“During the war in Gaza, Israel was accused by many countries and by many U.N. officials that we deliberately starved the population in Gaza. That was a blood libel,” Israeli Ambassador Danon told Fox News on Tuesday. “When we actually answered those claims and asked our colleagues where they got the data, the answer was that they relied on Hamas reports.”

The Gaza SMART nutrition survey, coordinated by the UNICEF-led Nutrition Cluster and presented by the State of Palestine Nutrition Cluster on July 22, 2026, examined 1,335 children under age 5. The assessment covered regions home to about 83% of Gaza’s population. Roughly 17% of the population could not be surveyed because of security and operational constraints.

The survey recorded acute malnutrition rates between 0.2%-0.8% using weight-for-height measurements, with a global estimate around 0.5%. Using mid-upper arm circumference, the rate stood at 1.3%. Evaluators concluded there was “no widespread acute malnutrition at population level.” The rates were significantly lower than those in neighboring countries.

Danon argued that the latest figures debunked earlier starvation claims and said previous numbers drawn from Hamas sources were fabricated. “For the future, we shouldn’t count on a terrorist organization. We are a reliable country, we share data, we share concerns regarding humanitarian issues, and we should not collaborate with terrorists,” he said.

He pointed to specific past statements by senior international officials. U.N. Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs Tom Fletcher, in a 2025 BBC interview about border access, said 14,000 babies were at risk of dying within 48 hours without immediate nutritional aid. That figure was later clarified as an 11-month projection involving children at risk of severe malnutrition.

“That was false and did not happen. Using starvation and babies to spread blood libels against Israel is outrageous,” Danon said. “We care about babies in Gaza more than those making these allegations against us.”

Danon mentioned that Israel maintained records of food supplies entering the territory throughout the conflict. “In terms of the food coming into Gaza, that was very easy for us to prove because we control the checkpoints and count the number of trucks coming in,” he explained.

The survey results arrive as prominent Left-wing and anti-Israel politicians have continued to push the claim that Israel has been starving people in Gaza.

Last year, then-New York Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani posted, “Netanyahu said he’d allow aid into Gaza. He lied. For nearly 80 days, nothing has reached Gaza’s soup kitchens, bakeries, or hospitals. Thousands of babies — and countless adults — are being starved by the Israeli government. This is a heinous war crime, one that should shock and anger every single one of us.”

In a July 25, 2025, statement, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) said, “After many months of Israel blocking humanitarian aid, children and other vulnerable people are starving to death in increasing numbers. The World Food Programme says that the food crisis has reached ‘new and astonishing levels of desperation, with a third of the population not eating for multiple days in a row.’ Children’s bodies are eating themselves from within, their organs are shutting down. 

“Doctors themselves are fainting from hunger,” Sanders added.

El-Sayed hid up to 100 videos where he pushed radical policies, including getting rid of the right to bear arms and complaining about fireworks, CNN reported Tuesday. His comments about getting rid of the Second Amendment came shortly after a transgender-identifying woman murdered six people at a Christian school in Tennessee. 

“What if we tweaked the Constitution, amended the amendment, and instead of the right to bear arms, we change it to the right to have healthcare?” he said in April 2023, according to a video viewed by CNN. He claimed that the move would lead to “fewer people dying by gun and more people living because they have healthcare.”

The hidden views come as El-Sayed faces an exodus by some Democrats from his campaign over his extreme views and association with activists like Hasan Piker, who said America “deserved 9/11.” El-Sayed also deleted numerous social media posts advocating to defund the police. 

In a July 2024 podcast titled, “Fireworks just aren’t worth it: hear us out,” El-Sayed argued that “fireworks suck” and said Americans should find other ways to celebrate the Fourth of July. The rant against fireworks was sponsored by the Marguerite Casey Foundation, which El-Sayed noted advocated for “feminist prison abolition.” 

El-Sayed downplayed concerns about border security as illegal crossings surged to record levels under President Joe Biden in another video flagged by CNN.

In September 2022, when illegal border crossings reached an astounding 227,000, El-Sayed said that border security “doesn’t even make the top five among issues that people in the United States actually care about that affect their lives.”

“It’s crazy to me that the party that says that they’re the party of family values can’t understand when people will make decisions for their families — because that’s exactly what these migrants are doing,” he added. 

In other resurfaced videos, El-Sayed attacked Michigan’s beloved Mackinac Island and claimed football was a breeding ground for “toxic masculinity.” 

“Football is very much associated with a particularly masculine and oftentimes toxically masculine culture,” he said.

El-Sayed’s campaign claimed his views articulated in the videos don’t reflect what he believes today. 

“Abdul is the former captain of his high school football team, loves Michigan football on Saturdays, and celebrates the Fourth of July with fireworks like the next Michigander. Cherry-picked comments from old podcasts don’t reflect his beliefs today,” his campaign said. 

While attempting to distance himself from some of his past statements, El-Sayed’s campaign still includes far-Left policy positions like defending so-called “gender-affirming care” and “Medicare for all.”

Newsom, recognizing the appetite in his party for “insurgents” and agents of “change,” insisted that he could be all of those things while also bringing the experience that came with his more than two decades in elected office.

“I think what’s happening is there’s just a desire for change,” Newsom said. “I think this notion of insurgency over incumbency is the real message here, and people just want fighters — they want people with conviction, strength, clarity, people that get it and want to get things done. And they’re done with the status quo, and I totally respect that.”

Newsom went on to claim that despite his eight years as governor — and more than a decade in elected office prior to that — he was not an example of the “status quo” people were so desperate to leave behind. Instead, he still viewed himself as the “insurgent” rather than the “incumbent,” coining a new phrase to describe his position in the field: “established insurgent.”

“I’ve long felt like I’ve been an established insurgent,” he explained, adding, “I’ve always had that mindset. I’ve been in elected office a long time, but I’ve never been naive about people’s desire for change, including my own desire for change.”

Newsom’s comments came as he traveled to Michigan, where Democratic Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed eked out a narrow victory over the more established Democrat Rep. Haley Stevens. The likely 2028 hopeful brushed aside concerns about El-Sayed’s more extreme views and alignment with far-Left streamer Hasan Piker — who is well known for praising Islamist terrorist groups like Hamas and Hezbollah, idolizing communist dictators like Mao Zedong, and making outlandish claims like “America deserved 9/11.”

El-Sayed, despite being given multiple chances to denounce Piker, has doubled down at every opportunity — but Newsom did not appear to be bothered by that, and instead argued that El-Sayed’s success was simply a manifestation of the people’s “desire for change.”

Responding to Republicans who have argued that El-Sayed is just more proof that the Democratic Party is embracing the extremes, Newsom said that was “nonsense,” adding, “He’s not even a member of the DSA.”

The California governor, whose term ends in January, is expected to launch a presidential campaign ahead of the 2028 election cycle — and recent polls, which show democratic socialist darling Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) eclipsing him, might be the inspiration behind his attempts to reinvent himself.

Rain McMillan Walmsey, 22, was on board Southwest Flight 958 en route to Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) Friday morning when he fell into medical distress and became unresponsive, local outlet KNBC reported.

Nearby passengers and flight crew scrambled to help, performing CPR and other lifesaving measures as the man suffered a medical emergency midflight. When the plane landed, paramedics rushed aboard, but the young man could not be revived. Firefighters pronounced Walmsey dead at the scene, KNBC reported.

The Los Angeles County Medical Examiner’s Office identified the victim but has not yet determined a cause of death, pending further investigation. The office listed Walmsey’s place of death as a LAX Southwest plane.

Southwest confirmed that a medical incident involving one of its passengers occurred aboard the flight but declined to provide additional details.

In-flight deaths remain rare, but Friday’s incident is the latest example of a medical emergency or unruly passengers forcing an airline to abandon normal flight operations and respond to a crisis midair.

In June, chaos erupted onboard an American Airlines flight after an unruly passenger reportedly bit a fellow flyer en route to Philadelphia, CBS News reported. The combative passenger was “trying to fight everybody,” according to air traffic control audio obtained by the outlet. 

“I don’t know… if he’s hallucinating or whatever, but he just bit a passenger, and he’s trying to fight everybody,” a pilot told an air traffic controller, adding, “What a day, huh.”

Reports of unruly passenger behavior peaked at a staggering 5,973 incidents in 2021, during the height of the coronavirus pandemic, and have steadily declined every year since.

“Incidents where airline passengers have disrupted flights with threatening or violent behavior are an ongoing problem, and airlines have seen rapid growth in occurrences since 2021,” The FAA said, citing a “zero-tolerance policy on unruly passenger behavior.”

It starts when institutions learn that standing with Jews costs more than excluding them. Long before governments write discrimination into law, culture normalizes it. Long before rights are stripped away, voices are quietly pushed out of mainstream life.

I know this firsthand.

On August 20, Bell Bird Books in Nashville, Tennessee, was set to host the launch of my second book, “White. Blonde. Jew.: A Call to End Extremism, Speak Up, Reclaim Center.” This wasn’t a store that reluctantly agreed to carry me. The owner invited me. She read the manuscript and texted me afterward that it was “spot on,” “incredibly brave,” and that she was “so thankful it will be out in the world.” We built the event – marketing materials, promotional graphics, a shared sense that this conversation belonged in Nashville.

Then the pressure campaign started.

Within hours of the announcement, social media filled with demands that the store cancel. I was called a “Zionist,” a “Zionist genocide loving freak,” told that “a Zionist author is different than a Jewish author,” and – ironically – a “Nazi.” Customers told her they would not shop there as long as the store hosted me. The message was simple: stand with this Jewish author and pay for it.

I asked the owner directly: had anyone threatened violence?

No, she said.

This was not about safety. I had arranged armed security for the event as a standard operating practice so that I, the bookstore, and our guests would feel comfortable. She responded that she “wasn’t worried at all” and that it “sounded great.”

This was about reputation. This was about Gen Z and younger millennials’ online mob of intimidation. This was about Southern housewives clutching their pearls. This was about the discomfort of being associated with a Jew who isn’t quiet. This is about what happens when your children become indoctrinated in college, graduate, and populate our cities.

The invitation was posted the afternoon of July 25, and the event was canceled less than three days later.

Her reason, explained to my literary agent: “the book was too big, too serious, for her small little store.” That reasoning doesn’t hold up under the timeline. Nothing about the book’s size or seriousness changed between her invitation and the event announcement — only the volume of online pressure did.

Then it got worse.

She contributed to a piece in The Tennessean on July 29 that led readers to believe she still stood behind the event — behind me — even though she had already canceled my launch less than 24 hours earlier. You cannot quietly remove a Jewish author from your store one day and let the public believe you defended her the next. If we’re going to be honest about intimidation, we have to start with honesty itself. And if we are being honest — how are bookstores allowed to claim independence when the online pressure campaign dictates who is shelved and supported?

History doesn’t judge institutions by the statements they issue to cover their cowardice. It judges them by what they do under pressure, when doing the right thing has a cost.

Many will read this as a small-business marketing decision. The Jewish community may recognize something else.

For nearly three years, Jewish writers, artists, musicians, filmmakers, public intellectuals, and photographers have been on the digital front lines of a fight most people still won’t name. We’re rarely part of the political conversation — until our books are published, our art exhibitions open, and our music debuts. Then we’re often first in line for the organized online campaigns built to make institutions decide we’re not worth the trouble.

This pattern should concern everyone, because it isn’t new. People think Nazi Germany’s persecution of Jews began with the Nuremberg Laws. It didn’t. It began with pressure campaigns, public shaming, humiliation, and exclusion. In 1933, radicalized university students organized the “Action Against the Un-German Spirit” against Jewish authors and intellectuals. Blacklists circulated. Books were publicly condemned. Publishers, theaters, and universities distanced themselves from Jewish voices before any law forced them to — because the pressure alone had already worked.

America in 2026 is not Germany in 1933. The Holocaust was a singular horror, and nothing should flatten that. But history doesn’t end there, and the radicalization pipeline looks familiar. Dr. Charles Asher Small, founder of the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy, has spent over a decade tracing how Middle Eastern funding — primarily from Qatar — flows into American universities without being reported as required by law. Small doesn’t mince words about who’s behind that money: Qatar, he’s said, is “the sanitized face of the Muslim Brotherhood.” Students who pass through programs shaped by that funding graduate and carry the pattern with them: organized public intimidation, structured shaming, economic threats aimed at small businesses, institutions deciding a Jewish voice simply isn’t worth the inconvenience.

“Zionist” is part of the hate playbook. The word is used as a pejorative for “Jew” — not because the people using it know what it actually means, but because it functions the way a slur functions for any other marginalized group: it lets the person wielding it launder their own bigotry. Calling it “anti-Zionism” instead of antisemitism does the same work the N-word does for a racist — it sanitizes the speaker while it strips the target of their humanity. And it does something else, too: it severs Jews from the very communities we have stood shoulder to shoulder with through civil rights. Zionism, stripped of the slur, is simply the belief that Israel has the right to exist. But to a generation raised on the word as a weapon, “Zionist” has become a scarlet letter — a way to exclude us from the mainstream spaces we contribute to, before anyone has to engage with a single thing we’ve actually said.

My book isn’t even out yet.

The people demanding my event be canceled never read it. They judged the title. They judged the cover. A culture that judges books by their covers is one that will let history’s darkest chapters repeat.

“White. Blonde. Jew.” is about what happens when identity gets weaponized, including the rise of antisemitism, my life as a working photographer, my trips to Israel after October 7, and why bearing witness matters even when it’s uncomfortable. It argues for nuance and against extremism.

None of that mattered to the people who wanted me silenced.

This is bigger than one bookstore. According to the American Jewish Committee, 91% of American Jews now feel less safe in this country; nearly nine in 10. Artists Against Antisemitism members have lived through many of the examples I’ve described, and I am only one data point in a much larger reality: the Anti-Defamation League recorded roughly 6,000 antisemitic incidents last year, an average of 17 every day. And remember how small our community is. If 100 people in a room represented America, just two would represent the Jewish community. Yet those two are increasingly being pushed to the margins of the very mainstream spaces we have helped build. We feel the temperature of this moment every day. It is not heat; it is the cold shoulder.

In the end, the bookstore owner didn’t just cancel the event. She took down the post on July 30. A security justification followed, even though armed security had already been addressed and accepted before the cancellation. The timeline matters.

Jewish books no longer have to be burned to disappear from public life. They need only enough pressure for bookstores to decide they are too costly to defend against their peers.

When you choose to listen to the people doing the intimidating instead of the people being intimidated, you don’t hold the line. You move it. Every time an institution folds, it moves a little farther, one step closer to a pattern history has already shown us to be true.

***

Alyssa Rosenheck is a bestselling author and photographer who brings creativity and clarity to today’s cultural conversation. Named one of Architectural Digest’s Top 50 photographers in the U.S., she blends visual storytelling with advocacy. Her upcoming book, “White. Blonde. Jew.” (August 2026), confronts contemporary antisemitism and calls for a return to truth-telling, intellectual courage, and Western values. Alyssa played a key role in the successful withdrawal of two BDS resolutions in her hometown of Nashville, Tennessee.

A November 2025 pitch deck from Motion Ventures obtained by Pro Football Talk identified Keim as the company’s “chief operation/growth officer.” Keim was the only person besides company founder Mohamed Coulibaly featured in the deck.

“Steve plays a critical role in guiding expansion strategy, evaluating new opportunities, and supporting leadership across divisions by navigating high-stakes decision-making, managing large budgets, and leading multidisciplinary teams as Motion Ventures continues to scale nationally and internationally,” the pitch deck said.

Several former NFL players told Barron’s that Keim’s involvement helped give them confidence in Coulibaly and his business. The athletes said they participated in conference calls that included Keim, while Coulibaly told Barron’s in May that Keim was the chief operating officer of Motion Ventures.

Keim confirmed to ESPN that he was, in fact, working with the head of the company, promoting it to friends, family, and players who asked about the venture. However, he did explicitly state that he never received salary or insurance and eventually suffered a seven-figure loss from his investments.

He added that Coulibaly used his name to “legitimize” the business without officially putting his name in any part of the company, which he discovered when meeting with a banker about Motion Ventures.

The pitch deck also claimed that Seahawks general manager John Schneider, Philadelphia Eagles defensive lineman Jalen Carter, and numerous current and former Eagles players were “notable clients and partners.”

Barron’s first reported allegations against Motion Ventures in July, when three former NFL players said they had collectively lost more than $1 million after investing in a “larger pooled ‘escrow’ structure” through Coulibaly’s business. The players alleged that sales data provided for the stores had been falsified, giving them the impression that the businesses were generating sales while they waited for returns on their investments. 

None of the three athletes received money back. Initially, they invested in the other aspect of Motion Ventures, Shopify-powered online stores, where they received “at least some financial returns that they invested,” according to ESPN.

Coulibaly disputed the fraud allegations before his death.

“I strongly dispute a number of the factual assertions and characterizations contained in the Barron’s article and any follow-up reporting that relies upon them,” Coulibaly told the New York Post.

No arrests have been made, and no criminal charges have been filed in connection with the allegations against Motion Ventures. 

Tae Crowder, former linebacker for the New York Giants, told ESPN that he is still seeking answers and trying to recover his money, and may file claims against Coulibaly’s estate. Despite concerns from his financial adviser, Crowder invested $500,000 in Motion Ventures and saw no money returned to him.

Coulibaly, 24, was found dead late last month in the swimming pool of a New Jersey home, as reported by ABC. Authorities discovered his body while performing a welfare check requested by a concerned family member, after his family members called to check in on his well-being.

Authorities have not released a cause of death, and the investigation remains ongoing. 

Keim spent 24 years in the Cardinals organization, serving as general manager from 2013 until his departure following the 2022 season. Before becoming GM, he held several positions in the team’s front office, including regional college scout, director of college scouting, and vice president of player personnel. 

Keim joined Klutch Sports Group as general manager of its football division in 2024 and left the company in March 2026.

Keim previously declined to discuss Motion Ventures when contacted by Barron’s in May, saying he could not comment on the business without Coulibaly’s permission. He did not respond to another request for comment from Barron’s following Coulibaly’s death.

“I’m doin a 6course dinner inspired by menstruation alongside my friends Autumn and Kel,” Hong posted at the time. “There will be booze too. Come hang.”

I'm doin a 6course dinner inspired by menstruation alongside my friends Autumn and Kel. There will be booze too. Come hang. https://t.co/PttgObCWWV pic.twitter.com/qvxOsqvQ2N

— Francesca Hong For Governor (@FrancescaHongWI) October 3, 2019

The 37-year-old socialist state representative and former Madison ramen chef, who leads the polls ahead of Tuesday’s Democratic primary, has left voters with a bad taste in their mouths. Just a year after her 2019 banquet, Hong sparked outrage by tweeting a call to “Cancel Thanksgiving.” She wrote, “Cancel Thanksgiving. Should have done this in 1621. If it takes a worldwide pandemic for us to realize we should stop celebrating colonialism and the original superspreader event that killed Indegenous [sic] folx [sic] and women so be it.”

Pressed on CNN about her past anti-Thanksgiving tirades, Hong offered up a word salad, saying:

I’m a chef, and one of the first meals that I made, that was for the community when I was 16, was a Thanksgiving meal. You know, I always think my hospitality background and owning a restaurant for seven, eight years that bringing folks around the table, to share conversation and build community, is always a good thing. But Thanksgiving is also a time that’s incredibly painful for many people in our communities. And so, I think there I wanted to make sure that people understood that there are multiple views. But views can evolve, and the position that I’m running for right now, and I think my background as a chef, will actually help me become a better governor that’s able to bring more people to the table.

Establishment Democrats are terrified Hong’s radical track record will cost them the general election against Rep. Tom Tiffany (R-WI). Even Democratic Governor Tony Evers publicly doubted her ability to win, adding, “She spends a lot of time, from what I understand, talking on Twitter and all these other extraneous issues. … People in this room … have seen tornadoes destroy the city, and we’re going to spend time on that bullsh*t that others are talking about on Twitter? Please.”

Hong, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America who boasts of being an “anti-capitalist” business owner, has also unleashed foul-mouthed rants at local industry groups like the Tavern League, publicly branding them with vulgar epithets, the Washington Free Beacon reported. In another post, she complained about being surrounded by “too many old white people” at a local fast-food spot.

The messages, released this week by Republican Sens. Ron Johnson (R-WI) and Rand Paul (R-KY), show Fauci privately discussing concerns about the potential risks of COVID vaccination for pregnant women, including the theoretical possibility of miscarriage.

In January 2021, Fauci communicated with Vivek Murthy, who would soon become surgeon general, and then-CDC Director Rochelle Walensky about the issue. In one message, Fauci said that a second dose of an mRNA COVID vaccine could “theoretically” be “associated with miscarriage in the 1st trimester.”

Credit: Sen. Ron Johnson

In another exchange, Murthy expressed his own concerns about the vaccines, telling Fauci, “I’ve been hearing the concern about the mRNA causing mutations in the developing fetus as well.” The following day, Murthy flagged an announcement from the World Health Organization advising pregnant women to avoid the Moderna COVID vaccine at the time.

Credit: Sen. Ron Johnson

The messages were released just days after the Department of Health and Human Services turned over Fauci’s government-issued phone to the Senate. The phone reportedly contains roughly 34,000 text messages and more than 500 voicemails. Johnson and Paul have indicated that additional material could be released after the senators complete their review. So far, fewer than a dozen of the messages have been made public.

