But the stereotype that our friends across the pond occasionally smelled a little funky was playful and often wrong, easily dismissed with a trip to Europe, or simply shrugged off by a continent too cool to care. That balance has been broken, though, by a wave of people who actually do reek, who wouldn’t know deodorant if it slapped them in the face, and who are now banning the one thing that kept Europeans legit: alcohol.

Bally Bagayoko, the far-Left Muslim mayor of Saint-Denis, the gritty banlieue north of Paris, has just banned the sale of alcohol inside the town’s train station between 7 p.m. and 6 a.m. Mais non! What will the French drink? Anyone who has lived in France knows the nation runs on café and booze, with water an afterthought. Don’t do this to them, Bagayoko!

But he can, apparently. Article L2212-2 of the General Code of Local Authorities entrusts mayors with ensuring order, safety, and hygiene, and Bagayoko ostensibly aims to quell the nighttime disturbances around the station by stripping Dionysiens of their liquid courage during the most romantic hours.

I lived in the arrondissement next door to Saint-Denis in 2023, and I can tell you the culprit behind the crime that creeps out after dark is not takeaway champagne.

The blame belongs to leftist policy: ushering in immigrants of varying cultural norms, eroding consequences for criminals until they grow bolder, and systematically prizing “root causes,” anti-discrimination rhetoric, and institutional skepticism of police over consistent deterrence, enforcement, and cultural assimilation.

Thanks for ruining everything, progressistes. But you can’t blame the French commies alone for the devastation of a once-beautiful, sexy, vibrant city. Hold your nose and call out their abettors too: the Islamists, who team up with them in a red-green alliance to seize power, trading the perfume of a free people for the stench of parallel societies.

Mayor Bagayoko’s ban is small but telling. As migration trends intensify, the French demographer Jean-Claude Chesnais warned that “there will be an overall mingling of cultures and civilisations that may lead, as far as France is concerned, to the emergence of a predominantly African population and to rapid Islamization.”

Practicing Muslims do not drink. In neighborhoods where their share of the population rises sharply, the social consensus around alcohol as a normal, public, everyday pleasure weakens. What begins as a response to nighttime disorder around a train station can become, over time, a broader accommodation of more restrictive norms. Parallel societies form; one grows in population size and political weight, while the old habits of the Judeo-Christian host society are gradually squeezed out. Then suddenly a glass of Bordeaux isn’t just curfewed; it’s condemned.

In France. Where water is wine and wine is, well, also wine. 

But this watermelon coalition isn’t just stealing the joy from that midnight rush of finding a mini-market after the bars close, grabbing one last nightcap, and wandering to the Seine to yap until you yawn. It’s also stripping the hygiene from the morning routines of commies across Europe.

A massive tent encampment, thousands strong, has taken over the Puerta del Sol in Madrid, in what early reports described as a “protest on behalf of the housing crisis.” Again, gracias, progresistas. But it quickly became an excuse for an aggrieved and bored camp of communists, anarchists, pro-Palestinian groups, and assorted activists to spill onto the streets, cultivate bacteria in their armpits, and protest the shower.

Now the dichotomy between Spain’s political forces sharpens by the musty minute, with commentators branding the protesters “subsidized, dirty Spain” and their mockers “the Spain that works and showers.” Conservative Spaniards are trying to rid the streets of the encampment by draping Spanish flags around their shoulders and hoisting bottles of shampoo, urging the socialist-lovers to use them.

It’s hilarious. And typical.

Whether you call it socialism, communism, or leftist policy, the mechanisms match and the patterns share the same stench. Public services rot, then basic maintenance collapses, then filth becomes the background noise of daily life. In the Soviet Union, communal apartments and crumbling housing stock were ubiquitous. If an elevator broke, it stayed broken; trash piled up in courtyards, and hot water was more rumor than reality. Same with Mao’s China; the impoverished citizens saw famine and forced labor camps because of a collectivism that wasn’t warm, but deathly cold.

The modern versions look and smell similar. Venezuela under Chávez and Maduro went from one of Latin America’s richest countries to a land of garbage mountains and hospitals without soap or running water. Cuba still rations basic hygiene products. In Western cities with prolonged Left-led governance and heavy street encampments, like San Francisco and Portland, or now Sol itself, the same markers appear: waste, odor, and zombies addicted to the Blues and to the bluest-of-blue policies that put them there.

Look at France. Look at Spain. Look at the United Kingdom. Their trouble is a burgeoning welfare state built on leftist demands to hand everyone and their mother entitlements with no need to work, plus open borders that admitted cultures that are anathema to theirs, plus a replacement theory that is actively supplanting the heirs of 1789 with sharia believers. That is how they got there. That’s how they got so stinky.

If you don’t like what you see through those red-green colored glasses — filth, squalor, and alcohol bans — then stop ordering the socialism special while expecting the Bordeaux to keep flowing, mon chéri.

“The Jewish people are not foreign occupiers in the land of our forefathers,” Netanyahu said in a video posted on X. “Our history is not a colonial enterprise. Our land is not stolen land.”

The Jewish people’s right to their own state in their ancestral homeland is non-negotiable.

Watch: https://t.co/uMWfObAMaJ

— Benjamin Netanyahu – בנימין נתניהו (@netanyahu) October 16, 2026

“This is our homeland; it’s called Judea. That’s where Jews come from. We’ve been attached to it for thousands of years,” he added.

The prime minister called the remarks “regrettable” but never named Obama. The former president made them Tuesday during a paid onstage interview with Irish journalist Susan McKay at the O2 Arena in Belfast, Northern Ireland, before a crowd of about 7,000, according to the New York Post. Hours earlier, Queen’s University Belfast had given him an honorary doctorate.

Obama granted that Jews had suffered persecution “for millennia,” much of it in Europe, and had good reason to seek refuge. Then he added: “What is also undeniable is that they took land off people and they were excessive. And those people understandably said, ‘This is injustice and I want my land back.'”

He also said Israel had “ceded moral ground” by leaning on its military edge instead of compromise. He said he had made that case to Netanyahu directly while in office.

Netanyahu said Israel is not the obstacle to peace. He blamed the refusal of “our enemies, and America’s enemies” to accept a Jewish state “in any boundaries.”

The exchange revives a feud that shaped both men’s time in power. In 2011, Netanyahu lectured Obama against using Israel’s pre-1967 borders as a basis for negotiations. In 2015, he went before Congress to argue against the nuclear agreement Obama was then negotiating with Iran. And he condemned the administration’s decision in December 2016 to let a UN Security Council resolution against Israeli settlements pass.

The latest clash comes ten days before Israelis vote in an October 27 election widely seen as a referendum on Netanyahu’s leadership.

He left the hospital at approximately 3:30 p.m. — several days earlier than initially anticipated — and returned to the Vatican after a 10-minute car ride, according to The New York Times.

 “I am much better, thank you,” the 71-year-old American pontiff told a journalist as he departed.

The Vatican reported Friday that the pope is making steady progress in his recovery. Blood tests and chest X-ray confirmed improvements in his overall condition, according to a joint statement from his personal physician, Dr. Luigi Carbone, and Dr. Stefano Margaritora, the surgeon who led his operation. The doctors said Leo would continue respiratory physiotherapy but was well enough to carry out his normal daily activities independently, the Daily Wire previously reported.

Credit: Vatican Media

During his hospitalization, the pope celebrated Mass in a makeshift chapel on the 10th floor of Gemelli Hospital, personally distributing Holy Communion to those in attendance. Hospital doctors, nurses, and members of the Vatican City State Gendarmerie Corps joined the service. 

“In his homily, the pope thanked all healthcare personnel — doctors, nurses, and nursing assistants — for the work they carry out every day caring for the sick and for those in fragile conditions, and in particular for everything they have done and continue to do for him,” the Holy See Press Office said.

The pope was diagnosed with lung adenocarcinoma, a type of non-small cell lung cancer, following surgery to remove a localized nodule from his right lung. The procedure involved removing the lower lobe of the lung, and tissue examined during the operation confirmed the diagnosis doctors had suspected beforehand. The Vatican has not disclosed whether further treatment will be necessary or whether the cancer has spread.

Leo is expected to recite the Angelus prayer and deliver his weekly blessing on Sunday from his apartment overlooking St. Peter’s Square, marking his first public appearance since the operation. His audiences and public engagements remain canceled through Tuesday, October 20.

U.S. District Judge Jinsook Ohta of the Southern District of California issued a preliminary injunction on Wednesday directing Secretary of State Marco Rubio to hold the 2027 lottery, which offers up to 55,000 green cards a year to applicants from countries that send relatively few immigrants to the United States. Ohta, a Biden appointee, was born in Seoul in 1976 and immigrated to the U.S. at age six.

Under a revised timeline both sides requested, the State Department must announce the registration period by October 29, open online entries by November 1, keep the window open for 30 days, and notify winners by December 3. The department must then process selectees’ applications until that year’s visas run out or the fiscal year ends on September 30, 2027.

The case was brought by Red Eagle Law, a California immigration firm that told the court diversity visa clients make up a large portion of its business. The firm sued Rubio in August after the department failed to open registration, which normally begins each fall.

Government lawyers argued the legal deadlines for running the 2027 lottery had already passed. Ohta, who had earlier denied the firm’s request for a temporary restraining order, rejected that position, finding that sticking to the usual timetable would mean no lottery would happen at all.

Then-Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem announced the pause in December after authorities identified Claudio Manuel Neves Valente, a 48-year-old Portuguese national, as the gunman who killed two students at Brown University and then murdered MIT professor Nuno Loureiro in his home. Neves Valente, who was later found dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound, obtained his green card through the lottery in 2017.

The Brown University shooter, Claudio Manuel Neves Valente entered the United States through the diversity lottery immigrant visa program (DV1) in 2017 and was granted a green card. This heinous individual should never have been allowed in our country.

In 2017, President Trump fought to end this program, following the devastating NYC truck ramming by an ISIS terrorist, who entered under the DV1 program, and murdered eight people.

At President Trump’s direction, I am immediately directing USCIS to pause the DV1 program to ensure no more Americans are harmed by this disastrous program.

— Special Envoy Kristi Noem (@EnvoyNoem) December 19, 2025

“This heinous individual should never have been allowed in our country,” Noem wrote at the time.

The State Department followed by halting issuance of diversity visas indefinitely, and in March it finalized a rule requiring entrants to submit a valid passport when they enter.

Trump has sought to end the lottery since his first term, when he pressed Congress to scrap it after an Uzbek national who entered through the program killed eight people in a 2017 truck attack in New York City. Congress created the program in 1990 and has never repealed it.

Ohta’s order comes after a federal court in a separate case lifted the December suspension on visa issuance in August.

“Whoever the president endorses will ultimately win the Republican primary,” Vance said in an interview with Sean Spicer. “While Donald Trump will ultimately decide who is going to be the Republican nominee, you have a general election; 330 million Americans are going to decide who the president of the United States is.”

Vance described himself as a “procrastinator” when it comes to deciding whether to run, saying he plans to put off the decision until he can no longer avoid it.

“I’m so focused on the midterms,” Vance said. “If my wife was making this decision, she would have been thinking about this for the past two years. But I’m the sort of person; I’m not going to make the decision until I really have to.”

Vance said his family will be a major consideration. 

“We got four little kids. You have to make sure that you could do this in a way that actually was good for the kids. Like you cannot sacrifice your family for even the very high office and the high service that comes along with it,” Vance told Spicer. “You got to make sure that you think you’re the right person that can make a good contribution to the country at that time.”

“The midterms will happen, and then I’ll have to start thinking about it, and then I will,” he added.

It’s a clear signal that Vance has not ruled out a White House bid, which would put him in the difficult position of carrying Trump’s MAGA movement forward while keeping together the politically diverse coalition the president built. Among its members – or former members – is Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News host and close friend of the vice president, who has called for Trump’s impeachment, floated the idea of creating a new political party, and defended far-left Democrats in the 2026 midterms.

“But at what point do you find that, because of your position as vice president, you’ve maybe got to call some balls and strikes?” Spicer asked Vance about their relationship.

“I think you have to do that all the time, and I’ve done that with Tucker. I’ve done it with any number of people,” Vance said, pointing to their disagreements over the Iran war.

Vance then directly criticized Carlson for defending Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic Michigan Senate candidate.

“Abdul El-Sayed is a guy who you agree with about the Iran War, and I understand that. But wait a second, this is a guy who says that the Iran conflict is a problem because it violates international law. How is that America First?” Vance asked. “A guy who said that a terrorist who tried to kill a bunch of innocent schoolchildren — that he empathized not with the innocent families but with the terrorists himself. So I think that you have a responsibility to have these disagreements.”

Vance was referring to El-Sayed’s comments following a Hezbollah-inspired attack on a Jewish preschool in suburban Detroit in March, after which the Democrat said that “hurt people hurt people.”

Still, Vance made clear that his disagreements with Carlson would not lead him to cut ties, arguing that abandoning a friend over politics to gain an advantage would be disloyal.

“I’m not going to do the thing where I say because I disagree with what Tucker has said about Abdul El-Sayed, therefore I think that he’s a terrible person and I disavow him. I am never going to do that,” Vance said.

“I think it’s disloyal, and I think that anybody who conducts themselves like that in order to gain political advantage is not worthy of the vice presidency,” he added.

At a Tuesday debate, Collins went after Jackson for not yet disclosing who was paying for his candidacy. “I would point out that we have no idea who is financing Troy’s campaign,” she said. “He promised to be completely transparent, yet he has not filed a single report.”

Jackson bristled and promised to hand over the report the next morning. “Because we see yours and I know that there’s no billionaires funding me,” he said. “I’ll give you the report tomorrow and then we’ll talk about it on Thursday.”

He didn’t follow through. His campaign instead released its third-quarter filing Thursday, the Federal Election Commission’s deadline, reporting $20.4 million raised since he entered the race in July. The filing shows maximum contributions from at least four billionaires: Bain Capital co-chairman Josh Bekenstein, Getty Oil heiress Anne Earhart, hedge fund founder Nat Simons and his sister, Liz Simons.

Collins pressed him on it that night in Bangor, at the race’s final debate held before Election Day. She noted that Jackson had pledged to refuse billionaire money and said, “That’s not accurate.”

WATCH: Troy Jackson Discloses Campaign Donations From Billionaires Two Days After Saying ‘There’s No Billionaires Funding Me’ https://t.co/SqhjDzggHg

— Washington Free Beacon (@FreeBeacon) October 16, 2026

“I know what’s in my campaign,” Jackson replied. “As far as the billionaires that I might have on my campaign, that is accurate. But I haven’t made any deals like Senator Collins has with those billionaires.”

The crowd burst into laughter.

Jackson then vowed to “tax those billionaires” once he reaches the Senate. He also blamed the delayed report on the size of his donor base, saying more than 200,000 people had contributed to his campaign. Separately, he said he had received $15,000 from oil and pharmaceutical lobbyists and donated it to charity.

Jackson’s campaign website still tells voters he “isn’t backed by corporate PACs or billionaire donors.”

Jackson became the nominee in July after Graham Platner withdrew following numerous scandals, most recently a sexual assault allegation, which Platner denied. The race remains close. A recent Washington Post-Schar School poll had Jackson ahead 50% to 46%.

On Monday, agents from the Department of Homeland Security searched the congresswoman’s home after a federal judge approved the search warrant. Once inside, the agents took several personal items, including her cellphone, notebooks, personal computers and her passport, according to the Wall Street Journal. 

“There is no legitimate basis for any suggestion that she has violated any law concerning her citizenship status,” said Omar’s attorneys in a letter to the Justice Department. 

“This vindictive, retributive, and politically motivated criminal investigation into one of the President’s chief congressional critics violates Representative Omar’s constitutional rights and threatens the separation of powers,” they added. Her attorneys argue the search was deliberately timed for the final weeks before the midterms, when voters will decide whether Omar serves a fifth term. Justice Department practice has long discouraged overt investigative steps against a candidate in the roughly 60 days before an election — a practice Omar’s lawyers say the department violated.

Spokesperson for the Department of Justice Emily Covington told ABC news that, “Our attorneys and law enforcement partners complied with all court orders and legal obligations, as they always do.” Omar’s attorneys also requested copies of any video and audio recordings that were made inside her home. 

The scope of the investigation remains unknown, however, the Daily Wire outlined five possible crimes on Wednesday. First, the Department of Justice could be looking into whether Omar’s father committed immigration fraud when he was seeking refugee status—meaning his Ilhan Omar’s citizenship could also be affected. Second, there are questions around whether her father became a citizen and whether Omar was under 18 at the time.

Third, there are allegations that her husband, Tim Mynett, used Omar’s position to benefit his firm’s African clients through legislation, along with questions about his businesses and the couple’s financial disclosures. A 2025 filing valued the couple’s assets at up to $30 million, largely from Mynett’s business stakes; an amended filing earlier this year reported a net worth of roughly $18,000 to $95,000, with Mynett’s businesses listed as having no value after liabilities.

On Thursday, Omar thanked her supporters and constituents who have stood by her. “Thank you to everyone who stood with me over the years,” she said. “It’s been a scary journey but I have always been grounded in my work and ability to provide exemplary service to my constituents. Trump and his administration have been after me since I arrived in Congress. I have always stood up to him and that will never change. The pedophile protector will never silence me.”

The Department of Justice did not immediately respond to the Daily Wire’s request for comment. 

Christopher “Dodge” Smith, 40, allegedly attacked Jessica Antolini, 30, following an argument outside a bar in Safety Harbor, Florida, on Tuesday night, according to the Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office.

Witnesses told investigators that Smith arrived at the bar shortly before 9 p.m. and appeared to be “hunting” for Antolini. Some described him as looking “possessed,” according to a criminal complaint cited by the New York Post.

After finding Antolini, Smith provoked an argument with her outside the bar before shooting her in the face. Authorities said he then drove his SUV over her and fled the scene with his 5-year-old daughter and a dog still inside, leaving Antolini critically injured.

“Detectives say multiple 911 calls reporting the shooting were received from witnesses who also provided information about Smith’s vehicle,” the sheriff’s office said in its incident report.

Deputies later located Smith’s SUV and attempted to pull him over. Smith allegedly refused to stop, forcing deputies to immobilize the vehicle, according to the New York Post.

Smith was initially charged with attempted first-degree murder and child abuse. He is being held without bond at the Pinellas County Jail. After Antolini died from her injuries, his murder charge was upgraded to first-degree murder.

Safety Harbor Mayor Joe Ayoub announced Antolini’s death in a Facebook post, describing the community as grieving following a “devastating act of domestic violence.”

“It is with a profoundly heavy heart that I must share that our neighbor, Jessica Antolini, has passed away from the severe injuries she sustained during the attack,” Ayoub wrote.

“As a father to a 5-year-old daughter myself, my heart completely breaks for the innocent young child who was caught in the middle of this horrific event. No child should ever have to witness or endure such trauma,” he added.

Ayoub also praised law enforcement and community members for their swift response, crediting them with helping apprehend the suspect and ensuring the child was safely reunited with loved ones.

“I want to extend my gratitude to the Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office and the brave community members who stepped forward instantly on Tuesday night,” he wrote. “Because of your quick actions and the rapid response of our deputies, the suspect was immediately apprehended and remains in custody facing upgraded charges of First-Degree Murder.”

Christopher Dodge mugshot. Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office (credit: NYP)

“President Trump is a kind, wonderful, gracious, thoughtful, enthusiastic, and hardworking man. I wish more Americans appreciated him. No one will ever make America great the way he has and continues to,” she said. “It was an honor to work for him.”

Zacharia posted the statement on Friday night, the same evening she and her family reportedly joined Vice President JD Vance and his family for dinner at the vice president’s residence. She also shared a photo of herself standing beside Trump as he sat at the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office. Earlier that day, five days into her tenure, Trump said he had urged her to reconsider staying on.

“I said to her, honestly, if I were you, I’d reconsider,” he told reporters outside the White House on Friday. “I would reconsider.”

“I told Katie that in my opinion she was treated very, very unfairly, very unfairly by the news,” Trump said disclosing more of the conversation.  “And I said, Katie, do you need this? I don’t think you need this, and we’re talking about doing something. We like Katie a lot.”

Zacharia was thrown into the role on short notice, accepting the job last Friday and holding her first press briefing on Tuesday. After a halting debut at the podium and questions over whether she had misrepresented herself as a lawyer, she was out exactly one week after Trump offered her the position.

At the time, Trump had said, “I am confident that Katie will deliver strong results for our Country as the next White House Press Secretary, as she has the respect of, and will work fantastically with, the Media, the American People, and my Administration.”

Anthony Scaramucci — whose 11-day stint as White House communications director in 2017 had long been the benchmark for brief tenures in the Trump White House — offered Zacharia some advice on X.

“Dear Katie Zacharia,” he said. “Speaking as the world’s leading expert on short White House tenures: turn off the news and go enjoy your family. In time you’ll realize that the Universe did you a major favor.

Before serving as Press Secretary, Zacharia briefly worked for the Department of Homeland Security as a spokeswomen for former Secretary Kristi Noem but left six weeks later after the schedule became too difficult to manage with her family. 

Noem reportedly congratulated President Trump on choosing Zacharia for the role. 

I have used mildly uncharitable language. Certain words have been thrown around — words like demons, Satanists, perverts, degenerates, bastards, morons, half-wits, imbeciles, freaks. And that was just over breakfast this morning. 

Of course, all of those descriptions were accurate and, if anything, overly generous. But I will admit that they do qualify as criticisms. And I can tend to criticize these people on a relatively frequent basis. 

I am going to take things in a different direction. For the first time in the history of my life, I am going to speak positively about a Democrat. In fact, I am going to highlight a Democrat candidate that I support. 

WATCH: The Real History of Communism: The Russian Revolution 

Granted, I don’t support most of her views. We no doubt disagree substantially on the issues. But she is, without question, the most eloquent, compelling, persuasive, intelligent, and virtuous Democrat candidate to run for office since at least the 1840s. 

I’m not going to vote for her because I don’t live in her district or her state, and also because voting for a Democrat is spiritually equivalent to selling your soul to Satan, but from afar I will offer my admiration and moral support. 

Her name is Jaime West, running for county council in Fayette County, Indiana. She recently appeared on a candidates forum hosted by a local news station. Clips from her interview have gone massively viral. 

Many people have noted that she is, for a Democrat, shockingly cogent, fluent, and well-spoken. By Democrat standards, this woman is one of the great political figures of our time. The Democrat Party should immediately make her their presidential nominee for 2028. They certainly don’t have anyone better. 

