His opponent is still unknown, but Republican Steve Hilton narrowly trails Becerra, according to the latest tally. Becerra overtook Hilton in the vote count over the past 24 hours.

With 66% of the votes in on Friday evening, Becerra leads with 26.7% support, ahead of Hilton at 26.4%. Both were ahead of billionaire Democrat Tom Steyer, who was at 21%. Under California’s top-two primary system, candidates from the same party can advance to the general election if they finish in the top two.

On Thursday evening, with 58% of the vote reported, Hilton led Becerra by more than a point, at 27.2%. Becerra was at 25.9%, while Steyer was third with 20.1%.

JUST IN:
Democrat Xavier Becerra officially advances to November’s election for California Governor.

Still waiting on more results to determine who his opponent will be officially. pic.twitter.com/gl7k08SGJp

— Ashley Zavala (@ZavalaA) June 5, 2026

“More than ever, California needs our voices and our values,” Becerrra posted on social media Friday evening. “To all the people and the voters of California, this is your state.”

“We will not be bought. We will not be bullied. And we are never backing down,” he added.

President Donald Trump has commented on California’s lengthy ballot tallying process and accused Democrats of election fraud.

“Look what’s happening in California, the Dumocrats, right before our very eyes, are stealing the vote,” Trump posted on Truth Social on Thursday.

In another post, Trump said, “There’s BIG cheating by the Dumocrats in California. Votes are all tied up. May not be in for weeks. Under investigation by the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Los Angeles. Why the vote counting DELAY???”

Becerra responded to Trump’s accusations, claiming the president is “trying to undermine confidence in our elections because he’s a repeat loser here.”

“Sorry Donald, the voters decide who leads California. Not you,” he added.

Donald Trump lost the 2020 election. He lost California by millions of votes in the 2024 election, and now he’s trying to undermine confidence in our elections because he’s a repeat loser here.

Sorry Donald, the voters decide who leads California. Not you. pic.twitter.com/juhpYvJ0LP

— Xavier Becerra (@XavierBecerra) June 4, 2026

Becerra served 12 terms in Congress and is a former California attorney general. He is considered more of an establishment, moderate Democrat than Steyer. He quickly rose in the polls after former Rep. Eric Swalwell dropped out of the gubernatorial race amid sexual assault accusations.

Delayed results are routine in California because of the state’s extensive vote-by-mail system, signature verification, and procedures for resolving ballot errors.

The final tally of California’s races could take as long as three weeks. Unlike many states that require mail ballots to arrive by Election Day, California accepts ballots that arrive up to 7 days later if postmarked on time. Then, those ballots have up to 7 days to reach a processing center. Counties must verify signatures, count provisional ballots, and allow voters to cure certain ballot defects before results are certified.

Starbuck published research on Wednesday examining Harley-Davidson CEO Artie Starrs, who took over the company in October 2025, roughly a year after Harley-Davidson backed away from DEI policies following significant consumer backlash.

According to Starbuck, Starrs promoted DEI initiatives during previous leadership roles at Topgolf and Pizza Hut and later hired a chief brand officer with a similar background.

Harley-Davidson announced in 2024 that it would scale back several DEI-related initiatives after facing criticism from customers and activists. The company said at the time that it would focus on its core business and customer base.

Starbuck argues that Starrs’ record raises questions about whether the company is truly moving away from those policies.

While Starrs was CEO at Topgolf from 2021 to 2025, the company maintained employee resource groups and public initiatives supporting LGBT causes. Starbuck also highlighted social media posts from Starrs’ time at Pizza Hut that promoted diversity and inclusion efforts. 

Starbuck further pointed to a 2020 educational initiative launched by Pizza Hut and First Book during Starrs’ leadership which The Daily Wire covered at the time. The program included materials on race, racism, privilege, and equity in classrooms.

More recently, Starbuck criticized Starrs’ decision to hire Marcus Fischer as Harley-Davidson’s chief brand officer.

Before joining Harley-Davidson, Fischer served as CEO of advertising agency Carmichael Lynch. Starbuck argued that the agency actively promoted DEI initiatives, LGBT advocacy efforts, and diversity-focused employee programs.

Starbuck reviews several of Fischer’s social media posts, revealing his support for the LGBTQ community, celebrating a diversity achievement for Hilary Clinton, and anticipating DEI conferences such as the National Diversity & Leadership Conference. Fischer responded to an Instagram post asking what Carmichael Lynch was doing to “ally” with the LGBTQ community. He said the company hosted an in-office drag event, raising $12K for the Family Tree Clinic, which “specializes in LGBTQIA+ healthcare access.”

Harley-Davidson disputed suggestions that it is reviving DEI programs.

In a statement responding to Starbuck’s review, the company said its focus remains “getting back to the basics: building great motorcycles, strengthening our network of 500+ U.S. dealers, and supporting a workforce that is proud of the product they put on the road.”

The company also pointed to one of Starrs’ first actions as CEO: restoring Harley-Davidson’s legacy Bar & Shield logo.

At a joint press conference in Columbus, the administration officials announced several steps that are being taken to eliminate fraud in the state.

Forty-nine home health care firms have been suspended (most of them in the buildings highlighted in our stories), and one was raided Thursday morning, Dr. Oz said. He specifically mentioned The Daily Wire’s findings, saying “there’s a road here very close to where we are [with] 288 facilities in one block,” and “no more champagne on private jets.”

The press conference came a day after the House Oversight Committee spotlighted the Daily Wire’s reporting, in which task force chairman Brandon Gill drilled down into the abuse’s connection to refugee communities.

Oz highlighted that connection.

“This is a Mecca for Somalian populations, it’s a hub for the Bhutanese and Nepalese. We were naive to think that practices that are common in other parts of the world wouldn’t follow them here,” he said.

The assistant attorney general for the National Fraud Enforcement Division, Colin McDonald, said that Ohio’s attorney general will announce an $11 million action from the state’s Medicaid fraud control unit, that Ohio’s secretary of state has signed a data-sharing agreement giving investigators access to corporate ownership records, and that State Auditor Keith Faber has applied to have federal fraud investigators detailed to the state.

“To the people of Ohio, if someone offers you a medical perk that sounds too good to be true, it is,” McDonald said. “We are resolved to till every field and turn over every rock to bring [fraudsters] to justice.”

There were numerous announcements of fraud in various fields in the state. Dominick Gerace, U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Ohio, announced a $30 million Medicaid fraud prosecution involving non-existent autism care. He said a home health care company in Columbus was raided Thursday morning, but that he would not be sharing details.

“This task force is going to operate similar to how we operate in the violent crime space, we’re going to inject a sense of urgency,” he said.

David Tuppler, U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Ohio, said five individuals from Ghana have been charged with conspiracy to commit wire fraud and money laundering, involving swindling the elderly.

“They devised a romance scheme to establish trust and then tell stories of vast inheritances and convince the elderly to pay them, using it to buy a mansion in Ghana, a Lamborghini,” he said. Luxury cars that had been seized were on display at the press conference.

Andrew Ferguson, who co-chairs the anti-fraud task force alongside Vice President J.D. Vance, announced that major actions were being taken outside of the state to combat fraud as well. In Hawaii, he announced during the press briefing that the state’s Medicaid fraud control unit was decertified.

He said the federally-funded unit astoundingly “didn’t produce a single indictment of a fraudster from 2021 through 2026,” a near-certain sign that nobody was even looking.

Ferguson pledged a “two-pronged attack on fraudsters: DOJ will put fraudsters in jail, and the agencies will make sure we install safeguards to the money never reaches the fraudsters in the first place.”

Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche’s message was clear.

“This is a good day for Ohio,” Blanche said.

U.S. District Chief Judge John McConnell Jr. ruled that U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services exceeded its legal authority when it halted final decisions on asylum, work permit, green card, and citizenship applications from nationals of dozens of countries across Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East.

The policy was enacted after prosecutors accused Rahmanullah Lakanwal, a 29-year-old Afghan national, of carrying out a deadly shooting in the nation’s capital the day before Thanksgiving.

Prosecutors say Lakanwal drove from Bellingham, Washington, to Washington, D.C., and opened fire on National Guard troops, killing U.S. Army Spc. Sarah Beckstrom, 20, and wounding U.S. Air Force Staff Sgt. Andrew Wolfe, 24. 

Wolfe, who underwent skull reconstruction surgery, is making a slow—but remarkable—recovery.

Lakanwal pleaded not guilty to nine charges, including first-degree murder.

Lakanwal entered the United States during former President Joe Biden’s administration after serving alongside U.S. troops in Afghanistan in a CIA-backed unit, The Daily Wire previously reported. 

After the shooting, President Donald Trump called for the death penalty and signed off on the immigration restrictions, citing national security concerns.

“This order aims to safeguard U.S. citizens from aliens who may seek to commit terrorist acts, pose threats to national security, promote hateful ideologies, or exploit immigration laws for malicious purposes,” the administration said at the time.

In the 135-page opinion issued Friday, McConnell sharply criticized the policy and the government’s implementation of it.  

McConnell said the restrictions “threw the lives of countless immigrants living in the United States into indeterminate legal limbo” and said USCIS exceeded its legal authority, failed to explain its policy changes, and accused USCIS of leaning on “anti-immigrant sentiments.” 

“Over six months later, many of those individuals remain without work, without legal status, and without any meaningful ability to plan for their futures,” Judge McConnell wrote.  “In legal terms, that means USCIS’s actions are contrary to law and arbitrary and capricious.”

Democracy Forward, a legal nonprofit that helped represent the immigration groups behind the lawsuit, celebrated the ruling.

“This ruling reaffirms a basic principle: the federal government cannot shut down lawful immigration pathways or discriminate against people based on where they come from,” Skye Perryman, President and CEO of Democracy Forward, said. 

The decision marks a significant defeat for the White House, which is expected to appeal. 

The Department of Transportation announced the review this week, citing concerns about rider safety and rising crime on the transit system.

“Every American should be disturbed by the horrific crimes we have seen on MARTA in the last month,” Duffy said. “No one should be forced to fear for their safety simply because they choose to ride public transit.”

The investigation was triggered after the May killing of Margaret Swan, who was fatally stabbed while riding a MARTA train.

According to authorities, surveillance video showed 25-five-year-old John Elijah Matthews approach Swan without provocation before stabbing her repeatedly as she attempted to defend herself. Swan died at the scene.

The attack came less than a week after another stabbing at a MARTA station, where a 40-year-old man was injured.

Duffy’s Transportation Department has given MARTA 15 days to submit detailed plans to combat fare evasion, its 2026 and 2027 security budgets, and records of all safety-related funding received from the Department of Homeland Security for its review and analysis. 

Duffy said the administration has already pushed transit agencies in other major cities to strengthen security measures.

According to the Transportation Department, Chicago has increased police patrols, Washington, D.C., has reported a decline in transit crime, Los Angeles has hired a police chief dedicated to transit authority, and Philadelphia has expanded its camera network. 

The push has gained urgency after a string of violent attacks, including the killing of  Debrina Kawam, who was set on fire aboard a New York City subway train in 2024, and the fatal stabbing of Iryna Zarutska on North Carolina’s light rail system. 