The texts are particularly notable because of how they compare with Fauci’s public messaging about COVID vaccination and pregnancy. Just days after his private discussion about the potential miscarriage risk, Fauci publicly offered a much more reassuring assessment of the vaccines for pregnant women. In one interview about a week later, Fauci stressed multiple times that there are “no red flags” showing adverse effects for pregnant women. He later said that it’s “pretty clear” pregnant women should get vaccinated.

Fauci did not publicly discuss the possibility of miscarriage that he had raised in private, nor did he mention Murthy’s concerns about potential effects on a developing baby.

The text revelations come on the heels of Fauci’s pandemic-era diary entries, which were recently made public by Paul. In one diary entry, Fauci described suffering a pulmonary infarction months after receiving a COVID vaccine. Critics say someone publicly urging Americans to receive the vaccines, and shaping mandates, should have been transparent about his health episode.

National Institutes of Health Director Jay Bhattacharya said the discrepancy between Fauci’s private and public comments helps explain the erosion of trust in public health officials. “It’s shocking to me that he was sharing private thoughts and that, when he was out in public — and he was out in the public A LOT — he didn’t share those private thoughts with the American public,” Bhattacharya told Fox News on Monday.

Folks online flooded social media with backlash, too. Peter Hasson, a former news editor, said he and his wife had to scrape by during the pandemic because his then-pregnant wife refused to be vaccinated, apparently sharing the same private concerns as Fauci and other medical professionals before we had more data.

“My wife was pregnant and in her clinical year of PA school at this time,” Hasson said. “But virtually none of the hospitals or doctors offices in the … area would accept PA students for clinical rotations if they weren’t vaccinated — even if they were pregnant, even if they had the antibodies — because they were following Fauci’s advice.”

“My saint of a wife put our baby daughter first and still didn’t get the shot because she didn’t want to risk anything that might mess with the baby, but we had to spend months and months living out of Airbnbs in various rural small towns across Texas — the only places in the state where hospitals couldn’t afford to turn away help from PA students, vaccinated or not — while eating the rent on our empty apartment at the same time. It was worth it but it literally cost us tens of thousands of dollars while we were a one-income household living on a journalist salary,” Hasson added. “And so now, to see Fauci had the same concerns she did? Infuriating.”

A Senate committee recently voted to hold Fauci in contempt after he repeatedly invoked his Fifth Amendment rights rather than answer questions before Congress. The contempt referral is currently sitting with the Justice Department for review.

Fauci, though, received a highly controversial preemptive pardon from then-President Joe Biden on his final day in office. The pardon covers federal offenses Fauci may have committed dating back to 2014, and grants him a full and unconditional pardon for any such offenses.

The firestorm erupted during Chicago’s 90-86 loss to Indiana on Saturday, when Carrington’s hit on Cunningham drew blood. Officials upgraded the initial call to a Flagrant 2 upon video review, triggering Carrington’s instant ejection.

Before the sweat even dried, Carrington posted a cryptically aggressive message to her Threads account: “WHITE PRIVILEGE @indianafever.”

On Monday, when she was asked about her Threads post, she responded, “I already spoke with people who potentially will have the agency to create the change that I’m hoping comes about from not just this incident, but ones in the past and that are obviously going to be coming up in the near future, probably.”

“It was unfortunate that I made contact with her in the way that I did, but it was never intentional,” Carrington told the Chicago Sun-Times. “And, look, it might happen again. That’s just how I play. I’m gonna always go all out.”

Carrington shifted her focus to WNBA officials, saying, “Whether it’s the foul that I committed, whether it’s the reaction, the retaliation, I would just love it to be consistent across the board regardless of the name on your jersey or your skin color or the score of the game, the stakes, whatever. I would love there to just be consistency when it comes to all of that. I don’t think we’re there yet. That’s something that I’ve talked to the league about as well. I think that will eliminate a lot of the frustrations that we all have.”

Carrington also took aim at podcast host Emmanuel Acho, who blasted her Threads post, saying, “If we are paying attention to what DiJonai Carrington did to Sophie Cunningham, it was not a race-based decision. And to call that a ‘white privilege’-based foul is to completely undermine the term of white privilege and to also completely ignore the rules in basketball. You hit her in the head; you drew blood; you didn’t connect with the ball at all whatsoever. So to me, it was just very ignorant and to some degree asinine by DiJonai Carrington to suggest that that call was based on white privilege.”

Carrington shot back, “I’ve never once claimed that the assessment of the foul was white privilege (that was your assumption). Try exercising your critical thinking skills, I know you studied psych. Furthermore, I’m the LAST thing from ignorant or asinine when it comes to speaking on ‘white privilege.'”

I’ve never once claimed that the assessment of the foul was white privilege (that was your assumption). Try exercising your critical thinking skills, I know you studied psych. Furthermore, I’m the LAST thing from ignorant or asinine when it comes to speaking on “white privilege”,… https://t.co/mykXGTtiXJ

— dιjonaι carrιngтon♛ (@DijonaiVictoria) August 10, 2026

The idea that egg freezing allows women to gain more control over their lives is popular, and it’s certainly a comfort to many women who feel they aren’t ready for motherhood but don’t want to forgo that potential. However, for many women that sense of control is at least in part an illusion.

The process for freezing eggs is invasive — involving not only the injections that AOC showed herself taking (which are also often taken by women who are trying to conceive naturally), but an additional surgery for the egg retrieval itself, which can cause severe side effects in extreme cases. Only around 11% of patients use their eggs within seven years, implying that most women who freeze their eggs either conceive naturally or choose not to have children at all. Of those who do use their frozen eggs, only around 29% report a live birth from egg freezing across all patients (although patients who are younger in age or have more frozen eggs have much higher success rates). That’s not even taking into consideration the financial cost of the procedure and the additional cost of the storage on top of that — usually around $15,000-20,000 upfront for the initial storage, and then $500-1000 annually after that so long as a woman chooses to keep her eggs frozen.

Is that physical and financial toll worth it for the cancer patient who wants to preserve her fertility? Or the woman who has lifelong medical issues that make natural conception difficult anyway? Without a doubt. But when it comes to the average, otherwise healthy woman who thinks this is a way to kick the can down the road indefinitely — maybe because she’s still waiting for the right man, maybe because she isn’t sure if she wants kids now but thinks she might at some point in the future — the calculus shifts: Egg freezing might still be the right individual decision for her (ultimately, only each individual woman can make that decision for herself), but it’s less of an obvious answer. That’s why it’s so important for those who have platforms to be honest about what egg freezing is — and what it isn’t.

This is what AOC claimed she was doing, telling ABC News, “In this political environment where this administration is denying reproductive care to women across the country, from abortion rights to the ability to carry out a healthy pregnancy, I think it’s important for us as leaders to have these conversations and share these processes, especially for working women across the country and normalize them.”

Well, maybe egg freezing is truly a political decision for her. That shouldn’t be surprising in her case: She’s one of the 535 most powerful people in the country, and even among them is one of the handful of congresspeople who’s a household name. Whether you love her or can’t stand her, you have to admit she’s great at social media and getting her name everywhere. There’s a good chance she might want to run for her party’s nomination in 2028, seeing that she is, for the first time, old enough to run, at 36 today and 39 by Inauguration Day 2029.

That is clearly a unique position to be in, and one that likely no other person in American political history has occupied: to be a woman who’s young enough to have children but old enough to be president, and politically accomplished enough that it wouldn’t be that out of the blue if she managed to pull off a win. Crazier things have happened.

Beyond that, she’s been in a relationship with her college sweetheart for around 15 years and engaged to him for over four years. It would be impolite to speculate as to why they haven’t gotten married yet or had children yet, but, hey, we can shrug and say: Elites, they’re not like the rest of us.

And yet that’s exactly the issue here. AOC claimed to be speaking to “working women” by posting her egg-freezing journey online, but she’s too far removed from their day-to-day concerns to grasp how unique her situation is, despite feigning “relatability.” The truth is, the average 36-year-old with a fiancé she’s dated for nearly half her life and been engaged to for four years is not a famous congresswoman eyeing a presidential bid, but is very likely a woman in a dead-end relationship who might be feeling more immediate desperation to start a family. Maybe she’d benefit from freezing her eggs, maybe not, but independent of that choice, the biggest question facing her is whether or not her fiancé will marry her and have kids with her now, or whether she’ll cut him loose and find someone who will.

In other words, AOC is pushing a luxury belief: the lifestyle she’s promoting of endless, timeless choice — even as pregnancy statistically becomes more and more difficult for the average woman with age, especially for those who are financially constrained and can only afford so many cycles of IVF — is not going to work for most normal women, whose preferences are necessarily shaped by the fact that they, unlike AOC, are not rich and famous and powerful. 

Here’s one place where AOC could use her position in society to help ordinary women who are desperately seeking IVF: The Trump administration has championed IVF accessibility, with a particular focus on lowering costs of commonly prescribed fertility medications through TrumpRx. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services even estimate savings of up to $2,200 per cycle on medication, which is a huge amount in savings for hardworking couples trying to expand their families. Rather than pretending that the Trump administration has been uniquely against IVF and other fertility treatments, AOC could reach out across the aisle and help the women she claims to champion.

Let’s hope she puts aside partisan politics and gets to work instead of posting stories on Instagram so more Americans can have the babies they want. And let’s also hope things work out for her and she can have the babies she wants, too.

***

Neeraja Deshpande is a policy analyst at Independent Women.

Our family’s experience isn’t unique. We are among the millions of American parents who understand, intimately, that there is no single childcare arrangement that’s right for every family.

It is also why there is no universal child care solution — and why our policies shouldn’t pretend there is.

For many families, affordability is a massive challenge. In many parts of the country, child care rivals housing as one of the largest monthly expenses families face. Making care more affordable should absolutely be a priority, particularly if we want to make it easier for couples to start families and have the number of children they hope to have. But affordability alone isn’t enough if families aren’t free to choose the type of care that best fits their needs.

That requires expanding the range of options available to families. Parents don’t all want the same thing because their families don’t all have the same needs. A nurse working overnight has different childcare needs than a teacher working a traditional school schedule. A child with special needs may thrive in one setting, while another flourishes somewhere entirely different. Public policy should expand those choices, not limit them.

Ultimately, addressing America’s childcare problems isn’t about getting more families into one model — it’s about helping families find and afford the model that’s right for them.

Unfortunately, many policymakers are focused on making universal, taxpayer-funded daycare the centerpiece of childcare policy. New Mexico recently became the first state to implement universal child care. The program makes child care cost-free for families who choose state-approved providers. That may sound appealing, but when public resources are directed toward a single model of care rather than giving families the flexibility to choose the arrangements that best fit their needs, the result is a system that favors one type of child care instead of respecting the diversity of American families. Public policy should be family-directed rather than provider-directed. Not only do families have different preferences, but nearly six in 10 parents say they would prefer informal care over a childcare center, even if the center were free and conveniently located. That means policymakers in New Mexico are pushing parents towards their less preferred option.

Policymakers often believe that formal, institutional childcare programs are better than alternatives like home-based care, but Head Start offers an important lesson. After decades in operation, the federal government’s own evaluation found no lasting academic benefits, and another study of state-run pre-K identified some negative emotional outcomes for Head Start participants. While intensive programs can help some very at-risk, low-income children, the evidence does not support expanding one government model as the solution for the general population.

The pandemic also demonstrated the risks of building a childcare system that depends too heavily on any single model or set of decision-makers. Families relying primarily on one centralized system had little control when programs closed, while those with other childcare arrangements — those not dependent on government funding — often had greater flexibility. In many communities, privately operated schools and preschools reopened before their public counterparts, giving families who had access to those options greater continuity.

A better approach is to build the strongest possible childcare ecosystem — one that includes daycare centers, home-based providers, faith-based programs, family caregivers, nannies, and every other arrangement that helps parents balance work and family life.

That also means removing unnecessary regulations that create barriers for small and home-based providers while preserving strong health and safety standards so more can enter the market, families have more options, and costs come down through greater competition. Oklahoma, for example, has excessively detailed toy requirements, with stipulations for the number of toys and the variety of their categories. It even specifies how many balls of various sizes are needed for each number of children. Many regulations, including those adopted with good intentions, have increased childcare costs and made it harder for providers to enter the market. The result is fewer providers, higher costs, and fewer choices for families.

The best childcare policy is the one that trusts parents to make decisions for their own children and gives them the freedom to choose from a wide range of affordable, high-quality options.

America doesn’t need a universal childcare solution. It needs a universal commitment to helping families choose the child care that’s right for them. Because there is no universal American family, there never will be a universal childcare solution. Our policies should reflect that reality.

***

This is part of a series of op-eds based on Independent Women’s new report, “Flourishing Families: An Agenda to Help Families Thrive.” The report, found here, details ways to support families without direct government subsidies or radically distorting the tax code to redistribute resources to families.

Heather Madden is the vice president for policy initiatives at Independent Women.

The law signed by Governor Maura Healey on Monday removes the state’s 24-week abortion restriction and allows a doctor to greenlight an abortion up until just before the baby is born. As Healey signed the legislation, a group of supporters cheered and clapped in support of the new law, paving the way for ending the life of full-term babies. 

“We’re a state with some of the strongest abortion protections in place,” she said. “And yet, you’ll hear from folks about some things that just weren’t in the right place in terms of making sure that women and couples and families had access to the care that they need, particularly those who experience complications late in pregnancy.”

Late-term abortions often include a gruesome process where the baby is fatally poisoned in the womb and then delivered dead. They can also involve an abortionist crushing and dismembering a baby before its delivery. At full-term, most babies weigh around seven pounds, have fully developed organs, and have a layer of fat to stay warm. 

The law easily skated through both the Democrat-controlled state Senate and House. An abortion after 24 weeks may now “be performed by a physician based upon the professional judgment of the physician,” according to the law. 

In pushing for the legislation, Democrat Representative Christine Barber, the sponsor of the legislation, said that abortion “should be between a doctor and a patient.”

Healey’s signing of the law was met with immediate backlash from pro-life advocates. 

“Legalizing elective abortion up to birth on healthy mothers and healthy, pain-capable unborn children is not about protecting the doctor-patient relationship,” Massachusetts Citizens for Life President Myrna Maloney Flynn said. “It is about abortionists normalizing the deaths of fully-developed infants and pressuring vulnerable women to permit their unborn children to die in heinous acts of violence.”

“These abortions represent among the most severe human rights abuses permitted in only a few places around the world, including China and North Korea,” she added. 

The SBA Pro-Life America condemned the law as “barbaric.” 

“It should shock the conscience that tens of thousands of unborn Americans are barbarically dismembered limb by limb and torn apart every single year,” said SBA Pro-Life America President Marjorie Dannenfelser. “Without a minimum national standard, the United States remains 1 of only 8 countries worldwide that allows abortion at any point in pregnancy.”

Other states with similar laws include Alaska, Oregon, Colorado, New Mexico, Minnesota, Michigan, Vermont, New Jersey, and Maryland.

The fiery Hollywood veteran ripped the socialist congresswoman on X after she skipped onto ABC’s “This Week” and attempted to scrub her radical record. Cornered over extreme Left-wing proposals such as abolishing prisons and axing Thanksgiving, Ocasio-Cortez giggled away her past support for issues such as defunding the police, brushing off the outrage, saying, “I have a local city councilman that has this saying, ‘Woke 1 was crazy,’ and I think that what’s important is that we have to assess what a candidate is saying now.”

Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) immediately torched AOC’s sudden pivot, warning the Bronx Democrat that she can’t just shove radical leftism down voters’ throats and laugh it off when the politics get tough.

I wonder why @AOC suddenly wants to walk back her calls to defund the police.

You don’t get to shove radical leftism down Americans’ throats, then laugh it off when it no longer serves your political interests. She can’t hide from her socialist record.https://t.co/G98FckYC8I

— Sen. Marsha Blackburn (@MarshaBlackburn) August 10, 2026

Then came Woods, dropping a bunker-buster on AOC’s die-hard supporters:

It’s far from the first time Woods has taken an axe to Ocasio-Cortez’s ego. Back in 2019, she gleefully tweeted that she and her compatriots were “in charge.” Woods fired back with a fusillade reducing Ocasio-Cortez’s claim to rubble, pointing out some basic facts of what it means to be an American, and even more specifically, a political representative in Congress. Just for good measure, he gave her a brief history lesson, quipping, “If you ever learn to read, look it up.”

Ocasio-Cortez set herself up by tweeting, “Yup. If you don’t like the #GreenNewDeal, then come up with your own ambitious, on-scale proposal to address the global climate crisis. Until then, we’re in charge — and you’re just shouting from the cheap seats.”

Woods shot back, “So, you may have missed this, but the way it works in America is YOU work for US. The last time somebody told Americans to sit down and shut up was 1776. If you ever learn to read, look it up. You are not only [an] idiot, you’re an arrogant idiot, and there is nothing more dangerous.”

Woods’ career has included his mesmerizing Emmy-award performances in “Promise” and “My Name Is Bill W.” — along with his Oscar-nominated performances in “Salvador” and “Ghosts of Mississippi.” Other standout performances include “The Onion Field,” “Holocaust,” “Once Upon A Time In America,” “Citizen Cohn,” and “Nixon.”

The team updated the old Highmark Stadium by building a new one across the street, and no expense was spared for the venue — except, it appears, the cost of commonsense designers.

Some seats are blocked by panes of glass, including at the 50-yard-line. There are seats in the upper deck that can’t see the end zone. Expensive lower level seats are obstructed by a standing platform that juts out past the line of vision. 

“Whoever designed the new Bills stadium … wasn’t very keen to detail. Imagine paying tens of thousands on PSLs and season tickets and walk into a view like this…” one person said in a popular X post. 

Whoever designed the new Bills stadium should wasn’t very keen to detail. Imagine paying tens of thousands on PSLs and season tickets and walk into a view like this… pic.twitter.com/mGhzbCaMVs

— BuffaloWeather (@weather_buffalo) August 9, 2026

Fans attended the team’s first practice in the new stadium over the weekend, which is what led to the backlash. There are currently 17,000 Personal Seat License holders who have one or more seats, per Bleacher Report. 

A rep for the Bills said that the team has heard from “less than one percent” of the Personal Seat License account holders about obstructed-view concerns and will handle them on a “case-by-case basis,” according to Pro Football Talk’s Mike Florio.

Florio also said the obstructed-view seats would not be sold for football games, but would rather be used for other events such as concerts. 

As the tension grew, the Bills released a statement that seemingly addressed the issue.

“Thank you to Bills Mafia for setting a new attendance record with more than 50,000 fans at the Return of the Blue & Red,” a statement from the team said. 

“Saturday’s practice was a great opportunity to test the new stadium. We are currently addressing internal and external feedback regarding the facility’s operation following the first event. We’ll utilize the next six weeks to refine any details as we prepare for the home opener on Thursday, September 17.”

The president declared a crime emergency on August 11 of last year and launched a federal surge soon afterward as part of his “Make D.C. Safe and Beautiful Task Force.” Trump was determined to clean up the streets and monuments of the city and to put criminals behind bars, spurred on by the fatal shooting of 21-year-old Eric Tarpinian-Jachym, a Capitol Hill intern.

Washington is not the same place it was a year ago. As of August 2026, the city’s fountains are running again. Graffiti is cleaned off most major monuments. National Guardsmen stroll the streets and chat with tourists and families.

“This has been the largest, most aggressive law enforcement collaboration ever assembled to confront crime in a major American city,” the U.S. Marshals shared in a press release, describing how “federal, state, and local law enforcement” stood “shoulder to shoulder with the National Guard, refusing to accept violence as the status quo in Washington, D.C.”

(Photo by Kent Nishimura/Getty Images)

Trump’s efforts to clean up D.C. resulted in over 16,000 arrests, the U.S. Marshals shared. Thirty-five homicide suspects were apprehended, and authorities found 25 missing children and returned them to their homes. Authorities took more than 100 gang members off the streets and made more than 3,200 narcotics arrests. They also seized almost 2,000 illegal firearms.

Newly confirmed Attorney General Todd Blanche described the Justice Department’s efforts, in collaboration with their law enforcement partners, as “extraordinary.”

“More than 16,000 arrests, thousands of illegal drugs and firearms taken off the streets, and dangerous violent offenders brought to justice mean safer neighborhoods and lives protected,” he said in a statement. “We will not relent until every community in Washington, D.C., is safe.”

In September 2025, the task force tracked down two suspects in Tarpinian-Jachym’s killing, 17-year-old Jailen Lucas and 17-year-old Kelvin Thomas, as well as a third suspect, 18-year-old Naqwan Lucas, who was apprehended in October 2025. Lucas was also charged with the murder of 17-year-old Zoey Kelley.

The task force additionally arrested 19-year-old Laurence Cotton-Powell and 18-year-old Anthony Taylor for violently attacking and beating a former Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) staffer.

(Photo by Al Drago-Pool/Getty Images)

And in January, the task force captured three confirmed MS-13 gang members who were wanted on first-degree murder warrants for shooting a 14-year-old boy in Prince George’s County, Maryland.

“This operation shows the relentless dedication we have to investigate and apprehend the most violent, dangerous fugitives,” Gadyaces S. Serralta, director of the U.S. Marshals Service, shared in a statement. “When law enforcement works together, the impact is exponential. The D.C. Safe and Beautiful Task Force is proof of that the whole-of-government approach works.”