Here, then, is Jaime delivering her remarks:

Now, there are a few things that come to mind right out of the gate, as it relates to Ms. Jaime West, having watched the entire interview with great care and attention and having taken copious notes. Specifically, I have 10 important points to make:

1) She seems to have obviously drunk two and a half liters of chardonnay before this appearance. And apparently, along with appearing to be a raging alcoholic, she also delivers groceries. If you’ve ever ordered groceries for delivery, this actually makes a lot of sense. 

Anyone who’s ever used Instacart knows what it’s like to order paper towels, a box of spaghetti, and a gallon of milk and then have someone pull up in your driveway nine hours later with toilet paper, a jar of mustard, and a bottle of soda in a flavor that you didn’t know existed. Instacart allows substitutions, so if an item you order isn’t on the shelf, the driver can substitute a similar item for it. 

The problem is that Instacart drivers interpret “similar item” as any item that also exists in a three-dimensional plane. They look at similarity in a more metaphysical sense. I thought they were just being philosophically rigorous in their thinking. But it turns out these people — including Uber Eats drivers — are actually sauced out of their minds. So that solves the mystery. Already, Jaime has enlightened us more than any other Democrat ever has. 

2) Before you laugh so insensitively at this woman who seems absolutely sloshed, I want you to stop and think about the courage and determination on display. This brave woman seemingly woke up that morning, had some coffee, had three Xanax, had a couple shots of vodka, had a couple more, then two more after that — which, in fairness, was a pretty standard American breakfast in the 1950s — and despite being apparently hammered and bombed into oblivion, she still had the wherewithal and persistence to get in her car and show up for this televised interview. That’s not an easy thing to do. 

And what’s more, she is trying to use really difficult sentences for an apparent drunk person. Before you pass judgment on her, why don’t you try guzzling nine margaritas and then looking into a camera and saying a phrase like “emergency services”? I mean, this woman even tried to say “rural communities.” I botch that on the show all the time, and I’m not even drunk when I film the podcast usually. So have some respect for this woman, and frankly for the whole drunkard community, which she is so bravely, and I would say nobly, representing. 

3) The first five minutes of Jaime West’s remarks come in response to a single prompt. The invitation to “tell us about yourself” launched her into a twisty, rambling, discursive, tangential, only vaguely intelligible monologue that had little if anything to do with the question that was asked. This reminds me of every conversation I’ve ever had with my three-year-old. You might think that you don’t want your public officials to resemble three-year-olds. First of all, it’s way too late for that. Second, Scripture says that we should be like children. So in a certain sense — which is a totally theologically incorrect sense, for the record — this woman is an inspiration. 

4) If you have ever said that you want to vote for someone who is just a “regular person,” an average Joe or Jane, well, here you go. Allow me to introduce you to Jaime West, a regular person. I hate to sound elitist, but this is what voting for a regular person means. Which is why I’ve always said I want to vote for people who are not regular. 

I want them to be well above average, above regular, in terms of intelligence, virtue, coherence, and so on. If you want a truly regular person, this is what you get. This woman is exactly the kind of person you would expect to encounter at the DMV or Walmart, which is to say she’s regular. 

That rant Jaime delivers about seven minutes into the discussion about data centers is remarkable in that it exactly resembles — in every detail — the rant 10 million drunk aunts will be delivering around the Thanksgiving table next month. Take the average person, give them 3 to 5 servings of alcohol, ask them about current events, and this is precisely what you get, for better or worse. 

5) That said, credit where it’s due: I do unironically agree with one point that the seemingly drunk left-wing wine aunt made on the data center issue. If a trillion-dollar tech company wants to build a data center in a community, they should be required to invest heavily in that community. In fact, they should do it without being required. Wealthy tycoons used to build schools, parks, libraries, hospitals, and museums, and inject money and resources into public institutions and the community at large. 

Modern tycoons, especially these Big Tech freaks, with the exception of Elon Musk, generally don’t do anything like that. It may be only leftists who point this out, but that doesn’t make it a left-wing point, and it doesn’t make it wrong, even when the leftist who says it doesn’t know where she is or what planet she’s on. So she got this one right. Even a blackout drunk clock is right twice a day, as the saying goes. 

6) The whole interview with West is incredibly profound, but in the final two minutes she so deftly and skillfully weaves together the various intellectual threads of her argument. I found it not only persuasive but frankly unnerving in its power and elocution. 

7) She presents many compelling arguments, but I thought the most convincing was when she said, “The sheriff’s nephew threatened to blow my head off, but you know, what are you gonna do?” 

Fascinating. Brilliant. Think about what she’s saying here. The sheriff’s nephew. What does that mean? It seems to establish the hereditary nature of power. We are not merely governed by those we elect, but by the networks those in power establish, the oligarchy, the instruments of coercion that lie outside of elected office. 

“Threatened to blow my head off.” What do we take from that? I would say it introduces that enduring and even ancient problem of institutional force set against the individual — the timeless collision between personal liberty and the state, which our Founders grappled with, and whose intellectual and moral tradition has now been taken up, dare I say, in even more eloquent terms, by this incredibly drunk woman from Indiana. 

8) And then we come to the brilliant pivot where she takes us from a political observation to something almost transcendent. “But you know.” Three simple words that erupt onto the scene, suddenly, out of nowhere, reminding us of the limits of rational inquiry, the futility of standing before reality itself and demanding justice on our own terms. 

9) Finally, she asks, perhaps rhetorically but perhaps not: “What are you gonna do?” Some would take this as a call to action, a cry in the night, a Paul Revere moment. Indeed, perhaps that’s exactly how she meant it. 

On the other hand, perhaps this is less a question than a display of a kind of existentialist acceptance of the absurd nature of being. This brings to mind Albert Camus, the 20th-century French philosopher whose entire catalog this woman has no doubt read and understood. 

10) But she is operating with a far more advanced philosophical understanding, recognizing that indeed sometimes the sheriff’s nephew threatens to blow your head off — your head of all things, the source of rational thought — and the only choice you have is to get on with your life, to get on indeed with your seventh bottle of Pinot Noir. Is this resignation? Is it surrender? No, it is wisdom, I say. It is the moral courage that can be found in fighting a battle you can’t win, and winning a battle you can’t fight. 

Now, does any of that make any sense? No. Will Jaime West even remember doing this interview when she wakes up in the morning? No. Was any of this remotely worth your time? Also, no. 

But in the words of a great woman: “What are you gonna do?” That’s something for us all to reflect on.  

It’s a warm October day here in metropolitan Dallas, but inside the convention center, the air is cool and tinged with pink and purple lights that illuminate the nearly 6,000 women who have traveled across the country to hear Stuckey speak.

“What I do, and what I believe in this realm God has called me to do, is to the best of my imperfect ability to try to navigate the chaos of the culture with as much clarity and courage as possible and take many Christian women along with me,” Stuckey tells her audience. “That’s what Share The Arrows is about.”

This is the third annual Share The Arrows conference, a gathering for conservative Christian women to hear from Stuckey, worship with a praise band, and hear faith leaders share how to navigate a secular culture as a Bible-believing Christian. The name of the event is one of solidarity: if conservative Christians stand up for one another, they can “share the arrows” of the broader culture’s attacks. These women aren’t here to be coddled with feel-good women’s empowerment slogans. They’re here to be challenged.

The conference’s core audience is women in their 30s and 40s, but attendees are all ages. I speak with one 85-year-old who joined her friends for the day. “I’m so happy to be here with this many young women,” she tells me. The youngest attendees cannot speak with me — because they’re babies. Dozens and dozens of babies pepper the auditorium, the halls, and the designated nursing room. This conference could be sponsored by Mabe baby carriers.

Vitaly M Photography

Thirty-eight-year-old Tracey flew all the way from Southern California with her two-month-old to attend the event. Stirring her coffee, the homeschool mom of three tells me she came specifically to hear Stuckey speak, and that she trusts her enough to expect the other speakers to be “really solid.” Perusing the booths and getting a “little bean” onesie from pro-life Seven Weeks Coffee was a bonus.

A fan of Stuckey’s YouTube content, Tracey praises her boldness and debate skills, saying Stuckey has helped her feel that it’s okay to speak out about your beliefs.

“My husband and I own a local business, and we tend to have quite a few LGBT customers,” she says. “We have a transgender person on our staff and several in the gay community, and we hire them because we want to encourage them and they’re really good at the work. But also — they’re lost.”

“You can’t just preach in your workplace; you can get in a lot of trouble for that. So it’s like, learning how to be bold in my faith in work. We homeschool, and there’s a big secular community of homeschoolers. And they think we’re crazy believing in ‘sky daddy’ or whatever they say,” she laughs. “So I think it’s just been more encouraging to me to stand up for what I believe.”

This year’s speakers include author and former lesbian Rosaria Butterfield, Reformed pastor Costi Hinn, Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders, and Alisa Childers, a podcaster and former member of the Christian band ZOEgirl. I hear attendees buzzing about the guest speakers, particularly Butterfield, but it’s Stuckey they’re most excited to see.

A Voice In The Wilderness

Since launching the “Relatable” podcast in 2018, Allie Beth Stuckey has become something of the patron saint of conservative Christian millennials. Well, maybe not the patron saint — she is Protestant, after all — but a standard-bearer, something more akin to the Old Testament prophetess Deborah.

She’s not afraid of telling hard truths; in fact, that’s her whole brand. Attendees repeatedly gush over her boldness and moral clarity. “She’s very confident and clear on what she believes,” Tracey, the homeschool mom, tells me.

Stuckey has 938,000 followers on Instagram, and “Relatable with Allie Beth Stuckey” is one of the top 20 Christian podcasts. She’s known for her uncompromising positions on abortion, transgenderism, feminism, and pretty much every hot-button culture war issue you can name. She’s not just a Republican, though. Everything she talks about she sees through the lens of faith.

“I really admire the fact that she is such a straight shooter,” says Abbie Halberstadt, an author and homeschooling mother of 10 (with another on the way). Halberstadt, known on her Instagram as “M is for Mama,” was a speaker at last year’s conference.

“The Word of God is living and active; it’s everything we need for life and godliness, and that’s what Allie’s hammering over and over again,” she says. “This is such a unique opportunity to, as she says, get a no-fluff encouragement session, just a shot in the arm of ‘I’m not the only one out here doing this crazy thing of living according to the Word.’”

Vitaly M Photography

In 2020, Stuckey published “You’re Not Enough (And That’s Okay): Escaping the Toxic Culture of Self-Love.” Four years later, she followed it up with “Toxic Empathy: How Progressives Exploit Christian Compassion,” a book whose title made critics lose their minds.

But her thesis isn’t that empathy itself is bad. It’s just that it can be easily weaponized — and often is.

Rachelle and Jennifer are in their 40s, and they traveled with 12 other women from Kentucky in a four-car caravan to attend the conference. Rachelle says Stuckey has made her think more deeply about political issues. She hadn’t considered the ethics of surrogacy, for example, until Stuckey addressed it in “Toxic Empathy.”

“I had never really thought a lot about surrogacy,” she says. “That kind of surprised me. But when she broke it down, it was like, ‘Okay, I guess I didn’t know as much, or I didn’t pay as much attention.’”

Jennifer chimes in, “I’ve never thought about finding what the truth is about that.”

My Sister’s Keeper

When I meet Stuckey, she’s wearing a walnut-colored maxi dress and half-reclining on a blue sofa, poised as if, despite being 37 weeks pregnant, she’s not quite ready to rest. She’s about to go on stage with Governor Sanders, but has a few minutes to spare.

It’s a bit of an understatement to say women have been in the news these past few weeks, between the Lindsay Clancy trial and the “Cornell 7” case. Of course, I’ve got to ask about toxic empathy.

Stuckey published her book in 2024 in response to what some call “Woke 1” — the cultural psychosis that was the American response to the COVID-19 pandemic and the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement.

“It ended up being prescient because it’s just gotten worse,” she says. “It’s gotten to the point to where we’re not just saying like, ‘Oh, riots are fine,’ or ‘These violent protests are fine,’ but actually, ‘We’re going to find a way to feel sorrier for a woman who murdered her children than the children themselves.’”

There’s not a lot of social cache to be found in being correct, she adds. “Actually, the story Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez told about Jane Doe isn’t accurate” isn’t going to win over online mob. “There’s way more social capital to be gained by going along with what the mainstream says and seeming the most empathetic,” she says. There’s something particularly female about the urge to be perceived as taking the side of the oppressed, but the narrative doesn’t always fit reality.

“We as women are so relational, and it’s a good thing, and we’re social, and there’s part of us that wants to be accepted, and it’s not necessarily bad,” Stuckey says. “But when push comes to shove, I do believe that the truth has to win.”

Vitaly M Photography

Stuckey is traditional, but not “trad” — “trad is not the same thing as biblical,” she says — and she has focused much of her attention over the years on the ethics of reproductive technologies: surrogacy, IVF, and birth control. These things are now staples of rightwing discourse, but just a few years ago, that wasn’t the case.

“In 2020 … most conservative commentators were not talking about surrogacy and IVF and hormonal birth control because it was just seen as like, ‘Oh gosh, they’re going to think we’re real extremists if we start talking about this stuff,’” Stuckey says.

“I just had a woman come up to me here who was like, ‘Last year, because of this conference, I got my IUD out, and here’s my baby!’” she adds.

Stuckey argues that hormonal birth control “doesn’t stop ovulation; it stops implantation,” making it impossible to support as someone who is pro-life. If her opinions have changed over the years, Stuckey says, they’ve only strengthened — particularly on the issue of abortion.

Even women who don’t use hormonal birth control are often using apps to track their cycles, and these apps use gender-neutral language or partner with organizations such as Planned Parenthood. Stuckey has just made a big announcement to her followers: She’s launching her own fertility app, Ana Kate.

“A baby is viewed as a burden to avoid, or a right any adult is entitled to,” says the ad for the app that plays in the auditorium. “Even science has become politicized, with many experts refusing to acknowledge the uniqueness of the female body.”

Vitaly M Photography

Ana Kate, not yet released, is “a cycle and pregnancy tracking app to track what’s true,” with a prayer board and Bible verses and language about the sanctity of life.

To her followers, Stuckey says she hopes to make something big. “I want to create something that’s so good that even the progressives have to use our app and say, ‘Ugh, I’ll just get past the Bible verses!’”

Let There Be Light

This is 35-year-old Rachel’s second time at Share The Arrows.

“Some women’s conferences, they fluff stuff up a little bit too much, and they waver, and they tiptoe around things. And we knew that this conference would be steady. We’d be shooting some arrows, girl!” she laughs. She and four friends from church flew from Knoxville, Tennessee, to be here.

Stuckey “came out of the gate just like with abortion and LGBTQ. It was like, yes!” Rachel continues. “A lot of times, even in the Christian community, [those] are subjects that are danced around or can be controversial, and they shouldn’t be. And straight out of the gate … it was like, this is what you should stand on, this is what God’s word says, and here’s God’s word that backs this up. … It’s like, yes, queen!”

Sisters Kaitlyn and Kennedy, also making their second trip to Share The Arrows, are waiting in the merch line. Kaitlyn is wearing a blue and white toile prairie dress and soft baby wrap. A work-from-home mother of two, she says she left last year with a feeling of optimism.

“We know what the end goal is,” she says. “We know how this ends, so it made me feel better that we’re leading our lives the right way.”

Kennedy, a junior in high school, says last year her mother dragged her last minute to the conference, which took a precious Saturday away from her. This year, she feels differently.

She says she goes to a private Christian school in the Dallas area where many students aren’t living out their faith. Seeing the other attendees last year, she says, “I felt very behind.” But now, “I feel like I’m on the right track.”

“Like how she has hope in general,” Kennedy says, looking at her sister, “I just have hope for myself.”

***

The counter-culture show cut its teeth mocking the latest headlines, and the news cycle has never been more farcical. Yet today’s “SNL” is like a clean comic forced to open for a DNC fundraiser.

No evidence is better than the show’s recurring Tucker Carlson impression. The former Fox News superstar has gone rogue since the right-leaning network dismissed him in 2023.

First, he continued his monologues on Elon Musk’s X, often covering topics the legacy media ignored. Slowly, then all at once, the 57-year-old found his inner Alex Jones, but worse.

Conspiracies. Anti-American ravings. Nazi reassessment. One recurring theme? Israel. Carlson’s antisemitism caught many by surprise, reflecting an ominous trend across Western societies.

In ways, he’s helped lead the despicable charge. His seething hatred for all things associated with the Jewish nation also puts him in line with too many Democrats. Social media users burn endless calories counting up all the times he mentions Israel. Spoiler alert: It’s a lot.

So why can’t “SNL” lay a satirical glove on him?

The show has more than enough material to run a dozen Carlson sketches. Maybe more. It’s a rare chance for “SNL” to reach across the aisle, since Carlson now attacks GOP targets, from President Donald Trump to Michigan Senatorial hopeful Mike Rogers, as much as Democrats.

So where’s the real Tucker Carlson, or just a reasonable facsimile? We’re still waiting after three serious swings and misses on the NBC showcase.

Show regular Jeremy Culhane introduced his Carlson impression earlier this year, featuring the bit on the “Weekend Update” segment. Something felt immediately off.

Sure, Culhane nailed Carlson’s odd chuckle and cadence, but this wasn’t the pundit who was suddenly cozying up to Russia, defending Sharia Law and casting doubt on basic World War II history.

He was a cartoonish conservative figure, a stick in the mud who saw evil liberals lurking around every corner.

Here’s part of Culhane’s March 2026 impression. The subject? The Oscar-nominated films of the year, including “Sinners”:

Because of course, leftist woke America’s favorite movie this year is about sinning. Huh? Really? Why does that not surprise me? Sorry, kids. We don’t go to church anymore. We go to “Sinners.” That’s the rule. That’s the goal now.

Carlson isn’t known for his film reviews, and that generic conservative blather no longer connects with the new, not-remotely-improved Carlson. It’s like imitating Ronald McDonald by wearing a three-piece suit and slicking your hair back, Gordon Gekko style.

It doesn’t make sense.

Later, Culhane’s Carlson deployed a weird anti-gay argument against another Oscar nominee – “Hamnet.”

We’re not allowed to say Hamlet anymore … They took the “L” and gave it to the LGBTQ.

The jokes could have come from just about any cartoonishly conservative pundit. So why put those yuks in Carlson’s mouth?

It’s not as if a killer Carlson impression doesn’t exist. Several Internet-based comics have taken up the challenge with often hilarious results. The best may be Ami Kozak’s recurring impression, complete with a bad wig but real insights into his stunning devolution.

He frequently nails how often Carlson contradicts his own nutty wisdom.

Yet Culhane returned in May to mock Carlson anew, ignoring the stiff competition for the gig. Once again, the impression appeared spot-on but didn’t capture who Tucker Carlson had become. The third appearance as Carlson came just days ago.

The sketch looked past all of Carlson 2.0’s wicked ways and presented him as a cranky conservative. Culhane’s Carlson went back to the movies, depicting a de facto conservative attacking gay culture via his take on “The Odyssey.”

 The Hollywood cabal shoots its filth with millimeters — or as I like to call it, the gay inch … I like “The Odyssey.” It’s so nice to see Greek people do something other than make women feel uncomfortable.

This time, the show briefly admitted that Carlson had turned on President Trump. That was the only moment of honesty.

Still, we saw nothing about his incessant antisemitism, attacks on Israel or suggestions that the wrong guys won World War II.

But why?

It could be as simple as a collective detachment from today’s conservative movement. Maybe their image of Carlson is stuck in the year 2021? That makes sense, since the show’s writers lean aggressively Left. Need proof? “SNL” spent four years ignoring President Joe Biden’s obvious mental decline.

They see Tucker as a conservative boob, the symbol of a group they abhor. So they put dumb, hateful rhetoric in his mouth to attack the greater right-leaning movement.

The more ominous reason may be the most likely. They won’t update their Carlson parody because they agree with this version of him. Antisemitism is raging on the Left, be it the party’s support of leaders like Zohran Mamdani or the endless liberal college students chanting, “from the river to the sea…” on campuses nationwide.

It doesn’t take much imagination to see the real Carlson standing shoulder-to-shoulder with those students given his recent monologues.

“SNL” has viciously targeted President Trump for the past decade. The 2026 Tucker Carlson wants the president thrown out of office for threatening to nuke Iran.

Is the enemy of my enemy my friend?

Both theories could be right. Or, the latter makes the most sense.

Either way, this milquetoast Tucker Carlson impersonation proves how far a once mighty satire show has fallen. They finally became the “not ready for prime-time players.”

***

Christian Toto is an award-winning journalist, movie critic and editor of HollywoodInToto.com. He previously served as associate editor with Breitbart News’ Big Hollywood. He’s also the host of The Hollywood in Toto Podcast. Follow him at @HollywoodInToto. 

This weekend, veteran broadcaster and longtime ESPN anchor Sage Steele takes a timeout from filming “The Sage Steele Show” to sit down with The Daily Wire. Splitting her time between Nashville and her little slice of heaven in Florida, she joins us in-studio to describe falling in love again after 50 (with her husband, Dave Barbuto, in her corner), committing daily to God’s purpose for her life, and unleashing the courage to face any storm and find her voice. Here’s how she inspires us all to be bold, brave, and resilient.

* * *

Sage Steele radiates the kind of glow that can only be earned by surviving trial by fire. “When you were little, did you ever think, ‘I want to grow up to be canceled’?” I ask. She laughs, “That word didn’t even exist in 1972!” 

Sage forged her dream career in sports broadcasting by becoming the face of “SportsCenter” and “NBA Countdown” on ESPN. A self-described “proud Army brat,” she loved athletics as a kid and overcame her natural shyness to be even better than the boys at memorizing names, numbers, and stats — and talking about it on camera. By age 11, before she ever saw female sports anchors on TV, Sage declared to her parents that she was headed to the big leagues. 

“My mom and dad were like, ‘Okay, so you want to be on TV? You’re gonna have to talk,’” Sage says, reliving the genesis of her lauded career. “We’re watching TV and I have to memorize the names, the jersey numbers, the position, where they went to college, all those things. My dream was to be around world-class athletes and professional athletes, to learn from them. I never knew that I’d actually be able to accomplish it.”

Sage’s gift for storytelling could draw even the sports-curious over the finish line. She also lent her hosting talents to the Miss America pageant, “Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve,” and the Scripps National Spelling Bee, among others. But everything changed when Sage became the headline herself. 

Just 48 hours after she settled her lawsuit with ESPN and Disney, I first heard Sage detail how simply speaking out about COVID vaccine mandates — after she was forced to comply — led the media giant to pull her off the air. She eventually parted ways with the network that had been her professional home for nearly 17 years. A single mom to three after her first marriage of 20 years dissolved, she felt everything was on the line. But she sure wasn’t letting her right to speak get swept off the table. 