NASA mission control issued the order at approximately 9:04 a.m. Eastern as Russian cosmonauts worked to repair the leak. Reuters reports a senior NASA official said the leak rate had increased from roughly one pound of air per day to two pounds per day.

Five of the station’s seven crew members temporarily took refuge inside the SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft while two Russian cosmonauts remained in the affected area to carry out repairs. 

American astronauts Jessica Meir, Jack Hathaway, and Chris Williams, French astronaut Sophie Adenot, and Russian cosmonaut Andrey Fedyaev took shelter inside the Dragon capsule.  Roscosmos cosmonauts Sergey Kud-Sverchkov and Sergey Mikayev remained aboard the station to address the leak. 

NASA and Russia’s space agency, Roscosmos, have reportedly spent months investigating a series of recurring air leaks in a Russian section of the International Space Station.

The latest leak is believed to be associated with the Zvezda service module, a critical Russian-built component that includes living quarters, life-support systems, communications, and propulsion functions. 

NASA spokesperson Bethany Stevens said the agency acted out of caution.

“Out of an abundance of caution, Nasa has directed all four of the agency’s SpaceX Crew-12 members and Nasa astronaut Chris Williams to assume an elevated safety posture in the Dragon spacecraft while the repair is under way,” said Stevens. 

Officials later reported that one leak had been while crews continued work on a second. 

After approximately two hours inside teh Dragon spacecraft, NASA instructed the crew to return to normal operations aboard the station.

“Roscosmos has paused Friday’s structural repair efforts inside the Zvezda service module transfer tunnel, known as PrK, as more measurements and data is assessed,” Stevens said.

“Given this development, NASA has instructed the crew members inside the Dragon spacecraft to end the safe haven procedures and return to planned operations aboard the International Space Station. We look forward to working with Roscosmos on a collaborative approach to address the leaks.”

The International Space Station, which is about the size of a football field, serves as a permanent laboratory in space. It is a joint effort between the United States, Russia, Europe, Japan, and Canada.

While small air leaks are not uncommon aboard aging spacecraft, officials have said the recurring leaks remain a concern. 

Why would supporters of the transgender athlete take umbrage with CIF’s policy when he was not only allowed to compete under his adopted gender identity but also take home hardware? Because it is not actually about participation. It is, however, about advancing queer theory and a far-Left ideology into every aspect of American life, including youth sports.

Even though proponents claim that their position is about “inclusivity” and “fairness,” the real agenda is the forced acceptance and affirmation of a transgender athlete’s chosen gender. If everyone doesn’t agree that “trans women are women,” it’s hateful. As they see it, any rule or small measure taken that explicitly or implicitly reinforces biological reality invalidates and erases the trans individual’s claimed identity — this is why we hear phrases like “trans genocide” being used to describe America.

This explains why there is outrage from the transgender athlete’s family, supporters, and activists over the CIF’s policy.

While the girls’ California track and field championships drew major headlines, the West Virginia transgender athlete at the center of the U.S. Supreme Court case West Virginia v. B.P.J. also received national coverage after dominating his female opponents en route to a state title. The biological male threw the shot put two feet farther than the top female finisher, a massive performance gap by the sport’s metrics.

Ironically, the West Virginia teen’s attorneys from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) argued in January that their client, a male, has no physiological differences or competitive advantages compared to females.

Unfortunately, the ACLU’s argument is rooted in ideological virtue signaling intended to advance a radical Left-wing agenda. It is absurd that society has to rely on scientific research and data to reinforce what humans have understood for thousands of years. Yet here we are in 2026 debating whether male athletes have an advantage over biological females.

If you happen to be confused about this matter, I can assure you that after spending a quarter century coaching male and female athletes from junior high to NCAA Division I, there is a verifiable difference in athletic ability and performance between the two sexes.

But regardless of how much data and common sense we inject into the cultural fray, those who are committed to the transgender cause are not going to stop pushing for policies that allow males to compete against females or to have access to female-only spaces. Today, it is a single biological male athlete here or there, but if this intrusion is not stopped, girls’ athletics teams across the country will feature multiple males who claim to be female.

In fact, the Department of Education recently sent a warning letter to Jefferson County Public Schools in Colorado over allegations that the district allowed more than 60 males to compete on female teams.

Within the next few weeks, the Supreme Court will release its decision in West Virginia v. B.P.J. Hopefully, the outcome will help stop this madness. I am convinced there are school districts that would welcome the legal clarity to restrict males to male sports.

No female athlete should be forced to compete against a biological male or have to share a state or national championship podium with one.

Unfortunately, proponents of transgender athletes are not going to go away quietly.

Which is why parents, school leaders, coaches, and community members need to demand a return to common sense and reject the far-Left, radical queer theory-based ideology colonizing sports and education.

***

Rhyen Staley is a researcher for Defending Education. He holds a master’s degree in elementary education and has over a decade of classroom experience in both public and private schools. He has over 25 years of coaching experience from junior high to Division I.

Karen Bass and Nithya Raman each saw their vote totals surge by over 10,000 votes while the sun was down and people were asleep. Meanwhile, Spencer Pratt, the only candidate with a coherent plan to rescue a city drowning in vagrancy, methamphetamine, fire, and fecal matter, apparently received zero votes out of more than 20,000 cast.

Zero. Not one. Statistically, that is not an anomaly. That is an impossibility.

As for the gubernatorial race: days after election night, only 60% of ballots have been counted, with several million votes still outstanding. We do not yet know which mayoral or gubernatorial candidates will advance to the runoff. We may not know for weeks. Or months. Or, at the rate California operates, sometime before the next Ice Age.

California’s voting system is not broken by accident. It is meticulously designed to corrode public trust, and it is succeeding. Here is exactly how they did it.

California operates the most mail-in-dependent voting system in the country. Every registered voter automatically receives a ballot. Ballots can be postmarked on election day itself and still accepted up to seven days later. Counties then have weeks to verify signatures and process returns. “Election Day” in California is less of a civic event and more of a suggestion, a starting pistol for a bureaucratic marathon that ends whenever the state decides it’s done.

California must have a case of dyslexia like their governor, Gavin Newscum, because they saw “Election Day” and read “months.”

The predictable consequence, which is not a coincidence, is that Republicans routinely lead on election night, only to watch their margins dissolve as weeks of late mail-in ballots roll in and “flip” the race.

It tends to feel like officials just wait to call elections until enough of their blue mail-in ballots come through the mail. Whether that is intentional coordination or simply negligent design that consistently benefits one party is, at this point, a distinction without a difference.

Florida processes over 10 million votes in a single evening with paper ballots and same-day results. California, home of Silicon Valley, Stanford, and the most vaunted tech economy on the planet, cannot finalize an election before the next one is scheduled.

The state that puts a computer in your pocket cannot count ballots in a week.

In a world where you can design elections for speed and trust, it raises the question of why you wouldn’t, unless you had ill intentions, which California Democrats do.

They’ve rigged election law to favor their own candidates, and the machine is able to coordinate its institutions and nonprofit apparatus to reap votes. It’s legalized and sophisticated fraud. We’re watching it happen.

They’ve perfected the ballot harvesting game, where a third party can collect and submit an unlimited number of ballots with almost no oversight. Unions, Democratic Socialists of America chapters, activist networks, homeless-service groups, and the entire institutional apparatus of the California Left operate sophisticated, well-funded, voter-contact operations that collect and deliver ballots at scale.

They know exactly which precincts to target, which populations to harvest, and precisely when to submit to maximize impact.

They could just channel this energy towards, I don’t know, simply putting up normal candidates, but that would apparently be insane.

Republicans, who do not have an equivalent organizational infrastructure in California and who remain ideologically skeptical of the practice itself, cannot match this.

The asymmetry is not incidental. The rules were written by the people who benefit from them.

Layered on top of this is no voter ID requirement for mail ballots and signature verification that is often rubber-stamped under pressure, and you get a system where people counting and delivering votes have more power than the voters themselves.

Democrats in California do not need to be compelling, charismatic, or responsive to constituent concerns. They do not need innovative policy, persuasive messaging, or genuine community engagement. They need an organized harvesting operation and a permissive legal framework. They have both.

Then there is the voter roll catastrophe, which is not a bug but a feature.

A recent lawsuit exposed 873,000 inactive “ghost voters” still on California’s rolls. Of those, 150,000 had been inactive for four or more consecutive elections, a direct violation of the National Voter Registration Act, a federal law that California has simply elected not to follow. Los Angeles County alone carries 5.8 million registered voters, a figure that exceeds the total population of most American states and defies every reasonable demographic analysis.

Yet the same registrar-recorder offices that get $336 million a year (and pay top officials almost half a million) can’t keep the lists clean.

Taxpayer dollars are always being used with the utmost love, care, and respect in the Golden State.

But inflated, unaudited rolls are not just embarrassing; they are operationally useful. They provide plausible deniability for questionable ballots, make large-scale harvesting easier, and create the conditions under which late vote “discoveries” in close races appear to be administrative processing rather than manipulation.

When a system refuses to purge ghost voters but spends lavishly on ballot processing infrastructure, you are not watching negligence. You are watching strategy.

Combine all of it: voter registration at locations without ID verification, no mail ballot ID requirement, unlimited harvesting with minimal oversight, unmonitored drop boxes, ballots counted weeks after election night, and rolls packed with hundreds of thousands of legally ineligible inactive voters. The result is a system where accountability is structurally impossible to enforce, and no one trusts a darn thing.

People are not stupid. We can see what’s going on and draw rational conclusions.

If Nithya Raman ultimately surpasses Spencer Pratt, it will further fuel distrust in elections and simply certify that Los Angeles hates itself. They’d rather engineer outcomes for the political machine that built it than abide by the will of the people.

The fraud is not cinematic. There are no masked operatives rappelling into polling stations. It is drab, procedural, and conducted entirely in the open, in statutes, in nonprofit 990 filings, in late-night batch uploads, in signature verification logs that no one audits. It is legalized, systematized, and optimized.

And California is proud of it.

If they won’t change, then fine. Let them wither and rot in it. They don’t deserve Spencer Pratt or Steve Hilton.

To this day, British authorities are hiding critical evidence involving the murder of 18-year-old college student Henry Nowak. No member of the public — not even the jury that just convicted Nowak’s murderer, a foreigner named Vickrum Digwa — has seen the photos and cellphone videos Digwa took, in which he chased Nowak down and mocked him as he died a slow and horrific death. 

“You’re not going to get away with this big man,” Digwa said as Nowak struggled to breathe. Digwa also said, “you’re not dying bro,” and “you were recording me thinking you’re sick” (meaning “tough”). The judge ruled that the videos are simply too shocking, even for the jury in a murder case. 

According to the Daily Mail’s reporting, “This clip was not played in court for being ‘too disturbing to be shown.'” Yes, too disturbing to be shown, which suggests it’s somehow even more disturbing than the body camera footage. We’re talking about a sadistic execution that’s been hidden from the public.

And speaking of the body cams, we also don’t have the full body camera footage of the police response to the murder. The footage cuts off the moment the authorities finally realize that Nowak has gone unconscious, more than 60 seconds after they dragged his body across the pavement and handcuffed him, and more than 15 minutes after he was first stabbed. 