Two National Guardsmen were ambushed while they were serving under the task force. On November 26, 2025, a shooter targeted Staff Sgt. Andrew Wolfe of the West Virginia Air National Guard and Army National Guard Specialist Sarah Beckstrom. Beckstrom was killed by the gunman, while Wolfe continues to recover from his wounds.

“Sgt. Sarah Beckstrom gave the last full measure of devotion, and Staff Sgt. Andrew Wolfe endured a profound sacrifice in service to others,” said Brigadier General Leland D. Blanchard II, Commanding General (Interim) of the District of Columbia National Guard. “Their courage will forever be part of this mission’s legacy. We honor them by carrying the work forward -united in purpose, steadfast in service, and committed to protect the people of Washington, D.C.”

Lorri Nandrea of Canton was listed as one of four hosts of a June 5 campaign brunch for Jackson at the Local 14 Solidarity Center in Jay, Maine, according to an invitation reviewed by the Maine Wire. At the time, Jackson was running for governor. He is now the Democratic nominee for the U.S. Senate and will face Republican Sen. Susan Collins in November in a race that will help determine control of the Senate.

The invitation described the event as a “Brunch with Troy Jackson” and said the four hosts — Nandrea, Linda Deane, Cynthia Phinney, and Jimmy McHugh — had known Jackson for years and “worked with him on important legislation that we believe makes Maine a better place to live.”

The Communist Party USA’s website maintains an author page for Nandrea listing four articles she has written for the organization: “Waking class consciousness today,” “Why fixing capitalism is not enough,” “Killer capitalism vs. green socialism,” and “Unions are more popular: How does this translate into action?” Communist Party USA has also referenced Nandrea as recently as 2025. 

It’s unclear if Nandrea was a member of Communist Party USA when she co-hosted Jackson’s event.

Jackson became the Democratic nominee on July 25 after Maine Democrats selected him to replace Graham Platner, who withdrew from the race following an allegation of sexual assault that he has denied. Jackson, a former Maine Senate president from northern Maine, will now take on Collins in one of the Democrats’ most closely watched Senate challenges.

For Democrats, the episode may feel like déjà vu. Among Platner’s earliest controversies was his past identification with communism and the resurfacing of his involvement with the Socialist Rifle Association. Platner then faced scrutiny over a Nazi tattoo along with other profane past statements.

Jackson had campaigned alongside Platner during the earlier campaign and emerged as the replacement nominee after Platner’s withdrawal. Jackson has now sought to present himself as a working-class alternative to Collins, emphasizing his background as a logger from rural Aroostook County and his decades in Maine Democratic politics.

But as Jackson asks Maine voters to send him to the U.S. Senate, the political network behind his candidacy will inevitably come under greater scrutiny. That leaves Jackson with a straightforward question to answer: What did he know about Nandrea’s political background, and what role, if any, has she played in his campaign beyond the June event?

Judge Wayne Ozzi issued a temporary restraining order requiring the city to remove its published tax roll, which contains more than 900,000 properties, and barring officials from taking further action on approximately 17,000 warning notices already sent to property owners. The order also pauses related deadlines while a lawsuit challenging the tax’s implementation moves forward.

The surcharge applies to certain New York City properties that are not used as primary residences worth at least $5 million and condominiums and co-ops valued at $1 million or more.

The homeowners behind the lawsuit are not challenging the tax itself. Instead, they argue that the city’s Department of Finance is improperly placing the burden on property owners to prove they do not owe the tax rather than requiring city officials to determine which properties are subject to it. The lawsuit claims the city placed “homeowners in an untenable position in the dead of summer.”

The lawsuit was brought by three homeowners, Rachel O’Brien, Carmine Morano, and Simon Hedley, who say they were forced to gather documents proving their properties are their primary residences.

“The rollout of this surcharge is a debacle,” said Randy Mastro, a lawyer for the plaintiffs. 

The city also published a searchable tax roll containing information on roughly 900,000 properties, prompting privacy complaints from homeowners. The Department of Finance has said that the vast majority of properties on the roll are not subject to the surcharge and that only roughly 17,000 property owners who received warning letters are potentially subject to it.

Mamdani said Monday that his administration would “vigorously defend” the city’s implementation of the tax in court. His administration has maintained that the surcharge is legal and can be implemented fairly.

When Mamdani first promoted the tax, he released a controversial video featuring him outside the home of Citadel CEO Ken Griffin. 

Griffin responded by saying Citadel would add more jobs in Florida following what he called Mamdani’s “creepy” video.

“We will add far more jobs in Miami over the next decade as an immediate and direct consequence of the mayor’s poor decision here with respect to his posting of that video,” Griffin said. 

The next hearing in the homeowners’ lawsuit is scheduled for August 31.  

As he prepared to leave Ankara, Turkey, on July 8, Trump climbed the stairs of the old Air Force One while the television cameras filmed him as usual. The journalists who took their seats were instructed to close their window shades, a direction that caused chatter on social media at the time.

Meanwhile, The Washington Post reported that Trump was being shuttled to an Air Force C-32A plane on an airport catering truck that is usually used to load food and supplies onto the presidential plane. Secretary of War Pete Hegseth also boarded the plane, but he used the stairs of the jet. When that plane took off, Trump’s real location became unknown to most people in the world for a number of hours, according to the Post.

Air Force One, laden with White House staff and journalists, departed Turkey as a decoy, according to the Post. Publicly, the White House said that Trump left on the old Air Force One rather than the new Qatari plane, and Trump had announced on social media that was his plan amid media prattle over the safety of the new jet.

According to the Post, however, Trump’s secret departure was due to an Iranian assassination threat against Trump.

US President Donald Trump disembarks from Air Force One upon his arrival at Etimesgut Air Base near Ankara, on July 7, 2026. (Photo by Doukan Keskinklç / POOL / AFP via Getty Images)

The Washington Post sourced its reporting to a U.S. official, a person with knowledge of the president’s travel, and “corroborating material.” The White House did not confirm or deny the report to The Daily Wire, but it pointed to statements from Steven Cheung and the Air Force about the safety of the Qatari plane.

“The new Air Force One is a state-of-the-art aircraft that has been fitted with high-level security protocols that ensure the safety of the President and his staff,” Steven Cheung said in a statement, in response to The Daily Wire’s inquiry. “As the President has said recently, there are many enemies of America who have their sights on him, and we use every tool at our disposal to address those threats.”

The White House also directed The Daily Wire to a statement from the Air Force on the new Air Force One, praising the new aircraft as “safe, secure and equipped with the most advanced technologies necessary to meet the requirements of the presidential mission.”

“Those requirements were carefully crafted to prioritize mission over aesthetics, leaving much of the previous head of state interior layout minimally changed,” the Air Force said. “No risk was taken in security, safety or mission communications, but the collective team made trades on some of the less commonly used mission sets that Boeing must deliver to support the next 40 years.”

We return to an unstable Westeros, ravaged by the whims of rival claimants to the crown. Bolstered by her new dragon riders and having dispensed with delusions of a pacifist ascent to power, Rhaenyra Targaryen (Emma D’Arcy) swiftly takes King’s Landing and finally assumes the Iron Throne.

Among my gripes with this franchise is its broad lack of favorable characters to root for. Daemon Targaryen (Matt Smith) remains an obvious favorite antihero, though this is more a testament to Smith’s arresting charisma than to anything the screenwriters have given him.

The series also has a curious knack for pushing women into positions of immense power only to have the weight of the crown scramble their senses — Daenerys, Cersei, now Rhaenyra — much like whoever runs the WNBA.

And Alicent Hightower (Olivia Cooke) is somehow even more vexing. Even from captivity, she continues playing her own children like pieces on a chessboard, though her motivations become increasingly difficult to follow. Early in the season — slight spoiler — she helps engineer Rhaenyra’s capture of King’s Landing, manipulating Aemond Targaryen (Ewan Mitchell) into flying to Harrenhal and leaving the capital vulnerable. She presents the betrayal as an attempt to avert further bloodshed and salvage what remains of her family, only to spend much of the season thereafter conspiring against the very children she professes to protect.

The prevailing wisdom that proximity to power maddens and corrupts continues to writhe through the series. In business school, we had a popular elective called “Power and Influence,” devoted to understanding organizational structures, individual motivations, and how people accumulate enough leverage to get their way. Westeros would make for a fine case study. Authority here is almost entirely relational: kings depend on dragons, dragon riders depend on armies, armies depend on lords, and every alliance lasts precisely as long as the incentives holding it together.

Late in the season, one of Rhaenyra’s powerful new allies is wooed by the enemy after discovering that, under her rule, he cannot simply wander off to the pub for a pint during work hours. The particulars of his 401(k) are not discussed onscreen. The show is set in a fantasy realm a thousand years in the past, but competitive benefits remain an unwavering means of poaching talent.

The season’s most intriguing practitioner of this game is Ormund Hightower (James Norton), portrayed with chilling psychopathy as he grooms the young Daeron Targaryen (Benjamin Evan Ainsworth) into a pliable Hightower claimant to the Iron Throne. After conquering Tumbleton, a trading town loyal to Rhaenyra, Ormund strategically embeds his forces among the civilian population, effectively daring the queen to unleash dragon fire and massacre scores of innocents along with his army.

It is only reasonable to assume that Hightower’s great military inspiration is Yasser Arafat. I will spare the particulars for those who have yet to watch, but to drive the point home, the culminating battle finds bound and captive children lining the fortress walls as human shields.

This also underscores the folly of Rhaenyra’s reluctance to intervene decisively once the Hightower incursion becomes clear. Throughout the season, Ormund orchestrates stabbings and murders among Rhaenyra’s command in King’s Landing. Even when Daemon captures one of his operatives, the prisoner apathetically invites Daemon to kill him, warning that they “will never stop.” Ormund’s strategy is simple: keep escalating until Rhaenyra either responds on his terms or loses control altogether. A “Hightower Intifada,” if you will.

This is also where “House of the Dragon” can become maddening. Otherwise clever characters periodically lose all strategic sense when the screenplay needs another reversal. Rhaenyra repeatedly ignores obvious opportunities to exploit her overwhelming advantage in dragons, while supposedly seasoned political operators make decisions whose principal justification appears to be that another episode remains.

Despite her intentions, Rhaenyra’s restraint does not prevent bloodshed; it merely postpones it, while allowing her enemies to make the eventual confrontation considerably worse. By the time she acts, Ormund has entrenched himself among civilians and transformed Tumbleton into precisely the humanitarian catastrophe she hoped to avoid.

Here, George R. R. Martin’s fantasy politics become remarkably grounded in reality. Foreign policy rarely affords leaders the luxury of choosing between violence and peace; more often, the choice is between exercising force now and confronting considerably greater violence later. Deterrence works only when an adversary believes there are consequences for crossing the line.

Rhaenyra approaches her foes with something of Neville Chamberlain’s logic that restraint today might purchase peace tomorrow. Instead, her adversaries treat every hesitation as permission to escalate — a timely lesson in geopolitics she will have to carry into the fourth and final season of “House of the Dragon.”

Peace is not always preserved by the ruler most reluctant to fight. Sometimes it is preserved by making it sufficiently clear that the fight will not end well — or, in more contemporary parlance, would-be assailants can “f— around and find out.”

***

Harry Khachatrian (@Harry1T6) is a film critic for the Washington Examiner. He is a software engineer, holds a master’s degree from the University of Toronto, and writes about wine at BetweenBottles.com.

This article is part of Upstream, The Daily Wire’s new home for culture and lifestyle. Real human insight and human stories — from our featured writers to you.

Callan’s mother, Lindsay Clancy, could be heard sobbing, her folded hands and dark hair veiling her face from prying cameras. Her attorney, Kevin Reddington, leaned toward her and whispered. A court officer moved toward her in the background. 

“In terms of the marks around Callan’s neck, and the petechiae around his eyes and face, did that give you an indication here of the mechanism of death for Callan?” asked the prosecutor. 

“Yes,” Springer continued, “it is consistent with a ligature strangulation.” 

Moments later, the court broke for recess. As she was wheeled from the courtroom, Lindsay’s body slumped forward in her wheelchair. She appeared unable to hold herself upright.

A mother in any other circumstance would never be forced to sit, stone-faced, through such gruesome testimony about her own child. In this case, however, it was Clancy herself who murdered Callan, along with her two other children, five-year-old Cora and three-year-old Dawson. 

The facts of the case are undisputed by the defense. On January 24, 2023, Clancy sent her husband, Patrick, to pick up takeout and medication for their daughter, Cora, leaving her alone with their three children at their home in Duxbury, Massachusetts. In Patrick’s absence, Clancy lured the children to the basement and, using rubber exercise bands, strangled them one by one.

Then, she climbed the stairs to the master bedroom. She locked the door, slit her wrists and neck with a kitchen knife, and threw herself from the second-story window. 

When Patrick returned home a short time later, the house was quiet — an oddity for a family with three young children. “Guys?” he called, expecting an enthusiastic answer. He first checked for his family in the children’s bedrooms, and then the upstairs bathroom for signs of bath time. When he reached the locked door of the master bedroom, he knew something was wrong.

Behind it, he found the room in disarray. Blood speckled nearly every surface, as though it had been sprayed “with a hose.” The bed had been pushed diagonally into the middle of the room. The far window was open, the screen pushed up, the pitch-black 40-degree night blowing in against the silver curtains. 

Lindsay left bloodstains on the shingled siding before landing on the frozen ground beneath the window, her head toward the house. The fall shattered her thoracic spine and multiple ribs and caused a Jefferson fracture in her neck, leaving her paralyzed. By the time she was found, her internal temperature had reached 82 degrees Fahrenheit, indicating severe hypothermia. 

The 911 call capturing Patrick’s discovery of his wife and children was deemed too graphic to release publicly. Lindsay heard the call in court, as did the unusually large panel of 18 jurors.

Photo by David L. Ryan/The Boston Globe via Getty Images

The questions before them are more complicated than whether Clancy killed her children. Instead, the case asks the jury to grapple with some of the most difficult issues in criminal law and medical ethics: Did she possess the mens rea (or guilty mind) required for first-degree murder? Did postpartum psychosis absolve her of legal responsibility for her actions?

And another question the verdict cannot answer: did the medical system fail her long before she killed her children? 

The warning signs

By all accounts, Lindsay Clancy was a “wonderful mom.” 

The sentiment was repeated ad nauseam by countless of the prosecution’s own witnesses over the first nine days of testimony, including her ex-husband, father-in-law, nanny Elaine Rossi, co-workers, pediatrician, and close friends. 

Lindsay “loved our children,” Patrick said, and “never took her frustration out on the kids.” She was dedicated to being a mom, he recalled, and “worked twice as hard as most,” rarely taking a break to rest. 

However, after the birth of her third child, she experienced what defense experts assert was a bout of postpartum mania, waking every day at 4 a.m. to run three miles, ride her Peloton for 30 minutes and do another 30 minutes of aerobics. Just five weeks after giving birth, she ran a five-mile race.

The mania was followed by sudden and severe anxiety and depression. Recognizing that something was very wrong, and trusting in the medical system as a labor and delivery nurse at Massachusetts General Hospital, she reached out for help. Psychiatrist Dr. Jennifer Tufts prescribed Zoloft, to which Clancy had a serious adverse reaction: she did not sleep for 48 hours, experienced racing thoughts and intense anxiety, and felt “awful.”

As Clancy asserts in her civil suit against the many healthcare professionals who treated her in the months following Callan’s birth, this was a “dramatic departure from her previous sleep patterns and was an obvious warning sign of medication-induced activation consistent with bi-polar disorder.” 

The risk is sufficiently well-recognized that Zoloft’s labeling includes a warning about the potential for these symptoms.

Clancy reported the reactions in October 2022 to Dr. Tufts, who simply discontinued the Zoloft and prescribed a cocktail of Ativan and Benadryl. She would consult with Dr. Tufts at least four times in the fall and winter months. 

The cycle continued with different providers. “Frustrated and scared,” Clancy checked herself into the South Shore Hospital emergency room and was later treated through the hospital’s Perinatal Behavioral Health Program. There, she was prescribed trazodone and Prozac, both of which she later reported had worsened her symptoms. South Shore psychiatric nurse practitioner Julie Paul discontinued those medications and started her on Ambien, Remeron, and Klonopin, after which she experienced dissociation. 

She was “unable to determine what was real,” and “unable to be alone.” 

She then contacted a new practitioner in Weymouth, nurse Rebecca Jollatta, who prescribed Seroquel, after which “Lindsay’s condition took a dramatic turn for the worse,” according to the civil suit. “She developed suicidal ideation and began experiencing what she described as ‘intrusive thoughts’—which were actually auditory hallucinations. The voice said, ‘I will not be the same. I want to die.’”

Photo by Matt Stone/MediaNews Group/Boston Herald via Getty Images

In December 2022, her suicidal ideation worsened, accompanied by “thoughts of harming the kids,” which she reported to Patrick and to her mother, who drove her to the emergency room. She was admitted to a partial hospitalization program at Women & Infants Hospital in Providence, Rhode Island. By then, she had lost 15 pounds in a month.

Over the course of her illness, Clancy repeatedly sought help — at least 40 times — from family and friends, suicide hotlines, emergency departments, inpatient programs and mental health providers. She continued reaching out even as her condition deteriorated, but some support clinicians turned her away because she “did not have a suicide plan.” 

She ultimately self-admitted to additional emergency rooms and inpatient programs, the last of which was at McLean Hospital. She was released after only five days so she could attend her daughter’s birthday party.

All in all, Clancy was prescribed 13 different medications, including benzodiazepines, antidepressants, and sleep aids, in the four months leading up to the deaths of her children. 

The defense’s central claim is encapsulated in Clancy’s civil suit: “The psychotropic medications Lindsay received appear to have paradoxically exacerbated her underlying psychiatric vulnerability, precipitating a state of manic psychosis characterized by compelling command hallucinations.” In other words, Clancy was experiencing severe postpartum psychosis, a condition they contend was worsened by the medications she was prescribed.

The persistence of postpartum psychosis

To outside observers, Clancy’s case appears to fit a rare but tragic pattern: women whose postpartum psychosis was not adequately recognized or treated before it ended in catastrophe.

The most famous is Andrea Yates, the Houston mother who drowned her five children in the family bathtub after experiencing severe postpartum psychosis, including commands “from Satan” she believed were commanding her to harm them. Before the killings, Yates had sought psychiatric help, including multiple hospitalizations, but her condition continued to deteriorate. She was initially convicted of capital murder in 2002, though that verdict was overturned on appeal in 2005. Yates was retried in 2006 and found not guilty by reason of insanity.

Another is Carol Coronado, a California mom who was sentenced to life in prison after stabbing her three daughters to death and attempting suicide by stabbing herself so deeply that she punctured the sac surrounding her heart. In the months before the tragedy, Coronado reportedly sought help multiple times — from her husband, family, and healthcare professionals — but those around her failed to recognize the severity of her condition. She remains incarcerated to this day. 

These women were also attentive mothers, by all accounts, who were overtaken by a psychiatric condition more common than many people realize. Postpartum psychosis affects approximately one in every 500 mothers, though the risk rises dramatically, to 20–30%, among women with bipolar disorder, whether diagnosed or undiagnosed. Yet when a new mother leaves the hospital, her chance of being screened for postpartum depression varies widely. When she is screened, it’s often through a 10-question survey developed in 1987. There is currently no widely used screening tool specifically designed to identify postpartum psychosis. 

“Throwing drugs at problems”

Expert psychiatric witnesses set to testify for the defense have also spoken publicly about Clancy’s case and what they describe as significant failures by her medical providers. Dr. Margaret Spinelli, a clinical professor of psychiatry at Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons and founder of the university’s Women’s Program in Psychiatry, conducted a comprehensive forensic psychiatric evaluation of Clancy over multiple hours-long visits. She diagnosed Clancy with severe Bipolar I Disorder with psychosis and postpartum onset.

Spinelli said Clancy’s providers “never seemed to communicate with each other,” adding that Clancy “did all she could to obtain the appropriate treatment.”

The defense is also set to call Dr. Phillip Resnick, a prominent forensic psychiatrist who served as a key witness in the defense of Andrea Yates. 

“I don’t know anyone that could hear this case, and not just feel utterly enraged by what happened to her,” said outside expert Dr. Josef Witt-Doerring, a board-certified psychiatrist and leading expert in psychiatric drug side effects and withdrawal. 

“The senseless loss of life of these three children, for no reason, when it was so clear that she was responding poorly to these medications — I don’t know when the psychiatric establishment will wake up and realize that you can’t just keep on throwing drugs at problems.” 

And then, in a subsequent interview with East Idaho News: “A terrible evil has occurred.” 

The Clancy case

The prosecution is nearing the end of its case, having worked through the vast majority of its 168-person potential witness list. Plymouth County Assistant District Attorney Shanan Buckingham, who wears a large bow in her hair each day in what appears to be a tribute to Cora Clancy, contends that Lindsay acted “intentionally, rationally, and swiftly,” meticulously planning the killings and staging a suicide attempt.

Buckingham and her co-counsel, Jennifer Sprague, have presented the jury with hours of testimony detailing the facts of the case, many of which have already been stipulated to by the defense. They’ve played the graphic 911 call, presented autopsy photographs of the dead children, and held up the Christmas pajamas baby Callan was wearing when he died.