Photo by Meg Oliphant/Getty Images

“I think there was relief and exhaustion and then total fear, because what do you do?” she remembers. “I’ve always only worked for people, for networks, so I didn’t know what to expect. I thought, somebody will forgive me for standing up for myself and hire me, and I can go back to doing sports. And that never happened.” Sage cops to the disappointment that accompanies difficult endings, but she embraces new beginnings. “It’s the way it’s supposed to be based on God’s plan.”

Now more than two years into producing her own podcast, Sage often wishes she had spoken up sooner. But the timing made her a champion for generations to come. “I get why people go quiet and go dark. I did for a long time too,” she says. “And then you say enough. It makes me sad that we as a country allowed it to get to the point where someone who disagrees with you can silence you.”

Anyone who still thinks they can shush Sage Steele out of the conversation has another thing coming. “I highly recommend getting canceled,” she says. She’s serious. “It’s been so cool. There have been so many blessings that have come from it.”

Speaking of one of those blessings, Sage’s hubby — retired U.S. Army officer and entrepreneur Dave Barbuto — joins the conversation, casually holding her hand like they’re two cool kids in high school. (The perfectly matched pair celebrated their first anniversary in September). Here’s what a little “cancellation” can do for someone who still believes that anything’s possible.

When you know, you know

“I look at him every day and I still get butterflies,” Sage says. She and Dave met at a veterans benefit in Nashville in 2024 when neither one of them was looking for love. Dave had just broken off a previous relationship, and Sage was attending as her friend Katie’s plus-one. Once he spotted Sage across the room, Dave summoned his best icebreaker.

Courtesy of Sage Steele

“I just said, ‘Hey, my name is Dave. And your mom and my mom, 32 years ago, took care of retired nuns at a convent together,’” Dave says. “And I played high school basketball against your brother.” It was all true. Sage remembered the family name and how their mothers had stayed friends ever since they took elderly nuns out for ice cream at Dairy Queen. The conversation flowed into after-party cocktails where the two talked for hours. 

Sage was the first to pick up on the chemistry. “I knew halfway through the night at the after-party,” she says. “We were talking about everything we both had been through — difficult divorces and kids and just balancing it all — and then he was in the military and our fathers were both [in the military]. It hit me, we just had this connection. Then I started to act like a 16-year-old child.” Sage laughs. “I mean, I had had a couple glasses of wine.” 

Sage recalls how her friend Katie advised, “‘You’re going to marry him. Don’t screw it up.’ And I looked at her and I said, ‘I know.’” They got married almost a year later at Diamond Creek Farms in Nashville, the place where they first met.

“The altar that we had set up was probably 10 feet from where I met her,” Dave reminisces. The wedding was officiated by Sage’s longtime friend and former host of “The Bachelor,” Chris Harrison. I suggest this ceremony was the inspiration for Chris’s new faith-centered relationship show, “The Vow.”

“I would like to take credit for that,” Sage laughs. “I always used to say to him, ‘You need to start a show for old people like me.’” I mention “The Golden Bachelor,” which didn’t check enough boxes. “I’m not quite that old,” Sage says. And about the contestants she jokingly refers to as “Psycho Barbies in their 70s,” she adds, “And I’m not that thirsty.”

I ask Sage and Dave if there was ever a point where they had given up on falling in love again. If two meaningful relationships might be one too many for this lifetime. 

Photo by Araya Doheny/Getty Images for DailyWire+

“I would never have given up on love, but I did wonder if I could trust someone,” Sage shares, acknowledging the firestorm around her public image. “I had friends who didn’t want to hang out with me, much less men. I had been told before by a man that I was too controversial and he wasn’t comfortable introducing me to people,” she admits. “I was like, oh gosh, I need to make myself smaller because otherwise I’m going to be alone in my life.” After praying on it, so to speak, she found peace with being herself. “The right person won’t run away from me.” 

Team effort

In the midst of a conversation where Sage is lamenting the metabolic shift of a certain phase of life — she says “It sucks” and “I’m going to be fighting it until the bitter end” — Dave points out that they remain committed to a good sweat five days a week.

“We work out in our home gym and then we walk a ton,” Dave explains. “We live in 12 South, so it’s like the best walking neighborhood.” Sage jumps in on Dave’s ab workouts and keeps up the weightlifting form she developed from her CrossFit days. “I honestly have the Peloton app. I don’t have a bike anymore, but their strength classes are so good on there,” she says. 

As for her playlist, Sage cranks up “The Zac Brown Band … Morgan Wallen, Lauren Daigle, Post Malone, Francesca Battistelli, Jelly Roll, Dermot Kennedy, Stevie Wonder, old Tracy Chapman hits … a little bit of everything.” When she looks over at Dave and says, “It’s so hot to see him working out,” I confirm for the official record that they are both #goals. 

“Genetically, we’re lucky because we’re tall and we work hard,” Sage explains. But, blessedly, she’s also real about it. “It’s not like I don’t try.” Her ultimate goal for maintaining her fitness? “I want to be around to haunt my children for a very long time.”

Made with love

Sage openly calls out Dave’s beer snobbery, revealing of their wedding, “He helped plan everything, but his number one priority was not just the type of beer we had there, but the quantity as well. Five different beer selections along with all the wine, too. I was like, who needs five options?” Dave laughs, “There were no complaints.” But the one thing they agree on is that “date nights always revolve around food and wine.” 

Dave does most of the cooking, preferring “steak for sure, red meat, a lot of pasta,” but Sage skips the starches, opting for her favorite “big, fat, juicy medium-rare ribeye with broccolini.” When they’re going grill-adjacent, Dave notes, “We’ve gotten into these bowls where we just do some sort of meat, tons of vegetables, sometimes couscous or rice, and a bunch of arugula.” Sage adds, “We don’t use dressings anymore. It’s just fresh lemon, salt, pepper, and olive oil.” 

These days she’s doing less of the sweet stuff, but Sage has also been down for a good bake session. “During my kids’ childhood, I made weekly banana bread from scratch,” she says. “I really enjoyed doing it alone at, like, midnight. My kids just loved it. I would switch up fresh blueberries in it or chocolate chips, dried cranberries. That made me feel that when I was working, they could taste that and think of me and be like, ‘Look what my mom did.’ That’s why I did it.”

After she describes her chocolate chip cookies, her “really good carrot cake,” and her lemon squares that absolutely require fresh-squeezed lemon, I’m mentally clocking a future cookbook. “I find it very therapeutic,” Sage says. “I did it during a lot of tougher times in my life. I’d turn on a podcast and pour a glass of wine and make a lot of stuff.”

Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images

Trusting the journey

Sage and Dave would never refer to themselves as spiritual influencers, but they’re hoping to share what they learn about their faith with fans. I’m curious about the book they regularly dive into on Instagram: “Trusting God with Today,” a daily devotional by Charles F. Stanley. It was a gift to Sage and her siblings from her dad.

“Shortly after we met, I was living in Florida and [Dave] was [in Nashville]. So we just did it over the phone or we’d send each other a screenshot and then share what we took from it,” Sage says. Sage and Dave both grew up Catholic and put God first when things started getting serious. Dave had no qualms about asking Sage, “What are you looking for in a relationship? What’s important to you?” After scribbling down Sage’s answers while he was traveling for work, he remembers her “first thing was faith, which was my first, too.” 

“It’s been uncomfortable to be open about my faith,” Sage admits. But step by step, she’s inviting others to ask hard questions along with her. Maybe someone else out there is wondering, “Why has God pointed my life in this direction?” 

“I’m only standing because of some tough times where I finally just gave up and gave in and was like, ‘Okay, I don’t know what to do, God. Help me,’” Sage explains. “How can I keep that to myself when I know how helpful it’s been to me?”

“Don’t give up hope, but let go and let God,” she says. “Trust the timing. You just don’t know what’s next.”

***

Ben Domenech: I want to start with this: looking back at everything that’s gone on over this past year in terms of the fluctuations and the political responses to the decisions that have been made by the United States, by Israel, and by other actors in the region, how do you view the current state of the Middle East at this point in terms of risks, what do you anticipate happening in the immediate future, and how much have things changed over the course of this year?

Mark Dubowitz: The Middle East is never a happy place or a stable place. It hasn’t been for probably centuries. But I think today the United States is in a stronger position because we’ve done severe damage to one of our most deadly enemies, the Islamic Republic of Iran. And this is a regime that’s obviously been at war with us for 47 years. It’s killed and maimed and kidnapped and tortured thousands of Americans, not to mention being responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Middle Easterners and others around the world.

President Trump’s decision to launch a counterattack against the Islamic Republic to finally push back against the regime after more than four decades, I think, has certainly provided us with more space to advance American interests. And we certainly have done what I think President Trump set out to do, which is to severely weaken this enemy.

And this enemy is severely weakened, but obviously not yet crippled and not yet completely down for the count.

BD: The decision to undertake this and the timing that occurred in terms of the president pulling this trigger was one that, from the get-go, I think made some of his allies within his political coalition nervous, including perhaps even the vice president. That’s my own opinion, obviously, not one necessarily you have to share. And their nervousness seems to have been, at least in America, born out of the fact that many Republicans now blame the current economic situation, or essentially the fact that they’re not further along in terms of a recovery, on the decision the president made. He’s stuck by it.

I wonder what your response would be to those Republican politicians who are looking to their domestic priorities, concerned about their own careers. And are you surprised at all that the president himself seems to have really dug in his heels even against criticism that seemed to grow within his own ranks?

MD: I’m no political pundit or analyst, but certainly my understanding is from American history, presidential history — at least modern American history — that presidents often lose Congress in their last two years, which is why presidents often pivot to focus on foreign policy and their overall legacy in the remaining two years. So it was highly likely Republicans were going to lose certainly the House, maybe the House and Senate, regardless of whether President Trump made a decision to launch this counterattack against the Islamic Republic. I think the costs of the war are not insignificant, and no one wants to minimize them. Obviously, there’ve been more than 20 U.S. casualties. Our aircraft fleets have taken damage. I think we’ve lost about 800 or so aircraft and drones, but I think about half of those are drones, which represents about 0.6% of our 13,000-strong fleet. Obviously, there’s been damage to bases in the Middle East, and it’s had an economic impact that has translated into higher oil prices, gasoline prices, and inflation than it otherwise would’ve been.

But I think the president can make a good case that the economy is in strong shape. I think GDP growth is strong, the stock market is strong, unemployment is low, and inflation is lower than it was under President Biden. So I think the president was right and understood that having Iran with nuclear weapons and a massive missile shield under which it could build those nuclear weapons would represent a more severe threat to the United States, to our economy — to the global economy — than rolling the dice and taking this risk of launching a counterattack. And I think the counterattack has gone much better than many experts expected. Today, the United States military, under the leadership of Admiral Brad Cooper, has taken back from the Iranians — and the United States, with Israel as a very capable partner — has done severe damage to Iran’s nuclear program, its missile program, defense industrial base, military — and it’s now tipped the Iranian economy into a massive crisis.

And so there’s a much weaker enemy, an enemy that has really been built to operate with impunity over multiple administrations dating back to 1979. So was it worth the price? I mean, I’m not a Republican running for Congress, maybe not for them. Maybe they will lose their jobs. Maybe it was inevitable they’d lose their jobs anyway. But I think for U.S. national security, it has been worth it. And I just want readers to imagine a scenario where the president hadn’t acted, and Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei was still alive, and he was still moving forward with his nuclear weapons program and intercontinental ballistic missile program threatened the United States, a massive missile shield to protect that nuclear program, a strong economy and a regional network of terror proxies responsible for killing and maiming Americans over the years that was still powerful and still deadly.

That was the trajectory we were on before President Trump made his decision to counterattack.

BD: In terms of the awareness that people had of the ballistic missile shield that you mentioned that Iran had built and the degree to which that it was capable of far-flung reaching out and affecting, impacting nations with whom we are closely allied, did it surprise you at all that when it became clear how far they could truly reach, something that we’ve been warned about but hadn’t necessarily been proven yet, that the reaction from those European nations in particular who basically all learned that yes, it’s true, they can target all of you if they wanted to with this type of program. Are you surprised at all that their reaction was what it was, as opposed to perhaps becoming more in favor of what the president and Israel were doing?

MD: I’m not surprised. These European countries have been appeasing the Islamic Republic for almost five decades. None of them have the military capabilities to really push back in any meaningful way. The reality is, when you look at the problem of Iran, the only country that has meaningful capabilities that can work with the United States is Israel. Nobody in the Gulf can; nobody in Europe can, for reasons that we can discuss. But these countries do not have that ability in terms of power projection. Now, do they have other abilities? Absolutely. I mean, could they impose punishing sanctions? Could they use their diplomatic leverage to isolate the Islamic Republic? Could they have sent support to the U.S. Navy in the Gulf in terms of moving ships through? I mean, to be fair, the Emirates did, but very few other countries either had the capacity or the willingness to do so.

So there’s more they could do, but when you’ve underfunded your militaries and when you don’t have the ability to actually fight in any meaningful way, then your default position becomes appeasement. And I think that, unfortunately, has been the default position of the Europeans for many years. Now, to be fair, the Europeans, particularly the French — to some extent, the Brits and the Germans — are deeply concerned about Iran’s nuclear weapons program and have been active in trying to stop it through diplomacy and through sanctions. So I think we share that concern with our European and Gulf allies, but ultimately it’s only the United States and Israel who can ever actually stop that program. And I think we’ve seen pretty remarkable abilities, both of the U.S. military and the Israeli military, to reach deep inside the Islamic Republic and do severe damage to a program that, as CIA director John Ratcliffe noted before the June war of last year, that nuclear program was on the one yard line and the Iranians were capable of moving forward with more than 20 bombs worth of weaponized uranium in an active weapons group who could have produced multiple nuclear weapons and fixed those to those long range missiles that you referenced and ultimately to an ICBM which could reach the continental United States.

BD: The attitude that some people have toward intelligence services, and not just our own, but those around the world, is one of real skepticism coming out of not just, I would say, intelligence failures stretching back to the Iraq War, but also, I would say, their level of decreased confidence in the expert class or however you want to describe it, that has been continuing to grow and only increase in recent years for a lot of things unrelated to the Middle East or Iran. When it comes to the way that you view those services and perhaps not having a clear idea of all of Iran’s capabilities, or perhaps just putting on a bold face in public about how much damage they did in the early days or what they were going to be able to rely on — are you more confident now that we have a full picture of what the situation is in terms of Iran’s capabilities, that we truly know what they have, where they have it, what we need to be worried about, and what’s been truly obliterated at this stage versus where we were before this started?

MD: I lose sleep over what we don’t know. Between U.S. and Israeli intelligence agencies, I think we have as good a picture of an enemy state as possible. If you compare it to our intelligence penetration of other U.S. adversaries like China, Russia, or North Korea, I think we’re much better positioned with respect to Iran than these others, but that doesn’t mean we have a complete picture. It doesn’t mean that the Iranians don’t potentially have some covert nuclear weapons program buried under a mountain that we’re unaware of. It doesn’t mean that we have a full picture of their ballistic missile inventories and production capability. I think it’s a very hard target. It’s a very big country. There are lots of places where you can store missiles and where you can potentially implement a covert nuclear breakout. But you’ve got the two best intelligence agencies on the planet, America and Israel, who have focused enormous resources on this problem set for many years.

So again, one should never be too confident or diluted into thinking that this is not a regime that is going to do everything possible to reconstitute whatever it’s lost and that it’s looking for every opportunity to develop nuclear weapons and the ICBMs to carry them. So measured confidence, but I think everybody should be losing sleep who’s in the business of trying to stop this deadly regime.

BD: One of the aspects of this that became clear relatively quickly, I think, even for those who haven’t been paying attention to it for a while, is in the aftermath of the slaughter of thousands upon thousands of people, you can pick your preferred number and the bits and pieces of information that we’re getting out of Iran, it was striking to me how unlike so many of the other conflicts that the United States had participated in, everything that was coming out of there in terms of the experience of the Iranian people was basically either very minimal — non-existent in terms of its breakthrough to Western media — or some form of limited information that really prevented the American citizenry, in my view, from having a clear picture of what was going on over there and perhaps something that would’ve made Americans much more supportive of this in terms of the potential effect it could have for the people who were there in terms of seeing what’s going on internally within the nation.

How much of a difference do you think that would’ve made if Iran basically was not a black box, just completely hemmed off from the rest of the world, in terms of that information’s ability to get out for people around the world to see what’s really going on there?

MD: I think you’re right. On one hand, I think the regime was very adept at shutting down its own information space and then using our open information space to run very effective influence operations into the United States and around the world. But I’m a bit cynical about this because I think that was aided and abetted by many mainstream news organizations who are either indifferent to what was happening or it didn’t fit their kind of ideological — pre-established — narrative.

That this was, again, the sort of combination of the disdain for Trump and the disdain for Netanyahu that’s so prevalent in liberal media today, that they just didn’t want to report on what was really happening inside Iran — that this was a brutal regime massacring tens of thousands of Iranians and a regime that was deadly and dangerous, not only to its own people, but to the region and to the United States. Particularly if you have to then push a narrative that maybe President Trump and the Israelis are actually winning. That’s so counter-narrative to their own ideological assumptions that it’s going to take a pretty forward-leaning and brave editor in some of these places to actually report on that. And the Iranians were very adept at taking advantage of that information space, both in the West and in shutting down their own information space.

So it was difficult to learn the scale of the slaughter. Though I have to say, brave Iranians were getting videos out, and any enterprising reporter who cared could have found enough evidence and enough images to have reported fairly on what was taking place. But I think there was callous indifference and, in some cases, a real willingness to put their own ideological agendas over the suffering of Iranians and the threat the regime actually represented to America.

BD: Is there any way to break that in an era when information flows so freely around the world, or at least people have the built-in assumption that it does? Is there any way to create a scenario where people are, at least going forward, better able to get information out and more able to receive it even if the media is compromised on this point?

MD: I think there is. We have the benefit now because of social media, because there are so many potential sources of news and the ability to get out images, and it’s broken the stranglehold the mainstream media has on the flow of information. So yes, I think the opportunity is there, and we certainly see our enemies do it so well. They’re running a cognitive war against the West to deepen the fractures and fissures inside our own democracies. We’re not only seemingly unable to defend against that, but we’re also unwilling to go on offense and run a comparable cognitive war against them. Now, it’s difficult because you’re running them against dictatorships that have the ability to shut down the internet and control the flow of information, but increasingly it’s even difficult for these dictatorships.

The Iranian case is a perfect example of how brave Iranians broke through this information stranglehold and the shutdown of the internet, and still got out images. It’s a question of: Is the West prepared to win? And are we prepared to understand that even if we win in the military domain, if we lose the cognitive domain, ultimately these enemies will wear us out and undermine whatever military gains we’re able to achieve.

BD: As a Christian, I don’t like to edit the Bible, but I believe that when they said the poor will always be with you, they left out the pod bros will always be with you. What is your attitude toward the Obama era, Obama-Biden era, foreign policy podcast bros, whatever you want to call them, and their attitude toward this war? Sometimes I’ve seen some of the things that they’ve posted, and it strikes me as infuriating because I don’t think that they’ve learned anything, but I wonder what your response has been to what they’ve been pushing out there in terms of commentary.

MD: I disagree with it vehemently. I’ve been debating these people for decades. I think probably just stepping back from these individuals, but just sort of looking at American society today, I think it’s increasingly difficult for the United States to defend our country and to weaken our enemies when everything has been so politicized inside America. I feel like people are rooting for America to lose because they don’t like the president. I mean, I absolutely oppose President Obama’s Middle East policy. I thought his nuclear deal with Iran was fatally flawed. I thought it was going to lead to a pathway to nuclear weapons. I thought he left us much weaker after eight years than we had been, but I never wanted President Obama and America to lose to our adversaries.

I have some misgivings about President Trump. I disagree with him on some issues, but I want President Trump and America to win against our adversaries. I think there used to be an expression that partisanship stops at the water’s edge. Well, that’s no longer even remotely close to being true. And I think today everything is politicized, every issue, including our national security. And you find people who either intentionally or inadvertently are rooting for the enemy over America. And that’s just a gift to our enemies.

BD: I’m at risk of saying that’s more predominantly on one side; I would just point out that I did not see any Republicans or conservatives rejoicing after Abby Gate, but it infuriates me to see that too.

You talked a couple of times about the degree to which Americans are being targeted by these influence operations. That’s certainly something I’ve seen as well. For the average American online who’s perhaps maybe a little too online, as so many are, what’s one thing you’d like them to start paying attention to when it comes to the things that they’re reading or the information that they’re consuming that should put up their antenna about whether someone’s trying to influence them to take an anti-American position?

MD: I think there are a number of indicators. First is the sort of overall recognition that your feed is being controlled by an algorithm. So if your feed is serving up an overwhelming amount of information that’s just always on one side, then you should know automatically that you’re being controlled by the algorithm. And so breaking free of this algorithmic control over your mind, over the information that you see, is so necessary. You’ve just got to get beyond that because these algorithms, by the way, in some cases are being controlled by our adversaries. If you’re on TikTok and you’re getting videos served up to you, those videos — that algorithm is being controlled by the Ministry of State Security of the Chinese Communist Party. It’s as simple as that. It’s akin to World War II, when families gathered around the radio after dinner to hear news from Europe.

Imagine if every radio set in America was controlled by Joseph Goebbels and the Ministry of Propaganda of the Nazi Party. That’s what’s going on right now with TikTok. So it’s algorithmic control and algorithmic bias, in some cases actually controlled by our adversaries.

Also recognize the hundreds of billions of dollars that countries are spending on this and just be educated about what the Qataris are doing, for example, as they spread Islamist Muslim Brotherhood propaganda around the world, not only through social media, but through normal traditional media, through the education system, really in all aspects of our economy and all our institutions. Be educated about who Qatar is and what their ideology is. And then I think it’s really important to understand that some of the biggest influencers on both the Left and the Right — people like Tucker Carlson today — that their popularity is in part being driven by foreign funding, by foreign bots, or foreign-directed bots.

I just saw an interesting statistic. I think the Ukrainians just blew up a Russian data center, which led to a sharp drop-off in viewership for people like Carlson and others in this case on the sort of far-Right. But certainly as true on the radical Left. So just a much better understanding of the information you’re consuming is not being provided to you by fair-minded people, and it’s being, in many cases, directed by America’s enemies.

The president likened it to a constitution and said “it really is a form of protection,” which meets voters where they are during a crucial election season. A recent Plymouth Union Public Research survey found 79% of respondents want government and tech leaders to come together on the best methods for monitoring SI’s growth, and a Quinnipiac poll found 91% saying it is important to have the right protections for SI.