We were told, during the sentencing hearing, that officers supposedly reacted with shock when they began performing CPR on Nowak. That was supposedly the first time they realized he had a fatal chest wound. But strangely enough, the police haven’t released the full body camera footage of the moment the officers came to that realization. We have no idea what they said or did, specifically. 

Yes, Nowak was seriously injured. He ultimately lost around 20% of his total blood volume. But the overall survival rate, when that same vein is injured by gunshot or stabbing, is around 20%. It’s not 0%. And Nowak was stabbed just down the street from a major trauma center. 

Surgeons at the hospital could’ve inserted a tube into his chest and pumped out the blood. They could’ve sealed off the vein. But the authorities didn’t transport Nowak to the trauma hospital at any point. Instead, they arrested him and waited for the ambulance until he died. 

Could the surgeons have saved Henry Nowak’s life? We obviously don’t know the answer to that question. But given all of this deception, Britons have no reason to trust the government’s pathologist in the case, who insisted that Nowak would’ve died no matter what, regardless of what the police did. The government didn’t even try to save Nowak. Instead, they engaged in a cover-up, which continues as we speak.

In that respect — and many other respects — the slaughter of Henry Nowak bears more than a passing resemblance to the execution of 17-year-old white high school junior Austin Metcalf at a track meet last year in Frisco, Texas. 

Yesterday marked the first day of testimony in the trial of Karmelo Anthony, who killed Metcalf — and who still managed to graduate from Centennial High School thanks to the local school district (which should be disbanded immediately). 

Based on the trial so far, it’s clear that we still haven’t gotten anything close to the truth about this case. Once again, as we’ve seen so many times, the official narrative, which we all took for granted over the past year, is falling apart. Now that witnesses are testifying and evidence is being introduced, many of these lies are finally being exposed. The judge has banned audio or video recordings from the trial, but because a small number of reporters are in the courtroom, the truth is getting out, in some capacity.

We’ll start with the revelation that, according to prosecutors, Karmelo Anthony lied to investigators during questioning after the killing. Already, we knew that Karmelo Anthony asked police officers whether he could possibly have a valid self-defense claim. We’ve also known that he threw the knife into the stands as a way of hiding the murder weapon. We know he told a police officer, “It’s not alleged, I did it,” when the officer mentioned the stabbing. 

So, at the risk of understatement, Karmelo Anthony’s behavior, for a long time, has strongly suggested that he was aware he allegedly committed murder. But at least his responses — as incriminating as they were — seemed relatively truthful, as far as we knew. Now we learn that, in fact, some of his responses weren’t honest at all.

This is a quote from NBC in Dallas, which had a reporter in the courtroom:

Prosecutor Bill Wirskye continued his opening statement, saying that Karmelo Anthony lied to investigators when he said he told Austin Metcalf not to touch him. “He knows what he did. He knows he provoked the murder,” Wirskye said. “And that lie tells you all you need to know about his mindset that day. You simply cannot provoke someone, and when they push you, take their life,” Wirskye said.

Later on, the same prosecutor stated that, according to witnesses, Karmelo Anthony did say to Austin Metcalf, “Touch me and see what happens.” In other words, Anthony went into the tent that was reserved for Austin Metcalf’s team. And then, when Austin Metcalf told Anthony to leave, Anthony responded by daring Metcalf to physically move him from the tent, along with a thinly veiled threat. Anthony also reached into his bag, as if he were going to produce a weapon — which Metcalf (and all the witnesses in the tent) thought was a bluff. 

That’s evidently very different from the version of events that Anthony presented to investigators, in which Anthony was just minding his own business, telling Metcalf not to touch him, and then Metcalf grabbed him for no reason. In reality, Anthony was belligerent. He was looking for an opportunity to use the illegal flip knife he was carrying, which he knew was a prohibited item. Rather than simply leaving the tent, he began reaching into his bag for the knife. And before long, he dared Austin Metcalf to make physical contact, presumably so that he could have a pretext to murder him.

We also learned during Thursday’s opening statements that, after Anthony stabbed Metcalf, coaches working for Metcalf’s school had to chase Anthony down and detain him. The prosecutor stated that Anthony tried to exit the stadium after disposing of the knife. But as Anthony fled, Austin Metcalf’s twin brother Hunter lifted Austin’s shirt and saw a “gaping hole in his chest.” 

At that point, bystanders pointed out Anthony as he was running away, and some of the coaches ran after him. This was when a student named Hudson Dean told an athletic trainer that he saw Karmelo Anthony throwing a knife into the stands. 

Meanwhile, a coach named Joshua Rebmann, who stayed with Metcalf, recognized immediately that he was going to die. Rebmann had military training and said Metcalf was making very labored breaths, indicating that his brain was running out of oxygen. Metcalf lost his pulse before the ambulance arrived on scene.

According to NBC, Anthony fled the scene and tried to exit through the front gate. He attempted to blend in with the crowd, which was rushing out of the tent. But he didn’t get far, because “several coaches stopped him before he made it to the exit.” 

In particular, Coach Robert Starr, who worked as head track coach at Metcalf’s school, testified that he “hopped over a gate and approached Anthony and stopped him.” So, Karmelo Anthony was trying to leave the scene. There’s no question about it. 

There’s another major element of this trial that, until now, has been minimized and downplayed by the media. It’s the surveillance video showing parts of the altercation from a distance. This is footage that hasn’t been released to the public. The authorities are hiding it, just like the British government is hiding several of the videos involving the murder of Henry Nowak. But as we’ve discussed, a small number of news outlets have been allowed to see the video and describe it to their audience. In every case, the outlets have said it’s useless. They’ve told us for an entire year that there’s nothing interesting about the footage.

But if that’s the case, it’s very odd that the prosecution made the video a centerpiece of their opening argument, as well as the first testimony that the jury heard. Jurors watched two versions of the footage — the raw video and a version that was enhanced. And then, prosecutors questioned a video forensic expert (who works with the DA’s office) about the footage. The entire tape lasted for 15 minutes and 20 seconds, and it begins with the Metcalf brothers entering the stadium.

At the 3-minute, 24-second mark, Anthony enters the stadium. At 7 minutes, 57 seconds into the video, the forensic expert says that “people started paying attention to what was happening under the tent.” One person appears to push another person underneath the tent. The physical confrontation lasts just a couple of seconds. Then there’s a flurry of movement. As described by an NBC reporter in the courtroom, Anthony “exits the bleachers at the top of the tent, goes onto the walkway, down a ramp and into the parking lot, and appears to alternate between running and walking throughout.” As Anthony exits the bleachers, someone is pointing at him. At 12 minutes, 30 seconds, Anthony is being escorted out by police.

From these descriptions — which were provided by reporters who could barely see it, since the TV wasn’t angled towards them — we can conclude that, indeed, the video footage is highly relevant evidence. It’s not worthless, as every media outlet claimed. 

Instead, to the contrary, the footage is strong evidence of Anthony’s guilt. If Anthony had truly acted in self-defense and neutralized a dangerous threat, there would be no reason for everyone to run out of the tent in a panic and to point towards Anthony so that the coaches and the police would apprehend him. 

When Daniel Penny neutralized the violent homeless schizophrenic on the train, people didn’t run out of the subway car and tell the police to arrest him. Instead, they helped Penny restrain the vagrant. And they were relieved when he took care of business. 

So the fact that this footage shows the opposite reaction from bystanders — the fact it shows how horrified they were by what Karmelo Anthony did — strongly suggests that he committed murder. And the other students were worried that he’d kill them next, like a mass shooter. Also, it’s obviously noteworthy that Karmelo Anthony was briefly “running” as part of his escape. Who was he running from, exactly? It really makes you think.

It’s also important to point out that one of Austin Metcalf’s classmates, who is black, ran after Karmelo Anthony. This is reporting from The Daily Mail, which was also in the courtroom:

New state witness Vincent Cooper, a coach at Frisco ISD, is now testifying how he was assigned to manage Karmelo Anthony after the stabbing and stop him from leaving the football stadium. Later, Cooper was asked to calm down a teammate of Austin Metcalf (pictured below) who was angry about Austin’s stabbing. Austin’s teammate, who is black, wanted to attack Anthony. “He stabbed my brother,” the black Memorial teammate said of Austin Metcalf. The teammate explained that he was on the football team with Austin and he considered him family.

This was an immediate reaction from Metcalf’s black teammate. His testimony is completely fatal to the Left’s entire narrative about this case. If he thought Austin Metcalf was attacking Karmelo Anthony because he’s black or whatever, then the odds are pretty good that this particular individual wouldn’t lunge after Anthony and try to avenge his fallen teammate. But that’s what he did because, in the moment, he recognized exactly what Karmelo Anthony had done.

Although it’s not clear who did the pushing in the video, it’s certainly possible that it was Austin Metcalf. Witnesses said that Metcalf, as part of his effort to get Karmelo Anthony out of the tent, applied some physical force. But obviously, when you’re unarmed and you push someone (without even knocking them over), you’re not using lethal force. The person you push isn’t allowed to murder you, because he can’t possibly have a reasonable fear for his life under those circumstances. If the attacker is in the wrong team’s tent —where he’s not supposed to be — and he’s daring someone to push him, and he knows he has a knife, and his victim doesn’t — then there’s no viable self-defense claim. Period.

Along those lines, one of the most important parts of Thursday’s testimony zeroed in on the fact that Anthony was in the wrong tent. Robert Starr, the head track coach, testified that “A tent marks your spot.” He said that it’s a “big deal” to ensure that other people are kept out of the tent, for a variety of reasons, including keeping property safe from theft. He said it’s widely understood at these track meets that you’re not supposed to go into another team’s tent. Additionally, on the day of the stabbing, Coach Starr had texted Metcalf, telling him and his brother that they needed to be “leaders” for the day and to step up, and essentially run the tent. They needed to “assist with getting tents off buses and carrying heavy equipment.” Metcalf responded, “for sure coach gotchu.” And after Metcalf’s death, Coach Starr testified that he replied to that message, “I love you man. Sorry I didn’t say enough.”

The point is, by the broadly accepted standards of the track world, Karmelo Anthony was trespassing. On cross-examination, Karmelo’s defense attorneys tried to make the argument that, occasionally, students will go into the other team’s tent to chat briefly — especially if they see someone they know personally. And Coach Starr agreed that, in certain situations, this does happen. In this case, Karmelo’s defense attorneys say he saw someone named “Edwin Parra” in the Memorial High School tent (Memorial is Austin Metcalf’s school). And Parra is supposedly a “close family friend of Anthony’s girlfriend.” Karmelo Anthony, the lawyers say, had reason to remain in the tent with this acquaintance because it had begun raining. Evidently, Karmelo Anthony’s high school (Centennial) didn’t have its own tent. They only had a tarp.

Contrast Anthony’s behavior with, say, Kyle Rittenhouse, Daniel Penny, George Zimmerman, Rick Chow, or anyone else who engaged in lawful self-defense and who the Left tried to send to prison for the rest of their lives. None of these people attempted to flee after they eliminated the threat. 