But the prosecution’s tactics are not landing with the increasingly skeptical public in the way prosecuters may have expected. Messages of mourning, and of support, for Lindsay have overwhelmed social media. Think pieces have been published in major media outlets about the culpability of Big Pharma in this particular tragedy. 

The prosecutors have failed to recognize an important cultural shift: We no longer live in a world where a judge could sentence Carol Coronado, a mentally ill mother, to life in prison with little public examination of the relational and medical failures that preceded the tragedy. And we’re past 2020, when a largely compliant public, driven by fear, surrendered extraordinary liberties in deference to government agencies without scrutiny of the science behind each consequential decision.

We live instead in an age of appropriate skepticism, where institutions are expected to prove their competence, not merely invoke their authority. If the jury reflects that broader public sentiment, it should prove consequential for Lindsay Clancy, whose failure by the system had deadly consequences.

***

Grace Salvatore is a Nebraskan writer based in New York City.

This article is part of Upstream, The Daily Wire’s new home for culture and lifestyle. Real human insight and human stories — from our featured writers to you.

For years, the WNBA has served as sports’ loudest megaphone for wokeness. In 2021, the league identified “LGBTQ+ advocacy with a focus on trans rights” as one of its Justice Movement priorities and conducted education sessions on trans inclusivity. Its members have recently criticized anyone who questioned whether biological sex should determine participation in women’s sports.

Last week, the coaches got in on the game. Minnesota Lynx coach Cheryl Reeve wore a “Trans Kids Belong” t-shirt while coaching a game. Golden State Valkyries coach Natalie Nakase spoke out strongly in favor of inclusivity and the inclusion of trans women. And when Indiana Fever coach Stephanie White was pressed about a biological male playing in the WNBA, she responded that she didn’t believe “exclusion is an answer.”

But its own rulebook presents a debate. The league says its players must be women. But it has never clearly defined what makes someone a woman for eligibility purposes. It is an exercise that would have seemed preposterous at the league’s founding 30 years ago, so I’ll offer them sympathy there, but I immediately rescind it for the self-inflicted mess they currently find themselves in.

And my popcorn is in the microwave for the show that is about to unfold as two former NBA players — Enes Kanter Freedom and Royce White — are declaring eligibility for the 2027 WNBA draft. This approach is already being tested in France, where transgender basketball player Julie Tetart is dominating the women’s pro league, averaging 21 points and 20 rebounds per game, and winning the Player of the Year recognition. She said she, too, is open to playing in the WNBA.

Regardless of how one feels about the seriousness of Kanter or White, they are not the WNBA’s problem. They are the stress test. When an institution makes identity a central organizing principle, it eventually must answer the practical question: What happens when identity collides with the rules of the game? That is what has happened here.

Enter Sophie Cunningham — one of the league’s most marketable stars — who said she wanted to protect girls from having to compete against biological males and stood by her decision. Then came the backlash: criticism from other players, Seattle Storm owner Celeste Keaton verbally abusing two young girls supporting Cunningham before a game, and the physical assault Cunningham has taken on the court since, which certainly makes one wonder.

The league decided to have a very public ideological debate over whether biological sex should matter, and so along comes Kanter and White in one of culture’s ultimate “gotcha!” moments to essentially say, “Let’s see whether you actually believe what you are saying.”

Kanter, an 11-year NBA veteran, has read the league’s rulebook and reviewed its eligibility criteria, and believes its vagueness allows him to simply declare himself eligible. Perhaps more creatively, White is identifying as transgender for the purposes of competing in women’s basketball.

If the league believes identity is sufficient, then the devastating question becomes, “What objective test distinguishes a sincere transgender applicant from someone exploiting an undefined rule?”

The Women’s National Basketball Association must now answer: What is a woman? And thus, it is presented with a brutal catch-22. If the league says, “Women’s basketball is for biological females,” it contradicts years of its own messaging around trans inclusion. They would be selling out and turning their back on a community they have championed louder than most for years. But if they say, “If you identify as a woman, you’re eligible.” Now what? Can they turn away Kanter and White? Two players who would essentially guarantee a championship to any team they join?

The ultimate question for the WNBA is, “If biological sex doesn’t matter, why should an NBA player’s biological sex suddenly matter when he enters the WNBA? That’s the question the league is forced to answer, and every option is an airball.

Most likely, the WNBA will dismiss Kanter and White as a publicity stunt, but the damage is done. Eventually someone will come along who isn’t a stunt. Imagine someone who transitioned a decade ago, lives full-time as a woman, has undergone hormone treatment, plays professional basketball, genuinely wants to play in the WNBA, and meets whatever current criteria the league establishes. Some would call this scenario a slam dunk.

The WNBA is proving on a very public scale the fallacies that permeate woke culture. Conviction looks great on a t-shirt, until it’s tested in real-world circumstances. For years, the league told us that gender identity deserved recognition. Now gender is asking for a roster spot, and finding room on the bench will prove difficult. Expect to see the slogans fade on players’ attire and their social media pages quiet down once they face stronger competition for their job.

Biological sex is either relevant to women’s professional basketball or it isn’t. The league’s decision moving forward will determine whether the WNBA endures or if it accidentally turns itself into the LGBTQNBA.

***

Gates Garcia is the host of the YouTube show and podcast “We The People.” Follow him on Instagram and X @GatesGarciaFL.

In broad daylight, on a European beach, an African migrant was caught performing a depraved act of public indecency in front of families and children. He was jerking off on a public beach in front of kids.

It was an act that, in any sane society, would have resulted in the immediate arrest and incarceration of the predator. When bystanders rightfully intervened to stop him, i.e., beat the sh*t out of him, and rightfully so, a startling thing happened: a white woman threw herself into the fray.

But she didn’t intervene to protect the children.

She wasn’t calling for the police, nor was she shielding the innocent. Instead, she placed herself in harm’s way to protect the predator. She leaned toward the man with a look of intense, therapeutic concern, a gaze usually reserved for a patient on a therapist’s couch, not a criminal caught in a most disgusting act.

When I recently commented on this incident, observing that I want a man who looks at me the way liberal white women look at invaders who commit such acts, the predictable outrage machine went into overdrive.

But my critique wasn’t merely about a single viral video; it was an indictment of a much deeper, more dangerous pathology taking root in our culture.

While this specific nightmare took place on a European beach, it serves as a grim “coming attractions” trailer for our American future if we don’t stop it in its tracks. We are currently witnessing an epidemic of pathological empathy among liberal white women, and it is quietly becoming the single greatest threat to our national security.

This isn’t compassion; it’s a desperate need for moral validation. We have raised a generation of progressive white women who have been taught that their primary duty to society is to apologize for it. They have been conditioned by an education system and a cultural elite into believing that “safety” is a microaggression, that “borders” are racist, and that “sovereignty” is a code word for bigotry.

The result is a global double standard that would be hilarious if it weren’t so deadly. In Spain, when tens of thousands of migrants swarm an enclave in a single weekend, the media rightfully calls it a crisis. The European Union holds emergency meetings.

But here in America? Under the Biden-Harris administration, we’ve had millions cross our southern border — a slow-motion colonization that makes the European crisis look tame. Yet, if you, a tax-paying American citizen, dare to call it an invasion, you are immediately branded a racist. You are a bigot. You are deemed a threat to “democracy.”

This performative empathy extends far beyond the beach; it is fundamentally altering our behavior at the ballot box. These same progressive voters, who claim to be the vanguard of “women’s rights,” are the primary engine behind a radical effort to erase women. They march for equality while simultaneously carrying water for radical ideologies that view women as second-class citizens. They scream about bodily autonomy while rolling out the red carpet for cultures that view women as property.

It is the ultimate political Stockholm Syndrome of the 21st century.

This is not just a political disagreement; it is a mental illness breakdown on a national scale. Liberal white women have been told that their inherent “privilege” is a sin that can only be washed away through a policy of radical self-destruction.

They view themselves as the moral arbiters of society, and welcoming the “invader” — no matter how dangerous or lawless — is their way of proving they are “good people.” They prioritize the comfort of the lawbreaker over the safety of the citizen because their manufactured guilt will not allow them to do anything else.

They would rather see their cities burn and their daughters shower next to grown men than risk being called “intolerant” at a wine-and-cheese mixer. The progressive Left has been trained to hand over the keys to the kingdom and then apologize for the locks being too difficult to pick.

They are welcoming criminals who despise our values, our laws, and our way of life, all while nodding along in a trance of performative empathy. And we have enabled this destruction from within, handing the future of our country over to pathological empathizers.

If this is the “future” the Left is building, I want no part of it. It’s time to wake up, throw the “Coexist” bumper stickers in the trash, and start acting like a nation that actually wants to survive.

We need to return to a reality where “illegal” actually means illegal. Because if we can’t tell the difference between a refugee seeking asylum and a public predator exploiting our goodwill, we don’t have a country anymore — we have a crime scene.

America first, or America is finished.

***

Congresswoman Nancy Mace is the U.S. representative for South Carolina’s 1st congressional district.

The order, dubbed “Gold Standard Childhood Vaccine Recommendations,” calls for reducing the number of diseases for which vaccines are routinely recommended for all children, spacing out childhood immunizations, and eventually administering the combined measles, mumps and rubella vaccine as three separate shots.

Under the order, vaccines for 11 diseases, including measles, mumps, rubella, polio and whooping cough, would be recommended for all children, down from 18 under the current schedule. Vaccines for several other diseases, including hepatitis A and B and meningococcal disease, would instead be recommended for certain higher-risk groups or through shared decision-making between parents and doctors. Influenza and COVID-19 vaccines would also fall into the shared decision-making category.

The order also directs federal agencies to work toward making separate measles, mumps and rubella vaccines available in the United States. “To the maximum extent feasible,” it calls for childhood immunizations to be administered at separate medical visits.

Trump defended the changes during an Oval Office signing ceremony, saying they would reduce the number of vaccines administered during individual visits and arguing that parents should have greater control over when their children receive shots.

“It’s inconvenient, it’s five stops, but it’s something that I think will have a huge impact on autism,” Trump said.

Trump has repeatedly suggested that childhood vaccines could be connected to rising autism diagnoses. Numerous large studies have found no association between the MMR vaccines and autism. The president also acknowledged Monday that he did not have scientific evidence for a claim he made that the current MMR vaccine could be “lethal.”

“What I’ve heard is that there are some people that say it is that way, and I say, ‘Well, let’s say there’s a 5 percent chance of it; let’s split it up,’” Trump said.

Secretary Kennedy, who has promoted vaccine skepticism for years and made reshaping federal vaccine policy a central part of his tenure at the Department of Health and Human Services, stood alongside Trump during the announcement.

The order directs HHS to develop proposed changes to the childhood vaccine schedule within 90 days. It also calls for additional research into vaccine safety, alternative vaccine ingredients and the timing and sequencing of childhood immunizations.

The practical effect of the order remains uncertain. States generally determine which vaccines children must receive to attend public schools, rather than the federal government, and individual measles, mumps, and rubella vaccines are not currently available in the United States. Manufacturers would have to develop and obtain approval for each product separately.

The order acknowledges that similar previous directives have been delayed by litigation and instructs federal agencies to advance the new recommendations “to the fullest extent allowable by law.” It also directs the Justice Department to pursue what it calls “meritorious” legal challenges involving state vaccine requirements and exemptions, including those based on parental authority and religious and medical grounds. 

Medical organizations and some Republicans have criticized the order.

“I’m a doctor. This executive order is wrong,” Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-LA), chairman of the Senate Health Committee, wrote on X. “The President does not have the expertise to make these changes.”

“Vaccines are overwhelmingly safe. Vaccines are effective. Vaccines DO NOT cause autism,” Cassidy added, arguing that separating vaccines could require children to receive more shots to obtain the same protection.

The administration has portrayed the changes as part of a broader effort to give parents more control over medical decisions and to reconsider longstanding federal recommendations. 

Pelosi, who has represented San Francisco in Congress for nearly four decades, is throwing her support behind San Francisco Supervisor Connie Chan as she works to defeat state Sen. Scott Wiener, and to do it, the retiring congresswoman has spent weeks mobilizing her network on Chan’s behalf. She has hosted major fundraisers for the supervisor, secured endorsements from congressional allies, and even loaned a top adviser to Chan’s campaign.

“Nancy has basically taken over Connie’s campaign,” Wiener told Politico, contrasting Chan’s operation with his own campaign, which he said has “enormous grassroots support.”

Pelosi has made clear that she intends to see Chan elected. “I know and love this district, I know the Congress, and I know Connie. I’m proud to endorse Democrat Connie Chan and ask you to join me in electing her to Congress,” Pelosi said when she endorsed Chan.

Pelosi’s intervention is particularly notable because Wiener was once considered an ally. The two have known each other for decades, and Pelosi previously supported Wiener in his campaigns for local office. But their relationship deteriorated as Wiener positioned himself to succeed Pelosi. Wiener announced his congressional campaign in October 2025, before Pelosi publicly announced that she would not seek another term.

The timing of Wiener’s announcement has remained a point of contention among Pelosi’s allies. Former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown, a longtime Pelosi ally who now supports Chan, told Politico that Wiener had assured him he would not announce a congressional bid before Pelosi made her own plans public. Wiener disputes that account, calling it “fabrication” and saying he never made such a commitment.

Several of Pelosi’s longtime political allies and constituencies have followed her in backing Chan, including organized labor. Chan is also supported by Sen. Adam Schiff (D-CA), the California Working Families Party and Our Revolution. Wiener, meanwhile, has endorsements from the California and San Francisco Democratic parties, along with several major labor unions and a majority of San Francisco’s moderate-leaning Board of Supervisors.

The latest escalation in the intraparty feud came over an AI-powered campaign chatbot created by Wiener’s campaign to attack Chan. The website, ConnieChan.ai, portrayed Chan as someone who says “no” to proposals involving housing and public transportation. Pelosi and a coalition of Democratic lawmakers and San Francisco political organizations condemned the chatbot, arguing that it could reinforce sexist and racist stereotypes.

“Women have spent generations fighting to have our own voices heard in the halls of power,” Pelosi and her allies said in a joint statement. “We should not have to fight against artificial intelligence putting words in our mouths.” Wiener later apologized and announced that he would remove both the chatbot and the billboards advertising it.

The controversy has nevertheless given Pelosi another opportunity to draw a sharp contrast between her preferred successor and Wiener. Pelosi’s political intervention comes after the June primary demonstrated that her endorsement alone may not be enough to determine the outcome. Wiener finished first with roughly 41% of the vote, while Chan received about 29%, sending the two into the November general election under California’s top-two primary system.

Pelosi has said her support for Chan is motivated in part by concerns over female representation in the Bay Area’s congressional delegation. Several prominent women who once represented the region, including former Sen. Dianne Feinstein, Vice President Kamala Harris, former Rep. Jackie Speier and former Rep. Anna Eshoo, have all been succeeded by men.

With Pelosi deploying her fundraising network, congressional relationships and longtime San Francisco allies on Chan’s behalf, the November contest is shaping up as more than a race between two Democrats. It is also a test of whether one of the most powerful political figures in San Francisco history can determine who inherits the seat and influence she spent nearly 40 years building.

According to Washington Reporter editor-in-chief Matthew Foldi, Democrats have become increasingly aware that independent candidate Seth Bodnar would stand a much better chance against the Republican nominee, Kurt Alme, a former U.S. Attorney backed by President Donald Trump. The only person standing in the way is Alani Bankhead — who won the Democratic Party’s five-way primary on June 2 with 43.7% of the vote — and the party appears ready and willing to throw out more than 48,000 votes to force a more favorable general election matchup.

The goal of the “project,” according to a series of screenshots Foldi shared, was to make the Montana Senate seat — and thus potential control of the upper chamber — “more winnable” by convincing Bankhead to drop out of the race. A call to arms sent out to activist groups around the state suggested that it was an “all hands on deck” situation because Bankhead, who had not responded to “gentler nudges,” had to drop out by August 10 in order to be taken off the ballot.

“Democrats want to push @AlaniBankhead out of the race in favor of ‘independent’ candidate Seth Bodnar, who is backed by Chuck Schumer and former senator Jon Tester. These documents offer an inside look at how Democrats’ dark money apparatus will use any means, including intimidation to secure their preferred nominee,” Foldi posted, following that with a screenshot of a document titled, “Montana Senate Seat: How to Help.”

The document is titled: Montana Senate Seat: How to Help. It urges Democrats “who have relevant relationships” to urge Bankhead to drop out of the race.

(3/xx) pic.twitter.com/St1x4C0ng7

— Matthew Foldi (@MatthewFoldi) August 9, 2026

Anyone with “relevant relationships” — meaning those who might have the ability to put pressure on Bankhead either directly or indirectly — was encouraged to use them to “encourage” Bankhead to exit the race ahead of the August 10 deadline. The document even included a list of people close to the candidate who could be targeted by their pressure campaign. The list included several family members, close friends, as well as current and former campaign staffers.

The document also contained helpful tips for those inclined to participate, from reminders to tag Bankhead in their posts to pre-written drafts that they were urged to alter slightly so as not to appear AI-generated.

Just one week prior, up against a nearly identical deadline, South Dakota Democratic Senate nominee Julian Beaudion withdrew from the race, citing a similar pressure campaign orchestrated by left-wing activists who pushed him out in favor of former Democrat-turned-independent Brian Bengs.

Beaudion explained just after he exited the race that he’d done so in light of a recent “devastating house fire” — the cause of which is still under investigation — and “intimidating threats to drop out of this race.”

“The mental and physical safety of my family is my priority and for this reason alone, I step aside,” he said.

The Indiana Recount Commission certified Trump-endorsed challenger Paula Copenhaver as the winner over Republican state Sen. Spencer Deery by just three votes, 6,332 to 6,329, bringing Trump’s campaign against Indiana Republicans who rebelled against his redistricting push to the brink of a clean sweep.

Eight votes originally credited to Deery were tossed over “clerical errors” by election officials, according to local outlet FOX59.

Copenhaver’s victory means six of the seven Indiana Republican senators targeted by Trump over their opposition to his redistricting push have now lost their primaries.

It’s a stunning turnaround from the May primary, when Deery initially finished just three votes ahead of Copenhaver, 6,337 to 6,334.

The recount result comes less than two weeks after Indiana Senate President Pro Tem Rodric Bray announced he would not seek another term as the chamber’s leader. Bray’s office cited threats to recruit and fund primary challengers against senators who supported him for leadership. 

Trump celebrated the announcement: “I am pleased to announce that the man who so foolishly led the Indiana State Senate, with almost every Candidate losing their Race, many of them in Office for years, will not be seeking Re-Election as Senate President because he wouldn’t have had a chance to be elected — Better yet would be if he would resign from Office, completely, but he will be met by us at the Indiana Polls,” Trump wrote in a Truth Social post.

In December 2025, the Indiana Senate voted 31-19 to reject a mid-decade congressional redistricting plan, defying intense pressure from Trump and Republican Gov. Mike Braun. Twenty-one Republicans joined all 10 Democrats to defeat the Trump-backed map.  

Shortly afterward, Trump vowed political retaliation, endorsing primary challengers against the state lawmakers, many of whom were longtime incumbents. 

Duane “Keffe D” Davis, 63, a longtime member of the South Side Compton Crips, has pleaded not guilty to murder with a deadly weapon. He spent years publicly discussing his involvement in the events surrounding Shakur’s killing, including in interviews and his memoir, statements that eventually helped revive the cold case investigation that led to his arrest, CBS News reported.

Jury selection begins Monday, with the trial expected to last about a month.

Prosecutors do not claim that Davis fired the fatal shots. Instead, they contend that he orchestrated the attack and provided the gun used to kill Shakur.

Shakur was a massive hit in the rap world when he was gunned down on September 7, 1996, while waiting at a red light in the car driven by Death Row Records co-founder Marion “Suge” Knight. The pair had just watched a Mike Tyson boxing match in Las Vegas and were headed to a club where Shakur was expected to perform. 

Shakur died six days after the drive-by shooting. Knight sustained minor injuries.

Grand jury testimony placed the killing against the backdrop of several overlapping rivalries, including beef between Death Row Records and Bad Boy Records and between two Los Angeles-area gangs, the South Side Compton Crips and Mob Piru, a Bloods-affiliated gang. 

Bad Boy Records was founded by Sean “Diddy” Combs and included the Notorious B.I.G., while Death Row Records included big names such as Shakur, Snoop Dogg, and Dr. Dre. 

Davis’ defense has accused the prosecution of relying on sources who did not witness the crime. His attorneys also tried to block excerpts from his book, “Compton Street Legend,” along with an interview Davis gave to police, from being used at trial. They argue the book is “fictionalized” and written with a co-author, making it unreliable as an account of what actually happened. 

The book describes a confrontation hours before the shooting in which Shakur and others attacked Davis’ nephew, Orlando “Baby Lane” Anderson. 

“We couldn’t let no record company studio gangsters do us like that,” the book says, adding that Shakur had “crossed the line.” 

In the book, Davis recalls how a gun was passed to individuals in the backseat of the car. According to his account, Shakur appeared to reach for a gun before someone in the backseat opened fire. Davis wrote, “One of my guys from the back seat grabbed the Glock and started bustin’ back.”