That makes the president’s new Super Intelligence Force even more important. Public attention on SI rose faster in one week last month than in the previous year, after multiple SI companies disclosed that their models had breached external sites, including government sites. This raised bipartisan concerns over SI agent containment failures, disclosure delays, and regulatory oversight, prompting a bipartisan Senate investigation. Voters are paying attention, and they want common-sense solutions that keep America ahead of China while managing real risks.

At the Alliance for a Better Future, we believe SI built by American companies and governed by American values can be a force for good, lifting up communities, improving health outcomes, creating good jobs, and strengthening our economy and national security. That transformation happens when Americans trust this technology, and trust is earned when Americans believe it will make their lives better.

The accord’s last paragraph contains clever foreshadowing: “Over time, it may make sense to codify these steps into laws or regulations.” So how can the task force turn the SI Accord into an SI Act that makes President Trump’s approach permanent, keeps his legacy intact after 2028, and builds trust with the American people?

The first step is making the underlying values clear, starting with this: super intelligence is not human and does not have rights or personhood. It should serve humanity, not replace it. SI should empower parents and protect children, never addict them, create unhealthy attachments to them, or coach them via chatbots toward sexual behavior or suicide.

Next is national security. SI testing needs clear, predictable rules including requirements for robust controls and monitoring, formal standards for independent evaluators, and federal guidance determining what companies can objectively measure in-house. Major SI companies committing to new internal monitoring is a positive step. A uniform standard will ensure nothing slips through the cracks and spare American innovators from a confusing patchwork of state rules.

Last week, after yet another disclosure from a frontier lab regarding unauthorized behavior and a State Department website, the SI Force took another big step. It started requiring companies to immediately disclose incidents involving their models, swiftly remedy any harm, and work to keep similar incidents from recurring. Its leaders called this “a critical national security obligation” and made clear it is not optional.

That is the right foundation on which to add a true incident report. When a car accident or plane crash occurs, an independent authority investigates the root cause, and its findings help the whole industry prevent the next one. Congress could build on the SI Force’s mandatory notification requirement and add a formal, independent review process for unintended SI behavior, such as a jailbreak.

Another step is to make the accord mandatory rather than voluntary. For now, tech leaders respect President Trump and are behaving accordingly. He speaks the language of business and knows how to make a deal. Future presidents may not. A Democratic president will almost certainly fumble the ball — either burying SI in heavy-handed regulation or letting it drift, potentially allowing China to take the lead.

Congress could make the accord mandatory through a procurement requirement for companies that do business with the federal government, or codify it as soon as next month’s lame-duck session. Locking in a light-touch, pro-innovation framework now is the best protection against overreach later.

Finally, the accord must have real teeth to ensure companies keep their word, under the accord today and under a mandatory measure when it comes. Accountability is a conservative value. The Federal Trade Commission has recently taken strong action against bad actors, and it should have adequate resources to enforce these commitments, focusing on companies that break their promises. These companies made a public promise alongside the President, and they must keep it.

The President’s Super Intelligence Task Force has a high calling, and we are grateful for its members’ service. Now, Congress should finish the job and ensure President Trump’s approach outlasts his time in office. Clear rules, independent oversight, and accountability will earn Americans’ trust in this crucial technology, and that trust will let America lead the world and enjoy all the life-saving and life-changing benefits it offers.

***

Janet Kelly, who served as Virginia Secretary of Health and Human Resources under Governor Glenn Youngkin, is currently the CEO of Alliance for a Better Future.

And judging by the outrage, Gillis struck a nerve.

“I haven’t been to the gym in so long, I didn’t know women just dress like whores now,” Gillis joked during his monologue. He went on to give a rather graphic description of those bright, artificial-bait-colored shorts, pulled so tight they might as well be painted on.

It sounds a little too detailed, but anyone who’s been to a gym in the last few years knows exactly what he means. Pair those shorts with a sports bra, and you’ve got what has practically become the standard gym uniform.

Gillis also joked about women filming TikToks at the gym and getting offended if a man so much as glances their way.

He’s right about this, too. I’ve watched gyms turn into social media studios, with tripods, cameras, and women filming themselves between sets. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve had to maneuver around someone’s camera just to finish my workout. Some even post strangers in the background and shame them for looking, the exact behavior internet sensation Joey Swoll has become known for calling out. A public gym is not your personal film set, and the rest of us definitely didn’t sign a release.

Between the revealing clothes and constant filming, the gym has become as much about attracting attention as getting a workout. Women of all ages, including wives, mothers, and teenage girls, are participating in this trend. Frankly, we’ve lost our sense of modesty and perhaps some self-respect.

I can’t pretend I’ve always gotten this right myself.

I grew up in the gym with a mother who was a bodybuilder, and eventually began competing in figure competitions myself. When I appeared on “The Bachelor,” I had just finished competing, and fitness was practically my entire personality on the show.

Afterward, I got caught up in chasing likes in a sad attempt to extend my 15 minutes of fame. I posted workout photos and shared more of my body online, hoping to stay relevant. Eventually, I hated the attention I’d been chasing. I still loved working out, and the satisfaction of seeing results, but I no longer wanted strangers’ approval.

As my relationship with God evolved, I began questioning why I felt the need to show so much of myself to others. I realized I could appreciate the body I had worked hard to build without needing strangers to admire it.

That conviction changed how I dressed, what I posted online, and how I carried myself in other areas of my life.

I didn’t stop loving my body. I stopped believing everyone else needed to see it.

Somewhere along the way, showing more skin became a sign of empowerment, while choosing to cover up was treated as insecurity. I couldn’t disagree more. Modesty doesn’t mean working out in a burlap sack. You can wear cute, flattering clothes and look great without putting everything on display.

I wish more women recognized their God-given worth, especially mothers raising the next generation.

I’ve seen teenagers at the gym wearing almost nothing while filming themselves, with their mothers right there, apparently approving their outfits. I’ve also seen wives and mothers posting workout videos and photos that leave little to the imagination.

Now, flexing in skin-tight clothing, sumo squats and exaggerated arched backs during kickbacks, all filmed from deliberately provocative camera angles, are perfectly acceptable so long as they’re passed off as fitness content. Let’s not pretend those camera angles are necessary for a workout. They’re not much more than thirst traps.

As a Christian and a mother of two daughters, I want my girls to grow up knowing their confidence comes from Christ, not the attention they receive for showing off their bodies. There’s a difference between simply getting attention and attracting the right kind.

Dressing provocatively may turn plenty of men’s heads, but that doesn’t mean those men want to know you, respect your faith, or build a marriage with you. If you’re looking for a man who values modesty,

commitment and faith, it’s worth considering whether you’re reflecting those same values yourself.

Gillis didn’t invent this culture. He made a joke about something many of us have watched get completely out of hand. And judging by the massive outrage, he exposed just how widespread the problem has become. The joke isn’t what needs to change. The culture does.

***

Jillian Anderson King is a former Washington Redskins Cheerleader Ambassador and ABC’s The Bachelor and The Bachelor in Paradise contestant. She’s a Mombassador for Moms for America, an ambassador for Turning Point and Turning Point Faith, and a proud Christian Conservative mother and wife. Jillian is also the founder of The Kings Firm, a strategic communications firm.

It remains unclear what position she will take next. A source familiar with the plans told The Daily Wire that Zacharia and her family are having dinner with Vice President JD Vance and his family tonight.

Zacharia’s exit comes just five days into the job. The move follows President Donald Trump’s remarks Friday that he urged her to reconsider her position, citing what he called vicious treatment by the media.

Speaking to reporters, Trump strongly suggested Zacharia’s tenure as press secretary would be short-lived following a rocky first briefing and intense media scrutiny over her legal background.

“I told Katie that in my opinion she was treated very, very unfairly, very unfairly by the news,” Trump said. “And I said, Katie, do you need this? I don’t think you need this, and we’re talking about doing something. We like Katie a lot.”

Trump said he wants Zacharia to “have a good life” and claimed the 41-year-old has been “brutalized” by the legacy media.

“I said to her, honestly, if I were you, I’d reconsider,” he added. “I would reconsider.” A source familiar with the plans told The Daily Wire that Katie and her family are having dinner with the Vances tonight.

Trump picked Zacharia as press secretary exactly one week ago. She previously served as a senior communications official at the Department of Homeland Security and as a spokeswoman for former DHS Secretary Kristi Noem. She left the agency about six weeks after joining amid leadership changes at DHS.

“Maybe it’s not for her,” Trump said, alluding to an imminent announcement after his Friday campaign rally in Georgia. 

In his announcement picking Zacharia, Trump said the mother of four had an “unblemished record of support, and has been a loyal and brilliant supporter, right from the beginning.”

“She is, likewise, a devoted fan and member of MAGA,” Trump said. “I am confident that Katie will deliver strong results for our Country as the next White House Press Secretary, as she has the respect of, and will work fantastically with, the Media, the American People, and my Administration.”

It’s unclear whether Trump will find a new replacement for Karoline Leavitt before the November midterm elections.

This is a developing story. Stay with The Daily Wire for updates.

Katie Zacharia is “transitioning out” of her role as White House Press Secretary, senior White House official confirms to @realDailyWire.

— Mary Margaret Olohan (@MaryMargOlohan) October 16, 2026

Sophie Cunningham continues to speak out against transgender athletes competing in girls’ sports.

This time, the Indiana Fever guard showed her support for 13 members of the Camas High School girls cross-country team in Washington who walked off the course rather than compete alongside a transgender teammate.

Refuse to pretend https://t.co/PoQEACENoZ

— XX-XY Athletics (@xx_xyathletics) October 14, 2026

The runners linked arms, walked for the beginning of the race and then exited the course. Some had painted, “Keep women in women’s sports” on their bodies.

The protest centered on Logan Mihailoff, who began the season competing on Camas’ boys junior varsity team before later moving to the girls division.

On Sept. 5, Mihailoff finished 76th in a boys JV race. Three weeks later, Mihailoff placed second out of 195 runners in the girls junior/senior JV race at the Nike Portland XC Invitational.

Cunningham responded to an XX-XY Athletics Instagram post about the protest with a simple message:

“Good work girls.”

The current Washington Interscholastic Activities Association policy allows students to compete in athletics consistent with their gender identity. The Camas School District has said it will continue following those rules while also working with athletes and families who have raised concerns.

Just following orders.
Sorry, not good enough.

— XX-XY Athletics (@xx_xyathletics) October 16, 2026

Washington voters will also weigh in on the issue Nov. 3.

Initiative 638 would prohibit students it defines as biologically male from competing in certain K-12 athletic activities designated for female students and would require verification of biological sex by a health care provider.

Cunningham has made her position on the issue clear before, being a strong voice in the pushback against biological men attempting to infiltrate women’s sports.

Now, she is backing the Camas runners who decided to take action for their beliefs.

Follow Gus Wilson on X at @ByGusWilson

The bubbly “Whipped” singer known online as YeeHaw MeeMaw told John Crist on his Net Positive podcast that she is over men constantly being ragged on.

“I personally am so tired of the man hater topic,” Roberts said on the podcast. “I don’t hate men. I love my husband. I love my dad. I have great uncles. My whole band is just a bunch of boys and they’re my best friends in the whole world.”

Since finishing as the runner-up on “The Voice” back in 2015, Roberts has cut her teeth in Nashville as a songwriter and singer, never forgetting her East Tennessee roots.

She married her high school sweetheart, Chris Sasser, who is often seen on the couple’s social media accounts, including “The Sasser House,” and she’s never strayed from her strong faith. Marriage and faith are recurring themes in her music, especially in her songs “Whole Lotta Little” and “Find Me A Man,” which showcase Roberts’ commitment to living a traditional life even in the spotlight.

During her rise in Music City, she’s noticed a pattern of artists coming for men instead of embracing what they bring to society.

“I don’t want to make like a guy who comes to my concert. I don’t want him to leave and be like, ‘Golly, I hate myself,'” Roberts said.

But according to Roberts, that’s how her brother-in-law felt after attending the 2024 CMT Next Women of Country showcase. He hadn’t done anything to deserve it, she said, but left feeling beaten down by songs bashing men.

“He said, ‘I think that I feel horrible about being a man,’ and I was like, ‘You know what? Can we change the narrative?’ If I was a dude I would think it would be kinda cool for a girl to like hype up her man.”

There is no shortage of hype in the Sasser house. Between his support for her career and their glimpses of home renovations, crocheting, and gardening, the two make marriage look fun.

Isn’t that the whole point?

“Do you want your girl to belittle you and make fun of you and act like he’s an idiot all the time?” Roberts said.

Despite the “men suck” mindset plaguing a large part of the country, several celebrities are happy to celebrate their husbands. Taylor Swift, Millie Bobby Brown, Sofia Richie, and Hailey Bieber have all publicly embraced married life.

Roberts knows it’s harder to write music that is strictly about positivity, but she’ll still choose to lift up her husband, walk the red carpet with him on her arm, and tell the world she’s got a good man.

As a female country singer, she knows her audience is primarily women, but Roberts said playfully that maybe more men would show up to women’s shows if they changed their tune.

“Maybe more girls would sell to men if girls weren’t being so hateful about men,” Roberts said with a laugh.

She’ll have plenty of opportunities to put that approach into practice. Her remaining 2026 schedule includes opening dates for country stars Thomas Rhett and Cody Johnson.

The 16-year-old gunman killed four people, including three children, at Silver Rail Elementary School in Bend, Oregon, where he had previously been a special needs student. All of the victims were in a special-needs classroom, school officials said.

The teacher was not injured in the confrontation. Her heroic actions “almost certainly helped prevent more bloodshed,” Bend Police Chief Mike Krantz said during a news conference detailing the attack.

The father, identified as Kaylub Giamanco, 36, has two children at the school. He witnessed the initial shooting outside and followed the gunman into the school, police said.

The gunman used a Maverick 88 pump-action 12-gauge shotgun reportedly purchased by his mother. He fired as many as 15 rounds inside the classroom and had about 44 rounds remaining, authorities said. Investigators believe he traveled to the campus on foot.

The victims killed were three children, ages five, eight, and 11, and 25-year-old teacher Meghan Lambert. The gunman also died at the scene. A seven-year-old student and a 54-year-old teacher were also wounded.

The five-year-old boy was identified by his family as Rhoam Summer. Police have not released the identities of the other child victims.

Authorities said shots rang out shortly before 1 p.m. Thursday, when the suspect approached the school from an undeveloped area. The teen shooter threw his shotgun over the school fence, climbed onto the property, and opened fire on a red Toyota pickup truck after its driver verbally confronted him. The driver continued down the street and called 911.

“The suspect walked westbound along the south side of the school and forced entry through an external set of double doors,” Krantz said. “He fired multiple rounds into the glass panes in the doors to gain access to the school.”

Then, he went directly into the classroom immediately to the left of the entry doors and opened fire, police said. 

Giamanco was not far behind. Police said he drove into the school parking lot, retrieved a .40-caliber pistol legally secured in his vehicle, and entered the building.

“As he made entry through the forced-open doors, he heard shooting and saw a teacher involved in a physical altercation with the suspect. He then went to the classroom where the struggle was underway and fired his weapon, striking the suspect multiple times,” Krantz said. 

The first report of a shooter came in at 12:59 p.m., followed by multiple 911 calls from inside the school. Officers arrived at 1:02 p.m. and learned the suspect had already been shot and killed by Giamanco, police said. 

The shooting has devastated the Bend community, with thousands gathering at a vigil Thursday night to mourn the victims and support their families. 

Oregon’s Democrat Gov. Tina Kotek said her heart is “broken” and praised the Good Samaritan who jumped into action.

“And to the community member who heroically intervened to stop further loss of life, your actions carry a heavy emotional burden, and I just want you to know that my thoughts are with you as well,” she said.

The former heavyweight champ’s lawyers are squaring off with Supreme, accusing the hype-fueled brand of breaking their deal by trading out an Israeli flag for a Palestinian one on a Tyson tribute hoodie. The item was pulled before its scheduled release.

The hoodie was part of Supreme’s Fall 2026 collaboration with London designer Martine Rose; it went public Monday. It was a throwback based on a vintage graphic drawn from Tyson’s famous Jeff Hamilton championship jacket. It showed Tyson alongside national flags under a banner calling him the undisputed heavyweight champion of the world.

But sharp-eyed watchers spotted something off almost immediately.

The original art, which Tyson’s lawyers say his team had approved, included the Israeli flag. Supreme’s version swapped it for the Palestinian flag, placed among the Union Jack, the Stars and Stripes, the Maple Leaf and others.

One streetwear account caught the change on day one and applauded it. Not everyone in Tyson’s corner was cheering.

Mike Tyson’s legal team has accused streetwear brand Supreme of violating an agreement by removing an Israeli flag from a remake of a vintage hoodie featuring the former boxer and replacing it with a Palestinian one.

The hoodie, which was produced in collaboration with designer Martine Rose, was pulled from sale earlier this week after fans noticed the change.

— StopAntisemitism (@StopAntisemites) October 16, 2026

Within days, the hoodie was scrubbed from Supreme’s lookbook and the preview section of its website. When the drop went live in stores and online Thursday, Oct. 15, buyers could grab the other Tyson pieces, including a co-branded Nike Dunk Low, but the hoodie was missing in action.

Streetwear page Ovrnundr claimed the brand also wiped images of the garment from social media, and store workers were reportedly told to pull any remaining stock.

Tyson’s legal team came out swinging.

Attorney Mitchell Schuster of Manhattan firm Meister Seelig & Schuster told Rolling Stone that Tyson’s team signed off on the artwork purely as a nod to boxing history, nothing more. He stated:

Without authorization, Supreme altered the approved design, embroiling Mr. Tyson in an unrelated political crisis. This modification constitutes a material breach of contract. With Supreme ignoring repeated demands, Mr. Tyson’s legal counsel will take all necessary action to protect his name, likeness, and legacy.

Schuster is no stranger to high-wattage brawls. He has also represented Justin Baldoni in litigation involving Blake Lively over “It Ends With Us.”

Supreme, for its part, is staying in its corner. The brand has not publicly commented, and Rose has also kept quiet.

Under Rose’s own label, she previously produced a limited run of Artists for Aid T-shirts featuring Palestinian imagery.

The streaming giant’s upcoming animated children’s movie, “Steps,” offers a subversive take on Cinderella, where the wicked stepsisters are the maligned heroes, not the bullies. The newly-released trailer reveals the film is set to be even worse than can be inferred from the premise.

Rebellious, misunderstood Lilith (stand-up comedian Ali Wong) resents her stepsister, Cinderella (Amanda Seyfried), the most popular girl in town, who leads a pampered life while ignoring Lilith. When Lilith accidentally turns her sister Margot (Stephanie Hsu) into a frog, she must team up with Cinderella to reverse the spell, save the kingdom and Margot, and heal their fractured sibling relationship.

The characters bear little resemblance to their fairytale counterparts, save for names and familial relationships. Worse, the morals seem entirely contrary.

Countless adaptations of Cinderella exist, so you’ll likely find nearly any variation of the elements that make up the classic story, but a select few characteristics are absolutely required to make the story recognizably Cinderella, regardless of era, setting, or other external identity markers.

Cinderella is forced by a wicked stepmother to be a servant, an external source — usually a Fairy Godmother or some envoy from her late mother — helps her transform to go to a party with the Prince Charming figure, and a lost glass slipper or equivalent brings the pair together for a happily ever after.

These elements remain relatively consistent whether the beleaguered protagonist is a high school student in the mid 2000s, an illegitimate daughter of an earl in Regency England, or a fairytale kingdom.

A Cinderella who is beloved in her town and spoiled is fundamentally antithetical to who the character is. Cinderella isn’t even her real name, but a cruel nickname born from being covered in cinders while cleaning the fireplace. Instead, the Cinderella of “Steps” is so pampered by her Fairy Godmother that she doesn’t even understand the concept of sweat.

Another fairly key aspect of Cinderella’s character is her kindness, even in the face of adversity and mistreatment from her stepmother and stepsisters. By contrast, this film’s five writers chose to present Cinderella as the bad sister, who socially abandoned Lilith rather than helping her fit in and make friends.

There are ways to craft a subversive Cinderella without rendering the character unrecognizable. In 1986, “Into the Woods” examined what happens after Cinderella gets her Prince and realizes he’s not the noble, good man he seemed. Disgusting 2025 body-horror black comedy “The Ugly Stepsister” shows a far less innocent Cinderella, but even she is forced into servitude and rewarded for her patience with a magical gown and the prince’s hand.

In another project, Seyfried as Cinderella would be inspired casting. A gifted actress with a delightful singing voice playing an iconic fairytale princess would be a match made in Heaven, but this role seems closer to Seyfried’s breakout role as a mean girl.

At this point, you have to ask: what’s the point of all these adaptations that paint female villains as misunderstood victims or even completely justified heroes?

By turning the cruelty and abuse of the wicked stepsister into misunderstandings or heroics, burgeoning bullies will learn justifications for their cruelties as their victims lose the language of right and wrong, replaced with complication and perspective.

There could be great value to little girls in a film about a wicked stepsister who, when magical circumstances force her and Cinderella to adventure together to save a loved one or even the kingdom itself, grows beyond her cruel mean girl ways to become a genuine sister and friend. Even a story that complicates the stepsister, demonstrating that she’s not all wicked and has some good that, if fostered, could help her develop into the virtuous person we all have the potential to be.

“Ever After,” “Rogers and Hammerstein’s Cinderella,” “Disney’s Cinderella III,” and even “Bridgerton”’s fourth season all allow nuance and depth for at least one “Wicked Stepsister” figure without sacrificing the protagonist’s virtue and inner strength to compensate.

But completely removing the characters’ misdeeds, and instead transposing them onto the heroine, is confused at best and malicious at worst.

“Steps” appears borderline unwatchable for adults and actively harmful to children. While the film may hold some surprises that improve its atrocious-seeming message, nothing in the marketing suggests it is any more than the disaster it appears to be.

Young girls should be encouraged to look up to characters like Cinderella, who faces adversity with kindness and takes risks to obtain her freedom and well-deserved happily ever after. The next generation of little girls deserve role models that demonstrate virtue, strength of character, and moral improvement, not excuses for villainy and selfishness.

And we all deserve more films like “Cinderella” and fewer like “Steps.”

***

Paulina Enck is a media specialist in Washington, D.C.

It’s an engineering flex; it shows what science can do. It also allows Elon Musk to make the case that Tesla and SpaceX should be brought together as a company, which he has been promoting.

What he’s doing is an AI vertical integration play. Tesla tends to build physical AI, meaning robotaxis and Optimus humanoid robots. SpaceX does virtual AI infrastructure, such as Grok orbital data centers. 