Kyle Rittenhouse walked towards the police blockade in Kenosha. Daniel Penny remained on the subway platform. George Zimmerman didn’t move an inch from the pavement where Trayvon Martin tried to smash his head into a pulp. Rick Chow stayed at his gas station and voluntarily provided a comprehensive statement to police the moment they arrived.

 Not that it really needs to be spelled out, but in general, innocent people don’t flee the scene after they defend themselves. They don’t try to hide the murder weapon. They don’t lie to investigators about what they were doing.

According to the Department of Justice, FBI agents arrested 21-year-old Bisaam Ghafoor of Leawood, Kansas, 21-year-old Elias Shamsaldeen of Porterville, California, and 25-year-old Bereen Dzayee of Lakeside, California.

The three men conspired from at least February 2025 through June 2026 to support the designated terror group, according to a criminal complaint filed in the District of Kansas.

The men communicated through Discord chats, voice calls, and other messaging platforms, where they pledged allegiance to ISIS and promoted violence on the group’s behalf, according to the Department of Justice. 

According to the complaint, the men repeatedly spoke about violence against Americans and U.S. military personnel. 

Prosecutors say Ghafoor remarked that it would be “sick” to have his name written on a drone used in an attack on Americans, while Dzayee suggested drone strikes should target U.S. Special Forces. Shamsaldeen expressed a desire to stab a U.S. servicemember, and Ghafoor said he had long wanted to behead a female soldier before adding, “I wish I could kill 300,000,000 Americans.”

Federal authorities accuse the three men of collectively providing over $2,000 to a person they understood to be a member of ISIS and trying to develop a cryptocurrency scheme to buy RPGs and drones to enable the designated terror organization to attack U.S. servicemembers. 

According to prosecutors, Ghafoor’s name was inscribed on a rocket-propelled grenade that was purportedly intended for use in an overseas attack targeting U.S. servicemembers. Investigators also say that Shamsaldeen helped finance the purchase of drones that were intended to be used in attacks against American troops deployed abroad.

The defendants also expressed a desire to travel outside the United States to fight and die on behalf of ISIS, according to authorities.

The three men were charged with conspiracy to provide material support to a foreign terrorist organization.

“This administration has put terrorists, cartels, and gangs on notice,” said Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche. “Today’s arrest of three individuals who allegedly conspired to provide material support to ISIS makes clear our commitment to taking down terrorist networks — anywhere. Thanks to the vigilance of the FBI, their alleged scheme was dismantled and further acts of violence against U.S. service members were prevented.”

FBI Director Kash Patel said the suspects “swore allegiance to ISIS, plotted multiple attacks, and even targeted U.S. service members.”

“The success of this op shows once again this FBI’s continued record of stopping terrorist attacks before they happen,” Patel said.

Assistant Attorney General for National Security John Eisenberg said the defendants wished to betray their country.

“According to the complaint, these defendants conspired to support ISIS, a ruthless terrorist organization, with the intent, among other things, to fund plans to kill American servicemembers abroad,” said Assistant Attorney General for National Security John A. Eisenberg. “Thanks to the work of the FBI, their plans to betray their country in the gravest way lies in ruin. Instead, these defendants will face justice in our courts.”

The investigation was conducted by FBI Joint Terrorism Task Forces in Kansas City, San Diego, and Sacramento, with assistance from FBI field offices in Richmond and Newark.

Appearing on The View to peddle her book to their loyal liberal viewers, Biden drew outrage Tuesday when boasting about how good her step-son Hunter Biden was doing and the family he was building. But Jill seemingly left out Hunter’s daughter Navy, an apparent shame the Bidens had tried to hide in the past.

“Hunter is doing so great, and he’s sober. He has a beautiful child, I mean, yes, thank you. Who’s named Beau. He named his son after Beau, and Beau named his son after Hunter. Just shows the bond,” she said.

Jill Biden implies Hunter Biden has only had 1 child, a boy:

“Hunter is doing so great and he’s sober. He has a beautiful child, I mean, yes, thank you. Who’s named Beau. He named his son after Beau and Beau named his son after Hunter. So just shows the bond.” pic.twitter.com/PHVYK9KLAx

— Nicholas Fondacaro (@NickFondacaro) June 2, 2026

None of the cast members pressed her on it, just like they didn’t press her on why she didn’t take President Joe Biden to the hospital after, as she first claimed to CBS News, she thought he had a stroke during the debate:

SARA HAINES: So, I understand completely your first instinct to defend him after that debate we were just speaking of. But did you feel any of that fear, as his wife right there beside him, to protect him? He had given so much of himself and to see you even saying, like, ‘I thought he was having a medical episode, I was concerned.’ Was there any part of you that went into protection mode of like, ‘Joe, you can’t keep doing this? They’re taking so much from you.’

JILL BIDEN: But the doctors told me he was fine.

With co-host Joy Behar jetting off to Europe to produce her play, they brought Swisher on to fill in.

It was her first time as a guest co-host, but she was comfortable enough to completely ignore Secretary of War Pete Hegseth’s decorated military service and suggest he didn’t have any military experience and was somehow a DEI hire:

SWISHER: But it focuses on what you were saying: lack of expertise. And that’s sort of everywhere. Like, look, Pete Hegseth —

HOSTIN: And he talked about DEI so much. It means, you know, ‘didn’t earn it’ now.

SWISHER: This is DEI, right?

HOSTIN: Yeah.

SWISHER: Didn’t earn it. Exactly. You have Pete Hegseth, who was a talk show host.

Hegseth is a decorated Army combat veteran with deployments to the war zones in Iraq and Afghanistan. Meanwhile, none of The View cast have served in the military.

Filling in for Joy Behar on The View, Kara Swisher falsely suggests Pete Hegseth has no military experience and has only ever been “a talk show host.” She claims Scott Pelley was “shoved out” because of a “lack of expertise” at CBS. pic.twitter.com/79plxr8RMG

— Nicholas Fondacaro (@NickFondacaro) June 3, 2026

If you think The View would try to hand-wave the lies away with one of their infamous “legal notes,” you’d be mistaken. The View has stopped issuing formal “legal notes.” A NewsBusters study found that The View had not issued a “legal note” in all of 2025.

Additionally, in a recent interview with Fox News, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr said they’re hearing many arguments against The View being a “bona fide news” program: “Disney’s The View is now asserting to the FCC that they are a ‘bona fide news’ program, and we’ve started an enforcement action there… At this point, The View and Disney have not established that they are subject to the ‘bona fide news’ exception. And in fact, as you noted, we are now seeing dozens of Disney-affiliated TV stations independently owned in Texas, effectively disagreeing with Disney that The View is ‘bona fide news.’”

Both the study and the comments from TV stations were more stones on the mountain they needed to climb to prove to the FCC they were somehow a “bona fide news” program.

***

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

He’s a 33-year-old YouTuber, filmmaker, actor, and director from New Jersey with 4 million subscribers. Back in March, Ridgway and his wife, Ashley, announced their first pregnancy with a pretty excited post. On April 8, they put out an ultrasound video.

We are big fans of ultrasounds, specifically because many women don’t recognize what is growing inside them. That’s because they’ve been lied to. And this is why we team with pro-life organizations to provide ultrasounds for women who are pregnant and considering whether to abort their baby.

On June 3, Jesse then posted a detailed statement on X, reposted by his wife, announcing that they had killed the baby in utero, which is what abortion is.

He wrote:

This week, my wife and I made the very difficult decision to terminate the pregnancy due to Trisomy 21. The choice was not made lightly. We really appreciate all of the personal stories that you guys shared with us, especially the unconditional support we received from fans no matter what we decided. I know some of you may be very disappointed to hear this news. 

We are devastated. This has been extremely traumatic for both of us, especially Ashley. She underwent the procedure earlier this week and is on the mend. Thankfully, everything went smoothly, but emotionally we are drained. Trisomy 21, also known as Down Syndrome, is caused by an extra chromosome. It is caused by an error in cell division, like a glitch. The odds of a baby having it is 1 in 1000. When I first confronted this news, I was shocked but optimistic. If they’re a little slow intellectually, then we’ll make it work. I signed on to be a parent, come what may…but I just didn’t fully understand what Down Syndrome entailed. 

Once we made it public, it became clear that MOST people don’t know what Down Syndrome entails (and no, it’s not the same as Autism): 50% of babies with DS have heart defects. 75% will have hearing challenges. Over 50% will have vision problems. Impaired immune function, developmental disabilities, learning disabilities, delayed physical development, poor muscle tone, structural issues with face, decreased lifespan, etc…Sadly, the list is long, feel free to look it up…

Down Syndome isn’t a “blessing”, it is objectively sh*tty from a health perspective. I didn’t realize just how rough it is for the child, let alone the family…more often than not, they would be fully dependent on others for the rest of their life. The miscarriage risk is also close to 50%, which made matters worse…they may never see the light of day and it puts Ashley further at risk. We spoke with doctors, friends, family and genetic counselors and learned that up to 90% of women terminate their pregnancy after learning the baby has Trisomy 21. This was WAY higher than I expected, I thought it would be lower given that I hear so many say they kept or would keep the baby. 

I believe that’s because most terminations happen privately, it feels shameful. A lot of judgment being cast. You never think you’d be in this type of situation until it happens to you and then things change. To all of my fans who have weighed in on this topic who have Autism, Down Syndrome or any other conditions…we appreciate you. You matter a lot and we’re glad you’re here. I commend you and your families for having the strength and courage to push forward. As for us, we made a difficult decision that we believe in the long-run will be beneficial for our family. Thankfully, we had a choice. It will take a little time to move on, but we are excited to try again in the future and hopefully have a better outcome. Love you guys & thank you for understanding.

This is disturbing stuff.

Now, to pretend that every parent doesn’t wish for, hope for, and pray for a healthy child is silly. I thank God I have four healthy children and a fifth — with the help of God — on the way.

When you make the decision to get pregnant, this is obviously part of the calculation, because what is very clear from this entire story is that, from the very beginning, it was acknowledged as a human life.

The ultrasound was done and they were excited. They weren’t excited because there was no human value.

Not only that, this post demonstrates why his wife is devastated: This is not a meaningless cluster of cells. It is a preborn child. That is why it’s devastating.

Once you understand that there is a moral component to the life of that child, killing the child becomes immoral.

That doesn’t mean that morality is easy. Morality is not easy. Morality is very often incredibly difficult. That doesn’t mean life is always wonderful, beautiful, or simple.

It does mean that doing the moral thing is required, whether or not it is difficult, and the only person in this scenario who really pays the price is the child. Was that child’s life not worth living? That is the actual presumption: that if you have all of these conditions, it’s better if the child is never born.

This is immoral. What makes it even more immoral and absurd is that the same YouTuber had put out a post earlier this year talking about their dog being diagnosed with stage-four kidney disease last year. He wrote:

Sweet’s Super Sixth Birthday. After she was diagnosed with stage four kidney disease last year around her fifth birthday, the vet said she had weeks to live. If we were lucky, maybe a few months. ONE YEAR LATER. She is still fighting. She is in the .0001% of superhero dogs that can continue living with no kidneys. We all need a hero in this life. Jenny has been one of mine.

First: I have a dog. Second: Dogs are great.

But a dog will never feel the way a human feels about life; a dog will never have the life experiences a human does.