Police found no weapons in the vehicle after the shooting, per the police detective assigned to the case. 

Anderson has been suspected of being the gunman but was never charged in Shakur’s killing. He was killed in 1998 in an unrelated gang shooting. The other two passengers who were in Davis’ car that night have also died.

Knight, who was seated beside Shakur at the time of the shooting, is currently serving a 28-year prison sentence in California for voluntary manslaughter. He had previously said he would not testify in Davis’ case.

Combs could also become part of the trial after Davis previously claimed that Combs offered him money to kill Shakur. Combs has denied involvement in Shakur’s murder.

Combs is currently serving a four-year prison sentence after being convicted on two counts of transportation to engage in prostitution. He was acquitted of the more serious racketeering conspiracy and sex-trafficking charges. 

He’s never been mentioned by Reuters, Axios, or the Associated Press. You also won’t come across Hunt’s name if you get your news from CNN, CBS, NBC, or ABC. 

In short, there is no mainstream media interest in Diquan Hunt whatsoever. And there never will be.

What makes Hunt so inconvenient for the media censors — the people who would prefer to bury all evidence of his crimes — is that he has an Instagram account. And on that Instagram account, over the past few days, Hunt has posted several livestreams in which he assaults women on the street in Charlotte, North Carolina. 

He has been broadcasting, in graphic detail, his deranged and unprovoked attacks on female bystanders going about their day. Here’s one of them, posted on July 29, in which he rants about McDonald’s before chasing a white woman into traffic, as he threatens to harm her. 

Watch:

🚨#BREAKING: I can confirm that the man arrested this week for violent street attacks on a woman in Charlotte was FREE BECAUSE OF A PLEA DEAL IN MARCH.

Diquan Shafar Hunt was arrested in December 2025 for Assault with a Deadly Weapon and three other charges.

On March 18, 2026,… pic.twitter.com/OPpCbxrUiP

— Matt Van Swol (@mattvanswol) August 7, 2026

The next day, Hunt — having somehow not been jailed after the incident we just watched — livestreamed another attack, where he came across a woman holding a “get well soon” balloon. He immediately punches her and knocks her unconscious on the pavement — an injury that clearly has the potential to be fatal. As he stands over the woman’s body, he taunts her and screams about killing people. 

It’s important to understand the reality of what’s happening. These are not “random” attacks, despite what you may have heard. First of all, Hunt specifically targeted defenseless and unsuspecting women (who were not black). And secondly, these attacks were engineered, at a policy level, by the black DA in Charlotte, whose name is Spencer Merriweather. 

In both of those respects, these attacks resemble the slaughter of Iryna Zarutska on the light rail system in Charlotte, just a short drive away from where these livestreams were recorded. 

Like Decarlos Brown, the black psychopath who killed Zarutska, Hunt made sure that he wasn’t ambushing anyone who could fight back. For all the talk about how “crazy” these barbarians are, somehow, they’re always very particular about the kinds of people they try to murder. You’ll notice that they rarely target anyone who appears to have the physical capacity to fight back. They’re “crazy,” and yet choose their targets carefully. How does that work? Nobody can explain, or cares to explain. 

And secondly, like Decarlos Brown, Hunt had a criminal history so extensive, and so obviously incompatible with life in a civilized society, that he should’ve been executed years ago. 

Neither one of these animals should’ve been allowed anywhere near the public. Both of them benefited from the fact that Democrats in positions of authority, always and everywhere, release violent criminals from prison as quickly as possible — as long as they’re not white. We’ll discuss Merriweather at some length as well as Hunt’s criminal history. But let’s start with this. Look at these two images:

These two images should be iconic. They tell the story. Not just the story of the crime problem in Charlotte — although they do tell that story. But also the story of American society in modern times. 

On the left: a young woman, who had been cheerful and happy, apparently on her way to visit a sick friend or relative. 

On the right: a degenerate black man, unstable and volatile and disturbed, with more than a dozen prior arrests, wandering around the streets, rambling nonsensically, angry for no reason, brutally assaulting any woman he comes across. 

The two happen to cross paths. The woman waves at the man. The man answers by savagely assaulting her. And this is the aftermath.

For years now, our laws and institutions have dedicated themselves to protecting, coddling, and indulging the person on the right, often at the immediate expense of the person on the left. 

It would not overstate the case to say that our system made a choice — it chose to trade the person on the left for the person on the right. It was decided that the person on the right must be free, must be comfortable, must be cared for and fed and clothed, literally no matter what the cost. 

If the cost is crime and disorder, if the cost is the breakdown of the social fabric, if the cost is the death of countless innocents — no cost is too high. Any price must be paid simply to keep the person on the right — the chronically dysfunctional, violent, anti-social black criminal — alive and free and walking the streets. 

A functional society organizes itself the opposite way. The priority is protecting the person on the left — the innocent woman (or child or man). While the person on the right — the malevolent, maladjusted criminal — is rightly seen as having no value to society, a net negative, a problem to be solved. 

And you solve it by throwing this person in a cage forever and forgetting that he ever existed. Or, if his crimes warrant a harsher response — and in this guy’s case they do — you give him a fair trial, convict him according to the laws of the land, and then promptly execute him and bury him in a grave that nobody will ever visit, because he has no friends, and no family that loves him. 

You only have to ask yourself a simple question. And the answer to this question should determine your position on issues of so-called criminal justice. The question is this: Of these two people, which one would you rather have walking around your neighborhood? You can’t say both. If you want the person on the right walking around, that means it’s not safe for the person on the left. This is a zero-sum game. So which would you prefer? 

If you are a sane person, and you say that obviously you’d prefer to live in a neighborhood where the person on the left is walking around, that means the person on the right, and every depraved, vicious predator like him, must be removed from society. That is what a functional society does. A functional society gives all the benefit, all the leeway, all the priority, to the person on the left. But we don’t live in a functional society anymore.

Instead, prosecutors are flat-out refusing to prosecute degenerate criminals. Matt Van Swol, who used to work at the Department of Energy, obtained all the court records for Diquan Hunt, going back more than a decade. 

So this criminal record begins when he’s 18. We can assume, with 100% certainty, that his juvenile record is extensive as well. But it’s all been expunged because during the “civil rights era,” our elites determined that it’s racist to keep track of crimes overwhelmingly committed by black teenagers. Specifically, in 1967, a commission set up by LBJ recommended that every state pass a law preventing the public from accessing the criminal records of juveniles.

There was never any logic behind this move. If someone with a name like “Diquan Hunt,” hypothetically, assaults dozens of people from the age of 12 to 17, there’s no doubt that he’s going to be a threat to the public for the rest of his life. It’s absurd to believe that, the moment he turns 18, he’s going to somehow “mature” and “grow out of it.” 

You know how many crimes are committed by normal teenagers, who actually have a future in society? Very few. A normal teenager — going through a phase of normal teenage rebellion — may get himself into trouble for relatively petty infractions. But if a teenager is prowling around, committing serious, brutal, perverse, and horrifying crimes, then he will almost certainly continue to commit such crimes — and worse — as an adult. 

The fact is, habitual criminal behavior as a teenager is the single best predictor of habitual criminal behavior as an adult. And it’s precisely for that reason — not in spite of it — that civil rights activists prevent the public from seeing juvenile records. 

So with that in mind, here’s Diquan Hunt’s criminal record, past the age of 18, which is the arbitrary date that we’re suddenly allowed to keep track. 

Watch:

🚨#BREAKING: I have obtained ALL of the court records for arrests against Diquan Hunt, the man who brutalized women in Charlotte NC.

What I have found will HORRIFY you…

Judges literally PROTECTED a Black serial female-abuser for nearly 10 YEARS.

You are not angry enough… pic.twitter.com/Sroh6tcVCS

— Matt Van Swol (@mattvanswol) August 9, 2026

The reason for all the dismissals, obviously, has nothing to do with a lack of evidence. You don’t get arrested six times when there’s no case against you. What happened here is that prosecutors in Charlotte made the determination that it would be racist to send Diquan Hunt to prison. They believe, as a matter of policy, that black people can victimize anyone they want — especially white women — as a form of reparations.

If you don’t believe that, consider the following statements from one of Hunt’s recent victims, who was attacked in December of 2025. 

The man recently spoke to a local news station, WBTV, which granted him anonymity because he’s still in fear of his life. According to this individual and court records, Hunt approached him at the light rail station located near the Spectrum Center in Charlotte. Hunt was committing a crime simply by being there. He had already been banned by the Charlotte Area Transit System. But on this occasion, in addition to trespassing, Hunt was looking to terrorize the general public. 

He was armed with a gun, a knife, and a hatchet. Seeing the man, Hunt lifted up his shirt and asked, “Are you ready to die today?” The man froze for a moment before escaping. Police arrested Hunt, and he was charged with four misdemeanors — including assault with a deadly weapon — which apparently is a misdemeanor in the dystopian hellscape of Charlotte. In just a few months, on March 18, Hunt accepted a plea deal from prosecutors for “assault with a deadly weapon and carrying a concealed weapon.” He was sentenced to time served, meaning he didn’t have to spend any additional time in prison. This is from WBTV, reporting on the circumstances of the plea deal:

Hunt had been in the Mecklenburg County jail for 89 days since his arrest three months earlier on December 18, 2025. He was released the day of his sentencing. “I had to go to court in March for my incident and they gave him basically a slap on the wrist,” the man said. He said he spoke with the District Attorney’s office before sentencing. “They pulled me into a room and basically said that they felt he had been punished enough and were giving him time served,” he said. “I was shocked, but what am I going to say to the D.A.? I tried to put my two cents in and they didn’t want to hear that.” When asked what he would say to the DA and judge now, the man said: “This is on their hands. I think they owe everyone an apology. They need to lock these people up. It’s time to stop giving people a pass.”

So there it is. The prosecutors determined that Hunt “had been punished enough” because he spent 89 days in the county jail while awaiting trial. 

This is someone who, by this point, had multiple prior arrests for attacking women in public, all of which the DA dismissed. He’s violated multiple domestic violence protective orders, which means he’s terrorizing women even after he’s been explicitly told by a court to stay away from them. And again, the DA dropped all of those charges. 

And now, after threatening to murder a man while armed with a hatchet and a firearm on public property that already banned him from the premises, the DA’s conclusion is that 89 days in jail is enough of a sentence. The time he spent in jail because he couldn’t make bail — which he would’ve had to spend anyway, guilty or not — is his “punishment.”

It should be abundantly clear based on this reporting alone that we need to get rid of the idea of criminals getting credit for “time served.” It needs to be abolished. If you’re in county jail awaiting trial, it means there’s probable cause to believe you committed a crime, and you couldn’t make bail (even with the help of a bail bondsman). That’s too bad. But you’re not in prison. Depending on the charges, you might even be at home, sitting on your couch with an ankle monitor that doesn’t actually work and that no one ever checks. 

Really, even if you were in prison for the whole period of time you’re awaiting trial, it still doesn’t matter. You’re not being punished for the crime you committed. You’re in a holding pattern until your guilt can be adjudicated. 

If you’re convicted after a trial, you have no argument whatsoever that your pretrial detention should somehow count towards your sentence. 

Imagine if anything else worked like this. Let’s say that, during the next fake pandemic, you’re forced to stay in quarantine for two weeks after landing at the airport, while they test your saliva or whatever. And then, when the results finally come back, you’re informed that, unfortunately, you tested positive for Ebola, COVID, monkeypox, and measles, all rolled into one. You’re a walking superspreader. 

You’re far more dangerous than anyone thought. Then the doctors say, “Oh, don’t worry about it, normally you’d have to spend two weeks in the hospital to treat this, but because you already spent a while waiting for your results, you’re good to go. You get credit for all that time we had you in quarantine.”

This is how our “Criminal justice system” works, or doesn’t work. It’s an absurdity that plays out every day. And in this case, it’s actually even worse, because Diquan Hunt’s family was begging prosecutors — and anyone else who would listen — to lock him up for as long as possible. They understand that he’s a rabid beast, and he’s going to kill someone eventually. But they were ignored. 

Watch:

🚨#BREAKING: The sister of the man filming himself beating women in Charlotte NC just went public.

Her message is HORRIFYING.

Her own family has BEGGED to keep him locked up for NEARLY 10 YEARS.

They even PERSONALLY CONTACTED THE JUDGES TO ASK HIM NOT TO BE RELEASED.

He was… pic.twitter.com/GYtR2ng24d

— Matt Van Swol (@mattvanswol) August 8, 2026

We can’t show the DA’s face enough. Every victim of Diquan Hunt — and there are quite a few of them — should be able to hold Spencer Merriweather personally responsible for everything that happened to them. Spencer Merriweather belongs in prison. He’s responsible for the murder of Iryna Zarutska, and he’s responsible for this woman getting brain damage on the sidewalk. And those are just the high-profile cases we know about. The DA wants violent black criminals to go free so that they can terrorize more innocent people.

This was always Merriweather’s platform, just like it’s the platform of every Democrat prosecutor. For context, here’s one of Merriweather’s campaign videos when he was running for DA. Watch how quickly he pivots from the idea of “putting criminals in jail”:

No, actually. Justice does mean putting criminals in prison. That’s your entire job. That’s how you treat “survivors” with “dignity and respect.” You’re not a therapist. You’re not anybody’s friend. Your only responsibility is to go to court, present the evidence, and secure convictions so that dangerous criminals are placed in cages for as long as possible. 

If you have a DA candidate in your city who says anything else — if he starts deploying this social justice rhetoric — then you shouldn’t vote for him under any circumstances. “Respect for the victims”, in reality, means that the DA will privately tell the victims that the criminal has suffered enough in jail, and he needs to be released, even though you’re his 50th victim of the month, and he just threatened to behead you with a hatchet on the train platform.

This is, without exaggeration, how things work now in North Carolina. You might remember this story from back in March.

Watch:

🚨#BREAKING: Horrifying video footage has emerged from Charlotte NC of a man attempting to RUN OVER A POLICE OFFICER WITH HIS GUN DRAWN, trying to avoid arrest.

WHAT IS HAPPENING IN CHARLOTTE?!!!!!!!! pic.twitter.com/MQFt9gKKJQ

— Matt Van Swol (@mattvanswol) March 2, 2026

A 25-year-old woman named Tanaezah Michelle Austin allegedly ran over a police officer who was trying to break up a street takeover in northwest Charlotte around 3:25 a.m. The footage was recorded and uploaded to the Internet, as you can see there. She mows the officer down in her Kia. And yet, she got out of jail just a few hours after her arrest on a $3,000 bond, which is obviously comically low. Afterwards, according to Van Swol, she “HAD ALL CHARGES DISMISSED BY A JUDGE FOR HITTING YET ANOTHER MAN WITH HER CAR!!!!!”

Unsurprisingly, here are a couple of the magistrate judges that Van Swol found were involved in these decisions.

They’re on the right. Their names are Williams-McNair and Felicia Wilson, both Democrats. They set this woman free on $3,000 and $10,000 bonds for nearly killing two men with her vehicle, including a police officer. Let’s also address the elephant in the room. Both of these judges are black. Spencer Merriweather, the DA, is black.

Very often, in a huge number of cases, the judges and DAs responsible for letting violent black criminals go free are black, and if they aren’t black, then they’re white liberal women. Racial tribalism is the dominant way of resolving legal issues, especially in the cities, which are all controlled by Democrats. It’s primitive, it’s barbaric, and it’s illegal. But if you live in these cities, that’s what you’re facing. 

When liberals are trying to explain the mythological concept of “white privilege,” they’ll often say that although a white person may be disadvantaged in some ways, it will never be because they’re white. Black people are always disadvantaged because they’re black. Here’s a BBC video elucidating this point.

Watch:

Of course, as we’ve seen, the reality is precisely the opposite. To bring it back to the subject at hand, black criminals in this country are routinely given light sentences or no sentence at all, or their charges are dropped entirely, because they’re black. This happens constantly. Untold numbers of innocent civilians have been brutalized and killed so that black criminals can walk free — because they’re black. Whereas white criminals, if they get similar soft treatment — and sometimes they do — it won’t be because they’re white. Spencer Merriweather is not going to cut a white criminal a break because of his skin color. 

The upshot is that, no matter who you are — white or black — you’re not safe from the degenerates that these judges and DAs are letting out of prison. Here’s another case from Charlotte, from just a few months ago. A pregnant woman was getting her toddler out of her car around 11:30 a.m. at a supermarket — in the nice side of town — when a black woman approached and started stabbing her. 

Watch: 

They say it’s “random” and they won’t tell you anything about the victim so you can draw your own conclusions. But when the black suspect was finally apprehended, once again, she had a very lengthy criminal history. This is from Fox News: 

Records show she has nine prior convictions — six felonies and three misdemeanors — largely tied to theft-related offenses, along with more recent felony convictions for firearm possession and misconduct while in custody. She was most recently released from prison in April 2025 and completed post-release supervision in January 2026.

After nine prior convictions, including six felonies, the judicial system in Charlotte determined that a few months of “post-release supervision” was all she needed. Well, actually, she needed to be removed from society, permanently. 

Think of how many people you know in life who have six felony convictions. If you even know someone like that — and you probably don’t — would you want to live anywhere near them? Would you want your family living anywhere near them? Of course not. It’s absurd. They’re dangerous, evil, unstable people. And for that reason, no one in the public should ever have to interact with them again. But in this case, a pregnant woman had to deal with this woman. And she and her child nearly died because of it.

Then there’s the case of 29-year-old black man David Simpson in Charlotte. He posted bond shortly after midnight, then committed murder less than 90 minutes later. This is, again, someone with an extensive criminal history, including previous charges for first-degree murder, as well as a conviction for voluntary manslaughter. This is from the local news station WCNC:

A man accused of killing one person and injuring another in an east Charlotte apartment complex shooting appeared before a Mecklenburg County judge Friday. … Court records show Simpson posted bond for unrelated charges on Tuesday and was released from Mecklenburg County jail around 12:20 a.m. on Wednesday, a few hours before the deadly shooting. … Court records show Simpson pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter in Mecklenburg County Superior Court in August 2015 after originally being charged with first-degree murder in a 2013 case. He was sentenced to 73 to 100 months in prison and was released on parole in October 2020. … He also has a pending 2025 case involving charges of possession of a firearm by a felon, resisting a public officer and misdemeanor larceny.

What’s important to understand is that we’re not just talking about left-wing Soros-funded DA’s in isolation. Yes, the reason these criminals are getting out of prison is that they’re not white. They’re free to terrorize everyone else — including other non-white people — solely because of their skin color. That’s clear. But these prosecutors have the support of a very large demographic on the Left. And so do the violent thugs like Diquan Hunt. 

Take a look at this video response to Hunt’s supposedly “random” beatings. And pay particular attention to the comments on the right side of the screen. Notice how they’re almost all supportive of Diquan Hunt. They’re mocking the white women who were attacked. 

Watch:

Black man says that he supports the Black man that attacked 2 random WHITE Women for being WHITE.

He said that he was taking out the “White Trash”.

Check out all the comments…

They hate you & do not value your life.

We know what happens when Whites become the small minority.…

— Lozzy B 🇦🇺𝕏 (@TruthFairy131) August 8, 2026

If you’re going to have a 65 IQ, then you might as well at least be a kind, compassionate, morally upright person, so that there’s something good about you, some kind of redeeming quality. To be incredibly stupid, and also a bad person — as the guy in this video clearly is, along with most of the commenters — is the worst of all worlds. 

“My empathy for them has ran dry,” one comment said. “I don’t care either,” said another. “Sounds like a little ancestral karma.”

This is how Karmelo Anthony raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for stabbing a white teenager to death at a track meet in cold blood. 

There is a groundswell of support in this country for executing white people. And you don’t have to spend a lot of time on social media to see the evidence.

This rhetoric is not considered extreme among Democrats. Their elected officials are saying the same thing. A Tennessee state lawmaker named Joe Towns just posted this statement on Facebook:

Black people are being hung around the country because of Trump’s rhetoric. Keep your GUN WITH YOU AND SHOOT ON SIGHT. DEAL WITH  THE SYSTEM LATER. HOWEVER,  STAY LIVE!! IT’S TIME TO START HANGING THOSE THAT ARE HANGING YOU! SCREW THE RULES , THEY DON’T WORK FOR YOU, NEVER HAVE. YOU MUST F THEM UP, NO EXCEPTIONS. EVIL RACIST BITCHES!! SAVE YOUR OWN DAMN LIFE AND DON’T TRUST LAW ENFORCEMENT!

That’s a reference to a case where a black woman was found hanging from a tree behind a vacant home in Mississippi. There’s no evidence it was a lynching as opposed to a suicide (which is how all of these cases turn out). But he’s using the woman’s death as an excuse to encourage anti-white violence. He’s telling black people to start hanging white people and shooting them on sight.

The people who tell you that “white supremacy” is the greatest threat facing this country cannot point to any prominent white person, anywhere, who talks like this about black people. Meanwhile, anti-white racism is celebrated right out in the open, by elected officials. And it’s also celebrated in the culture as well.

Leftist judges and DAs are intent on springing violent criminals loose so they can terrorize entire cities. Yes, most violent criminals are irredeemable, and they need to be locked away for the rest of their lives (if not put down on the spot). But all of these degenerates — all of these killers and low-lifes — are enabled by cowardice. The people who are being victimized are not nearly as ruthless as the people who are doing the victimizing.