They both partner with Intel on the Terafab project in Texas, which is a gigantic foundry to design and scale custom microchips that they’re using for everything from autonomous vehicles to robots to space-based computing.

What makes all of this possible? Free, available pools of capital in a deregulated economy. Those enormous ready pools of capital are what distinguish American markets from Europe. Elon is using those pools of capital to do awesome and cool things.

It’s not evil materialism that robs your soul to say, “This is cool.”

I’ve noticed many of the same people out there saying capitalism is somehow emptying out the human soul are celebrating this coolness. Why? Saying it’s cool for a car to fly doesn’t make you an evil materialist. It makes you a human. It is cool. In fact, it’s awesome.

We ought to point out that this has to do with capitalism.

Here’s how it works. If you have large pools of capital in a deregulated economy, you get massive innovation, as you saw with Tesla.

There’s a reason that Tesla is an American company. All the top AI companies are located in America because they require heavy capital expenditure.

Your capital expenditure has to be pretty high in order to grow. And that only happens in the United States. That’s how we end up with Tesla, Meta, and Google. That is an excellent thing.

The other kind of economic system that can generate pretty nice cars is something called state capitalism. State capitalism, or mercantilism, is what you currently see in China. China has run up its debt in order to subsidize development in particular areas, just as Hitler’s Germany did.

Economically speaking, Hitler’s Germany could produce nice cars because if you take a bunch of money and you pour it into one particular area, then you can end up with a pretty nice car.

China has a competitive automotive company called BYD. BYD has the target goal of selling five million vehicles, about three times more than Tesla. They dominate the lower end of the electric vehicle market. Half of the cars are priced under $25,000.

Here’s the point: If Tesla fails, another company right on its tail will move into its space. That is not true for BYD in China because there’s no competition there. So China will just keep pouring money into BYD.

There is a problem with state capitalism, which so many Americans seem to want, a sort of economic fascism: It’s wrong. It also ignores the fact that China has to rack up these enormous debts in order to pick and choose winners and losers in its own economic development.

The debt-to-GDP ratio in the United States is above 100%. Capital Economics has indicated that China’s total debt-to-GDP ratio across the public and private non-financial sectors is over 300% of GDP. China simply lies about it because, in the end, they will cram it down on their citizens.

In the United States, if we spend too much money, we’ll end up ruining our bondholders. China tends to fund its debts internally by making its own citizens suffer, and they don’t care.

The likely outcome for China is state stagnation over time. If we rank innovation across economic systems, free market capitalism is at the top, followed by state capitalism, then the heavily regulated economy, where you allow some private industry but regulate it so heavily that the government runs it, as you see in Europe.

On Thursday, Emmanuel Macron announced an agreement between France and Germany on the automotive sector. He said, “We are driven by a clear ambition: to successfully transform our automotive industry, while upholding our climate goals and our production in Europe. … Europe must be a continent that innovates, invests, produces while protecting the climate and safeguarding our jobs.”

The electric vehicle from Citroën does not look like a Tesla. It looks like a piece of junk. Even Macron looked distinctly unimpressed.

At the bottom of the heap of innovation in economic systems you’ll find communism, in which the government nationalizes the means of production.

It turns out that communism sucks and government ownership of the means of production sucks, which is why California has built no functional track for its high-speed rail project after 18 years — and is $95 billion over budget.

Communist countries have tried to develop cars before. Yugoslavia (now Serbia) once built a state-subsidized car called the Yugo, and it became a punchline; a piece of junk. The Yugo tended to fail. The replacement cost several hundred dollars. Quality control was awful; parts of the interior could snap off in your hands. The body would actually corrode because it had no rustproofing.

It took 17 seconds to accelerate from 0 to 60 mph.

You might as well have a horse-drawn carriage.

One woman was driving a Yugo across the Mackinac Bridge in Michigan. She was blown off the bridge by a gust of wind and died.

Here’s reality: Capitalism is great, and communism sucks.

One of the great lies that some capitalists tell themselves is that capitalism is great because of a kind of noblesse oblige, the idea that if you go out and you build a successful company, the best thing that you’re going to do with that is to give to charity.

That is wonderful. I give a lot to charity; I’m privileged to have the opportunity to give a lot because, thank God, I do really well.

But the main way I help other people economically is through my day job, because roughly 200 people rely on this company directly. We likely have a thousand others who rely on this company indirectly.

Elon keeps tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of people employed. He is ensuring that tons of people get better products. He’s also ensuring safety. Human driving is so much worse than full self-driving that it’s not even close.

I literally entrust my family’s lives to full self-driving; I have it on the Tesla we own. After my dad, who is 70, was in a car crash this summer that destroyed his traditional vehicle, I urged him strongly to get a full self-driving Tesla because its reaction times and judgment, particularly at night, are going to be better than his own.

Technology is amazing. It’s great. If everyone were on full self-driving, we’d save roughly 40,000 lives a year in the United States.

Then we have completely useless people like Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), who is very wealthy because she owns a bunch of rental properties in Oklahoma. She has suggested that Elon is wealthy only because the economy is rigged.

Or maybe he’s wealthy because he has founded several extraordinarily successful companies.

If you like Emmanuel Macron in his own version of the Yugo in France, you can have it.

Not a single capitalist is responsible for the debt in which the United States now finds itself. Governments rack up government debt.

The premise for leftists is that wealth confiscated from the people who create and innovate is better in the hands of the government.

That’s a lie.

According to one prominent football insider, Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce was prepared to trade his helmet for a headset before this season.

Now, he’s being floated as the potential replacement for Troy Aikman in the Monday Night Football booth in 2027.

On Friday’s episode of “Pardon My Take,” Pro Football Talk founder Mike Florio predicted that Kelce will be one of the most sought-after broadcasting free agents next offseason, with ESPN, CBS, and Amazon all competing for his talents.

ESPN, of course, is at the center of a public spat with Aikman, who is reportedly upset about not being offered a new contract despite his 25-year broadcasting partner, Joe Buck, already signing a six-year, $108 million deal.

Troy Aikman this morning on @dfwticket about rumors of tension between him and Joe Buck.

“There’s probably a time and a place for all that. I don’t know if now is the time. I don’t know if it’s hard to figure out kind of what happened. I’ll broadcast through this season and I’ll be a free agent at the end of the year and kind of see what happens. I’m looking forward to whatever the rest of this season does hold and the Super Bowl and all that and where my next landing spot may be.”

— Joseph Hoyt (@JoeJHoyt) October 15, 2026

When reached by Sport & State, ESPN declined to comment on the current Monday Night Football contract negotiations, instead emphasizing that its focus is on this season and producing the network’s first Super Bowl in February.

But according to Florio, Kelce is actively looking for his next career move.

“Last year, [Kelce] and Greg Olsen were inquiring with Amazon about whether [Kirk Herbstreit’s] Amazon spot would be available this season,” he said. “Kelce was already looking into this before this season.”

Kelce has the connections to make a big splash into broadcasting. His wildly popular podcast, “New Heights,“ is distributed by Amazon, while his older brother, Jason Kelce, is fast becoming a featured player on ESPN’s NFL team.

Oh, and then there’s the whole Mr. Taylor Swift angle.

Florio believes this could all create a full-blown bidding war in early 2027.

“He’s going to be the one they all want,” Florio said. “CBS is going to be looking, ESPN will be looking, and Amazon has a clause that they can tear up [Herbstreit’s] contract if they find someone better.”

Florio added that Amazon and ESPN could also pursue Los Angeles Rams head coach Sean McVay, but that Kelce would be the networks’ first choice.

And if ESPN wins that bidding war, it would be another sign that the network is fully embracing its Football Bro Era.

Pat McAfee rewrote the playbook

ESPN’s ever-growing Pat McAfee presence has brought hand-wringing from traditional sports media types, but despite the opinion of the vocal minority on social media, the proof is undeniable.

The Pat McAfee business is booming.

McAfee has quickly become one of, if not the, most valuable personalities at the Mothership. His show attracts a loyal audience, generates viral moments, and connects with a generation of sports fans who would rather talk about sports like they’re hanging out with friends than sitting on-set with the “Sports Reporters.” (RIP to that incredible program, by the way.)

The current, McAfee-centric version of “College GameDay” has turned in five of the 10 most-watched regular-season episodes in the show’s 40-year history. ESPN executives know this, and they’re betting that this direction is best for the bottom line.

“The more he appears, the harder it is to see the show as the ultimate gathering place for all fans”

And yet, @CollegeGameDay continues to deliver historic numbers week after week in terms of viewership, on-site crowds and interest since @PatMcAfeeShow joined CGD. 🧐 https://t.co/s04lLR3gIY

— bill hofheimer (@bhofheimer_espn) October 15, 2026

Which brings us back to the Kelces.

Jason’s beer-chugging, shirt-ripping, earnestly goofy personality made him a Philadelphia folk hero. Certainly, he’s taking some getting used to on a national stage — and much like McAfee, he seems to be feeling some backlash due to overexposure — but he’s a largely likable character with a clear future in the booth, on set, or in the podcast studio.

Then there’s Travis — a mega-celebrity with Super Bowl rings, McAfee’s frat-boy attitude, reality-show chops, and the global-icon connection that will draw the young female demographic the NFL so desperately craves.

Between the Kelce brothers and McAfee, ESPN could harness enough High T energy to offset, at least in part, a decade’s worth of accusations about the network’s progressive social engineering.

Look, nature is healing.

You may not like it, but one thing we know about the modern sports-media landscape is that personality sells. Authenticity beats polish every time, and (most) fans don’t need more trained journalists to tell them what to think.

They want to talk ball, and they want entertainers who can help them feel the moment.

The future of football broadcasting will keep changing. ESPN seems perfectly fine with that.

Hostin was triggered when Rogan explained to actor Michael Douglas why he voted for President Trump in 2024 and said immigration policy was one of the driving factors. “Okay. So I will fact check everything Joe Rogan got wrong in that clip a little bit later,” she chided, hyping up what she thought would be an epic smackdown on the MMA fighter.

“He signed a $250 million deal for that podcast. I’m not sure why he can’t afford a fact checker,” Hostin shouted as she stepped up to the plate. She would go on to prove ABC couldn’t afford them either.

Sunny Hostin gets snarky as she tries to fact check Joe Rogan about her Democratic Party’s open border policies. Of course, it’s full of lies.

Hostin…
-falsely claims the border was closed under Biden.
-falsely claims the Biden amin didn’t’ give illegals instruction on how to get in (there was an app for that).
-the only moving of illegals was done by conservative governors, ignoring how the Biden admin dumb them in their states.
-ignores Rogan talking about Dems wanting to “turn them into citizens” to get their votes and just argues that non-citizens voting is “very rare.”

— Nicholas Fondacaro (@NickFondacaro) October 16, 2026

First up, Hostin took issue with Rogan accurately saying the border was effectively open and nonexistent under Biden. According to her, Biden saying “don’t come over” in an ABC interview was enough to repel them:

He said in our opening clip, “it was insane to just not only leave the border open,” that was false. Biden even explicitly told migrants “don’t come over” during an ABC news interview with George Stephanopoulos in March 2021. The administration was still turning away most single adults and many families under Title 42.

As the Heritage Foundation reported, over 10 million illegal aliens entered the United States under President Biden. Additionally, Biden’s use of Title 42 began late in his term, when it became clear immigration was a major issue in the 2024 election, and the odds of a Democratic win were becoming questionable. Illegal immigration was one of the issues Trump rode to victory.

Next up, Hostin falsely claimed the Biden administration wasn’t helping illegals enter the country, Democrats weren’t funding their housing, and only Republicans were moving them around:

Number two, Joe Rogan said “give people instructions on how to get in” and also “transport them to cities and put them up in hotels.” Who organized and paid for transport, Joe? Republican governors. Texas Governor Greg Abbott and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis initiated and funded the high-profile, state-run busing and flight operations.

Let’s break this down into its component parts.

Firstly, there was an app for that. The Biden administration infamously used the CBP One app to give illegals instructions on where to cross and what to do once they got in.

Secondly, Republican governors moved illegal immigrants dumped in their states by the Biden administration to the sanctuary cities that were enticing them to come in. And if there were no illegal immigrants entering the U.S., as Hostin suggested earlier, how were there even illegals for the governors to relocate?

It’s interesting that she didn’t touch on the “hotels” bit. In September of 2024, news broke that an El Paso hotel was taken over by the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua. Hostin’s New York City had also abused its hotels by using them to house illegal immigrants.

Finally, she tried to clap back at Rogan for talking about how those people could be used to impact future elections:

He said was it to “turn these people into citizens and have them permanently voting your side because you helped them and let them in?” Votes by non-citizens are very rare. How rare you ask? Between 0.0003% and 0.001%.

While Hostin was going on about how “very rare” it was for “non-citizens” to vote in our elections, that’s not what Rogan was talking about.

As Hostin initially quoted, his comment was about how the Democrats wanted to “turn these people into citizens” through amnesty programs and the like, which would mean their votes would be legal.

It’s one thing to step on a rake. It’s another to look into the camera as you put the rake on the ground and say “hold my beer.” Or in Sunny Hostin’s case, her glass of whine. Pun intended.

***

Nicholas C. Fondacaro is the associate editor for the Media Research Center and NewsBusters.

Laken Snelling, 22, pleaded guilty in Fayette Circuit Court on August 21 to first-degree manslaughter, abuse of a corpse, tampering with physical evidence, and concealing the birth of an infant. The judge imposed 10 years for manslaughter and one year for each remaining charge, with the sentences running concurrently, according to WKYT. 

“I was under a lot of emotional stress and my baby came unexpectedly,” Snelling said during the plea hearing. “And instead of helping him, I ended his life and afterwards I cleaned up and didn’t tell anyone.”

Former Kentucky cheerleader has pleaded guilty to killing her newborn baby and stuffing him in a trash bag in her closet, claims she was under “emotional stress.”

22-year-old Laken Snelling has admitted to killing her newborn baby by “depriving him of oxygen.”

“I was under a lot of emotional stress and my baby came unexpectedly… And instead of helping him I ended his life and afterwards I cleaned up and didn’t tell anyone,” she said in court.

She has pleaded guilty to manslaughter, abuse of a corpse, tampering with physical evidence and concealing the birth of an infant.

Will Lindsay Clancy fans raise $1M for her too?

— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) August 21, 2026

Snelling’s roommates discovered the baby in August 2025 after questioning her account of noises they had heard from her room, LEX18 reported, citing court records. They said they heard loud noises around 4 a.m. Later that morning, Snelling said she had passed out,  had not been feeling well, and planned to seek medical attention.

The roommates found the baby wrapped in a towel inside a black trash bag in her closet. Police were called, and Snelling was arrested four days later, according to WKYT.

Her roommates also told the 911 operator that they found a “blood-soaked towel on the floor and a plastic bag containing evidence of childbirth.”

The Kentucky Medical Examiner’s Office determined that the infant was born alive and died from asphyxia by undetermined means. A Fayette County grand jury subsequently indicted Snelling on a first-degree manslaughter charge, LEX19 reported.

Snelling initially pleaded not guilty earlier this year, but later changed her plea and admitted killing her son by depriving him of oxygen.

At Friday’s sentencing, relatives mourned the future they had hoped to share with the baby, McCoy Cade Hall, the New York Post reported.

One female relative said, “As a grandparent, you imagine the memories you’ll make with your grandchildren.” She said she was looking forward to “first words, kisses, and all the little moments that become lifelong memories.”

“You look forward to watching them grow and seeing the person they become,” she added. “For Cade, those possibilities were taken away before he ever had the chance to experience them.”

“So there’s a way to say that, but even that, you know, I had people leave the church over that,” Hamilton said.

In the September 2018 webinar, Pastoring in Partisan Times, Hamilton, a liberal pastor in the United Methodist Church, discussed what he characterized as the challenges of confronting racism in rural America, recalling Confederate flags he saw while driving through the Missouri countryside.

“There are places where preaching against racism will be very hard,” Hamilton said, describing rural areas where “you see a lot of Confederate flags” and hear “interesting” things on local radio.

“And so, if I’m in those congregations, I still have to ask the question: I may have a gospel imperative about racism, but I still have to ask the question: How do I communicate that in a way that people can hear it?” he said on the webinar.

Speaking more than a year before George Floyd’s death sparked nationwide protests and riots, Hamilton explained why he had told his mostly white congregation that they needed to say black lives matter, arguing that many black people questioned whether their lives were valued.

“And the reason why we have to say black lives matter is because right now it doesn’t feel like black lives matter. The reason why we don’t have to say ‘white lives matter’ is nobody questions whether white lives matter,” Hamilton said. “But the reason why we have to say ‘black lives matter’ is because right now there’s a serious question for many black people and maybe for others as to whether black lives really matter.”

In response to an inquiry from The Daily Wire, Hamilton’s campaign said he was not calling anyone racist. The campaign said his point was about how to discuss issues with different communities and that he had previously affirmed that white lives matter and blue lives matter.

“As a pastor, Adam has practiced listening for 36 years, and this is another example of how he believes on even the hardest issues we can find common ground,” Tyson Brody, a campaign spokesperson, said in a statement to The Daily Wire. “Unlike Roger Marshall, Adam will not seek to divide Kansans by race, political party, or ability to pay a medical debt with 18% interest.” 

In the same webinar, Hamilton, who described himself as theologically evangelical but socially liberal, said he strategically times his sermons on divisive issues. In a separate February 2019 church talk, he discussed his uncertainty about advising parents of young children who identify as transgender, as The Daily Wire previously reported.  

“Do we give guidance? Do we not give guidance? What do we do here? And I think this comes up here [on the topic of bisexuality], and it also comes up when we think about smaller children in the question of transgender,” Hamilton said during the talk on sexual ethics. 

“Trying to figure out, you know, because I have this, from time to time, with parents of smaller children, and it’s like, OK, do I leave it up to the child to completely try to think through these things, and their understanding of their identity? Or is there some role that you play in that?” Hamilton added. 

Polling shows Hamilton and incumbent Republican Sen. Roger Marshall locked in a surprisingly tight race in a state that has not sent a Democrat to the Senate since the 1930s. Republicans have shifted some financial resources to back Marshall’s re-election bid. 

Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC), the chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, acknowledged earlier this month that the Kansas race is tight, The Daily Wire previously reported.

“I believe that Kansas is a competitive state,” he said during a press call. “I will, however, say that as I look at all the data, it tells me that Roger Marshall will be successful, albeit closer than I want it to be.”

Like the Iroquois, we find Jesuit missionaries particularly tasty, though unfortunately, most of our neighbors are Presbyterians, so we have to use a lot more spice. But we do try to keep it real by cooking up some of the actual recipes the Iroquois used when preparing to eat such missionaries as Jean de Brebeuf, or as the Indigenous peoples called him, Brebeuf Strognanoff, a tasty dish invented by Indigenous Peoples in the 17th century, about the same time European peoples were enjoying Rembrandt’s paintings, Newton’s science, and the English Glorious Revolution, which peacefully installed a constitutional monarchy with a bill of rights.

But we don’t celebrate any of these European things on Indigenous Peoples Day because it’s Indigenous Peoples Day. So mostly we sit around and try to figure out which of the many indigenous tribes broke the record for going the greatest number of centuries without inventing the wheel.

Another indigenous practice we like to remember on Indigenous Peoples Day is the land acknowledgement. Now many of you may think of a land acknowledgement as a speech or notice where a person or institution acknowledges that the land he’s living on or doing business on once belonged to a bunch of primitives who weren’t doing much of anything with it. And you probably think this sort of nonsense is mostly phony baloney virtue signaling by some privileged fat cat who never did a good deed for anyone and probably doesn’t even call his mother on Sundays, but now wants us to believe that he’s a nice person because he’s giving some meaningless shout-out to a bunch of long-dead tribesmen who have no chance of reclaiming their land and, even if they did, this schmuck would be the last person on earth to let them do it.

And, sure, all that’s true. But in their charming savage little way, the indigenous peoples also had land acknowledgements, like when the chief of the Sioux tribe stood up at a tribal meeting and acknowledged the Sioux had taken their land from the Cheyenne, who had taken it from the Kiowa, who had taken it from the Pawnee, who had taken it from the Arikara.

Then after that, the chief of the Sioux would laugh heartily, because he wasn’t giving the land back to the Cheyenne any more than the whites would give it back after they took it from him. In fact, after the land acknowledgement, the Sioux would also acknowledge that their tribe had now acquired a shiny new bunch of Cheyenne slaves, and then celebrate that victory by rustling up a tasty stew, if they could lay their hands on enough missionaries.

Now the one thing we do not celebrate on Indigenous Peoples Day is Christopher Columbus, because we agree with country singer Kacey Musgraves, who announced at her recent concert that Columbus was “literally the lamest person to probably ever exist. Like, for real. What a loser.”

All Columbus ever did was sail a ship the size of a dresser drawer nearly 5,000 miles over raging, uncharted ocean to open a hemisphere to the development of civilization, art, science, and technology where before there were only simple, rustic entertainments like human sacrifice, and an occasional relaxing afternoon sitting around not inventing the wheel.

That’s nothing compared to the accomplishments of Kacey Musgraves, who has written some very hummable little songs which no doubt the indigenous peoples would have enjoyed if they had had any instruments besides drums and whistles, or could have traveled to one of Musgraves’ concerts on something with wheels which, sadly, they never invented.

So I shout hooray for Indigenous Peoples Day because I just can’t say how sorry we all are that Europeans took their land and turned it into the USA. At least I can’t say how sorry we are without using the word “hypocrisy.”

For many of you, it’s sadly incurable. Treatment would require summoning your frontal lobe to produce a single consistent moral or rational thought across any two topics, and that lobe, I’m told, was surgically removed sometime around 2016.

I myself am suffering from whiplash, struggling to keep pace with the antonymous thoughts, feelings, and hot takes being churned out and choked on by you guys and gals.

For instance, earlier this week, I was reliably informed that commenting on what women wear is NOT okay. Period. Ever! Especially when it comes to women’s gym clothing. Comedian Shane Gillis committed the unforgivable sin of doing exactly that, in colorful language, and was promptly told to kill himself and rot in hell. (Though we all secretly know the gym women who photograph themselves in tight, neon short-shorts that are being swallowed whole by their own buttcracks. Nobody asked the shorts for consent.)

Then yesterday, REVERSE! The media overlords collectively forgot that, mere days earlier, they had cried misogyny over a man’s comment on a woman’s clothing. Instead, they cheerfully began dragging the (now former) White House press secretary for her every physical characteristic!

Perhaps their collective memory now rivals a goldfish’s.