This disconnect is about convenience. I’m not going to pretend that convenience is an unimportant factor in life. It obviously is.

But sacrifice and morality are about sacrifice and morality.

Every child is a blessing. But that doesn’t mean all blessings are easy. We have this bizarre notion in our society that everything in your life is either all good or all bad, either all easy or all hard, and that hard equals bad and easy equals good.

That’s not true. I have friends who have children with issues like Down syndrome, and it requires a lot from them. Sometimes it puts them on the verge of true, serious hardship.

That’s why they are heroes for doing it.

But being heroic means standing up for morality even when it’s hard. If we have a world full of people who simply dispose of babies for convenience, there is something truly evil happening on a societal level.

When he says, “We really appreciate all of the personal stories that you guys shared with us, especially the unconditional support we received from fans with no matter what we decided,” you cannot make a decision about another person’s life and be supported in that decision when it horribly affects that other person’s life.

The entire premise of this story, all of it, soup to nuts, is that this was a child. Otherwise, this would have no relevance to anyone.

That is the buried lede. Everyone is affected emotionally by this particular story because there was an ultrasound, and it showed a baby, a human life with potential, and everyone recognizes it.

If this were just the removal of a polyp, no one would care on either side. They also put out a video that showed them finding out that their child had trisomy 21.

The reason that we’re commenting on this issue is that it’s public. They are the ones who made this public in the first place. And so it became an issue of public controversy.

There may be a lot of people saying today, “It’s a private issue.”

I think we all have something to say when someone does something morally wrong, and when it becomes a matter of public controversy, we certainly have something to say about it, because it’s a comment on what society’s standards are. And societal standards should protect human life, because otherwise people make decisions not based on the independent interests of human life with potential; they make decisions based on what they believe their lifestyle will be and how their life will be affected by that thing.

That’s why you have moral rules and standards in the first place.

Joseph Sanberg was sentenced on Monday to 14 years in prison after pleading guilty to fraud-related charges connected to the company’s sustainability business. 

Aspiration originally operated as a financial technology company but later expanded into environmental services, including tree-planting and carbon-offset programs that turned out to be fraudulent. Theoretically, businesses could purchase these services to help offset their carbon emissions, but court documents say the intention to actually purchase those services was never there. 

Sanberg aligned himself with the Democratic Party in California, personally donating $11 million to back a ballot initiative to raise the state’s minimum wage to $18 an hour, The Daily Wire previously reported. Ultimately, it would be California’s clean energy policies that would allow Sanberg to turn his company into a multi-million dollar fraud scheme.

He labeled himself as an “anti-poverty activist.” Bill Essayli, first assistant U.S. attorney of the Central District of California, said, “This so-called ‘anti-poverty’ activist has admitted to being nothing more than a self-serving fraudster, by seeking to enrich himself by defrauding lenders and investors out of hundreds of millions of dollars.”

Prosecutors allege Sanberg’s “friends and associates” submitted letters of intent from various companies and individuals. Sanberg would then book the letters of intent as revenue, inflating Aspiration’s revenue and profits, which he would in turn use to advertise to investors and obtain millions in new Aspiration investments.

In some cases, Sanberg “went so far as to provide the money to his ‘customers’ which they would then send to Aspiration.”

Court filings in separate litigation have also alleged that several entities connected to Sanberg’s associate, Kfir Gavrieli, signed agreements to purchase large amounts of sustainability services. Those entities allegedly included Gavrieli’s footwear company, a family-owned business, a synagogue, and other individuals or organizations. 

Employees raised concerns when the revenue suggested in the letters of intent was not collected. KPMG, one of the country’s largest auditing firms, resigned as Aspiration’s auditor in 2022, citing revenue transactions with characteristics of fraud. The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) later alleged that revenue tied to the letters of intent accounted for roughly $44 million of Aspiration’s $100.6 million in reported 2021 revenue. The SEC says that, as a result, Sanberg was able to raise more than $300 million from investors based on the false appearance of Aspiration as a booming sustainability business. 

Investigators were struck not only by the size of the alleged purchases, but by who was making them. Having Gavrieli as a customer raised eyebrows because it included organizations and individuals that appeared to have little need for large-scale carbon-offset purchases.

A footwear company, typically, would not be required by California law to buy millions of trees or large volumes of carbon offsets, which caused the government to examine whether these were genuine commercial purchases. Typical participants of California’s carbon-offset program include oil refineries, industrial facilities, and natural gas suppliers. 

While Sanberg has already pleaded guilty in the Aspiration fraud case, allegations involving Gavrieli remain the subject of ongoing civil litigation in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Los Angeles. Court filings submitted by Dikla Gavrieli, Kfir’s sister and legal adversary, allege that Gavrieli and several entities connected to him participated in a scheme that helped create the appearance of strong demand for Aspiration’s tree-planting and sustainability services. Gavrieli has not been criminally charged in connection with the Aspiration fraud, and the allegations against him have not yet been proven in court.

Thomas Pauken II, 50, admitted in a plea agreement with Justice Department prosecutors that he acted as an agent of China from 2019 to 2026. Prosecutors said Pauken worked for a member of the Chinese Ministry of State Security who sought sensitive information about the United States. 

“Pauken admitted to being part of a conspiracy to obtain sensitive information from the U.S. government for the PRC,” said Assistant Attorney General for National Security John Eisenberg. “His actions are a betrayal of this Nation and pose an unacceptable risk to our national security.”

Pauken has lived in China since 2010 and worked for the Chinese state media outlet Xinhua News. At the same time, prosecutors said, he was on the payroll of a member of the Chinese Ministry of State Security referred to in court documents as “Cathy.”

According to prosecutors, Cathy directed Pauken to meet with human sources in the United States, provide those sources with laptops and cellphones, and send their reports back to China. 

In February 2026, Pauken was arrested after an apparent FBI sting operation during a recorded meeting at a Washington, D.C. hotel.

At the meeting, Pauken met with an unidentified U.S. government employee who had sought a job in the Trump administration and whom Pauken had allegedly been attempting to recruit on Cathy’s behalf. Prosecutors said Cathy wanted the official to produce reports she claimed would make their way to Chinese President Xi Jinping and shape policy.

Pauken offered to pay the government employee a $10,000 bonus and subsequent payments funneled through a bogus nonprofit, according to court documents.  

Court documents state that Pauken himself did not personally handle classified information, but acted as an “intermediary to recruit individuals to provide classified information to the Chinese.”

Pauken also sold multiple reports to a group of Chinese people from Wuhan, according to prosecutors. 

“PAUKEN’s Wuhan clients mainly sought information about technology and the U.S. Department of Justice,” a statement of facts compiled by prosecutors agreed to by Pauken said. “The Wuhan clients wanted PAUKEN to find an expert who would help them engage in cyber espionage.”

Pauken told the FBI he believed his work would deter a military conflict between the United States and China and that he would support greater religious freedom through his contacts in both countries.

His sentencing is set for September 1, and he faces up to 10 years in prison.

“By his own admission, not only did Thomas Pauken attempt to infiltrate U.S. political circles at the direction of China’s Ministry of State Security,” said FBI official Roman Rozhavsky. “But he gathered intelligence on his American targets and reported it back to his Chinese intelligence handlers.”

The birthrate has been dropping everywhere except in sub-Saharan Africa and Israel. If present trends continue, scientists predict the world’s population will soon be reduced to nothing but black people and Jews, blissfully enjoying an earthly paradise, where every basketball player can find an accountant, although no one will know how to tie a Windsor knot.

Some researchers feel that the so-called birth dearth is the result of the widespread use of online pornography. Columbia University sociologist Dr. Roland Fapmeister has been studying the effects of porn for the last seven years, ten, and eleven hours a day.

In a report to the United Nations panel titled, “Why There Are So Many Damned Israelis All Over the Place,” Dr. Fapmeister said:

There can be no doubt that many men have come to prefer porn to actual sex, because the women in porn have such spectacular bodies it’s enough to make a man insane with desire so that he can’t stop coming back again and again and again to watch these magnificent creatures do anything you want in bed, and with real enthusiasm too, they don’t just roll their eyes and play along and then make snide remarks about how they could have married Bill Burley from High School, who was a real man. Afterwards, you can turn them off, so they don’t start complaining about why you haven’t taken out the garbage or how come you can’t get a real job instead of locking yourself in the bathroom for hours, making disgusting grunting noises that make them think you’re up to something creepy, even when you tell them it’s scientific research, for crying out loud.

Dr. Fapmeister says the porn sites most appealing to men are those that depict women doing things real women often won’t do, like making dinner or showing them some respect.

Feminist sociologist Dr. Shrill Screamington says the baby famine is actually a good thing. It’s a sign of female empowerment, proving that women are no longer chained to staying at home serving husbands who love them but can instead stay in the office serving employers who could back their Mercedes over them and never notice the bump. The employer, however, might think the parking lot needs resurfacing, text his personal assistant about it, and wonder why she never gets back to him.

Dr. Screamington says that while it is true that feminism has led many women to spend their youths in a fluorescent hell of cubicle drudgery until they find themselves languishing in a solitary middle age marked by a sense of unspeakable emptiness made all the more unbearable by the unacknowledged but inescapable fact that it’s the result of their own self-certain but altogether misguided choices, including that nose ring that sent all the best marriage prospects running for their lives, there have also been many feminist triumphs. For instance, Americans are now so comfortable with seeing females in power that over 150 women are serving in Congress despite the fact that each and every one of them is crazier than a hamster on LSD.

At The New York Times, a former newspaper, sex columnist Susan Horwich agrees with the feminist position. In a recent speech to the “Society for Increasing Human Misery in the Name of Fairness,” Ms. Horwich said her weekly Times columns will continue to urge women to abandon institutions like marriage and religion that have imprisoned them in traditional roles as homemakers and mothers, and instead live lives of sterile promiscuity until there are no babies at all and the earth is a smoking ruin filled with nothing but basketball players and accountants, at which time, Satan will return to carry Ms. Horwich like a lover into an eternity of flames, as he promised he would when she sold him her soul in return for the Times job.

Authorities in High Point, North Carolina, arrested Victor Adulfo-Herrera after he allegedly struck a man with his vehicle and fled the scene before later attempting to set the home ablaze on May 27.

Adulfo-Herrera snuck across the border into the United States at an unknown time, the Department of Homeland Security told The Daily Wire. He was also previously arrested for driving while impaired.

In his first crime on May 27, Adulfo-Herrera drove a car into a man, who was left with serious injuries, according to prosecutors.

He later poured a gallon of gasoline near a home while a man and woman were inside, authorities said.

Prosecutors later revealed in court that the Mexican national knew the woman inside the home, local news outlet WGHP reported. The woman told prosecutors she’s afraid of Adulfo-Herrera, whom she was able to secure a no-contact order against, the report said.

The judge also issued no-contact orders to protect the other victims in the case, according to WGHP. The orders bar Adulfo-Herrera from contacting the victims himself or through someone else.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has since lodged a detainer in the case, asking local authorities to hand him over to federal custody for eventual deportation.

“This illegal alien from Mexico faces multiple criminal charges, including attempted arson, hit-and-run, and assault with a deadly weapon,” Acting Assistant Homeland Security Secretary Lauren Bis said in a statement.