The truth is that decades of propaganda from the civil rights era, and the lies about lynching and so on, have left Americans terrified of enforcing swift justice against the enemies of civilized society. And as long as that hesitation and cowardice remains, the violence — which is overwhelmingly committed by black criminals — will continue.

Millions of Americans just saw a black man, empowered by the Democrat Party, livestream the savage beating of a defenseless white woman. And like the murders of Brian Thompson and Charlie Kirk, Democrat voters cheered it on. Would they do the same if, say, a court livestreamed the sentence that Diquan Hunt deserves?

Would they be so excited by the prospect of terrorizing innocent people if, for once, the innocent people fought back? It’s truly hard to say. But in living memory, it’s never been attempted. Justice has been non-existent. It’s been passive, non-threatening, and non-lethal.

Starting with Diquan Hunt, and continuing with every single criminal who’s clearly incompatible with life outside of a cage, it’s time to change that.

“Lindsey Graham believed that the first obligation of the federal government is to keep its people safe,” Bessent said. “To place his name upon a base dedicated to our defense is to join Lindsey’s memory to the cause that animated his entire life.”

Bessent said Graham’s legacy belonged at the newly renamed Joint Base Lindsey Graham precisely because the senator “never outgrew the people or the places that first claimed him as our own.”

“Few men have traveled greater distances without ever leaving home behind,” Bessent said.

Bessent described Joint Base Lindsey Graham as the backbone of the Air Force’s C-17 fleet, calling the aircraft “the workhorse of our air defense.” He drew a comparison to Graham’s work in the Senate.

“From today forward, these planes will have Joint Base Graham on their tails,” Bessent said. “A reminder that Senator Graham was the American people’s workhorse.” 

Bessent was joined by Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, who echoed his tribute and emphasized Graham’s battles against left-wing ideology in the military.

“Lindsey spent his final years taking on a radical leftist ideology that had run rampant in the media, in academia, and even among a few members of Congress,” Hegseth said.

Hegseth argued that left-wing ideology had “killed” military recruiting efforts. 

Graham linked the military’s recruiting and retention struggles to the armed forces’ increasingly “woke” reputation. Graham backed a defense bill that banned the military from paying for gender-affirming healthcare for its soldiers, imposed a hiring freeze on all individuals tied to DEI initiatives, redirected $50 million in DEI programming to countering the flow of narcotics, and swapped DEI onboarding training for comprehensive training on the U.S. Constitution. 

For most of his career, Graham traveled to international hot spots to immerse himself in foreign policy and national security. His political career built on his distinguished record in the United States Air Force, where he served on active duty as an Air Force lawyer. Graham was stationed at Rhein-Main Air Base in Germany before later joining the South Carolina Air National Guard.

A memo signed by Air Force Secretary Troy E. Meink said the base was renamed after Graham to honor his “decades of distinguished service to the United States Congress and the United States Air Force.” 

Graham remained focused on foreign policy until the final days of his life. Shortly before his death, he traveled to Ukraine, where he met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and pushed for tougher sanctions aimed at pressuring Russia to end its war in Ukraine.

They can’t outrun their rhetoric. It always circles back, grinning.

For Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, she’s perpetually being strangled by her own airtight logic. In 2019, she warned that climate change would end the world in twelve years if we didn’t act. Yet this week she cheerfully announced she was freezing her eggs, apparently convinced she has all the time in the world, as she puts biology on pause to run for president. She insists socialists have abandoned obscure rhetoric…while remaining a proud DSA member in the same company as candidates who treat the American flag like toilet paper, excuse the 9/11 attacks, and brag about dismantling the Western empire. In 2021, she huffed that “woke” was just a nasty little euphemism for civil rights, and how dare anyone sneer at it, you racist. This week she coyly admitted that Woke 1 was “crazy,” a silly phase of goofy things she didn’t really mean.

If Woke 1.0 was merely crazy, Woke 2.0 might just spark World War Eleven. (Ask Ilhan Omar how many of those we’ve had.)

AOC can switch accents, ideologies, and positions with the restless flair of a chameleon on Adderall, but we cannot let her memory-hole what she said and did during Woke One. It was genuinely insane and destructive. Pretending otherwise isn’t evolution; it’s gaslighting with better lighting.

In 2020, she insisted that New York Police Department’s billion-dollar cuts didn’t go nearly far enough. A defunded-police society, she explained, looked like a white affluent suburb. Any criticism of the movement? Pure racial resentment. That same movement delivered the costliest and deadliest riots in modern American history: roughly two billion dollars in insured damage, a 30% spike in U.S. homicides, police resignations that skyrocketed and never fully recovered, and tens of millions of dollars of bail funds sponsored by leftist organizations and cheered on by AOC and her playmates that freed murderers, sexual offenders, and other violent criminals.

And it wasn’t only Defund. She worked overtime to inject DEI into every institution within rhetorical reach. She repeatedly described white supremacy as a “virus” — often subconscious, often dormant — in the nation and in ordinary individuals. She argued COVID relief should be written, “with a lens of reparations.” She became a key amplifier of the post-George Floyd worldview that filtered everything through systemic oppression and dismissed color-blind equal treatment as naïve or worse. The result was a surge of corporate DEI roles, mandatory diversity statements, staffing quotas, and federal equity mandates. Meanwhile, perceptions of race relations hit multi-decade lows, and workplace fairness concerns climbed as more people grew skeptical that preferential DEI processes still tracked pure merit.

In 2021, the woman spat all over capitalism by wearing a dress dripping with the bloody slogan “Tax the Rich,” to a Met Gala where tickets cost more than some Americans make in a year. Egg-freezing isn’t cheap either. Tax the rich, just the other rich, apparently.

Her rhetoric poured gasoline on those ideological fires. Watching her now try to laugh it off as youthful exuberance is not charming. It’s nauseating.

Especially since nothing has actually changed for the candidates around her. They’re talking crazier than ever, and more of them keep crawling out of the woodwork every week.

In the very same interview where AOC smiled, waved, and tried to reframe 2020 as a rebellious teenage phase rather than a national disgrace, she openly confirmed that she remains a member of the New York City DSA chapter. That same chapter wants police, prisons, the Senate, the presidency, borders, and the Department of Defense abolished outright. It has produced candidates who flirt with Sharia law in America, campaign alongside people who claim America “deserved” 9/11, and argue that Thanksgiving should be canceled because it’s racist.

Obviously.

Woke 1.0 may be over, but only because the Left has graduated to Woke Two: the sequel where despising America is the new patriotism, where Planned Parenthood rebrands abortion as gender-affirming care, where it’s chic to post videos of yourself injecting your ovaries with hormones on Instagram to stop the clock, where the WNBA doesn’t know what the “W” stands for, where capitalism is the bane of your existence, and where leading Democratic candidates are open terror sympathizers eager to dismantle the country from the inside.

AOC is trying to gaslight us into seeing her as a moderate communist who only hates America a little (some consultant must have whispered that she needs to chill if she wants a national stage). Her comrades, however, are not moderating. They are radicalizing at speed. They’re devouring the remains of the moderate Democratic Party for breakfast, hosting LGBTQ parties at mosques for lunch, and canceling dinner altogether because the nuclear family is apparently a white-supremacist construct.

They are losing their ever-loving minds. And it’s still hurting America, just as the rhetoric did in 2020.

It almost makes me nostalgic for Woke One. Hopefully, by the time AOC is ready to thaw those eggs at the ripe age of seventy-five, Woke Wars I through XI will all be ancient history. Maybe then we’ll finally return to common sense, nostalgic suburbia, and an Overton window that isn’t stretched to the breaking point by people who proudly cried woke wolf.

The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) has given its first political endorsement in the organization’s 110-year history to El-Sayed, Democrats’ nominee for Senate in Michigan. A significant portion of El-Sayed’s primary vote share came from Ann Arbor and East Lansing, Michigan, the homes of the University of Michigan and Michigan State University, respectively.

The organization’s president, Todd Wolfson, responded to backlash by pledging to get more political, not less.

Wolfson doubled down on X after being criticized for the decision, writing, “Apparently our first endorsement has upset some people. Good. Higher ed, academic freedom, research, collective bargaining, and the idea of college as a public good are under attack. AAUP isn’t going to respond by pretending politics isn’t happening.  We’re going to organize.”

Apparently our first endorsement has upset some people. Good. Higher ed, academic freedom, research, collective bargaining, and the idea of college as a public good are under attack. AAUP isn’t going to respond by pretending politics isn’t happening. We’re going to organize.

— Todd Wolfson (@ProfTWolf) July 31, 2026

Under Wolfson’s leadership, the AAUP has increased its commitment to political activism. AAUP Vice President Rotua Lumbantobing, who was elected to AAUP leadership alongside Wolfson as part of the “United Faculty for the Common Good” slate of candidates, described how the group’s current leadership was “building a stronger, more militant, AAUP” in a March 2025 interview.

“Our mission is to transform the organization into a fighting force,” Lumbantobing told the interviewer.

During its June 2026 biennial meeting, the first since President Trump took office, one reporter wrote that it “felt like a political war room.”

“This is not a normal moment, and this could not be a normal convention,” the AAUP said on its website of the meeting. “Higher education is under coordinated political attack, our democracy is under siege, and the institutions our members have built their lives inside are being hollowed out from above and weaponized from outside.”

AAUP members voted for a number of socialist-aligned resolutions at the biennial meeting and the group pledged to participate in political campaigns as a way to “build power” and “resist authoritarian policies.”

“The AAUP will support and participate in coordinated political and public campaigns, including legislative advocacy, mass mobilization, and public education efforts, to resist authoritarian policies at the local, state, and federal levels,” stated one resolution.

The union also committed itself to advancing a “broad agenda for democracy, racial justice, economic justice, and the public good,” writing in its resolutions that “recognizing that the future of higher education is inseparable from the struggle to build a more just and inclusive society.”

Mia McIver, executive director of the AAUP, said the group had partnered with a Democratic Socialists of America project to further the group’s “widespread organizing” in a March 2025 interview.

“We’re also going beyond this and are partnering with the Emergency Workers Organizing Committee, a joint project of the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America and Democratic Socialists of America, to support widespread organizing for dignity, respect and workplace safety,” McIver told Ms. Magazine.

The AAUP was founded in 1915 as a professional society for professors focused on defending academic freedom and has since morphed into a politically charged union that champions far-left social causes. The group sued the Trump administration to protect diversity, equity, and inclusion mandates in higher education, has pledged to fight transphobia, and strives to be “part of the solution” needed to dismantle so-called systemic racism in higher education.

Wolfson is a professor at Rutgers University, a public university in New Jersey. He is also a vice president of the American Federation of Teachers, a far-left teachers union known for championing gender ideology, Black Lives Matter, and organizing ICE protests during school hours.

In 2022, the AAUP joined forces with the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) to create the largest alliance of higher education professionals in the nation. The two unions announced a joint policy platform in April 2026 to wage war against the Trump administration’s “far right extremist attacks on American higher education.”

“The AAUP and AFT jointly launched a new comprehensive policy platform ahead of the 2026 midterms aimed to counter the Trump administration’s far right extremist attacks on American higher education and secure a strong future for public colleges and universities,” states the AAUP website.

The policy blueprint calls higher education a “public good” that should be “free” to all and lays out a societal vision that includes implementing a progressive tax system, ensuring educators have collective bargaining rights, and ending “right to work” laws.

Wolfson has a long history of political activism and co-founded two grassroots activist groups in Philadelphia, PA, called the Media Mobilizing Project and the 215 People’s Alliance, according to his curriculum vitae posted on the Rutgers University website.

The Media Mobilizing Project was an independent media project inspired by the tactics of the Zapatistas, a far-left political and guerrilla military movement in Mexico, with the goal of “building our own media in the hope of connecting mass social movements,” as stated on the Internet Archive copy of its website. The Media Mobilizing Project is now called the Movement Alliance Project (MAP) which “exists to help build a coordinated, cross-sector, multiracial, working class movement in Philadelphia that can transform our city and state to one that prioritizes people’s needs over capital,” according to its website. MAP received $300,000 of funding from George Soros’ Foundation to Promote Open Society between 2019 and 2021, according to public financial documents. Wolfson was the board president of MAP in 2019 and 2020, public documents show.

The 215 People’s Alliance is a “grassroots, movement-building organization dedicated to building multiracial, working-class power in Philadelphia,” according to its website.

The American Association of University Professors and Todd Wolfson did not respond to The Daily Wire’s request for comment.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — no longer So Fresh, So Face — and the heir apparent to Bernie Sanders, announced she is running for president in 2028. 

She did not do so by announcing it formally, but by doing two other things: she broadcast freezing her eggs on Instagram, and she laughed off Woke 1.0 as if it were no big deal.

Welcome to the 2028 Democratic presidential campaign, where biology is an obstacle to your happiness, and we’re substituting third-worldism for Woke 1.0. 

This is her announcement that she was putting her natural biology on hold to pursue the presidency.

She’s 36 years old. She’s perfectly healthy. She’s been in a relationship with this dude she is not married to for the last five years, for a reason no one can discern. She could just go have a baby the fun and easy way. Instead, she’s choosing IVF – freezing the eggs and then later undergoing in vitro fertilization.

IVF is really expensive. It is time-consuming. It is tough on the body for a healthy 36-year-old woman. Let’s say that you wanted to do it the old-fashioned, natural way. The chances of conceiving and having a healthy baby within one year of starting to try are somewhere between 75 and 80%. Now, let’s say you harvest that same 36-year-old woman’s eggs. The chances of a live birth per IVF round are around 40%. And the process is really, really not pleasant. 

But Ocasio-Cortez went on national TV and showed what she is doing.

It was a little crazy.

Let’s start at the beginning with the public — and very weird — announcement that she was freezing her eggs. 

Yes, we’re allowed to say it’s weird. It’s her decision, but deciding to Instagram your egg freezing is weird.

She stated:

So I’m aware that just by me choosing to not keep this private, there may be a consequence. But you know what? I’m okay with that. This is a choice that I am making to feel more in control of my life. And if people want to make assumptions about my decision, let them make those assumptions. I feel empowered to make this choice. I think it’s a very privileged position that I’ve been able to make.

We’re going to take the bait because we’re going to explain what the hell she’s doing, which is clearly bait.  This is all girlboss: real girl-bossing is when you inject yourself with hormones on Instagram Live to start a process that will cost tens of thousands of dollars to take control of your own life because biology is unfair and mean. 

And if a man comments, it is because he is sexist in some way. 

Now again, she’s the one who chose to make this public. It’s an obvious trap; this is the game that she is playing: to post, wait for people to comment, and then claim that they’re sexist for commenting.

We all know the game. It’s a really stupid game, but she’s also doing it publicly because she is saying something important about American society. She injected herself with hormones on Instagram Live for egg freezing. People do this privately. Why is she doing this in front of millions of people?

“Don’t be weird about this,” she admonished those watching.

You’re being weird about this. Why are you talking to me? Why am I watching this? This is none of my business. You’re the one live-streaming medical procedures on Instagram. You’re being weird. Are we allowed to say you’re being weird? 

She’s announcing her presidential run. 

She suggested that this is all because of men, you see, because men run for office and people don’t wonder if they want to have children. 

Most men running for higher office already have a family because they’re mostly in their 40s or older and they’ve been married for a while.

Nobody is asking whether a man is going to get pregnant during his campaign because men can’t — despite what the Left thinks — get pregnant.

The most powerful feminist thing she could do, if she really wanted to be totally feminist, is run for president and be pregnant at the same time, because then she could say, “Why are you bothering me just because I’m pregnant?”

When the Left says “right to privacy,” they never mean “Leave us alone. We just want our right to privacy.” They mean “We want you to approve of every decision we make and imitate it in public policy.”

Why isn’t she doing this the natural way? She is not doing this for medical reasons; she is not doing this because she is having fertility issues. This makes a mockery of those who are truly having fertility issues and are pursuing this process for medical reasons. 

This is not a decision to feel “empowered,” unless by empowered you somehow mean that biology itself is an obstacle to “living your fullest life,” which is a leftist idea.

The leftist idea is that biology itself, like normal maturation, is unfair and cruel. This is why they treat puberty as some sort of biological obstacle.

It’s why they are now treating pregnancy as some sort of biological barrier for women to overcome. 

I can’t think of anything more anti-woman than the idea that pregnancy is a biological burden on women and that it is something horrible to be overcome. 

It is a superpower. It is unbelievable. It’s an incredible gift.

Demeaning that so that you can compete in a “man’s world” is terrible.

She is trying to valorize herself for putting off pregnancy indefinitely, expensively, and more dangerously than the natural way. She doesn’t want you asking about whether she’s going to get pregnant while she’s running. Thus, she’s preemptively saying she won’t get pregnant.

She’s making the point that biology is unfair, womanhood is inherently unfair, and that there is no moral issue with fertilizing embryos you will discard.

This is all part and parcel of a broader agenda: Rebelling against reality by assuming that if we just fix reality, Utopia is right there. 

Which brings us to Ocasio-Cortez’s second big presidential announcement. She said Woke 1.0 was so over. It’s no longer “cool” or even “fetch” or anything like that.

The problem for the Left is that Americans ended up rejecting Woke 1.0. That is because Americans don’t believe that the Declaration and Constitution are rooted in racism. 

The reason woke died is because it was taken to the logical extreme, which is that everything was discrimination. 

Now there is a different phase. Think of the faces of Woke 2.0. Who are they?

Zohran Mamdani, Abdullah El-Sayed, and Hasan Piker.  

The leftist Edward Said said that America’s failure is that we are basically a corrupt empire whose capitalism corrupted the earth, and everything that happens everywhere else on earth that’s bad and at home is due to our terrible free market system.

And who better to represent America as a corrupt empire than victims of that corrupt empire? People from outside America who can come back to America and tell us what we do wrong.

Woke 1.0 forced Americans to say, “Am I racist or am I not?” Woke 2.0 is, “Is American capitalism inherently corrupting and bad? Is the West’s system of freedoms and free markets inherently imperialistic, colonialist, genocidal, and racist?”

It’s easier to pitch woke 2.0 than woke 1.0. Why? Americans have been convinced over the course of the last 25 years or so that America is the bad guy, that we and our allies are fundamentally evil, that our foreign policy decisions of the past two decades and maybe longer, going all the way back to World War II, according to some, are actually terrible and horrible, and we’re the bad guys in the world.

Add the economic angst right now, combine those two things, and you get woke 2.0, Ocasio-Cortez’s new program. It is about hatred of America.

Ocasio-Cortez is trying to capitalize on all of this. 

Her idea of Utopia is women freezing eggs and a communist agenda.

It’s more than weird.

It’s a Utopia that we should reject with all the strength we have.

The latest move comes after roughly 350,000 Haitian migrants lost their Temporary Protected Status (TPS) when the Supreme Court allowed the Trump administration to terminate the protections. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has since begun calling in the Haitians for check-ins with ICE officers, who are placing the ankle monitors on them, according to The Washington Post.

TPS had allowed many of the Haitian migrants to legally live and work in the United States for more than a decade while shielding them from deportation.

Now, the Trump administration has instructed federal immigration agents to begin prioritizing Haitians for arrest and deportation.

Many of the Haitian nationals who lost their protections have yet to appear before immigration judges or receive formal deportation orders. Some of those summoned have been enrolled in ICE’s Alternatives to Detention program, which uses tools including GPS ankle monitors to track migrants and ensure compliance with immigration proceedings.

As of July 11, nearly 54,000 migrants were outfitted with ankle monitors through the Alternatives to Detention program, according to ICE statistics. For comparison, roughly 30,000 migrants were wearing ICE ankle monitors in September 2025 and 17,000 in September 2024.

Activists said an estimated 50 to 60 Haitians living in Springfield, Ohio, a hub for the migrant population, have already received orders to report for their check-ins, according to the Springfield News-Sun.

During the 2024 campaign, then-candidate Donald Trump cited unconfirmed reports that Haitian migrants living in Springfield were eating residents’ pets and pledged to “absolutely” revoke their TPS if he returned to the White House.

DHS didn’t confirm whether the agency is targeting Haitians with ankle monitors, but criticized TPS as a “de facto amnesty program.”

“Every day, DHS is conducting law enforcement activities across the country to keep Americans safe. DHS does not discuss ongoing or future operations,” a Homeland Security spokesperson told The Daily Wire.

“Temporary Protected Status is exactly that — temporary. For too long, TPS has been allowed to function as a de facto amnesty program despite Congress never intending it to be permanent,” the spokesperson said.

DHS is now encouraging Haitians to leave the country on their own through the agency’s self-deportation program.

“What we would say now is it’s closing time, which means you don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here,” the spokesperson said. “The good news is it’s not too late to get a $2,600 check and a free flight home.”

And there’s no better way to tell that story than through film.

For decades, Hollywood has not made a single major film where the bad guys were Islamists. Villains are always Russian anarchist groups, white supremacists, or North Koreans.

So while Hollywood avoids the fact that radical Islamic terrorists have perpetrated attacks around the world, the Daily Wire is going to lean into it.

The film is called “Run Hide Fight: Infidels.”

Starring Jonathan Majors, it’s a 1990s-style action blockbuster — think “Toy Soldiers” meets “Red Dawn” — where ISIS takes over a liberal American university.