Vanity Fair’s style correspondent, José Criales-Unzueta, who dresses like a button-eyed character from “Coraline,” wrote this about Katie Zacharias’s first-day look:

Going by Zacharias’s look at her press briefing yesterday, she fits the bill. Her long hair was parted to the side in cascading waves and was paired with a white pussy-bow blouse done up inexplicably sans bow — perhaps to deliberately avoid any inevitable “grab ’em by the pussy” jokes — under a navy double-breasted skirt suit with wide shoulders and golden buttons, naval-style. A study of Zacharia’s personal social media reveals that she is more often than not wearing head-to-toe black or white, or black and white, in various kinds of tailoring styles, be that a vest-cut dress or a variety of suits. There’s also the occasional short A-line dress — Christian sorority-girl style — in pastel shades or, of course, MAGA red.

Cute. Criticism for thee, but not for me!

So which is it, leftists? Can we comment on clothing, or can we not? I’m fine with either. Just make up your ever-hating minds. 

Speaking of what women wear, it’s NFL season, baby, which means the WAGs (Wives and Girlfriends) of NFL players are out dressing to impress. Several have engineered their popularity into thriving businesses, crafting creative, artistic game-day wear for their men on the field and for every woman in the stands. Kristin Juszczyk, wife of San Francisco 49ers fullback Kyle Juszczyk, famously upcycles jerseys into custom puffer vests, tops, and coats. Her designs went viral after Taylor Swift wore one to a playoff game, and they eventually grew into a licensed NFL fashion line. Being a WAG has become a sweet career path in its own right, and people are hungry to know what it’s like.

But, as with everything good and fun in life, Chokingonyourownhypocrisy Syndrome takes hold if you haven’t been properly mentally vaccinated.

A chronic patient, Michelle Obama, had Kylie Kelce, wife of retired Eagles center Jason Kelce, on her truly awful podcast, “In My Opinion,” to ask her the hard-hitting questions. 

“Were you ever a WAG?” Michelle, the acronym stands for wives and girlfriends…so duh. But I digress. If this is the level of rigor your show offers, Hillary’s podcast may soon snatch the crown from yours in the Former First Ladies’ Garbage Podcast Division.

“Yes, I was a terrible WAG,” Kelce responded. “I felt like the term WAG itself reduced the women to being defined by the role that their husband held. I was fortunate on the Eagles; we had women who were lawyers, nurses, educators. We had these women who were seriously accomplished in their own right. And I’m like, ‘Don’t reduce yourself to get in line with him. You have your own stuff going on.’ And I was always really excited about the women with the Eagles, and never wanted them to be diminished.”

Wow! I’m shocked she managed to garble all that out with such hypocrisy lodged in her windpipe.

First of all, she is blatantly diminishing women who don’t hold law or health degrees, and she treats motherhood, entrepreneurship, and simply supporting one’s husband as lesser accomplishments. Marriage isn’t about shrinking your worth because you support your partner. It is the merging of two lives, two flesh becoming one, in which a wife’s accomplishment becomes her husband’s and vice versa. It is a partnership, not a competition. Just because the roles don’t look the same doesn’t mean the two aren’t equal, Kylie.

But secondly, come on.

Are we seriously watching two women, who are relevant to the media world solely because of their husbands, lecture us on how women shouldn’t be defined by the roles their husbands hold? Roles, and I’m just spitballing here, like president of the United States or a well-known NFL player?

Side effects of Chokingonyourownhypocrisy may include idiocy.

I don’t know whether this disease can be cured in certain women. TrumpRx offers the treatment at no cost to patients, but, alas, we can’t mandate that they take it.

But they need it. For months, patients have reported sympathy for a woman who strangled her three babies to death (and blamed hormones), while simultaneously insisting that women can run the world. For months, patients have declared that women have the right to do absolutely whatever they want with their bodies, while screaming that Sydney Sweeney using her assets to advertise a betting website is whorish and unbefitting. And for months, patients have preached that sexual freedom is the most important thing a woman can have and that nobody should ever judge what happens in a bedroom, while shrieking that consent while drunk doesn’t actually count and that sexual take-backs are perfectly fine!

Too bad they’ll never get the treatment they need. Side effects of the medication would include common sense, more respect from others, and the miraculous reattachment of that frontal lobe.

Sigh. One can dream. Until then, pray for those suffering from Chokingonyourownhypocrisy Syndrome.

Norwegian Armed Forces discovered the security breach last month after renting the cars from Hertz Norway. 

“It is correct that recordings were made in vehicles belonging to a Chinese-owned car rental company,” a spokesman for the Norwegian Armed Forces told Fox News. The Norwegian military rented the cars under a multiyear $32.8 million contract for daily tasks and operational activities but has not stated whether it will seek to get out of the contract. 

Hertz sources its vehicles from suppliers in China, North America and Europe. A source familiar with the matter told The Daily Wire that Hertz Norway is operated by their franchise partner, First Rent A Car Norway AS, and that franchises decide how to source their fleet.

Hertz does not share customer information with its vehicles’ manufacturers, and the vehicles sourced by Hertz Norway are not operated in the United States, the source confirmed.

China is also pushing to manufacture cars in the United States.

“They want to come in and build a plant to hire you, to hire your friends, and your neighbors,” Trump said in January. “That’s great, I’d love to have China come in.”

After meeting with President Xi Jinping in September, however, Trump said he was “the one that kept them [Chinese automakers] out. The tariffs kept them out.”

Lawmakers from both sides of the aisle are pushing to keep Chinese vehicles off American roads. Senators Bernie Moreno (R-OH) and Elissa Slotkin (D-MI) introduced the Connected Vehicle Security Act in April, targeting Chinese vehicles, software, and critical components. The bill advanced out of committee in July with unanimous support. 

“Chinese cars are surveillance packages on wheels, with the ability to collect on American citizens and transmit that data back to Beijing,” Slotkin said.

Similar concerns have followed Waymo’s expansion into Washington, D.C., where its camera-equipped vehicles could travel near the nation’s most sensitive government buildings and security sites. 

“These things are covered in cameras, and now you’re gonna send them around all the most sensitive national monuments, national security sites, without the ability to recognize the President needs to be extricated from a situation like we saw at the correspondent’s dinner,” a source familiar with White House security told The Daily Wire. 

A Waymo spokesman told the Daily Wire that it complies with all applicable U.S. laws and federal requirements and has a strong commercial incentive to protect its technology from Chinese competitors seeking to expand into markets such as Europe.

Waymo also uses Chinese-built vehicles in its fleet but says it installs its proprietary autonomous driving system at an Arizona facility before sending the vehicles out on the roads. 

The Daily Wire has repeatedly poked holes in this narrative, this week revealing police records that showed Soto was first arrested by the Kearny Police Department on Feb. 1 for allegedly violently assaulting his wife. ICE only took him into custody on Feb. 2 when they picked him up from the Hudson County jail.

Democrats don’t seem to care.

On Thursday, New Jersey Rep. Nellie Pou honored Martin Soto and his wife, Gabriela, at a legislative dinner celebrating the end of Hispanic Heritage Month.

During the event, Pou called Martin and Gabriela up to the podium as “special guests” of the event and handed them a letter while celebrating Martin’s recent release from ICE detention.

“I want to especially recognize Martin and Gabriela Soto, who are right here. I cannot imagine, I cannot imagine what those months were like for Martin and for Gabriela and their children. No family, no family should have to endure what they went through. No family,” Pou said.

“My office is proud to say that we worked very hard for months to secure Martin’s release. I worked very closely with so many different advocates, with many of my other colleagues, both Congressman Menendez and Congresswoman McIver and Congresswoman Analilia Mejia,” she said.

Pou went on to say she was “happy” to “finally” see Martin a free man and thanked Gabriela for advocating for his release.

“Pushing ICE and working with advocates who refused, we refused to give up. And, but I want you to know I want to recognize Martin’s wife, Gabriela. Gabriela is an unbelievable individual. Una mujer bien poderosa [a very powerful woman] in her own right. She spoke out publicly, demanded answers, told her family’s story, and never allowed anyone to forget about Martin. Thank you. Thank you for your courage, for your determination, and for your refusal to give up,” Pou said.

ICE previously confirmed that federal immigration officers took Martin into custody that day after he was charged with assault. The agency also accused Martin of participating “in inciting unrest and causing property damage” while detained at Delaney Hall.

“Martin, we are so very happy to see that you are finally home with your family. Martin, we are very happy that God has given you this freedom for now. I know that we are still fighting to ensure that he is permanently released. But he has the prayers of so many people. And like Martin, there are many other people who are suffering today. We understand that,” she said.

Along with Pou, New Jersey Democrats including Sens. Andy Kim and Cory Booker, and Reps. Analilia Mejía and Bonnie Watson Coleman also have backed Martin. None of their offices responded to requests for comment, giving them the opportunity to backtrack that support after the police report surfaced.

The Daily Wire previously reported on the incident based on local records obtained by the Oversight Project, which did not share any information about the victim other than her gender.

According to those records, Martin “purposely” caused “bodily injury” to the victim “specifically by using his hands, both opened and closed to strike” her “in her face, causing minor scratches and cuts to her face and neck.”

He then allegedly “placed a hand over” her “mouth so she could not scream for help,” the report stated.

The latest police report redacted the victim’s name except for in one part where it identified her as “Ms. Soto.”

It also identified the victim as the daughter of “Mr. Gabriel Osores.” Osores is Gabriela’s maiden name.

At the time, officers responded to a “domestic violence” call at the Sotos’ home, where they arrested Martin, who allegedly committed the beating while children were present, according to the report.

During the alleged altercation, Martin “tried to push” Gabriela’s father “off of him,” the report stated. The victim’s father “then told the defendant he must leave the house,” according to the report.

The victim “then contacted the police,” while Martin’s next move, the details of which are redacted in the report, prompted Gabriela’s father “to pull him away,” the report said.

The responding officers called EMS due to injuries to an unidentified individual and Martin, who they said was “bleeding from his nose, had a laceration on his lip, and several scratches on his abdomen.” Martin refused the medical aid.

The assault case was later expunged, a city official in Kearny recently told The Daily Wire.

On Oct. 6, Martin walked free from an ICE detention center in Elizabeth, New Jersey, where he was transferred in May, after a Biden-appointed judge granted his habeas petition that claimed he was wrongfully detained.

Mejia and her fellow Democratic New Jersey Rep. Rob Menendez welcomed Martin outside the detention center. Gabriela was also there to greet her husband and alleged abuser.

Gabriela did not respond to requests for comment on the newly obtained records.

While her husband was in ICE detention, Gabriela led protests pushing for the release of all illegal immigrants and raised more than $67,000 on GoFundMe in the process on Martin’s behalf. She claimed the stress of having her husband locked up caused her to have a miscarriage.

Martin’s lawyer, Selenia DeStefani, filed an application for the Peruvian national to receive a U visa, which is reserved for victims of certain crimes, over his alleged mistreatment by ICE. The New Jersey Department of Labor certified the U visa application.

DeStefani has denied that Martin has a criminal record and said that “he is the victim of a crime, not the perpetrator of one.”

In July, Gabriela told The Daily Wire that she was “not aware” of the police report, but confirmed that it was her husband’s information that was listed on the documents.

She denied the allegations of domestic abuse.

“My husband NEVER hit me I even have proof from pictures and selfies I had taken that week and I do not have no bodily injury. My husband never hit anyone. It’s only me my husband and kids at the home. My husband never would hit a female ever,” she said.

She also claimed that Martin “never got arrested by Kearny PD” and that “he left the house on February 1 at 530pm.”

“I have messages and locations and everything for proof from that afternoon. And I have a call from Delaney Hall at 1030 ish at night when he called me,” she said.

“My husband will NEVER do nothing to harm his family or his marriage,” she added. “I know exactly where he was and what he does and who he talks too [sic].”

Rep. Sean Casten (D-IL) is preparing to challenge Waters for the top Democratic position on the House Financial Services Committee, according to Politico, setting up a clash over seniority and generational change. Casten informed Waters of his interest this week, Semafor reported.

“I think it’s a pretty broad appetite in our caucus for generational change, and you can’t get a more glaring case for generational change … than an 88-year-old member, who will turn 90 before the next Congress is over, clinging to the gavel,” one senior House Democrat told Politico on condition of anonymity.

Waters was first elected to Congress in 1990 and has been the top Democrat on the House Financial Services Committee since 2013. She retains support from colleagues defending her experience. 

Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-NY), 38, is reportedly “fully behind future Chair Maxine Waters.”

“She is beloved in my district as Auntie Maxine,” said Torres. 

“I see Maxine’s wisdom not as a weakness but as a strength,” Torres added. “I can assure you Maxine Waters has more youthful energy than I will ever have in my life.”

Torres previously said it wasn’t ideal for former President Joe Biden to run at 80. 

A former House Democratic aide and Waters ally questioned Casten’s move, noting that he would be leapfrogging more senior lawmakers.

“It’s curious, but I don’t know if it’s concerning,” the former aide told Politico. “I think that it’s strange in the sense that he’d be jumping over a lot of people.”

But one member of the House Democratic steering committee backed Casten for the post.

“I have every confidence that as chair, he will be inclusive, good on the issues, and will use the platform to help the entire Democratic caucus,” the member reportedly said on condition of anonymity.

The fight over Waters’ future comes amid a broader debate within the Democratic Party over its aging leadership. Former President Barack Obama urged Democrats to elevate younger talent in February, though he did not single out Waters.

“There is an element of, at some point, you age out. You’re not connected directly to the immediate struggles that folks are going through,” Obama said.

Spokespeople for Waters and Casten did not respond to The Daily Wire’s requests for comment. Casten has not publicly stated that he plans to challenge Waters. 

Two decades ago, in 2005 and more ambitiously in 2007, Congress decided it knew how to fix America’s energy problems. With the country at war and gasoline prices climbing, families were feeling the squeeze at the pump. New laws required billions of gallons of ethanol to be blended into our fuels. Corn that once fed people and livestock went into gas tanks.

Food prices soared. One World Bank economist estimated that biofuels in the United States and Europe drove roughly three-quarters of the global increase. A law sold as making fuel affordable and assuaging consumers’ fear made food unaffordable. The bill hit the world’s poorest households hardest.

The World Bank estimated that the price spike pushed 100 million people into poverty, and the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization counted 75 million more people going hungry in 2007 alone. Emissions eventually fell because of an innovation no mandate anticipated: fracking. The mandate is still on the books.

Policymakers in Washington are about to repeat the renewable fuel standard’s mistakes twice over for AI by letting fear drive policy, and in an election season, nothing sells as well as fear.

Why does fear so routinely drive policymaking? Psychologist Roy Baumeister and journalist John Tierney call it the power of bad. We are wired to feel bad news more strongly than good news.

We need about four good experiences to offset each bad experience. Every alarming story about a chatbot or data center outweighs the thousands of quiet, unseen gains in medical diagnosis, personal tutoring, and productivity. Legislators react to that imbalance too, and they respond with laws to meet the alarmism.

The first mistake follows directly. Just as with ethanol, Washington is rushing ahead before anyone has clearly defined the problem. The legislative process, with its fact-finding, hearings, and debate, is designed to name a problem and weigh responses. Congress has not worked that way in a long time, and it has certainly not examined how artificial intelligence fits the laws we already have on liability, copyright, and fraud.

Before new laws pass, supporters should show that the harm is real, that it is widespread or persistent, and that competition, the courts, and current law cannot remedy it. When legislation is still needed, it should set the standard for safety or security and let companies race against each other to find the best path. Medicine, autonomous cars, art, and national defense raise different questions. One sweeping AI law answers none of them well.

The second mistake is permitting 50 legislatures to enact conflicting laws for technologies used and provisioned nationally. States passed more than 100 AI laws in the first half of this year alone. A start-up in Florida must now answer to rules hastily drafted in Sacramento, Albany, and Hartford before it ships a product. That is a tax on start-ups and entrepreneurs and a gift to the few big firms that can keep compliance lawyers on retainer.

It is also a gift to the Chinese Communist Party. By comparison, Chinese developers answer to a single regulator. Congress should do two things: preempt most state AI laws and examine how these technologies fit with existing statutes before writing new ones. A Justice Department task force or an agency policy statement is no substitute.

None of this means the fear and worries are imaginary. Harms from AI will emerge, and someone must answer for them. Much of that can happen under laws already on the books. A chatbot that defrauds a customer is still committing fraud. A hiring algorithm that discriminates still violates civil rights law. A defective self-driving car still exposes its maker to liability. Courts have adapted time-tested doctrines to new technologies from the railroad to the radio and the Internet. They can do it again.

The human costs of a bad law are more difficult to see than the political costs of a bad headline. Families facing food insecurity in 2008 never made the news in Iowa, where corn growers cashed in, or in Washington, where lobbyists had moved on. No one writes stories about the treatment that was never developed, the stronger building material that was never invented, or the start-up that never got off the ground. Lawmakers ignore what they cannot see. That is the power of bad at work.

Critics of preemption assume that more rules from more legislatures mean more safety and accountability. Usually, they mean less. As Washington prepares to repeat its costly ethanol mistakes on the frontier of artificial intelligence, it risks trading real, unearned fear for unseen, generational loss. To avoid the tragic, invisible human costs of the past, Congress must let the courts apply time-tested doctrines and have the patience to regulate with clear objectives, or once again, we risk starving the world of tomorrow to ease today’s political anxieties.

***

Kent Lassman is the president and CEO of the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

Trump’s speech will focus on illegal immigration, Tren de Aragua, and Laken Riley, a White House official shared with The Daily Wire. The president will deliver remarks at Dalton Municipal Airport as he tries to shore up support for Republican candidates in the midterm elections, specifically Georgia Republicans Rick Jackson and Mike Collins.

“One of the President’s greatest successes has been closing the border and dismantling Tren de Aragua,” White House spokeswoman Lauren Bis said on Friday. “Biden allowed this vicious gang to invade our country and kill innocent Americans, like Georgia nursing student Laken Riley.”

She added: “President Trump’s crackdown on illegal immigration and transnational gangs has contributed to the largest decrease in violent crime in American history.”

In Dalton, where the president will be speaking on Friday, the city’s population is almost 55% Hispanic and roughly 29% foreign-born, according to U.S. Census Bureau data.

Members of Tren de Aragua arrested in Georgia by ICE this year. Photos courtesy of the White House.

President Trump created the Homeland Security Task Force on his first day back in office, a task force dedicated to eradicating gangs, cartels, and transnational criminal organizations who have entered the United States under President Joe Biden’s administration.

Those individuals operated largely unimpeded until the second Trump administration: now the Homeland Security Task Force is the largest campaign against transnational crime in United States history, a White House official said.

Between January 20, 2025 and October 8, 2026, the White House shared, task force law enforcement arrested 1,296 Tren de Aragua gang members. Many of these arrests occurred in Georgia.

Some of these Tren de Aragua members arrested in Georgia include Jared Adonay Cruz Rivera, an illegal alien from Honduras who was arrested in April, with a criminal background that includes crimes ranging from armed robbery to aggravated assault.

In April, ICE also arrested three other Tren de Aragua members: Henrri Enrique Cortez Vargas, an illegal alien from Venezuela, Wuilians Bruno Tejada Villeda, an illegal alien from Guatemala, and Maricela Maria Gonzalez, an illegal alien from Venezuela.

Also in May, ICE arrested Rudy Gabriel Sauceda Ramos, an illegal immigrant from Honduras, Jonathan Homez Gonzalez and Jeremias Alexander Gomez Gonzalez, both illegal aliens from El Salvador with similarly long rap sheets, and Robin Acosta Conzalez, an illegal alien from Cuba.

The league instructed authorized sportsbook partners, including DraftKings and FanDuel, to stop offering the wagers beginning this season, according to a memo obtained by ESPN. Among the prohibited wagers are parlays that combine multiple bets on the same player falling short of specified statistical totals.

The regular season officially tips off on Tuesday.

One such wager was part of the gambling scandal involving former Toronto Raptors player Jontay Porter, who admitted he intentionally removed himself from games to benefit bettors during the 2023-24 season. Porter was banned for life from the NBA in 2024.

Federal prosecutors said a bettor placed an $80,000 parlay on the unders for six of Porter’s statistics in a March 2024 game against the Sacramento Kings. The wager would have paid approximately $1.1 million. Porter played just three minutes before leaving the game.

The new restrictions also prohibit bets on the winner of the opening tip, whether players will miss specific shots, and under bets on players expected to play fewer than 12 minutes a given game.

“There’s a balance between ensuring that we are removing problematic bet types but also ensuring that we don’t just move activity into the illegal market,” NBA executive vice president Scott Kaufman-Ross told ESPN. He said the league believes its new restrictions strike the right balance.

Federal authorities have also accused former Miami Heat guard Terry Rozier of conspiring with associates to profit from nonpublic information about his performance in a March 2023 game, when he played for the Charlotte Hornets. Prosecutors allege Rozier left after approximately nine minutes, allowing bettors to capitalize on wagers involving his statistical unders. Rozier has pleaded not guilty and denied wrongdoing.

Kaufman-Ross said the Porter and Rozier cases helped inform the league’s decision to prohibit parlays involving multiple unders on the same player. The league also directed sportsbooks to stop offering alternate under lines with larger potential payouts.

The NBA had previously restricted certain wagers involving players on two-way contracts after the Porter scandal came to light. Other existing restrictions cover bets involving turnovers, fouls, and missed free throws.

The latest rules will also extend to WNBA games beginning in 2027, according to the Associated Press.

A separate memo requires players, coaches, and training staffs to attend in-person training on the league’s sports betting rules. Former NFL player and retired FBI agent Charles Tillman will lead the sessions, according to the memo.

The league also told teams it has developed an artificial intelligence-based monitoring platform to detect unusual betting activity by analyzing injury reports, social media, and wagering patterns, according to the AP.

To address harassment and threats from bettors, the NBA will offer players an optional service that identifies and helps remove abusive social media messages, while a new text-message hotline will allow harassment and threats to be reported securely. 

DraftKings said it supports the league’s efforts, adding that some of the restrictions already reflect its practices. FanDuel said it remains committed to a regulated market that roots out abuses.

Giamanco was driving home for his lunch break when he heard gunshots and saw the gunman enter the school, his brother said. Despite not being there to pick up his children, Giamanco, who was carrying a concealed firearm, went inside and shot the gunman.

Giamanco’s brother described him as a hero, but said Giamanco has struggled with the thought that he could not save more children. Four people, including three children, were killed by the gunman. The three children killed were ages 5, 8, and 11.

Of those injured, a 7-year-old victim was airlifted from St. Charles Bend to Doernbecher Children’s Hospital in Portland Thursday night, sources close to the situation informed The Daily Wire. The young victim received emergency surgery after being shot in the face.

The Daily Wire reached out to Giamanco for comment.

This is a breaking story. Stay with The Daily Wire for updates.