“He is a danger to Americans and has no business being in our country. ICE lodged an arrest detainer with our law enforcement partners to ensure he is turned over to ICE, so that he can never again roam our streets and threaten our communities,” Bis added.

Adulfo-Herrera’s charges include felony hit and run resulting in serious injury or death, attempted arson, and breaking and entering with intent to terrorize and injure, according to WGHP.

He is being held on a $15,000 bond for the hit-and-run case and a $10,000 bond for the arson case.

Adulfo-Herrera appeared in court last week with his hands and feet cuffed, WGHP reported. He required a Spanish translator during the hearing.

He is scheduled to appear back in court on July 31, the local outlet reported.

Michael Gledhill, who is the son of Handy’s girlfriend, Wendy, allegedly stabbed Handy in the chest in the front yard of the home of Handy’s girlfriend, where her son also lived. After the stabbing, Gledhill told 911 dispatchers, “I am the son of man, I just killed the man of sin,” according to KTLA.

The stabbing that has shocked avid movie fans who knew Handy’s work most recently in “Top Gun: Maverick,” happened around 9:30 a.m. Wednesday in the 19200 block of Erwin Street in the Tarzana neighborhood of Los Angeles.

“I’m just trying to make it through one day at a time, a minute at a time,” 76-year-old Wendy Gledhill told The California Post.

“I loved James and my son. I still can’t believe it. … I can’t believe my son did it. I’m just trying to,” she added.

When officers arrived after the phone call from Gledhill, they found the veteran actor unconscious, per KTLA. Handy was taken to a local hospital by Los Angeles Fire Department paramedics and was later pronounced dead.

In video obtained by Fox 11 Los Angeles, Gledhill is seen on a neighbor’s doorbell camera walking away from the gruesome scene before returning and turning himself in to police. The video also shows a blue shirt on the ground covered in blood.

The motive for the killing is still under investigation, but according to KTLA detectives believe the stabbing was an isolated incident and there isn’t a threat to the public. Gledhill’s bond is set at $2 million, the New York Post reported.

Handy had a long career in Hollywood starting back in the 1970s. He had a role in “Arachnophobia,” as well as playing the exterminator in the blockbuster hit, “Jumanji,” alongside Robin Williams. He had several TV roles as well, including “Melrose Place,” “Alias,” “The West Wing,” and “NYPD Blue.”

Handy lived a reclusive life in his later years and made his last public appearance nearly 10 years ago in September 2017, per the Post.

Last July, two Boston-based Democratic operatives who met on Bernie Sanders’ 2020 presidential campaign began searching for someone who could take down Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME), according to Politico. National Democrats view the seat as their best path to flip control of the upper chamber. 

Daniel Moraff and Leanne Fan, who are engaged, have built an impressive political resume for finding unconventional candidates. During the 2024 cycle, the pair recruited independent candidate Dan Osborne to challenge vulnerable Republican Sen. Deb Fischer in Nebraska. Osborne, who was expected to caucus with Democrats if elected, forced Republicans to spend heavily to defend the seat. His pro-union, working-class campaign resonated with voters, allowing him to outperform Harris by nearly eight points.

Fresh off that effort, the couple turned their attention to Maine, scrambling to find a left-wing populist after their initial choice – union boss Chris Williams — was sidelined by an undisclosed scandal.

“It was a go,” Moraff told Politico. “But there was a skeleton closet that wasn’t true that we would’ve had to explain.” 

“They decided to go in a different direction,” he added. 

That different direction led Moraff and Fan to the home of Platner’s mother, Leslie Harlow, on Maine’s Ironbound Island. 

“They came to Ironbound knowing I was Graham’s mother,” Harlow told Politico. 

The operatives explained the type of candidate they were looking for and then asked for Platner’s cell number.

“And he came back in and said,” Harlow recalled to Politico, “‘Well, I guess we’re going to meet Graham tomorrow at 6 a.m.’”

About a month later, Platner launched his campaign on August 19 in a viral video that quickly attracted national attention from leftist activists and Democratic donors. 

But the oyster farmer’s sugar high has come crashing down in recent weeks amid a barrage of negative press about Platner’s personal misconduct. 

The Daily Wire previously uncovered that the Senate hopeful maintained an active account on a social media platform known to attract child predators. Over the weekend, several media outlets reported that Platner, a married man, had exchanged sexually explicit messages with several women. 

On Thursday, the latest shoe dropped. 

Platner engaged in a pattern of “intimidating and disturbing” behavior toward multiple women and lied about not knowing the meaning of his Nazi tattoo, according to a New York Times report. 

Three of Platner’s ex-girlfriends described volatile and “toxic” relationships with the Senate hopeful, claiming he demeaned women, became physically threatening, and was repeatedly unfaithful. On one occasion, an ex-girlfriend accused Platner of twisting her arm, shoving her into a bedroom, and holding the door shut until she became “calm.” 

Platner appeared on MS NOW to do damage control.

“There are some allegations in this piece that I just want to be kind of unequivocal about, are simply not true,” Platner said on the leftist television network. “Anything alleging physicality, anything alleging that I knew what my tattoo was, these are the statements of someone who’s politically motivated.”

Platner has shown no signs of suspending his campaign. He’s set to hold a campaign event Friday night with Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA).

The aircraft was being prepared for a flight to Los Angeles when it “unexpectedly retracted while it was parked,” the airline said in a statement, ABC News reported. 

Several people are injured as a Lufthansa plane collapses at a gate. https://t.co/vwR4cXqatk pic.twitter.com/MfXn7IWFll

— TMZ (@TMZ) June 4, 2026

“Several people sustained minor injuries – two Lufthansa cabin crew members and other employees from service providers were taken to a hospital for medical treatment,” the statement added.

No passengers were aboard the aircraft at the time of the collapse.

Lufthansa said it is working with authorities to determine what caused the nose gear failure.

“We are currently investigating the exact circumstances together with the relevant authorities. Technicians and support staff are on site. We will provide further information as soon as it becomes available,” the statement concluded.

Photos and video from the scene showed the front section of the Dreamliner resting on the ground after the collapse.

The incident marks the latest high-profile aviation mishap to draw public attention, though officials have not suggested it is connected to other recent airline accidents or runway incidents.

Last month, a Frontier Airlines jet struck a trespasser on the runway during takeoff, triggering panic onboard and a fiery emergency evacuation. Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy later said the individual had deliberately entered a restricted area of the airport. 

Also in May, a United Airlines aircraft hit a light pole while landing and approaching the runway at Newark Liberty International Airport. The light pole then hit a delivery truck. The truck driver reportedly sustained minor injuries.

In March, two pilots were killed following a collision between an Air Canada Express jet and an airport fire truck at New York City’s LaGuardia Airport. More than a dozen passengers were injured in the crash.

Jesse Ridgway, who has over four million subscribers on YouTube, made the announcement on Wednesday that he and his wife aborted their baby because of the Down syndrome diagnosis. The post prompted a strong response from pro-life activists and even House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA), who said the child’s life had value despite the medical diagnosis. 

“This week, my wife and I made the very difficult decision to terminate the pregnancy due to Trisomy 21,” Ridgway posted on X. “The choice was not made lightly. We really appreciate all of the personal stories that you guys shared with us, especially the unconditional support we received from fans with no matter what we decided.”

When learning the child may be born with Down syndrome, Ridgway said he first was “optimistic” that they could “make it work” if the child was just “a little slow intellectually.” 

“But I just didn’t fully understand what Down syndrome entailed,” he said. “I didn’t realize just how rough it is for the child, let alone the family … more often than not, they would be fully dependent on others for the rest of their life.”

Between 350,000 and 400,000 Americans have Down syndrome, meaning they were born with an extra chromosome. When polled, these individuals consistently say they are satisfied with their life and were happy they were born. 

Studies generally show that at least 67% of babies diagnosed with Down syndrome in the United States are aborted. In Iceland, there are almost no cases of Down syndrome because all those who would have been born with it were killed in the womb. Some Republicans have pushed for protections to prohibit Down syndrome-based abortions. 

Back in April, Ridgway posted an ultrasound picture of his child, writing, “first look at the little nugget.”

first look at the little nugget. 😱 pic.twitter.com/yjtVWzbyhh

— Jesse Ridgway (@McJuggerNuggets) April 8, 2026

Ridgway referred to the death of his unborn child as a “difficult decision that we believe in the long-run will be beneficial for our family” and appeared to make a political statement by adding, “Thankfully, we had a choice.” 

In response to that post, many pro-life advocates pointed out the wonderful lives that many of those with Down syndrome live. 

“Because God made us all in His image, it means EVERY SINGLE PERSON has inestimable DIGNITY and VALUE — and our value is not related in any way to the color of our skin, what zip code we live in, what our talents are, our health condition, or any other factor,” Speaker Johnson said. “Our value is inherent, because it is given to us by our loving Heavenly Father.”

“When a culture devolves to the point of depravity where ‘influencers’ can go online and so casually dismiss the deliberate murder of their own precious child, the survival of that culture itself is at risk,” he added. 

Kelsey Pritchard, the communications director for SBA Pro-Life America, told The Daily Wire that she hoped Ridgway and his wife would realize the value of all human life.

“I hope someday they wake up and realize, and the humanity of the unborn children and the humanity of people who have Down syndrome, because, honestly, we should feel bad for them, because they just robbed themselves of a lot of joy that they otherwise would have had they allowed this child to live,” she said.

She said that the cultural acceptance of targeting people with disabilities was a result of an abortion-saturated culture.

“I think it’s just evidence too of how stripping away the right to life for the unborn, it leads to this stripping away of the dignity of the human being, and bleeds into these other areas, like people with disabilities,” Pritchard said. “We know the slippery slope that exists when you start taking people’s rights away, and you dehumanize a whole class of humans.”

After the negative response to his announcement, Ridgway said that he had “never seen such hate and vitriol for two people grieving the loss of their unborn child and making an impossible decision” and claimed he had received death threats. 

He also said he was surprised that his announcement of ending the life of his unborn child to his 345,000 followers on X was “newsworthy.”

Many pro-life advocates responded by noting that Ridgway and his wife decided to end the life of their child. 

“My God. You two didn’t suffer a miscarriage or a stillbirth like millions of couples do every year,” said former ESPN anchor Sage Steele. “You CHOSE to abort your baby. And then you CHOSE to announce it publicly. YOU ARE NOT A VICTIM. This is narcissism at its finest.”

Sens. Susan Collins (R-ME), Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), Mitch McConnell (R-KY), and Thom Tillis (R-NC) once again crossed the aisle to block the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act, which would require proof of citizenship to register to vote in federal elections and a photo ID to cast a ballot. The amendment, offered by Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) as an attachment to the nearly $70 billion reconciliation package funding ICE and Border Patrol, needed 60 votes to clear the filibuster threshold. It never came close.

Graham didn’t pull punches after the vote. “There’s no other reason to say you don’t have to have an ID,” he said. “It just makes cheating easier.”

Lee then dropped the hammer and took aim at the “Zombie Filibuster,” the modern version of the filibuster that allows senators to obstruct legislation without maintaining a talking filibuster.