It’s exciting. It’s intense. It’s funny. It’s the biggest movie we’ve ever done. The radical jihadists lose, the red-blooded Americans win, and nobody apologizes for any of it. More importantly, it also says the thing: radical Islam is a threat to America, and we are all morons if we let it take over our country.

When we dropped the trailer, Mehdi Hasan said it would be “difficult to come up with a more bigoted, Islamophobic and cliched trailer than this one.”

Mehdi, why is it Islamophobic to point out what ISIS actually does and says? Why is it bigoted to say that ISIS wants to murder Americans? 

How exactly does depicting ISIS implicate all of Islam?

Hasan also took issue with the claim that Hollywood has refused to tell the story of radical Islam, but you could probably count on one hand the number of major movies where Muslims are the villains.

In fact, Hollywood has routinely changed Muslims from being the villains of films. Tom Clancy’s “The Sum of All Fears” was written with Palestinian terrorists originally, but in the film adaptation with Ben Affleck, the villains were neo-Nazis.

I’m also old enough to remember when “24″ had to deploy Kiefer Sutherland to publicly apologize for Islamophobia because there was one season where the Muslims were the bad guys.

Meanwhile, streamer Sneako put out a tweet saying, “The kuffar are getting so desperate they’re trying to do Bush-era propaganda in 2026. No one cares anymore. We all know the Israelis are the real terrorists.”

The root of “kuffar” is also kafir, which means “infidels.” This is the same guy who congratulated Abdulrahman El-Sayed on his primary victory in Michigan with, “Islam will save America. Inshallah.” Sneako doesn’t want you to worry about Islam while he chants on the streets of New York about the army of Muhammad returning to kill Jews.

As for the notion that ISIS is simply not a threat anymore: according to the Global Terrorism Index, 20% of all terrorist attacks on planet Earth are attributable to ISIS right now. ISIS remains the chief threat of terrorism worldwide today.

It is good to be able to say that the American people know their enemies. We ought to know what our enemies think, what they say, and what they do.

Director Kyle Rankin’s script definitely does that.

And if the Left is this pissed off at the trailer, just wait until they see the film.

After committing a flagrant two foul against the Indiana Fever guard in Saturday’s matchup, fans began to compile evidence of Chicago Sky guard DiJonai Carrington delivering overtly aggressive hits throughout her six years in the WNBA.

Carrington’s hostile behavior is on full display in the video compilation, created by fans, that circulated on social media. The repeat offender is shown pulling hair, shoving, and slapping her opponents — moves that appear to be unnecessary — during her time with the Sky, Connecticut Sun, Dallas Wings, and Minnesota Lynx.

The video even shows Carrington going at Cunningham’s superstar teammate Caitlin Clark by scratching her eye — and, in another clip, mocking Clark after a brief confrontation ended with a foul called on Carrington.

The Sky guard was ejected from Saturday’s game after officials upgraded the call from a flagrant one to a flagrant two following the replay, resulting in a $1,000 fine and removal from the game. This marks Carrington’s sixth flagrant violation in the last three seasons despite a number of additional scenarios that appear to have deserved the call.

After the game, Cunningham addressed Carrington’s ejection and the seemingly deliberate foul against her.

“Clearly, I think it was unnecessary. I’ve never really spoken to her and have no beef with her, but I guess she has some pent-up stuff,” she said. “Yeah, it’s intentional … She has no reason to be doing any of that … But I do think when people play the Fever, we’re nationally televised, there’s a lot of eyes on us and people just want attention. And that’s her just trying to get attention.”

Carrington responded to her ouster from the game in a locker-room post claiming that the ejection was the result of “white privilege” — and then shared the date of the team’s next head-to-head matchup on X with a smiling face emoji, suggesting that there might be more drama in the days to come.

At the time of publication, the WNBA had not announced any potential suspension for Carrington’s extreme behavior or multiple social media posts. The league is actively reviewing her posts as part of its guidelines.

A lot of things about this conceit don’t make sense, of course. Why is this movie a rom-com and not a dystopia? Why has every unmarried member of Congress not already been tossed in the clink? And why does this one night of legal free shagging not devolve into utter mayhem, orgies, and a windfall for STD clinics? But none of these questions, as you’ll see, really matter.

It seems an odd time for such a film, too. Gen Z is relatively sexless, so such a law isn’t even necessary for most kids these days. And yet we’re nowhere near a law like this being realistic, despite the dreams of the Trad Cons. But the film’s ridiculous premise has little to do with the actual plot; take it away, and you’re left with the misadventures and serendipitous story of young people looking for love.

This isn’t a sex comedy à la “Animal House” or “Easy A.” It’s a true rom-com, with all the trappings of the genre: a woman who’s a hopeless romantic, a heartbroken and hunky man, and the plot device that brings them together. 

Director Will Gluck previously helmed the much more sex-forward films “Anyone But You” (starring Sydney Sweeney and rated R for nudity) and “Easy A” (about a girl who becomes a modern-day Hester Prynne without actually having sex). This time, he said he listened to viewers who didn’t want random nudity.

“As we started to show it to audiences, we felt it takes you out of the movie,” he told Variety. “You’re engaged in the characters and what’s going on, and then you pan over and there’s two naked people having sex, and you watch the audience … it’s a physical thing. They turn to who they’re with and … the benefits do not nearly outweigh the negatives of it.”

“One Night Only” is still rated R, but what brief sex scenes exist are less “Bridgerton” and more of the 2000s rom-com variety. And if the movie has a message, it is, ironically, that random hookups end pretty badly. 

At the beginning of the most libidinous night of the year, singer and hopeless romantic Allie (Monica Barbaro) meets up with her friend at a surprisingly un-packed bar so they can both find a “prince,” someone to hook up with for the night who won’t ghost them the next day. They both know the odds are slim. “The chance of having great sex on a one night-stand is like 2.8%,” Allie sighs. 

When her friend manages to find a literal prince in line for the bathroom, Allie is on her own, roaming the streets of New York in search of love “on the least romantic night of the year.”

Meanwhile, pizza shop owner Owen (Callum Turner) is on a date with his girlfriend who breaks the news that she’d like to sleep with someone else tonight just to try it out. She encourages him to do the same, and he walks home, dejected, with an unrevealed engagement ring in his hand. 

Allie and Owen’s meet-cute is thrown off when he starts puking up the sushi he didn’t want to waste on his expensive date, yet they keep running into each other throughout the night as they look for other available singles. Of course, the plot keeps them from closing the deal with anyone else. In practice, this means that following your, well, not your heart, leads to comical misfortune. 

For the main characters, being unscrupulously horny leads to almost hooking up with an art thief, almost hooking up with a dopey singer who plays guitar in his underwear, and almost hooking up in your mother’s apartment (where your mother still resides).

Marriage, of course, is still on the table. When Owen’s mother suggests that he find some of his buddies to pick up women with, he responds that, due to the mandate, they’re already all married. (We never meet any of these friends as they are either enjoying the night or enjoying that they don’t have to take advantage of it.)

And Allie and Owen get trash-talked by the youth who are surprised to find these 30-somethings out and about. When two end up at a bodega fighting over the one available condom, a younger couple behind them balks, “Aren’t you kind of a little old?”

Even singer and popular “Repeal” campaigner Ezra has mixed views of the mandate, saying that it makes the night’s choice more significant. “Just maybe the fascists were right about this one,” he muses. 

Spoiler: At the end of the night, Allie and Owen don’t even have sex. After they finally reconnect with just a few minutes to spare before the mandate is back in effect, they decide to wait and give their relationship a real shot.

The concept of a no-sex mandate raises a lot of questions that are self-consciously answered by the film. It does explain some of the logistics; everyone has a tracker in their arm that checks hormone levels and flags the authorities if two nearby singles’ oxytocin levels spike at the same time. A politician on the news claims that teen pregnancies are “near zero,” STIs are down, and, comically, now “it’s a badge of honor to be an incel.”

But the film isn’t really about the mandate, and as such, doesn’t need to spend more time explaining it. Our attempts to understand this sci-fi world are as fruitless as the characters’ efforts to oppose it. “Repeal” is to the film’s characters what “resist” has become to today’s coastal dwellers, a futile but ubiquitous expression of one’s de rigueur politics. 

So, obviously, critics are complaining about the film’s lack of sex and anti-fascist campaigning. 

“‘One Night Only’ isn’t bawdy or trenchant enough for its concept,” complained the Associated Press. 

“‘One Night Only’ makes fun of purity culture, yet perpetuates it,” declares a Mashable headline, followed by the improbable subhead, “The rom-com imagines a fascistic U.S. that’s not too different from the one we’re living in.”

“One Night Only Might Actually Be the Darkest Movie of the Year,” declared a Vulture review that called the film “thrillingly cynical.”

Never mind that the Left would have preferred an NC-17 commentary on #resisting Trump’s America. “One Night Only” isn’t interested in politics or dystopia or any “1984”-esque anti-sex themes it conjures. At its core, it’s about looking for romance when everyone around you is looking for sex, and it suggests that for the two to go together, the latter is going to have to wait.

***

This article is part of Upstream, The Daily Wire’s new home for culture and lifestyle. Real human insight and human stories — from our featured writers to you.

TikToker B.D. Powell ordered three milkshakes at a Shake Shack in the Salt Lake City airport. Two were priced at $5.99 each, while a third cost $6.48 with added whipped cream. After Powell declined to leave a tip, the kiosk displayed a “calculating total” message before alerting him that there had been “a pricing update on one or more of your cart items.” The price of each shake had increased by 50 cents. 

“Everything just went up 50 cents. Every item went up by 50 cents, just making sure that everybody knows,” Powell said.

Shake Shack said the price increase was not company policy and that it was investigating the incident with HMSHost, the company that operates the airport location and its kiosk system.

“Thank you for bringing this to our attention. This is not a Shake Shack policy, and we’re currently looking into it with our licensee, HMSHost, that operates the Salt Lake City airport location and kiosk system,” the company said. 

HMSHost attributed the price change to a technology error with the kiosk and said the problem had been resolved.

The video amassed millions of views on TikTok and X as frustration with tipping expectations continues to grow in the United States.

A Popmenu survey released in April found that 78% of customers believe tipping practices “have become ridiculous,” while 44% reported tipping less this year than last year. 

“People are being asked to tip more than ever,” Bankrate Senior Industry Analyst Ted Rossman said. “There are crazy examples that you would have never even thought of 10 years ago. It’s getting harder and harder to avoid.”

Rossman made the comments after encountering a tip prompt while purchasing a sandwich from a self-service airport kiosk.

“Tipping in America is truly out of control,” said Kashif Ahmed, a financial planner with American Private Wealth. “I understand many folks get most of their pay from tips, but businesses have started to ask for tips when no extra work was done. And in some cases, no human was even present.” 

A chorus of boos followed the cruise ship captain’s announcement that Zuckerberg’s yacht had “refused” to help the skiff, according to a passenger. 

The Coast Guard, which heard the call just after 9:30 p.m. Monday, determined about 26 minutes later that the skiff — which had run out of fuel — was not in distress and issued a marine assistance request broadcast on its behalf. Monday. Zuckerberg’s 387-foot yacht, Launchpad, was reportedly the closest vessel but did not respond, according to the Alaska Beacon. The Wilderness Legacy, a cruise ship operated by UnCruise Adventures, ultimately came to the skiff’s aid.

“Mark and his family were not on board at the time of the incident,” a spokesperson for Zuckerberg told the Beacon. “As the Coast Guard noted, the boat was not in distress, and by the time the crew reviewed the Coast Guard contact on a different radio channel from the one they were operating on, the assist was already underway. We’re grateful all parties are safe,” he added. 

On its way to rescue the skiff, the Wilderness Legacy passed Zuckerberg’s yacht. 

Zuckerberg and his family spend much of their time at their primary residential compound in Palo Alto, California, about a ten-minute drive from Meta’s headquarters in Menlo Park. Over the years, Zuckerberg has purchased 11 homes in the affluent neighborhood and has an estate featuring guest homes, gardens, a pickleball court, and an unoccupied building used for outdoor parties. 

Meredith Kercher’s sister, Stephanie, told the BBC that Knox is “naturally free to continue with her life as she wishes,” but added that “the problem with this particular project is that it is comedy.”

“It’s not about whether people think she’s guilty or innocent, if someone else was doing the show specifically against Meredith, I would still feel the same, it is obviously an added wound that it’s coming from her at the same time, but I do feel very strongly that it should be something that’s not given a platform,” she said.

An online petition calling for its cancellation claims the show “mocks the horrific events surrounding Meredith’s murder and aims to somehow turn this tragedy into entertainment.”

Knox defended the show’s existence, saying she thinks it’s empowering for women and adding that she hopes Kercher’s family comes to see it.

The show is called “Cartwheel,” which references media reports that Knox did cartwheels in the police station following the discovery of the body. Per the Associated Press, the show is marketed as being about a woman “approaching forty, juggling motherhood and finally getting around to being furious about the whole wrongful-imprisonment thing. Especially when half the world is telling her to get over it, while the other half still thinks she’s guilty.”

It will run for 11 days at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in Scotland. 

Knox, who is now 39, made headlines almost two decades ago following the murder of her British roommate in Italy. Kercher was found stabbed to death at the apartment she shared with Knox and two other roommates. 

Knox and her then-boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito, were initially convicted of Kercher’s murder, and Knox spent nearly four years in prison before an appeals court freed her in 2011. Italy’s highest court ultimately acquitted them both in 2015.

Rudy Hermann Guede, whose DNA was found at the crime scene, was convicted of murdering Kercher in 2008. He was initially sentenced to 30 years in prison, which was reduced on appeal to 16 years, and was released in 2021 after serving most of the sentence. 

Knox has become an advocate for the wrongfully convicted, the AP noted, and has launched a podcast, written two books, and done speaking engagements to share her story. This is her first comedy show on the topic. 

El-Sayed made the comments in a 2021 Substack post responding to the resignation of then-Las Vegas Raiders head coach Jon Gruden, whose private emails containing racist and misogynistic language had become public.

“The toxic masculinity at the heart of America’s most popular sport — and men’s sports culture more generally — is way deeper than a few emails …” El-Sayed wrote.

The remarks are the latest resurfaced comments to draw attention to El-Sayed’s views on Michigan and American culture as he prepares for a general election campaign against Republican Senate nominee Mike Rogers.

El-Sayed played American football himself as a student at Andover High School in Bloomfield Hills, serving as a team captain and two-year starter at center and nose guard.

In his 2021 post, El-Sayed recalled football as an important part of his childhood, writing that “sports were my lifeline” and that he felt free on the football field. But he described the culture surrounding the sport in considerably harsher terms. He argued that a particular “bro” culture had been passed down through football for generations. “Racism, misogyny, and homophobia were lingua franca,” El-Sayed wrote.

El-Sayed contrasted that culture with the fictional soccer coach Ted Lasso, the title character of the Apple TV+ series, who he held up as an example of a healthier model of masculinity and coaching. “Ted cries. He talks through his problems. He encourages his players. He bakes biscuits (er, cookies) for his boss. He smiles … like, all the time,” El-Sayed wrote.

He argued that coaches should create an environment built around “positive, inclusive, and empowering values,” while acknowledging that sports can teach young people lessons about teamwork, perseverance, and discipline. “Sport is a metaphor for life,” he wrote.

El-Sayed also expressed a distinctly political preference for European soccer in another 2021 Substack post, writing that the sport’s promotion and relegation system “speaks to my politics.”

“But European soccer also speaks to my politics,” El-Sayed wrote. “Compared to American sports leagues, the sport is also deeply egalitarian.”

He praised the system for allowing teams to move between leagues based on performance and contrasted it with American professional sports, where teams remain in closed leagues regardless of their success. El-Sayed’s criticism of football comes as other resurfaced remarks have placed renewed attention on his sometimes-negative assessments of his home state.

During his unsuccessful 2018 campaign for governor, El-Sayed was recorded complaining about Mackinac Island, one of Michigan’s most prominent tourist destinations.

“I hate Mackinac so much,” El-Sayed said in a documentary about his campaign. “Every time I’ve ever come here I’ve hated it. Why am I here?”

El-Sayed went on to joke that if he won the governor’s race, Mackinac Island would become his summer home.

His comments have only made it easier for Republicans to portray El-Sayed as disconnected from Michigan voters. Rogers has already made appeals directly to Democrats who may be uncomfortable with El-Sayed’s far-Left politics.

El-Sayed narrowly defeated Rep. Haley Stevens in last week’s Democratic Senate primary, winning 48.5% of the vote to Stevens’ 47.5%. His campaign was backed by a number of far-Left figures including Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), and Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI).

Democratic leaders who backed Stevens during the primary, including Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), have since fallen in line behind El-Sayed as the party’s nominee.

El-Sayed will face Rogers in November in a race that could help determine control of the Senate. The Republican nominee has already sought to make the race a referendum on the direction of the Democratic Party, arguing that El-Sayed represents an increasingly leftward movement within the party.

His past writings now provide another window into the political and cultural views of the Democratic nominee — including his longstanding preference for soccer over the sport beloved by millions of Americans every fall.

Take, for example, the leader of the Green Party in Britain, Zack Polanski, who saw a brief surge in popularity as a hard-Left, eco communist backed by Islamists. Until his many lies and confabulations received a merest hint of scrutiny. After claiming that his powers of hypnosis could enlarge a woman’s breasts, the merciless Right-wing press dubbed him “Walter Titty” (and yes, he was a theatre kid).

Now it is the turn of the star Cambridge University Professor, Jason Arday, to be exposed. Until this week, Arday’s story was irresistible to the statist establishment in Britain. A Ghanaian immigrant raised in social housing in south London, Arday claimed to be autistic and unable to speak until he was 11, or to read and write until 18. And yet at 37 he became the youngest black tenured professor in Cambridge’s 800-year history. He was heralded as a genius, carried the Olympic torch, and sold a memoir for a reported $2 million. Why?

Because he combined being black with a host of other neurological and socio-economic challenges, and was supposed to represent the triumph of diversity over adversity. No one bothered to check whether his academic output was of any quality. Indeed, it was considered unseemly and faintly racist even to ask.

As Professor Arday’s memoir launch loomed, some scrutiny was finally applied. Nathan Cofnas, a philosopher himself sacked by Cambridge in 2024 for his heterodox views on race, published claims of plagiarism across Arday’s work. Passages of his doctoral thesis were found to be identical to another researcher’s earlier work. Even the thesis title has been copied (with just enough words moved around so as to create a grammatical typo in it!).

Retraction Watch reported that in one article the borrowed text allegedly appeared inside quotes from interviewees Arday claimed to have spoken to personally; subjects who answer in the exact published words of somebody else’s research are a rare breed.

Then came the real Walter Mitty material, and it is glorious. Arday claimed to have run 30 marathons in 35 days, suffering an epileptic fit and a fractured leg on the 21st before completing the remaining nine. He claimed 600 miles from Edinburgh to London in six days, elite ultramarathon territory. He claimed to have raised £5.5 million for charity; pressed by The Guardian, he said it was raised with others whom he cannot name.

He claimed to have installed water points in South America and Africa for WaterAid, which does not send volunteers abroad. He claimed visiting professorships at Ohio State, Glasgow, and Nelson Mandela University in South Africa; all three deny it. And he claimed a book with Palgrave Macmillan that never existed beyond a proposal. His current publisher must be envious.

Speaking of, The Atlantic even got hold of his memoir proposal, where the brain tumor he claims to have had was originally testicular cancer. He is a hilarious combination of Jussie Smollett’s fake hate crime, former Harvard President Claudine Gay, and Frank Abagnale, rolled into one. When he actually wrote “scholarly” works of his own, it was the usual racial grievance: British universities are hostile, racist environments. Those institutions responded by showering him with chairs and honorary doctorates. His work recalls the put-down attributed to Dr. Johnson: the parts that were good were not original, and the parts that were original were not good.

As amusing as this farcical trot through Alice-In-Wonderland-esque fantasyland is, the more interesting and depressing issue was the reaction of the establishment. When Times Higher Education prepared a 63-page dossier on the plagiarism last September, Arday hired Carter-Ruck, the most feared libel firm in a country whose defamation laws have no First Amendment to contend with, and the story was spiked. A journalist who asked questions was even reported to the police; Scotland Yard investigated him for months before warning him off contacting Arday.

Cambridge, supposedly one of the top universities in the world, called the obvious plagiarism of one of its star academics “a vile campaign to undermine his credibility.” An open letter was signed by heads of colleges, famous authors, and a who’s-who of media luvvies. As more revelations emerged, those names were quietly erased from that letter. Because Arday represented everything the modern Left loves, namely identity over merit, it tried to circle the wagons to protect their creation.

Melissa Chen has made an excellent comparison with Roland Fryer’s treatment by the American academic establishment. It exposes how morally bankrupt academia is and how uninterested it is in the truth. Raised poor in Texas, Fryer became, at 30, the youngest black scholar ever tenured at Harvard, winning a MacArthur genius grant. In 2016 he set out to document racial bias in police shootings, fully expecting to find it.

The data said otherwise, refuting a premise repeated on the Left and in the media, so he hired eight fresh research assistants and ran the study again. Same result. He published those findings, and spent the next month under armed guard, buying diapers for his newborn with a bodyguard in tow because his academic rigor ran counter to the narrative.