The 71-year-old pontiff “underwent blood tests and a chest X-ray this morning, which confirmed the steady improvement in his overall condition,” the Vatican said in a statement prepared by the popeʼs personal physician, Luigi Carbone. The surgeon who operated, Stefano Margaritora, added that he will continue with respiratory physiotherapy sessions and that his recovery allows him “to carry out normal daily activities entirely independently.”

New photos released by the Holy See Press Office showed the pontiff celebrating Mass during which he personally distributed Holy Communion in a makeshift chapel room on the 10th floor at Gemelli Hospital in Rome. Members of the hospital’s medical and nursing staff were also in attendance, along with members of the Vatican City State Gendarmerie Corps, according to the Vatican.

Credit: Vatican Media

“In his homily, the pope thanked all healthcare personnel — doctors, nurses, and nursing assistants — for the work they carry out every day caring for the sick and for those in fragile conditions, and in particular for everything they have done and continue to do for him,” the Holy See Press Office said.

The pope was diagnosed with lung cancer on Tuesday following an operation to remove a “localized” nodule, in which surgeons removed the lower lobe of the pope’s right lung. Examinations after the procedure confirmed the diagnosis of lung adenocarcinoma, a type of non-small cell lung cancer, which was the suspected result from tests conducted beforehand. The Vatican has not shared whether the pope will need any further treatment, or if the cancer has spread.

All audiences until October 20 remain canceled, and he is expected to stay in the hospital to recover for one week.

The pope is scheduled to make his first public appearance since the operation on Sunday to pray the Angelus, according to the Vatican. It is unclear whether it will be from the hospital or the Vatican.

The key word in Franklin’s challenge was you. He was 81 at the time. He knew the fate of the new American republic would rest in the hands of future generations. For more than two centuries since, “we the people” have answered Franklin’s challenge by exercising our rights, duties, and sovereign authority as American citizens.

Unfortunately, today, fewer Americans understand their rights, duties, and authority than ever before. In fact, our civics ignorance has reached the level of a national crisis.

A 2018 survey found that only 36% of American adults could pass the multiple-choice citizenship test the United States administers to naturalizing immigrants. Only 13%, for instance, knew when the Constitution was ratified, and only 24% knew why we fought the British in the Revolutionary War. Worse still, while three-quarters of seniors passed the exam, 81% of Americans under 45 failed.

A study six years later confirmed that the generational knowledge gap was growing. In 2024, 70% of surveyed adults failed a basic civic literacy quiz. Only one-quarter of respondents felt “very confident” they could explain our system of government. One-third of U.S. adults did not even know we have three branches of government!

The most recent data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the Nation’s Report Card, track the same downward trend. In 2022, only 22% of U.S. eighth graders scored at or above proficient in civics, while 31% scored below the basic level for their grade. The gap doesn’t disappear in college, either. A 2024 survey of undergraduates found that 60% of them did not know the term lengths for members of Congress.

This is more than an embarrassing factoid or just another symptom of the broken U.S. education system. America’s unique system of government — indeed, our entire way of life — depends on citizen sovereignty and democratic accountability.

If American citizens don’t understand how our Constitution works or our role in its functioning, the problem is not so much that the government will stop working. The problem is that the government will stop working for us. It will work instead for special interests, such as the teachers unions, that stand to benefit politically and financially from widespread civics ignorance. They certainly won’t solve this problem. “We the people” must. 

Toward that end, this month the American Cornerstone Institute’s Little Patriots program launched a national Civics Bee. Students in kindergarten through fifth grade from across the country will participate by answering questions about America’s founding, Constitution, and government. The competition will culminate in national finals in Washington, D.C., in April. Winners will have the chance to take home prizes, including a grand total of $39,000 in award money.

The Little Patriots Civics Bee will give young Americans an incentive to learn how our country works and what citizenship requires of them. It will prepare them to help preserve the institutions of our republic now and in the future.

When the United States declared our independence 250 years ago, European royals and aristocrats laughed when they heard we would be a democracy. They scoffed at the idea that ordinary people could govern themselves, let alone a large, diverse nation. But for 250 years, we proved them wrong — so wrong that today, all those Old World monarchies that mocked our Founding Fathers have been replaced with democracies of their own.

But democracies don’t perpetuate themselves automatically. They require engaged, responsible citizens to protect them day to day and generation to generation. The U.S. Constitution, in particular, with its federalism, separation of powers, and checks and balances, must be studied and understood to be sustained.

U.S. citizenship is the greatest civic blessing any people has ever enjoyed. Our Constitution protects our God-given rights and affords us greater justice, security, and opportunity than any other system of government. But freedom isn’t free. It requires “we the people” to learn and practice the habits of republican citizenship and pass them on to our children.

Thanks to efforts such as the Little Patriots Civics Bee, young Americans will not only be able to learn about the greatest Constitution in the world; they’ll be able to teach the rest of us about it, too.

***

Dr. Benjamin S. Carson Sr. is founder and chairman of the American Cornerstone Institute. He previously served as the 17th secretary of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

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.

In a harrowing vision of violence, the half-sister of Democrat Michigan Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed openly imagined a future October 7-style massacre of Jews in her novel detailing the “Final Intifada.” The novel is apparently a chilling fantasy that emerges alongside resurfaced posts where she explicitly outlined her family’s deep ties to the Muslim Brotherhood.

So why is Albanese’s left-wing government conducting a witch hunt back home against Christian supporters of their political opponents?

Albanese’s Labor Party has been hounding members of the Plymouth Brethren Christian Church (PBCC) — a small but mainstream fellowship with 55,000 members worldwide, including 7,000 in North America — over their political activity during Australia’s 2025 national elections. 

His Labor Party is weaponizing a post-election committee to target the Church, claiming that some of its members’ support of Labor’s opponents in 2025 equates to a grand conspiracy on the part of the Church itself.

The committee has called members of Plymouth Brethren Christian Church to appear more than twice as often as officials from the Australian Electoral Commission, the organization that runs the entire election. The committee has now gone as far as to threaten to subpoena PBCC leadership, including the church’s senior leader, Mr. Bruce Hales.

According to one conservative Australian Member of Parliament, this is simply a “hyper-partisan witch-hunt” against a Christian church.

With Democrats potentially poised to make significant gains in November’s midterm elections, America cannot afford to allow its purported allies to establish a precedent of anti-Christian lawfare by trampling upon the religious liberty that transcends all nations and peoples.

According to PBCC’s testimony, Mr. Hales, an unpaid member of the church, had nothing to do with the election. Based on all available evidence, he did not campaign, donate, or volunteer for a single candidate; he did not ask, counsel, or direct his flock to do a single thing in the election. So what reason would Albanese have to drag him before a committee?

In the words of Mr. Hales, “There has been considerable misinformation spread by the press, but I am completely confident that truth will prevail and God’s rights in upholding government will be upheld.” I pray, on behalf of the Church the world over, that he is right!

But in the meantime, this harassment campaign plays out against a global backdrop of surging anti-Christian bigotry. One in seven Christians faces discrimination because of their faith. Christians were targeted by governments and individuals in 165 of 198 countries in 2023, more than any other religious group.

President Trump, who recently nominated Cissie Graham Lynch, Reverend Franklin Graham’s daughter, as the U.S. Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom, has vowed to stamp this out, telling the United Nations that, “Christians are being persecuted all over the world,” and calling “the violent persecution of Christians” a “barbaric evil” earlier this year.

But despite President Trump’s stance, the forces behind this vicious Australian campaign can be found on American soil. If the Democrats take back the House or Senate in November, they will hold the reins of the same kind of committees and political weaponry being raised against Australia’s Christians.

Threats to liberty know no borders, and Albanese’s anti-Christian leftists have ambitions beyond their shores. At the United Nations General Assembly in September, Albanese launched Australia’s campaign for a seat on the U.N.’s Security Council in 2029 — the same U.N. whose Declaration of Human Rights enshrines the right to freedom of thought, conscience, and religion.

Albanese and his liberals, it appears, want to sit shoulder-to-shoulder with America as leaders of the free world, a world increasingly beset by anti-Christian animus that they themselves are fueling.

As Christians, we must not look away from the plight of our fellow faithful, especially not in a moment as critical and precarious as the one we face today. As Plymouth Brethren’s spokesperson Lloyd Grimshaw said in his opening statement to the Committee, “If religious discrimination such as what we witnessed in the 2025 election is allowed to start with my Church, it certainly won’t end with my Church.”

As American Christians, we need to take heed of this cautionary tale from the other side of the world.

***

Lucas Miles is Vice President of Faith for Turning Point USA.

* * * * *

When the Brewers secured the final out in Game 4 of the NLCS on Thursday to complete a shocking sweep of the two-time defending champion Dodgers, it was literally a generational event.

The 27th out that punched Milwaukee’s ticket to the World Series came 43 years, 11 months and 26 days since it last played in the Fall Classic. That was a Game 7 loss to the Cardinals in 1982. None of the current Brewers had been born, and neither had many of their current fans. But now, both can revel in a moment that took forever to get here, but is certainly worth the wait.

YOUR MILWAUKEE BREWERS ARE HEADING TO THE WORLD SERIES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! https://t.co/9wrVOIy54p

— Milwaukee Brewers (@Brewers) October 16, 2026

The chase for the first championship in franchise history begins Oct. 23 in Game 1 at American Family Field. You’ll have to forgive the city of Milwaukee if people there have forgotten what it’s like.

The last time they hosted a World Series game, Ronald Reagan was a first-term president, “E.T.” was the top movie at the box office and a gallon of gas was $1.26.

There are also pretty interesting differences — and ironies — between the current Milwaukee team and the one 44 years its senior.

The ’82 Brewers featured five future Hall of Famers in Robin Yount, Paul Molitor, Ted Simmons, Don Sutton and Rollie Fingers, and were collectively known as “Harvey’s Wallbangers,” a nod to manager Harvey Kuenn and the team’s propensity to crush dingers. They led the majors with 216 homers and a .790 OPS, and far outscored every other team on their way to an MLB-best 95 wins. They were very much a 2026 type of team.

The actual 2026 Brewers don’t have any household names (yet), but they do have plenty of talent. With NLCS MVP Jake Bauers (26 homers, .874 OPS), Jackson Chourio (25 homers, .837 OPS), William Contreras (1.157 OPS this postseason) and others, they present an annoyingly tenacious lineup that’s closer to something out of 1982.

They had an MLB-best .341 on-base percentage and more hits than anyone else (1,422). They take walks. They’re patient. They bunt. They keep the line moving and wear opponents out.

But they can slug, too, as they demonstrated by out-homering the Dodgers 7-1 over the four games of the NLCS. Still, their 154 regular-season homers ranked as MLB’s second-lowest total, which isn’t supposed to be consistent with winning these days. But they still scored more runs than all but one MLB team (Cubs), which illustrates the thorough nature of their offensive attack. It certainly helps that they had the second-lowest ERA in baseball (3.51), led by NL Cy Young frontrunner Jacob Misiorowski and his MLB-best 1.80 ERA.

It’s not quite accurate to call the 2026 Brewers a throwback team, but they at least pay homage. They’re a multi-faceted bunch, which is why they compiled an MLB-best 103 wins this season before going 7-1 through the first two rounds of the postseason.

GARRETT MITCHELL!

THE BREWERS HAVE COME ALL THE WAY BACK TO TAKE THE LEAD! https://t.co/dOx9zZUHT7

— MLB (@MLB) October 16, 2026

Spicy matchup awaits

The Brewers are a unique kind of juggernaut, one that did away with the supposedly unstoppable Dodgers rather easily and offers Milwaukee its best chance to be the last team standing for the first time ever. For that reason, the Brewers and their fans won’t love the seven-day wait between the NLCS and Game 1 of the World Series.

But at least they’ll have something to do: They can all watch the rest of the ALCS to see whether the Rays or Guardians will stand between them and the Commissioner’s Trophy.

Either team will present the Brewers with the same kind of challenge they pose to everyone else, that throwback-y style of play that can just as easily beat you with homers or a barrage of walks, singles and a well-time double down the line. It has the potential to be one of the more entertaining World Series in recent memory, so get ready for a fun ride.

The calendar says 2026, but the Brewers are about to party like it’s 1982 — just with a different ending in mind.

The former congresswoman glanced down at the paper for several seconds at a time while answering early questions at Thursday night’s “Debate for the State” in Anchorage.

After Peltola again appeared to read from her notes, Sullivan asked the moderators, “We weren’t supposed to get these questions beforehand, were we?”

“No, sir,” replied Alaska’s News Source reporter Wil Courtney. “Absolutely not,” added Alaska Public Media chief editor Lori Townsend.

“Okay, I’m just watching my opponent,” Sullivan replied, glancing over at Peltola after she read off a card during her answer.

Peltola cut in that she was simply better “prepared.”

A National Republican Senatorial Committee official mocked Peltola for apparently relying on talking points written by “Lower 48 handlers.” The Republican Party’s research arm posted a clip of her looking at her notes while discussing Alaska’s fishing industry.

Sullivan later told reporters that he believed them when they said no one saw the questions in advance.

“I’m not blaming you guys,” he said.

Presidential debates typically ban prepared notes and give candidates only blank paper and a pen. State and local debates are often looser. Alaska Public Media has not publicly posted its policy on notes.

Even where notes are permitted, the unwritten rule is to glance, not read. Checking a statistic or bill name is fine. Reading answers word for word tends to suggest a candidate doesn’t know the material, and answers that seem to anticipate questions can raise suspicions of a leak.

Those suspicions have a real history behind them. In 2016, hacked emails published by WikiLeaks showed that Donna Brazile, then a CNN contributor and later DNC chair, slipped the Clinton campaign advance word of questions during the Democratic primary.

The day before a March 2016 CNN debate in Flint, Michigan, Brazile emailed Clinton aides that a question would come from a woman with a rash. A Flint mother then asked about the water crisis. Brazile also tipped off the campaign about a death penalty question at a CNN town hall.

CNN cut ties with Brazile in October 2016. She later wrote that she would forever regret her decision to tip off the Clinton campaign.

The cue-card dust-up was only one front in a brawl. During the Alaska debate, Sullivan hammered Peltola over a New York Times report that former staffers accused her of angry outbursts. Peltola called the claims “outright fabrications or mass exaggerations,” and moderators threatened to cut the candidates’ microphones if the cross-talk didn’t stop.

The race has already had evidence of chicanery; a second Dan Sullivan, retired Petersburg teacher Dan J. Sullivan, is also on the November ballot after surviving a state effort to remove him. Republicans have accused him of entering the race on behalf of Democrats to confuse voters.

In a June Facebook post, Senator Sullivan said Peltola had been in Petersburg days before the other Sullivan announced, and that a Left-wing political operative helped launch the campaign. Alaska’s Division of Elections disqualified him, ruling that his candidacy had not been filed in “good faith.” Fourteen Republican-controlled states filed an amicus brief backing the division’s authority to remove him. But Superior Court Judge Thomas Matthews ruled the disqualification unconstitutional, writing that the law doesn’t allow removing a candidate who meets the legal qualifications for office.

Boulder County sued the two companies in 2018, seeking damages under Colorado tort law for local costs it blames on global climate change. That sounds narrow. It is not. The Justice Department, in an unusual unsolicited brief urging the Court to side with the companies, put the stakes plainly: “Can one city wield one State’s law to dictate how the rest of the world must address a global problem with global effects? The Constitution supplies the answer: Absolutely not.” The brief noted Boulder’s is one of roughly 60 similar suits filed by cities, counties, and states nationwide, all effectively on hold awaiting this ruling.

The dollar figures involved are not small. New York’s Climate Superfund Act, before a federal judge struck it down this past September, sought $75 billion from energy producers. Multnomah County, Oregon, is seeking more than $51 billion in a single suit. Add up even a handful of the roughly 60 pending cases and you are talking about hundreds of billions of dollars in potential liability, and that money does not come out of a shareholder’s pocket. It gets priced into the product, the same way any cost of doing business does. When a company defends against dozens of lawsuits in dozens of courtrooms for years, that legal exposure becomes a line item, and companies pass it to customers long before any jury reaches a verdict.

That concern was not hypothetical to the justices on Monday. Justice Brett Kavanaugh pressed Boulder’s lawyer on what happens if these lawsuits multiply, suggesting that enough of them could bankrupt defendants and noting that any manufacturer, any business, could face similar liability theories. He later asked whether the Court’s longstanding concern about judges making ad hoc climate policy should apply just as much to a six-person state jury in Boulder.

Here is what should worry people who have never set foot near a drilling rig: natural gas generates roughly 40% of all electricity in this country, more than any other fuel source, according to the federal government’s own Energy Information Administration. A liability regime built to punish oil and gas producers does not stay confined to gasoline. It runs straight through the fuel that keeps the lights on in Ohio, Georgia, Arizona, and everywhere else, regardless of how any of those states voted in the last election.

Many people also miss a national security angle. Former Attorney General Bill Barr has pointed out that this liability theory only reaches investor-owned American companies. State-owned oil producers in China and Russia are functionally untouchable in a Colorado courtroom. So the practical effect of a plaintiff’s win is not less oil and gas production worldwide; it is the same production shifted toward less transparent, state-controlled competitors who answer to no shareholders, no American courts, and often looser environmental standards than the companies being sued. Americans would pay more for energy and get, if anything, a dirtier global supply chain in return.

Then there are the jobs. The oil and natural gas industry supports 10.6 million jobs nationwide and contributes roughly $2.1 trillion to the American economy, spread across Texas, Pennsylvania, Wyoming, New Mexico, Louisiana, and North Dakota, among others. Litigation risk hits hardest exactly where investment decisions get made first: the drilling programs, pipeline projects, and LNG terminals that take a decade to plan and pay for. Communities like Midland and Odessa, Texas, or Williston, North Dakota, do not have a diversified economy to fall back on if that capital goes elsewhere. When investment slows, the roughneck, the pipeline welder, and the diner that serves them feel it first, not the plaintiffs’ law firms collecting a contingency fee.

Which brings up a detail worth knowing before you assume this is only about environmental stewardship: many of the plaintiff governments have their own budget problems. Boulder itself needs to cut $13.2 million from its 2027 budget. Washington, D.C. faces a $1.5 billion revenue shortfall. San Francisco is staring at a $936 million two-year deficit, and Baltimore, $64.4 million. Climate liability lawsuits have become an attractive, off-budget way for cash-strapped city halls to go looking for someone else’s money, and energy consumers everywhere are the ones being asked to cover the gap.

None of this requires anyone to take a side in the broader climate debate. It only requires recognizing that a damages verdict is a cost, and costs get paid by somebody. Justice Kavanaugh put the problem plainly Monday when he asked whether decisions of this magnitude should be left to a six-person state jury in Boulder. The Supreme Court now has to answer that question. Americans who fill a gas tank or pay a power bill should not be left financing national climate policy imposed piecemeal by juries in counties they have never visited through lawsuits they never knew existed.

***

Jason Isaac is founder and CEO of American Energy Institute and a former Texas state representative.

But there is recent precedent for deporting someone with seemingly parallel circumstances, even after they’d been in the country far longer than Omar.

In 2018, the Trump administration removed a 95-year old Nazi guard who entered the United States in 1949 by claiming to be an ordinary Polish farmer. Jakiw Palij was in reality a member of the SS who worked at a labor camp in Poland and was deported to Germany by Trump’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

Similar was done in the cases of 66 other Nazis. The United States welcomed more refugees fleeing Nazi persecution than any other country, but these Nazis sneaked in by hiding the fact that they were persecutors, not the persecuted.

The United States provided refuge to Somalis after the havoc wreaked by communist despot Mohamed Siad Barre, whose army committed a genocide of up to 200,000 members of a sect within Somalia known as the Isaaq.

But Omar’s family is not Isaaq. Quite the opposite: her father, Nur Omar Mohamed, was a colonel in Barre’s army. As the family of a high-ranking regime official, as a young girl she lived in a guarded compound, waited on by servants including a chauffeur.

Omar’s father allegedly told immigration officials he was an “educator,” changing his name to avoid detection. He died in 2020. A pro-Omar obituary mentions nothing about any teaching career, describing him as an “esteemed senior officer in the Somali National Army” who was trained by the Soviets and was “affluent.”

If all that is true, the Omar family’s admission into the United States would be similar to Nazis taking advantage of refugee programs for their victims.

The timeline supports it. The family didn’t leave Somalia until Barre was deposed and exiled in 1991. They weren’t fleeing his regime – they left because Somalis rose up against Barre’s oppression and drove him and his henchmen out.

Omar has said that Donald Trump has committed atrocities worse than any she saw in Somalia. That’s because she wasn’t one of the victims of her father’s boss.

Omar has said the raid on her home amounts to political persecution, but ironically, Barre passed a law allowing national security forces to indefinitely detain anyone who criticized the government, with no trial.

Theo Wold, a deputy assistant to Trump in his first term, responded to Omar’s statement, saying the Trump administration has a legitimate reason to look into the Democrat’s immigration status.

“I was involved in deporting one of the last living Nazi SS officers back to Germany, who had lied on his immigration forms to come to America all the way back in 1945. If any foreign-born person fraudulently obtained immigration status in America, they can have it reviewed at any time – up to and including a revocation of status and denaturalization of citizenship,” Wold said.

Nazi guard Jakiw Palij

Palij, the Nazi guard, moved to the United States in 1949 and gained citizenship in 1957. His citizenship was revoked in 2003 after authorities discovered the truth. A judge ordered his removal, but there was a lengthy delay because Germany, Poland, and Ukraine (which now controls the territory where he lived) didn’t want to take him, all claiming one of the other countries should.

Decades passed, with his neighbors in Queens making life as miserable as possible for him – unlike the reaction Democrats have given Omar.

Then came Trump, who ramped up the pressure on Germany, which finally relented.

“The US administration, senators, members of Congress and representatives of Jewish communities in the US stress that people who have served in the rogue regime of the Nazis should not be able to spend their twilight years unchallenged in the country of their choice, the US,” Germany’s foreign ministry said.

Germany conceded that it was a “moral obligation” to take him , saying “The guilt of those who carried out these crimes in Germany’s name will never elapse.”

Trump’s press secretary at the time, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, praised Trump for deporting the Nazi.

“For many years a Nazi forced labor camp guard had been living in NY — a terrible injustice. Past administration failed to deport him,” Huckabee Sanders said, adding that Trump “got the job done!”

“You are going to see some crazy stuff tonight,” the world’s richest man said as he walked onstage at SpaceX’s rocket test site in McGregor, Texas, and greeted the audience. Musk explained that what they were about to see would be so unbelievable that their live presence was required to prove the demonstration wasn’t generated by artificial intelligence.