“51 votes for the SAVE America Act during tonight’s budget reconciliation vote-a-rama,” Lee posted on X. “That means that but for the Zombie Filibuster, the House-passed SAVE America Act would now be on its way to the White House for President Trump’s signature.”

“If they want to filibuster the SAVE America Act, make them speak,” he added. “And if we’re not willing to make them speak and do the hard work, then it is time to nuke the filibuster.”

51 votes for the SAVE America Act during tonight’s budget reconciliation vote-a-rama

That means that but for the Zombie Filibuster, the House-passed SAVE America Act would now be on its way to the White House for President Trump’s signature https://t.co/3eVv6RpO3C

— Mike Lee (@BasedMikeLee) June 5, 2026

Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) had warned before the vote that “it’s about the math,” trying to manage expectations. What the math now shows is that even if the four Republicans voted for the bill, which has overwhelming public support, they still cannot get the bill through.

Democrats, predictably, cried foul. Sen. Alex Padilla (D-CA) insisted “current safeguards are working” and dismissed the effort as an attempt to “ban vote by mail.” He also complained about transgender-related provisions being added to the amendment during Pride Month, claiming it was “offensive.”

The American people want voter ID. A majority of the Senate wants voter ID. The only thing in the way is the filibuster.

The argument against killing the filibuster is that if Democrats gain power, they will ram every conceivable change through the Senate, such as increasing the number of justices on the Supreme Court and adding more states to the union that would pad their electoral numbers.

On Thursday, the Maine senator cast her 10,000th consecutive vote during a marathon vote-a-rama on President Donald Trump’s budget reconciliation package, which provides $69.5 billion in funding for ICE through 2029. The measure passed 52-47. Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) was the lone Republican who voted against it.

The Senate chamber erupted in applause as Collins hit the milestone, drawing rare bipartisan praise. 

“No matter what has been going on in the world or in her life, Senator Collins has never, never missed a vote in her entire Senate career. This is truly a remarkable milestone,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) said. “Many of us try hard to make every vote. Senator Collins has actually done it.”

Senator Susan Collins (R-ME, @SenatorCollins) 10,000 consecutive roll call votes. pic.twitter.com/GVMKpiQDf6

— CSPAN (@cspan) June 5, 2026

Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) backed up Schumer, calling the accomplishment an “impressive demonstration of endurance and determination.”

“I salute you for it,” he said. 

Collins, a moderate Republican who represents an increasingly blue state, is the first senator in history to reach the threshold. 

“Mainers are known for their work ethic, and they deserve a senator who works just as hard for them. Growing up in Aroostook County, I learned the value of hard work, perseverance, and honoring your commitments. I am proud to bring those values with me to the Senate every day,” Collins said of her 10,000 votes.  

“Representing the state of Maine is the honor of a lifetime, and I will continue to serve with the diligence and responsibility that Mainers deserve,” she added. 

Maine is considered a must-win state for Democrats seeking to flip the Senate and block President Trump’s second-term agenda. Collins has consistently defied conventional wisdom and political headwinds, winning four reelection campaigns with cross-over support in an increasingly polarized era.

Schumer’s praise of Collins is especially notable as Democrats bend over backwards to defend Platner as he remains entrenched in controversy. 

The Democratic Senate candidate engaged in a pattern of “intimidating and disturbing” behavior toward multiple women and lied about not knowing the meaning of his Nazi tattoo, according to a new report from The New York Times citing former girlfriends.

Three of Platner’s ex-girlfriends described volatile and “toxic” relationships with the Senate hopeful, claiming he demeaned women, became physically threatening, and was repeatedly unfaithful. On one occasion, an ex-girlfriend accused Platner of twisting her arm, shoving her into a bedroom, and holding the door shut until she became “calm.” 

“It didn’t cause an injury, it didn’t break my arm,” she told the Times. 

In damage control, Platner strongly disputed claims of physical intimidation or violence. 

“There are some allegations in this piece that I just want to be kind of unequivocal about, are simply not true,” Platner said on MS NOW. “Anything alleging physicality, anything alleging that I knew what my tattoo was, these are the statements of someone who’s politically motivated.”

WATCH: Hayes asks Platner where there are any other damning texts or pictures out there that could potentially get dropped late in the race. Platner’s response: “I’m not worried about it.” pic.twitter.com/lL70UrAaAA

— Jorge Bonilla (@BonillaJL) June 5, 2026

Earlier this week, Platner met privately with Senate Democrats in Washington as party leaders grew increasingly concerned about whether additional scandals could surface before the general election. 

Yet even as Democratic leaders coalesce around Platner, fissures within the party continue to surface.

“Graham Platner is a chronic liar who is mentally disturbed, sympathetic to Nazis, and dangerous to women,” Ally Sammarco, a Democratic political consultant, said. “I’m disgusted to see members of my party make excuses for his behavior because it’s politically beneficial. He should be nowhere near our party and the U.S. Senate.

Graham Platner is a chronic liar who is mentally disturbed, sympathetic to Nazis, and dangerous to women. I’m disgusted to see members of my party make excuses for his behavior because it’s politically beneficial. He should be nowhere near our party and the U.S. Senate.

— Ally Sammarco (@Ally_Sammarco) June 5, 2026

And apparently it’s “very, very good.”

Ötzi, the 5,300-year-old Iceman mummy, was found in 1991 on the border of Italy and Austria, where he was likely killed by an arrow to the shoulder. His body was famously preserved in the glacial ice of the Ötztal Alps, becoming Europe’s oldest natural mummy. 

A new study of the Iceman mummy, published Wednesday in the journal Microbiome, reveals groundbreaking insights into the surprisingly active gut microbiome of the ancient mummy.

Most notable was the living yeast discovered in the mummy’s guts, skin, and a “brownish” water. So the next step, naturally, was to make bread.

“What we didn’t expect to find was yeast,” the lead author of the study, Mohamed Sarhan, told AFP. “If you tell anyone you have yeast, they immediately ask: Can we use it for bread?”

The task resulted in three months of trial and error, but the researchers eventually created a loaf they called “very, very good.”

“At first, the yeast hadn’t yet adapted to the flour environment, so nothing happened at all. We then continued over a longer period and refreshed it about every two weeks so that the yeast could slowly adapt. Eventually, we obtained a completely normal dough that rose within 24 hours — basically just like with ordinary yeast,” he said in a statement.

The scientific accomplishment is just the beginning. Sarhan told Reuters the study shows the Iceman mummy as a “dynamic ecosystem” and there’s still much left to learn.

“His body hosts living, metabolically capable organisms that are ⁠actively responding to their environment,” Sarhan said. “The cold-adapted yeasts are growing. Certain bacteria have colonized and persisted across his tissues for decades.”

This isn’t the end of the borderline-cannibalistic endeavor. Get ready to crack open a cold one because mummy yeast beer might be next on the list. 

***

States are cracking down on illegal demonstrations, and radicals are panicking. Earlier this year, Utah enacted HB 331, which took several steps to enhance criminal penalties for crimes currently classified as misdemeanors. Arizona is close to sending a similar bill to the governor’s desk. These bills draw on a concept called “civil terrorism,” which I coined in early 2025 and have fleshed out since then, including in model legislation developed alongside my colleagues at the Manhattan Institute.

Civil terrorism refers to the weaponization of “minor” crimes to intimidate or coerce law-abiding citizens into taking a political position. The best way to understand it is to consider its most common manifestation. Radical groups block a road en masse, chanting about their environmentalist, economic, or geopolitical views. They communicate to trapped drivers that no trip to the airport, their jobs, or their families will be spared from the threat of future disruption until some policy changes are made. Rather than persuading their fellow citizens to support the change, they threaten to make life miserable until enough people cry uncle and acquiesce.

That is not how we communicate or settle political questions in our democratic system. We have robust First Amendment rights that allow us to channel strong, offensive, or controversial opinions into peaceable arguments — including in public spaces. But the First Amendment has never allowed people to shut down all other elements of American life so that some group can express itself with maximal ruthless effectiveness. We have laws that prohibit disorderly conduct, vandalism, trespassing, and more. And if those laws fail to deter repeat offenders or treat the minor crime of road-blocking by one person — a nuisance, not a menace — the same as road-blocking by 15 people, they should be updated. That is what civil terrorism laws do.

Most Americans grasp this intuitively and recognize that civil terrorism laws present no First Amendment problem. Yet some organizations and media outlets seem invested in pretending otherwise. A recent attempted hit piece against me and the Manhattan Institute in WIRED made some classic moves in trying to argue that civil terrorism laws are somehow violations of the First Amendment’s speech protections. It made some classic errors and employed some recurring misdirection, which is worth addressing.

The piece’s subheader is self-refuting. It says that civil terrorism laws would “increase[e] penalties for minor crimes committed while people engage in constitutionally protected free speech.” If people are committing minor crimes, however, the fact that they are engaged in some expressive behavior is constitutionally irrelevant. There is no get-out-of-jail-free card for yelling about a political issue while you do something illegal.

What is a “minor” crime, anyway? Just because something is classified as a misdemeanor now does not make it inherently unimportant — certainly not deserving of First Amendment protection, as if it were almost legal. Civil terrorists exploit the fact that some crimes are treated with kid gloves and hardly prosecuted. They violate precisely those laws in creatively destructive ways, knowing that they will face minimal consequences and can return to breaking the law repeatedly.

Their sympathizers, like the author of the WIRED article, often emphasize that such lawbreaking is “nonviolent.” That’s a red herring. Many laws prohibit nonviolent actions because “violent” and “illegal” are not synonyms. Our laws protect against behaviors that erode the social fabric, such as subjecting thousands of people to needless traffic to make a political point. Americans have an interest in clean, functional, orderly public spaces, which is why vandalism can be prohibited — and treated as a serious crime when its message threatens further disruption or even violence.

Click here for more Manhattan Institute content.

Another common criticism is that civil terrorism stigmatizes protest by labeling some demonstrators as terrorists. But these laws don’t label individuals “terrorists” as a pejorative or put them on a list. Civil terrorism simply describes the application of terrorist logic through less-violent means: We will continue to make your life miserable until you adopt our political position. Doing that with guns and bombs is violent terrorism. Doing it with other unlawful actions is still dangerous. More importantly, highlighting the logic of terrorism at play alerts lawmakers and our fellow citizens that the disruptions won’t stop if we ignore them. To the contrary, civil terrorists regularly vow to “escalate.” Our policy response has to be a crackdown, rather than a backdown.

Fretting about the invocation of terrorism or emphasizing the irrelevant (and arguable) element of nonviolence is a good sign that these critics don’t have much to go on. Frivolous First Amendment arguments attempting to extend constitutional protection to obviously illegal behavior shows that beyond all doubt. States have every right to ensure that their streets aren’t surrendered to radicals who only care about the Constitution when they can wield it in bad faith against law-abiding Americans. The movement to put civil terrorists in prison, investigate their organizers, and ensure that public spaces belong to the public again is gaining steam — and it is taking flak because it is over the target.

***

Tal Fortgang is a legal policy fellow at the Manhattan Institute. 

Displays and exhibits at the June Fourth Memorial Museum in El Monte, California, were spray-painted on Sunday in what museum officials believe to have been a targeted attack. The Los Angeles County museum tells the history of the June 4, 1989, massacre at Tiananmen Square, where soldiers killed up to 2,600 pro-democracy protesters. 

