million people cast their votes in a free and fair election. Our county election officials will finish counting those votes, just like they do in every election.”
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