Three years later, Harvard suspended him for two years without pay over harassment allegations he denies to this day, and closed his lab. The dean who announced that punishment was one Claudine Gay, who went on to become Harvard’s president and then to resign in disgrace over, of all things, plagiarism.

Fryer produced world-class, replicated research and was ruined. Arday produced borrowed prose and fabricated glories and was defended until the last possible hour.

And the sheer brass neck on Arday, the stench of his lies, and the desperate fawning over someone who was clearly either a Walter Mitty or a ruthless con man has seriously wounded academia. Perhaps in time, we will come to call unscrupulous grifters “Jason Ardays.” We should also refer to those willing to seek truth, damn the consequences, as Roland Fryers.

***

James Price is a former Chief of Staff to the Chancellor of the Exchequer and a senior fellow at the Adam Smith Institute.

Talarico, who has sparked backlash for his fringe views on Christianity, affection for transgender children, and disdain for the American flag, is banking on Republican crossover support to become the first Texas Democrat elected statewide in decades.

“Republicans for Talarico is as real as the six genders that Talarico claims exist, but has yet to explain what they are. This lame rebrand of White Dudes for Kamala is full of lifelong Democrat donors, activists, and other losers,” RNC spokesman Zach Kraft said in a statement to The Daily Wire.

That “rebrand” was put on display earlier this month when MS NOW aired a segment from the political show “Long Play,” featuring three white women from Tarrant County who portrayed themselves as disgruntled conservatives eager to vote for one of the most liberal candidates in Texas to run for federal office. The exchange went viral after Talarico’s campaign seized on the segment, dubbing the women “Republican Moms.”

During the segment, former school board candidate Mindy McClure described herself as a “moderate Republican,” but as the saying goes, follow the money. Federal Election Commission filings show McClure has repeatedly given through ActBlue to Democratic candidates and anti-Trump groups dating back to 2018, including the Lincoln Project and Kamala Harris’ 2024 presidential campaign.

“You’ve been Republicans for most of your voting lives. Who’s voting for James Talarico?” asked Jennifer Palmieri, the former communications director for Hillary Clinton’s failed presidential campaign.

All three of the so-called Republican moms raised their hands, arguing they had been duped by conservative culture-war messaging about “woke” politics in elementary schools.

Allison Stiles complained that COVID-19 had galvanized the “far right” around concerns over public school curriculum, using that apparent frustration as part of her rationale for supporting Talarico. “And I never send money to state people, but this year I did. Not only am I going to vote for you, but I’m going to give you some money!”

“It seems to be this systematic dismantling, where they want to almost, to use the phrase, burn it all down, and then rebuild it the way they want it,” Erin Montgomery said. “These are people that I may have supported, and I felt like I held a chunk of responsibility for what was happening, and now I’m going to do my damnedest to turn it around to get them out.”

Montgomery hasn’t voted in a Republican primary since at least 2017 and over the last 20 years has voted in more Democratic primaries than Republican primaries, according to a Republican source who has reviewed the voting records. Texas reporter Tony Ortiz also reviewed the records, which showed that at least two of the women participated in Democratic primaries despite identifying themselves as Republican voters during the interview.

“Ran the voting record for one of the ‘Republican’ women featured here and she’s already been voting in Democratic primaries this year,” Ortiz wrote in a post on X. “Seems disingenuous to call yourself Republican if you’ve already been voting Dem.”

In response to the discrepancies, a Talarico campaign spokesperson said the women have no official ties to the campaign, telling Fox News: “Republicans in Texas are endorsing James Talarico and rejecting Ken Paxton because they know James will bring people together to lower costs while Paxton continues to enrich himself at the expense of working people.”

The strategy extends beyond the three women from Tarrant County. Talarico has also leaned into the endorsement of former Tarrant County Judge Glen Whitley, a longtime Republican who has in recent years backed prominent Democrats — including Kamala Harris for president and Colin Allred over Sen. Ted Cruz in the 2024 Senate race, according to local outlet WFAA.

At a campaign stop in San Antonio over the weekend, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton called for Republican unity heading into November, warning that the race could help determine the balance of power in Washington.

“We need to unify, because the choice — as James Talarico would say — is binary. He would say nonbinary,” Paxton joked. “We have a radical, socialist Democrat and a conservative Republican … we’re all coming together because we realize this is a threat not just to Texas but the entire nation.”

Thousands of residents of the Spanish exclave gathered on Sunday in the Plaza de la Constitución, chanting “Enough is enough” and “Ceuta will not surrender,” according to Reuters. Some demonstrators could also be heard shouting “Ceuta is not for sale. Ceuta is Spain” and “Sánchez, resign,” referring to the far-Left Spanish prime minister.

Others accused the Spanish government of “abandonment.”

Hundreds of Ceuta residents held a demonstration on Sunday demanding solutions to the migration crisis, under the slogan “Enough, Ceuta won’t give up.” Residents in the Spanish enclave gathered at Plaza de la Constitución, waving Spanish flags and chanting Ceuta’s anthem. pic.twitter.com/6FL7jdJa1Y

— CBS News (@CBSNews) August 10, 2026

In late July, thousands of migrants, many of them young men, crossed from Morocco into Ceuta, located on the African continent, by swimming or climbing border barriers. Mainland Spain is just 11 miles from Ceuta, which has a population of 83,000, and is accessible by ferry.

Many of the migrants have since returned to Africa after failing to obtain documents to reach mainland Spain and complaining about the lack of food and support in Ceuta.

More than 1,300 migrant children remain in Ceuta, leaving government officials scrambling to address the issue, according to Euronews. Ceuta’s president argued the children should be returned to Morocco in what he’s characterized as an “absolutely unsustainable” situation.

All the while, the Spanish government says that the children who can’t be reunified with their families back home should find refuge and support in territories like Ceuta.

“Many of the unaccompanied migrant boys and girls do not have families, so in these cases the autonomous communities must act as their guardians and guarantee their rights,” said Sira Rego, Spain’s minister for youth and children.

The border crush came after Spain’s Supreme Court ruled that migrants crossing by sea cannot be immediately deported.

Earlier this year, Spain’s socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez opened the door for more than one million migrants to receive amnesty to counteract the world’s “MAGA-style leaders,” according to The New York Times.

Spain received more than double the number of applications it had initially predicted.

Jake Altman said during an interview with The Free Press that El-Sayed’s rise represented a dangerous takeover of the Democratic Party by a pro-communist and pro-terrorist faction. Altman, who was an activist with the DSA for almost a decade, said he would never support any Democrat who backed El-Sayed.

El-Sayed narrowly won the Democratic Senate nomination last week on a far-Left platform. His candidacy was backed by Hasan Piker, a popular streamer who once said America “deserved” the September 11 terrorist attacks. After El-Sayed’s primary victory over Rep. Haley Stevens (D-MI), Rogers pitched himself to moderate Democrats alienated by their party’s nominee. 

“We could see a world in which realignment continues, and you see more working-class voters of all kinds start voting for the Republican Party because the Democratic Party has become so disconnected from its traditional base, so unmoored and so crazy,” Altman told Free Press reporter Maya Sulkin. “I’m nervous. I’m going to do everything I can to help get Mike Rogers elected.”

Altman said that he was going “to try to stop these people who are willing to run on a ticket with explicitly pro-Hezbollah people, who are willing to give political cover to terrorists, who are willing to sympathize with terrorists, who are willing to sit in a room and pal around with Maoists, people who worship a guy who murdered tens of millions of people.”

“These are not people that you idolize,” he added. “I am not going to support any Democrat, ever, who is willing to back Abdul El-Sayed. I will fight you people to the ends of this earth. Haley Stevens should be ashamed of herself for endorsing him. Ashamed. She knows better. Her staff knows better.”

Michigan Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, who endorsed Stevens ahead of the primary, joined Stevens and other establishment Democrats in backing El-Sayed after his primary victory. 

“There’s nothing left to the Democratic Party. All the energy, it’s Hasan Piker’s party now. It’s Abdul El-Sayed and Hasan Piker’s party now,” Altman said. 

Some high-profile Democrats have pushed back on El-Sayed’s candidacy. Michael LaRosa, former press secretary to first lady Jill Biden, said he would rather see Rogers win than El-Sayed. 

“I would never encourage any Democrat to support a candidate too weak to stand up to extremists who believe that those men and women jumping from a burning building 110 stories up because the alternative was worse deserved what they got on September 11th,” he said on social media. 

The Michigan Senate race is considered a “toss-up” by election forecaster Cook Political Report.  

Iranian state media coverage framed the video as a first public look after months without new images and described the Mehr video as the first release of Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei. That claim was met with immediate scrutiny.

“By ‘FIRST TIME’, I think you actually mean March 20th, 2026,” an X post read. He pointed to a March post from Iran’s state broadcaster, IRIB, which had already published a video of religious science teaching by Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei.

Ariel Oseran, Senior Middle East Correspondent for i24NEWS, issued a similar criticism. He wrote: 

“Iran’s Mehr News released a video claiming to show Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei ‘for the first time,’ with no date or location specified. The right side of his face cannot be seen in the footage.” He later added that he had been informed that “this is an old video.” 

Other comments circulating alongside those posts treated the clip as previously seen material. One said “It’s old footage. Another reason to believe he’s dead.” Another wrote, “He is being kept ‘alive’ in press and politically by IRGC so their coup is legitimized.”

The Jerusalem Post reported that media outlets covering the release noted the clip bears striking similarities to another video released earlier in the year. Khamenei has not made a public appearance since the start of the war and the assassination of his father, former supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. 

He assumed the role in March after the February 28 strike that killed Ali Khamenei. The same reporting stated that the younger Khamenei was reportedly seriously injured in that strike and that he had generally kept a low public profile before becoming supreme leader.

State media said on Sunday that Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian met Khamenei around the start of the president’s third year in office in late July. That meeting covered military affairs and the economy, including securing resources, managing foreign exchange and energy use as well as economic ties with foreign partners, according to state media. 

Pezeshkian has given differing accounts in recent weeks regarding his access to Khamenei, who has not been seen in public since he succeeded his father in the role in March. On July 21, the president said interactions with the supreme leader were “increasing day by day,” but in early August he said communicating with Khamenei was “very difficult.” 

In May, state media also reported that Pezeshkian had met Khamenei for several hours in what was then the first publicly reported meeting between the two since Khamenei became supreme leader.

Basij Organization deputy Qasem Qoraishi said on Sunday that footage and other documentation would be released showing Khamenei among the public, out in the streets as well as in meetings with armed forces commanders.

Qoraishi said the footage would “once again bring disgrace upon the enemies and detractors of the Iranian people.” The comments appeared aimed at countering speculation about Khamenei’s health and lack of public appearances.

The latest video release comes amid persistent questions about Mojtaba Khamenei’s physical condition and whereabouts. A report published days earlier by Iran International described an unusual encounter in which Pezeshkian was reportedly taken to a secret location in Tehran and allowed only a brief meeting in complete darkness with a man he was told was the supreme leader. 

The interior was kept so dark that neither man could see the other, and Pezeshkian was not permitted to shake the supposed Khamenei’s hand, according to the report. After only a few minutes, he was instructed to leave. The outlet reported that afterward the president questioned whether the person sitting beside him was actually Mojtaba Khamenei, as he had only heard a voice in the darkness.

Florida’s attorney general James Uthmeier took to social media to deliver his assessment of the situation after Chicago Sky guard DiJonai Carrington was ejected from Saturday’s game over a flagrant foul against Cunningham.

The WNBA knows better than to play games down here in Florida, because I’ll be charging people with assault. https://t.co/wryaIdyFz3

— James Uthmeier (@JamesUthmeierFL) August 8, 2026

Uthmeier doubled down on his threats of legal action against players while increasing the charge in another post on Sunday.

I should probably clarify … assault and battery. https://t.co/EFQfdtFSAB

— James Uthmeier (@JamesUthmeierFL) August 9, 2026

The play — and Uthmeier’s reaction — came in the wake of numerous protests over Cunningham speaking up about trans-identifying men infiltrating women’s sports. Her assertion — that women and girls should have space to play without the threat of biological men invading their teams and their locker rooms — quickly created major news across the association, sparking backlash from leftist media outlets, other players, and coaches.

Since her initial remarks, Cunningham has stood her ground on her opinion that caused rallies for and against the Fever guard, as well as a series of ensuing incidents. In one instance, the co-owner of the Seattle Storm confronted two teenage girls sitting courtside with signs and shirts supporting Cunningham.

The Sky guard did not stop attacking Cunningham despite being ejected from the game over the weekend. From the locker room, Carrington posted on Threads “WHITE PRIVILEGE” — and later posted on X “8/23” with a smiling face, marking the date of the Sky and Fever’s next game.

After being informed about Carrington’s comment, Cunningham referenced a similar foul that had gotten her thrown out of a game in the last season — and said that she’d “deserved it” at the time. “There’s no reason to play that card,” she added, saying that the official’s call had not had anything to do with race.

Prior to the 2020 season, the WNBA had not played a game in the state of Florida in 18 years. They played a limited “neutral site” season in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic, but have not played a regular season game in the Sunshine State since. Any players with plans to replicate Carrington’s aggressive foul against Cunningham may now be hoping that pattern holds.

Judge Claire Williams repeatedly handed 30-year-old Lashawa Doyle a soft-touch “get out of jail free” card, granting him suspended sentences and credit for time served in almost all of his recent cases. Despite a staggering rap sheet boasting 22 arrests since 2020, which included eight arrests in 2026 alone, the judge consistently cut him loose without forcing him to serve any real jail time.

The tragic result of this judicial revolving door unfolded at Daffin Park when Doyle allegedly launched an assault on a female victim at a public restroom. City workers overheard the struggle and alerted an off-duty police officer, who rushed in to apprehend Doyle and halt the attack. Doyle now faces charges including criminal attempt to commit a felony, aggravated sexual battery, false imprisonment, and public indecency.

BREAKING: Man arrested for attempted r*pe at Georgia park has 22 arrests since 2020, eight in 2026 alone and was just released from jail 17 days ago

Judge Claire Williams is the one who keeps releasing Lashawa Doyle.

WE SHOULDN’T HAVE TO LIVE LIKE THIS pic.twitter.com/D5KL3AXe8K

— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) August 10, 2026

Just 17 days prior, Doyle had walked free after his latest release. Out of his last 15 arrests, he was consistently released “on his own recognizance” or given credit for time already spent behind bars. His arrests included a February assault on a woman at a transit stop — that left her facial features bruised —  and explicit sexual acts near college housing.

Though Judge Williams ordered Doyle to avoid new offenses, prosecutors somehow failed to file motions to revoke his suspended sentences even as his arrest count surged. Williams’ leniency comes amid her successful re-election campaign in May, where she touted her decades-long tenure on the bench as an example of “equitable” service.

Local leaders are fiercely blasting the system for failing law-abiding citizens. Alderman Nick Palumbo slammed the continuous releases, stating:

This is somebody that has time and time again violated the trust of our community. And I would love to hear accountability from the Judge and I’ve asked from the district attorney’s office, their accountability mechanism to what is happening here. Housed or unhoused, mentally ill or no, this is a violent sex offender in our community and people have a right to feel safe and not be terrorized in this manner. This could have gone — if it had not been for the Savannah Police Department, the park employees and the innocent bystanders that called this in — an entirely very different story.

Georgia State Representative Jesse Petrea echoed those frustrations, adding:

This is the same old story over and over again. And sadly, the people of Chatham County have again been failed by the system. … As a legislator, we have in Georgia provided every opportunity for the judicial system to hold anyone like this individual accountable for his crimes and to keep him away from the people — in the protection of the innocent and the frail and the vulnerable and the weak. All of that is there. It all hinges on one thing. And that is that the judicial system, our judges, our district attorneys and our sheriffs must do their job to hold these people accountable.

About $350 million in cheese is sitting in two warehouses operated by Credito Emiliano, where a European heatwave is quickly threatening profitability.

“This is the Fort Knox of Cheese. Instead of gold bars, you have gold wheels. Every wheel is 700 euros,” a spokesperson for the bank told CBS News. “Outside the temperature is very high and so we need a lot of energy to maintain humidity and temperature for the cheese.”

The bank has had to improve cooling systems and boilers, upgrade building insulation, and increase renewable energy production in order to keep the cheese stored at proper temperatures.

“If extreme events become longer-lasting and more intense, they will certainly have an impact on both the quantity and quality of milk, but above all they will lead to higher costs,” added Paolo Ganzerli, the international sales director at food group GranTerre.

As a whole, the Parmigiano Reggiano industry generates $5.15 billion in revenue a year, with exports of the cheese in 2025 accounting for more than 50% of Parmigiano Reggiano’s global sales. But rising temperatures don’t just affect the bank’s profitability margin as energy costs take a large share of operating costs. They also impact the amount of cheese available in the first place.

High temperatures cause cows to spend more time lying down — and therefore eating less — causing them to produce 10% less milk, which is one of Parmigiano’s key ingredients alongside salt and rennet. “The cow has less milk, and the quality of the wheel cheese [is] different. So it’s an important question for farmers, the producers, and also us to maintain an excellent level of conservation of cheese,” explained a spokesperson for the bank.

Italy is one of the European countries to reverse course on its closure of coal-fired power plants amid rising energy costs. Former Italian Prime Minister Paolo Gentiloni pledged coal-fired plants would be permanently closed by 2025 as the country shifted to renewable energy sources.

The permanent closure has since been shifted to 2038, giving Italy more time to secure alternative energy sources before taking coal-fired plants offline — a reversal that reflects a broader debate over whether Europe’s transition to renewable energy has moved faster than its energy infrastructure can accommodate.

Mike Sommers, president and CEO of the American Petroleum Institute, has argued that the continent moved too quickly. “In Europe there has been a very fast rush to the energy transition. I would argue too fast,” said Mike Sommers.

Not everyone in Europe agrees. European Commission Executive Vice-President Teresa Ribera argued that accelerating the transition to clean energy, rather than slowing it down, is the answer to Europe’s energy challenges. “The real risk is not moving too fast on clean energy, but too slowly,” Ribera said earlier this year.

But just because we all recognize that people need paid time off from work, doesn’t mean that Washington lawmakers should create another government program to provide it. The reality is that government paid-leave programs create as many problems as they solve.

Consider the states that have adopted government paid-leave programs. California workers, for example, lose 1.3% of their wages to a payroll tax to support the leave program. Washington state workers pay 1.13%. That may not sound like much, but for families living paycheck to paycheck, every deduction matters, and those taxes hit every single paycheck, every single year, regardless of whether you take leave. That’s money that can’t go toward groceries, rent, child care, or building the emergency savings that help families weather life’s biggest transitions.

Government paid-leave programs can also result in workers having less generous benefit programs and less true flexibility than before. That’s an important point to remember: when it comes to paid leave benefits, Americans aren’t starting from scratch. More than 80% of private-sector workers already receive paid sick leave, paid holidays, or paid vacation through their employers. Nearly 30% have specific family leave benefits.

While these numbers confirm that a large segment of workers could use more paid time off, particularly for family events like the birth of a child, they should caution against disrupting the benefits already in place. If the federal government were to create a payroll tax-funded leave program, companies would have an incentive to opt into it and stop providing the leave packages they currently offer. For many employers — including the nonprofit I work for — this would mean a less generous benefit at least for the first several weeks. Moreover, rather than working with your own company’s HR department, the leave-taking employee would face a government bureaucracy, which would likely mean unpleasant delays and paperwork burdens, and a lack of ability to stagger a return to employment or customize benefits.

Recognizing the problems with a one-size-fits-all government entitlement program doesn’t mean that nothing can or should be done to help workers who lack sufficient paid leave benefits.

Congress can start by reforming outdated labor laws, specifically the Fair Labor Standards Act, so that hourly workers can opt to receive paid time off, rather than collecting overtime pay. Government workers have long enjoyed this option: Rather than getting paid time-and-a-half for every hour worked overtime, they can earn an extra hour-and-a-half of paid leave. Proposed legislation — the Working Families Flexibility Act — would extend this voluntary option to private-sector employees, allowing workers to choose compensatory time off in place of overtime pay. This would cost the government nothing but would be an important way to help some of the most vulnerable workers in our country have access to paid time off.

Policy leaders should also find ways to make existing safety net programs more flexible rather than larger. All workers pay into the Social Security program from their very first day on the job. Policymakers could allow workers to access a small share of the retirement benefits they have already earned to provide financial support following the birth of a child. Workers who take this family leave option would then have to wait a few months longer to be eligible for full retirement benefits. That way, this new benefit option would be budget-neutral, not require any new taxes or new government mandate, and would limit its impact on existing leave programs. You can learn more about this and other approaches to expanding paid leave in this report from Independent Women.

It’s important to find ways to help families that need to take time off from work. Yet it’s also important to remember that the best way to help families is a robust job market — with plentiful, diverse employment opportunities. That means policymakers should preserve independent contracting and part-time work, and embrace policies, such as tax cuts, that let workers keep more of what they earn and that preserve true workplace flexibility.

The goal shouldn’t simply be more paid leave. It should be more choices for the people who know their own needs better than Washington ever will.

***

This is part of a series of op-eds based on Independent Women’s new report, “Flourishing Families: An Agenda to Help Families Thrive.” The report, found here, details ways to support families without direct government subsidies or radically distorting the tax code to redistribute resources to families.

Carrie Lukas is the president of Independent Women. Follow her on X at @carrielukas.