“We need an audience to prove that it’s not AI or SI,” Musk said, referring to the new term “super intelligence.” “You’re going to see what happens when you see a collaboration of the world’s best car company and the world’s best rocket company.” 

After a 20-second countdown, the new Tesla Roadster was revealed at the bottom of a curved ramp. The car climbed the ramp and drove upside down, using a fan underneath the vehicle to hold it against the surface. At the top, the Roadster flipped over and used thrusters to bring itself back to the ground.

SpaceX contributed 10 thrusters to the car. Together with the fan under the car, the thrusters let the car hover, spin and flip over. Musk said that while going upside down wouldn’t be necessary for the average driver, the car’s intense suction system allows it to “defy physics” on the road as it comes to a stop and makes sharp turns. 

Musk then showed the audience just how fast the car could go. In the demonstration, the Roadster went from zero to 60 mph in less than one second. Tesla says the car can reach speeds above 230 mph, and Musk said he eventually wants it to reach half the speed of sound, roughly 380 mph.

Musk also said the Roadster will be driven by a human, not by Tesla’s self-driving software. Musk wants the Roadster to be the only manually driven car Tesla makes, and the company touted the vehicle as “the last best driver’s car.”

Musk originally promised the second-generation Tesla Roadster in 2017, sharing a video on X of a flying car.

“The new Roadster will actually do something like this,” he said at the time.

Nearly a decade after his promise, Musk told Thursday’s audience that production would begin in 2028. He laughed as he promised them that, this time, the production would actually happen as the Roadster has had several delays over the past nine years. 

Despite members of the audience yelling out, “How much?” Musk and other executives did not share a price for the new car. However, Tesla’s reservation page offered customers a “performance” version of the vehicle that requires a $50,000 deposit and a “Thrust” version of the vehicle that requires a $250,000 deposit. The “rocket” version of the car is listed as “invite only.” 

The original essay, “24 Hours Inside the Adult Toy Store Where Kelly Clarkson Tried to Buy a Fake Bird,” can be read here.

***

“This isn’t about gossip, it’s about asymmetric social warfare,” a shopkeeper at Art of Play, in Brooklyn, tells me before going back to helping people play with various adult toys.

It’s Tuesday night at the “curiosity shop” on the border of Cobble Hill and Brooklyn Heights, one block from a $39,500/year Montessori preschool that recently went viral for teachers’ Issey Miyake-inspired uniforms.

The store isn’t consistently mobbed, but every hour or so it’s briefly crowded with press. (I was there when a German influencer (?) started filming a video, waving around massive prop dollar bills.) Neighbors stop by to show solidarity (“I’ve always loved you guys” and “I think Kelly was out of line!”). Workers from the Afghan bakery around the corner come through with free baked goods in a pie box. The owners of Buzzy, a neighborhood cannabis dispensary, drop off some free weed stuff.

We are being “literally attacked,” a store manager tells a patron.

Let me tell you why I’m spending an otherwise normal Tuesday evening at Art of Play. Saturday, Kelly Clarkson, the Grammy-winning popstar and former talk show host, tweeted to her 8.8 million followers that the store treated her like she was poor. The store then explained, on Instagram, that Clarkson wanted to buy “Molly,” a “one-of-a-kind singing and dancing bird” that is “not for sale.” Clarkson countered with screenshots of a $15,000 price tag, alleging she was told by a shopkeeper, in a “condescending tone,” that the bird “is for sale but it costs $15,000, so if you’d like me to find something comparable for you, I can.”

Tuesday, co-owner Adam Rubin told TMZ the celebrity “used her platform to squash us like a bug”; he says they’ve received death threats and that neighbors have been doxxed. “Kelly Clarkson has put us in danger,” Rubin told New York Magazine.

When I was hanging out in the store near closing — just me, one of the co-owners (a professional magician, obviously), and a manager, Hal — I was told what happened Saturday, from their perspective.

Clarkson walked into the store wearing a hat, a backpack, a yellow shirt, and loose jeans. None of them recognized her. She browsed for a minute, picked up a $198 hand-stained glass “flower kaleidoscope” (I messed with it; it’s a pleasingly heavy flat brass kaleidosdope) and a $240 zoetrope. She walked over to Molly, the crank-operated bird, and asked to buy it, pointing to its $15,000 price tag; the interaction was “polite,” I’m told.

Regarding whether it was “for sale”: “It’s like going into a furniture store and asking to buy a couch,” Adam said. They don’t give you that couch; it’s for display only. The owners tried to explain this to Clarkson. They told her she could buy a $2,000 wooden bird, instead. They seemed confused by her outburst.

Now, the bird is for sale — for $15 million.

“We added a few zeros,” the manager says. “It’s a piece of art and has changed value.” (They want to capitalize on the attention.)

Wednesday, Adam gestures to the bird: “If some crypto bro comes in and wants to buy this,” he explains, he’ll sell it. (He’d probably sell it to Kelly, too. If she’ll buy it.) Then, he’ll give every employee $15,000, pay the bird’s craftsman $1 million, and build an elaborate glass display for mechanical toys — with a “NOT FOR SALE” sign on top.

A woman comes in and plays with toys for 30 minutes, then reveals herself to be a reporter from The New York Times; two of her coworkers walk in suddenly. They want the CCTV footage of Kelly Clarkson trying to buy the bird, but Adam has already given it to Pablo Torre Finds Out (a Times podcast). Adam is confused. Don’t you guys talk to each other? he asks the Times contingent, before explaining that he’s not doing any more press.

“The Daily Mail is trying to pay me off,” he says.

(Later, one of the New York Times boys becomes obsessed with solving a wood-and-metal game where you have to guide a ball up a ramp. He tries to win for at least an hour and fails.)

A People reporter walks in to take a picture of Molly. Store owners, who seem not to know who is press and who’s not, continue to redirect everyone’s attention to the toys. “Feel free to pick things up and play with them,” the owner keeps saying. (In between all this, I’m trying to solve a $198 Japanese wooden “egg” puzzle that supposedly cracks (?), and various employees come over whispering hints, like: pretend it’s a real egg.)

A customer asks the manager if he thinks SNL will cover the Kelly vs. Bird Store saga this weekend; sadly, Hal says, SNL is on a two-week break. He’s researched this.

But if they were filming? “Sarah Sherman would play Molly,” he says.

Several people ask if sales are up. “This is busy for a Wednesday!” Adam replies, every time. An employee accidentally refers to people in the store as “fans” and corrects himself: “customers.” Later, I’m told Art of Play’s magic shows, which take place Wednesday through Saturday nights in a “hidden theater” within the shop (employees keep popping out of a bookshelf; I think the theater is behind the bookshelf), are sold out through the end of October. Tickets are $200 for the front row and $125 for rows two, three, and four; the theater seats 26 people. So, Art of Play is making roughly $20,000 to $26,000 per week of sold out shows.

One of the identical twin magician co-owners — Dan and Dave Buck, 40-something blonde guys from NorCal who reportedly made over $2 million selling DVDs of magic tricks — tells me he traveled to Brooklyn specifically to monitor the store in the wake of the scandal.

“Our neighbors are scared,” Adam says. Apparently, someone wished terminal cancer on a neighbor’s cat, Enzo (as the neighbor reported on Substack).

An annoyingly loud ambulance goes by. Adam, hand in the air: “If Mamdani comes, the only thing I’m asking is for a noise ordinance like in Japan, where nothing above a certain decibel is permitted.” (Japan’s “Noise Regulation Act” limits sounds over 55 decibels in residential areas.)

Adam is carrying a mug, reading the children’s book he wrote, and sells, about a boy who invents a “special robot sauce” (it turns people into robots) to a TV reporter who buys it; a local walks in and buys a wooden Jeff Koons-esque balloon dog sculpture for ~$135.

But back to Molly: Where did this ~five-inch bird that costs as much as a private jet… come from? And why does the store care so much about… “her”?

Dave, one of the twin magicians, tells me he bought Molly 15 years ago; the automaton (reminder: crank-operated bird) holds particular significance for magicians like him. Harry Houdini, the father of magic, he tells me, took his name from an eighteenth-century French automaton maker named “Houdin.” Automatons and magic are intertwined, he says. But Art of Play employees don’t teach magic in the store, Dave explains, because “in a world where everyone has to know everything,” he says, people need “one last bastion” of wonder and mystery.

None of us know the exact nature of the dispute on Saturday. But it seems obvious some sort of culture clash went down: Kelly, a native Texan, dressed kind of homeless, did not take well to Brooklynites’ possibly condescending (?) and maybe completely unintended implication that she is poor. (Clarkson is worth at least $45 million.) Clarkson is America’s first Idol. She has a slight southern twang. She is heartland-coded, Americana-coded, post-9/11 coded. (In 2011 she was a Republican; she supported Ron Paul before voting for Obama.) The store, on the other hand, is in a neighborhood that swung ~71% for Mamdani. Shopkeepers were talking about turning this drama into “positive social change.” They sell wood and metal toys to some of the richest people in New York City. (Tuesday night, neighbors were gossipping about Dua Lipa moving in around the corner.)

The store says Clarkson is punching down, “squashing” a small business “like a bug.” Half the country thinks she’s punching up. Where you fall depends on your politics, i.e. your memeplex.

Right before I leave, after finally solving the Japanese egg thing (you whack it against your hand and it opens…), an employee of some sort walks in wearing a suit. The manager pulls him aside, explaining that he (the manager) intentionally dressed down so as not to (I’m paraphrasing) come across as an out-of-touch elite Brooklyn hipster. The implication is that maybe it would be better not to wear a suit to this store.

“Optics are important,” the manager says.

***

Harris Sockel is lead editor at Pirate Wires.

I can only begin to imagine how hard that decision was. The girls had to know they were thrusting themselves into the spotlight on one of the most contentious issues of our time. They were taking a quiet but powerful stand in defense of reality, which would inevitably bring vilification on the most public stage.

They walked off the course because a junior named Logan Mihailoff — who finished 76th in a boys’ junior-varsity race on September 5 with a time of 23:10 — switched to the girls’ team a few weeks later. By September 26, he was second out of 195 in a girls’ race. Days after that, he won a girls’ varsity dual.

On October 10, he ran an 18:36 personal best at the Nike Hole in the Wall XC Invitational and placed in the top third of an elite women’s field. And on the day the girls walked off the course in protest, he finished second.

No amount of “extra training” explains a mid- to lower-pack boy becoming a top-of-the-pack girl in a matter of weeks. Only male puberty explains it.

But this was never just about a race. And it isn’t just about sports.

Does he change in the girls’ locker room? How far does the charade of him being a girl go? Are the girls being told they must give up their privacy and fairness on the course?

The adults in charge are treating the boy’s feelings as more important than the girls’ rights.

Now girls are leaving the team, and others are forfeiting races to make it clear that they won’t pretend he’s a girl.

I keep asking the same question: what are this boy’s parents thinking? How can they watch their son take podium spots from girls and feel any sense of pride? They are teaching him that the truth about his body is a choice, that female categories exist for his use, and that other people’s daughters exist to validate him. They are teaching him that taking what doesn’t belong to him is okay as long as he really wants it. That is not kindness. It is disgraceful parenting.

The parents of the Camas girls who walked have stood with them. But the rest of the country is watching teenage girls do the work adults refuse to do. Whether it is out of cowardice or complacency is unclear. But it is unacceptable. And I am angry about it.

I was an elite gymnast as a child, and I was raised in a culture of coaching abuse.

Parents, governing body officials, judges, and gym employees looked the other way while coaches physically and emotionally abused athletes in plain sight.

When I was heading to Russia for a major international competition in 1986, my own coaches (abusers in their own right) told me to just stay away from him outside the gym; don’t let him in your room. They were referring to the national team coach, Don Peters. The not-so-subtle implication from my coaches and governing body officials was: he’s a great coach. But you need to be careful. And we wouldn’t want to say anything untoward that might ruin his stellar reputation.

I was the first U.S. National Team gymnast to blow the whistle on rampant abuse in the sport in my 2008 book, “Chalked Up.” I wrote it because I didn’t want another child to go through what I had gone through.

The cowardice from adults when they refuse to stand up for young girls both baffles and enrages me. I’ll never sit by and wait for someone else to go first. That attitude is why it took me two decades to recover from my time in gymnastics, despite all of my successes. Because adults refused to do the right thing.

These Camas girls threw themselves into the spotlight where they will inevitably be harassed and bullied and threatened — because the adults would not take a stand first. These girls know the cost coming their way — friends who distance themselves or go silent, name-calling, and outright threats. And these girls did it anyway. They refused to pretend that boy is a girl. Because the truth matters. They matter.

When adults refuse to take that stand, they tell those girls they don’t matter enough. That the boy matters more, so just step aside and be quiet.

My question to parents across the country: how do you watch that and stay quiet? How do you see girls cry after refusing to race a boy and decide your own daughter can handle it? Should handle it! Should be willing to step down from the podium.

Fear of being called a bigot is not a parenting strategy. It’s pathetic. And sets a terrible example for children.

Don’t do the right thing if you’re scared people will call you names! Sell kids out if it means you can avoid people being mean to you!

At this point, any parent’s silence on the matter tells a daughter that her opportunities rank below boys’ feelings.

The people still defending this ideology after Camas have to be willfully blind. They watched a boy declare himself a girl and, within weeks, steal places from girls who trained all season.

What is happening here is a choice to prioritize ideology and a young man’s feelings over the rights of girls.

Adults created this. Sport governing bodies and school administrators enforce the rules that let a boy switch categories mid-season and then stand atop the podium as if he did something special. Teachers and coaches tell the girls to be kind and inclusive while the boy takes their spots and their space.

The girls in Camas refused. The rest of us can keep letting teenagers carry this burden alone, or we can say what is true: boys do not belong in girls’ sports or girls’ private spaces. And boys can never become girls.

Washington voters will have a chance to protect girls’ sports on November 3 to draw that line with Initiative 638. Colorado voters will have the same shot if they vote yes on Prop 134. If these initiatives pass, these will be the first blue states to stand up for the protection of girls’ sports. I hope it’s a watershed moment.

The girls walked. Now the adults need to decide whether they will show the same courage or cower and keep letting the kids bear the cost.

***

Jennifer Sey is the CEO of XX-XY Athletics. She is an author, filmmaker, and retired national champion gymnast.

But not every hurtful moment in a middle school hallway is bullying, and treating every unkindness as such can leave our daughters ill-prepared to navigate the important and valuable relationships in front of them.

Girls today find themselves in a confusing social arena, wrestling with unkind behavior and, sometimes, genuine patterns of bullying. The two are not the same thing, and how we help our daughters tell them apart shapes whether they grow up relationally resilient or relationally fragile. Much of what girls experience — and, if we’re honest, participate in — is garden-variety unkindness: gossip, selfishness, pride, a sharp word, a friend group that closes ranks for an afternoon. It’s evidence of something broken and self-centered in all of us, and it’s hurtful. But it doesn’t automatically belong under the bullying umbrella, which we should reserve for a real pattern, not a rough day.

At American Heritage Girls, we’ve spent three decades helping girls build character alongside their mothers and mentors. One of the most useful things we’ve learned is that girls don’t need a label like “bully” or “victim” handed to them nearly as much as they need a structure for evaluating what actually happened and a parent willing to walk through it with them rather than react on their behalf.

This fall, before you decide what happened to your daughter, try asking her these five questions instead.

How long has this been going on? A single sharp comment or one hard day at lunch is different from something that’s been happening for weeks. Bullying is a pattern, not an incident, and your daughter usually knows the difference before you do; she just needs to be asked.

Why do you think it happened? This question does something important: it invites your daughter to extend a charitable assumption toward the other girl before she decides how to respond. It doesn’t excuse cruelty, but it does keep your daughter’s own heart soft in the process.

Did it hurt your feelings, or did it scare you? Hurt feelings deserve comfort and coaching. Fear deserves your quick attention. This single question does more to separate ordinary unkindness from real bullying than almost anything else you can ask.

Is there anything you did that we should talk about, too? Girls are rarely on only one side of a conflict. Asking this isn’t about laying blame; it’s about raising a daughter who is honest enough to examine her own role, whichever side of it she’s on.

What do you need from me, and who else needs to know? Sometimes a daughter needs you simply to listen, and other times she needs you to call a teacher. Following through, and including the right adults, teaches a girl that asking for help is strength, not weakness. It also helps you discern whether this moment calls for compassion or for protection.

These five questions won’t resolve every situation in one conversation, and if what you hear points to real, sustained harm, act on it. Protecting your daughter is never something to talk yourself out of. But for the ordinary friction of girls growing up at school, this framework gives you and your daughter something better than a label. It provides a way to think clearly, respond with grace, and remember the dignity of the girls around her, even the ones who’ve hurt her.

That’s the work of raising a daughter who can tell the difference between a hard day and a real pattern, and who knows she can come to you no matter what the circumstances.

***

Rachael Culpepper is the executive director for American Heritage Girls (AHG), the premier character and leadership development program for girls ages 5 to 18. Rachael has been involved in AHG’s mission to build women of integrity since the ministry’s founding in 1995.

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.

This week, we’re all “fat bears” for that Halloween candy stash, wine that makes you feel like you’re floating, how eating together makes life worth living longer, and why the biggest rock band in history is so serious about having fun.

Creature feature

I have friends from when I worked as an artist in stop motion animation who I know have been designing their Halloween costumes since last Halloween. Unlike the viral “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” look golf influencer Paige Spiranac just debuted, their creations are lovingly handcrafted from head to creepy little toe. I love a brilliantly spooky ensemble, but I have more of the bandwidth for last-minute store-bought snacks. Give me an eyeball hot cocoa bomb and a “Purr-fect” box of chocolates with a Reese’s Peanut Butter Pumpkin on the side.

@nbcnewsA bear in Alaksa broke into a hospital and raided Halloween candy.♬ original sound – nbcnews

Well, I’ve met my spirit animal. We already wrapped up Fat Bear Week, but … once a fat bear, always a fat bear. One very unbothered Alaskan black bear satisfied its sweet tooth by walking straight through the automatic doors of an Anchorage hospital to dig into its stash of donated Halloween candy. New fear unlocked for any future hospital visits, but, hey, I’m not in the business of gatekeeping free snacks. I’m Kramer in “Seinfeld” with a mouthful of complimentary tortilla chips: “Are these free?”

Eating together 

Ina Garten is my personal patron saint of dinner parties, using “good vanilla” and casually tossing around the phrase “how easy is that?” as I burn the cookies. But on a recent episode of her new pod “Happy Hour,” she hosted actor Nathan Lane, who recalled an invitation to dine with legends of filmmaking Carl Reiner and Mel Brooks. Carl and Mel were famous for a 70-year friendship that at one point involved sharing a meal together in front of the TV (complete with little folding trays) at Carl’s Beverly Hills home every night.

When Carl died in 2020, Mel returned to his best friend’s home to eat dinner in front of the TV every night for a year. (I’m not crying; you’re crying.) Their daily routine was featured on an episode of “Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee” when Jerry Seinfeld interviewed Carl and brought takeout back for Carl and Mel from Nate ‘n Al’s (I’m undecided on the hot tongue sandwich Carl requested, but I’d take the chicken-in-a-pot that went to Mel). 

I was so touched by the simple gesture of two friends sharing a meal. Mel is now 100 years old (Carl lived to be 98), but maybe those TV dinners had something to do with their longevity. Research shows that while eating in isolation can lead to sadness and depression, those who eat most meals with someone else (anyone you enjoy!) often live longer. I’ve heard Arthur Brooks say that eating with others strengthens emotional bonds and creates memories. According to him, “The point of food isn’t food. The point of food is life and love.” 

Poppin’ bottles 

With another high-profile heist hitting the headlines this week — this one involved 30,000 bottles of Italian wine worth a cool 5 million euros — I’m once again a little envious of people with the talent for stealing things with a ton of flair. I apparently wasted my time playing soccer when I should have been developing James Bond’s life skills so I’d be on my mastermind friend’s speed dial to jump in on the greatest booze heist in Italian history. Can someone at least tell me where all this absconded vintage is allegedly being stored? I’ll bring the charcuterie.  

 

View this post on Instagram

 

A post shared by Mackenzie L Casey (@mackenzielcasey)

In more wine news, one blend hopes to make your next trip through TSA totally worth the wait. Winemaker Jesse Katz collaborated with United to pop bottles that bring the most flavor at 35,000 feet — where our taste buds typically get a little meh. His solution? Actually blend the wine mid-flight to nail the perfect ratio of cab sauv, malbec, merlot, petit verdot, and cab franc for the latest offering from Aperture Cellars. I’m pretending I’d ever be able to taste the difference between that and my ground-dwelling Bota Box pinot, but it’s about time air travel got an actual upgrade. Please pass those free peanuts with your pinky out.

Footloose and ideology-free

We all have our go-tos when everything in life feels like another lecture. Sports may be the last apolitical(ish) frontier. But locally, I also love my gym community where the laughter flows as we sweat for our lives, as well as a good movie (I just watched Guy Ritchie’s “The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare” on Netflix. Five out of five stars — definitely recommend). Another great escape? Music. And leave it to a few heavy metal bros to keep it that way. 

UNITED STATES: METALLICA SAYS THAT WE ARE HERE COME TO FORGET, NOT TO REMEMBER POLITICS

Sunday, 11th October 2026 https://t.co/QB0Dgdv2O2

— Agraprana Pahlawan (@skynewsagra) October 13, 2026

Currently doing a residency at the Las Vegas Sphere, Metallica frontman James Hetfield took a moment to thank the crowd for investing their time and money to be there and adding a very on-brand message (warning: rock ‘n’ roll language ahead): 

“I just gotta say, Metallica’s not here like some other entertainers to influence you with their bullsh*t, OK? We’re here to forget about all the outside sh*t. Metallica’s agenda is love, energy, and heavy music, baby!” 

Metallica’s not like other bands; it’s a cool band. Kinda makes me want to crank “Enter Sandman” at Costco tomorrow. (I mean, the first line is “Say your prayers,” so it’s family-style metal, right?) What do you do to stay sane amid the chaos? Share it with us in the comments because we could all use a little inner peace. 

Thank you dear readers who defended my use of the “Duck Tape” brand duct tape last week LOL. I’m just here to spark lively conversation (you can email me, too). I also loved the lesson in etymology from the reader who posted: “That map of strange city names lists ‘Nimrod, MN.’ But Nimrod was originally a great hunter/tracker in the book of Genesis. It was Bugs Bunny calling Elmer Fudd that, sarcastically, that made people think of it as an insult or the name of a buffoon.” Language is such an awesome tool to tell a story, wherever that tale may lead. OK, I’m off to bear-proof my candy stash (no one’s skimming my Twix). Enjoy your weekend! — Lauren