“The main part of the exhibition, including sections of the walls, was vandalized with spray paint, causing serious damage to the museum’s assets. The museum strongly condemns the perpetrators and those instigating the incident and will pursue legal action against them,” the museum said in a statement. 

The museum said it was working with the El Monte Police Department and had obtained certain leads and identified suspicious circumstances.” 

“We view this incident as yet another instance of ‘transnational repression’ and have reported the relevant details to the FBI and the appropriate committees of the U.S. Congress,” the museum said. 

El Monte police sergeant Andrew Mora told Domino Theory that police were probing whether the incident was a hate crime and would report it to the FBI. 

Museum co-founder Wang Dan posted photos of some of the vandalism and said that surveillance cameras were destroyed, but that the footage was able to be recovered and sent to the police. 

已经到达现场，现场破坏严重。

作案者潜入纪念馆，并破坏了摄像镜头，然后才开始损毁动作。

现发布第一批照片。 pic.twitter.com/hFn5RWYf1z

— 王丹 (@wangdan1989) May 31, 2026

“The June Fourth Memorial Hall will never cease operations due to such acts of destruction and threats. On the contrary, with the support of all sectors of society, we look forward to making the memorial hall even better!” Wang said. “No matter how fierce the storm, we will stand firm!”

Wang later spoke to the House Select Committee on China about the incident. The committee said the vandalism was “disturbing and sad.” 

“The museum will continue and all of us will never let the world forget about Tiananmen Square,” the committee added. 

The Congressional-Executive Commission on China also commented on the vandalism and called for the FBI to investigate. 

“Vandalism of a [Tiananmen Massacre] museum cannot erase the memory of what happened on June 4, 1989, or cover up the crimes committed by the [CCP] as it crushed peaceful demonstrations for freedom and democracy,” the commission said. “[The FBI Los Angeles] should investigate this as an act of [transnational repression].”

I previously argued that Governor Gavin Newsom treated California as a policy laboratory for all kinds of radical regulatory experimentation and that the results were overwhelmingly negative. Now there are signs of a state-wide reckoning.

Polling indicates that California residents could put an end to the toxic mix of harmful policies crafted or enforced by Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass and Governor Newsom.

The L.A. mayoral race has put this dynamic on full display. Former reality TV star and political outsider Spencer Pratt has made the Palisades Fire, which occurred under Bass’s watch, a central issue in the race. That fire, started by a deranged arsonist, caused damages estimated at over $28 billion and killed dozens of people. Bass’s team oversaw a response that policy experts have criticized as inadequate. At the time, the Washington Post editorial board argued that Bass’s city government “badly mishandled” the response, and, perhaps worse, that Bass tried to sweep evidence of her bungled response under the rug.

Though it happened over a year ago, Spencer Pratt is not letting Bass off the hook for her role in the fire, which affected him personally. “If they didn’t burn my house down, I wouldn’t be running for mayor,” Pratt has said. That strategy is working for Pratt. While still slightly trailing Bass in recent polls, Pratt is slated to face Bass in a runoff election in November.

Bass blamed climate change for the fires, which is no excuse for negligence. In fact, if Bass believes climate change is exacerbating wildfire risk, that arguably casts her in a worse light. If she believed that fires are now more likely to occur, due to climate change or any other reason, her decision to drastically reduce the L.A. Fire Department budget by $17 million before the fire was especially inexcusable.

Bass not only refused to accept accountability but also attempted a cover-up. Bass reportedly altered an after-action report to downplay the role of poor political decisions in the fire’s impact. The original report, much of which Bass reportedly quashed, may have discussed the reservoir drained ahead of the fire that could have supplied 117 million gallons of water, and the insufficient availability of firefighters.

Solely focusing on Bass, though, misses the larger point: In California, ideologically driven leftist policies have prioritized environmental regulations over brush-clearing measures. Faster vegetation growth translates to higher fire risk.

Californians know this, but they have long faced an uphill battle in clearing brush from public land. As a general rule, California doesn’t clear brush from public lands for environmental reasons, and residents must apply for a permit to do so — a lengthy and cumbersome process.

This is what happened in the Palisades Fire. Having not been cleared from public lands abutting residential areas, brush plants, which are evolutionarily engineered to burn, contributed to the fire’s rapid spread.

Californians know that politicians are at least partly to blame for mismanagement and poor policymaking that cost over 20,000 of them their homes in the most recent major bout of wildfires in early 2025.

That is why Democrats are at risk of losing their grip on power in California at the gubernatorial level, too. Republican candidate Steve Hilton is surging in polls among Californians and could be the first Republican elected governor of California in two decades.

Hilton is not tiptoeing around challenging fire prevention issues. To the contrary, he is leaning in with ambitious proposals to use remote sensing technology and drones to detect and stop fires before they spread out of control.

At the same time, Hilton has condemned California officials for putting ideology before people. Hilton has noted, “the California Coastal Commission also blocked fire prevention and mitigation measures in the exact hills that just burned, in order to protect a few thousand specimens of the Braunton’s milkvetch shrub.” He also got Californians’ attention, with his claim that the L.A. wildfires were “not a natural disaster” but rather “a man-made disaster.” Thanks to common sense axioms like these, he is currently the frontrunner in the race, much to the chagrin and surprise of California’s Democratic establishment.

California is a solid blue state and has been for many years. A red wave there would mean a red wave could be possible anywhere. And apocalyptic scenes of wildfires, the most salient and striking example of policy failure in that state, are getting voters’ attention like never before.

***

Sydney Rodman is a visiting fellow with the Independent Women’s Center for Energy and Conservation.

“He’s a big strong guy, and I said, how do you think you would do in women’s sports, Jaxson,” Trump said he asked Dart. “He said, ‘Pretty good, sir.’ He didn’t know I was joking.”

Trump made the comment while speaking to the media at the White House when he recalled his conversation with Dart while discussing the Supreme Court coming to a decision on biological men participating in women’s sports. While Trump’s comment was just a joke, it allowed him to state the obvious regarding the hypothetical. 

“He would’ve been the greatest athlete in the history of women’s sports,” Trump said. “You should see the size of this guy, he’s like a male model, he’s going to be a great quarterback.”

The president and quarterback were with each other publicly for the first time when Dart introduced Trump at a rally for Rep. Mike Lawler (R-NY) in Suffern, New York, on May 22. Dart, who publicly stated how honored he was to present the president at the event, was ridiculed by leftist outlets, sports media moguls, and even teammate Abdul Carter, who took to X to voice his frustration. 

Despite the backlash, stood his ground, supporting America and the president of the United States.

“This was a unique opportunity. Being asked and given the opportunity to introduce the president of the United States,” Dart told reporters. “My thinking was pretty simple. I’ve always loved this country. The president position has always been a position that I’ve well respected, regardless of political affiliation, political party.”

Trump later backed Dart as the quarterback faced criticism and suggested that the two have grown closer since the rally two weeks ago.

“Ideological conditioning and two-tiered policing are glaring symptoms of civilizational decline. They must be rejected across the West,” the State Department wrote on X. “The United States sends our condolences to the family of Henry Nowak and the people of the United Kingdom at this troubling time.”

Henry Nowak, 18, a first-generation university student studying accounting and finance at Southampton University, was walking home alone after a night out on December 3, 2025, when he crossed paths with Vickrum Digwa, 23, a Sikh man who was carrying a large ceremonial dagger on his belt. There was a brief exchange in which Nowak asked if Digwa was “a bad man” after noticing the visible blade. The exchange then escalated into a confrontation, and Digwa stabbed Nowak four times, including once through the chest, piercing his lung. Over two pints of blood pooled in Nowak’s chest cavity.

After the attack, Digwa told police that Nowak had racially abused him and that he had acted in self-defense. Officers arrived to find Nowak on the ground. “I’ve been stabbed,” Nowak told them. “I don’t think you have, mate,” an officer replied. He was handcuffed, read his rights, and informed he was under arrest for assault. He lost consciousness shortly after. First responders attempted CPR, but he was pronounced dead at 12:37 a.m.

At trial, the jury rejected Digwa’s self-defense and racism claims entirely. Sentencing Judge William Mousley was scathing, calling Digwa’s story “wicked lies” and finding that Nowak had said nothing racist. Digwa filmed Nowak as he lay dying, directed his mother to remove the murder weapon from the scene, and whispered to his brother in a police van — unaware they were being recorded — that he had stabbed Henry three times and that self-defense would fall apart if cameras existed in the area. He was sentenced to life in prison with a minimum term of 21 years.

Nowak’s father, Mark, said his son “did not die with dignity” — that he was treated as a criminal while his killer was believed on the spot.

Body camera footage released after the conviction confirmed the family’s account. Within days, hundreds of protesters gathered outside a Southampton police station, chanting “I can’t breathe” and carrying photographs of Nowak. Riot police blocked streets. Objects were thrown. Reform U.K. leader Nigel Farage called the killing evidence of “two-tiered” policing, and Elon Musk amplified the case globally. Prime Minister Keir Starmer acknowledged the footage raised “serious questions.”

Lyndsey Fifield, who dated Platner from 2013 to 2015, said that the Times convinced her to come forward to talk about her experience with Platner, but then, the reporters left out critical details. In a post on X, she said the Times “twisted” the story into a narrative driven by Platner’s Senate campaign.

“It dawned on me that this really was a set up all along. The journalists I trusted who convinced me to share a story I never wanted to tell methodically delayed and twisted this into a gift to the Platner campaign,” she said. “Violating the trust of his victims. Shattering the trust I placed in them with the most vulnerable story of my life.”

In response to Fifield’s post, the Times told The Daily Wire that it stood by its reporting.

“We published accounts provided by several women who were in romantic relationships with Graham Platner,” Times spokeswoman Nicole Taylor said. “Our story accurately presents each of these accounts as told to our reporters and according to our standards. We stand by our reporting of the accounts from Ms. Fifield and the other women, who provided a revealing look at the behavior of a major candidate for the U.S. Senate.”

Fifield, a Virginia conservative, said she told the Times that Platner regularly grabbed her by the shoulders hard enough to leave marks. She recounted an incident in which he allegedly twisted her arm behind her back, shoved her into a bedroom, and held the door shut, telling her to stay there until she was “calm.” Fifield said she eventually fell asleep and left the next morning, according to the Times.

Platner has denied any allegations of physical abuse.

Fifield, who has worked in Republican politics, said that the Times story downplayed the seriousness of her allegations and that stories from multiple other women she was told would be included were not.

“After the story went up I began to ask them … wait, where are the stories from the other women? Where are their accusations of sexual assault? Why am I the focus? Why are there 11 paragraphs dedicated to detailing my work history (more than has been published about Graham’s by far)?” Fifield asked. “Why does it say ‘nobody could corroborate’ when I offered them sources that COULD corroborate?”

She added that she was tricked by assurances from the Times that it would fully tell her story.

“I bucked all advice from my friends (and resisted my conservative bias) and decided to fully trust the Times journalists,” she wrote. “As they left my home they asked that I not talk to any other outlets and I insisted then and repeatedly over the following weeks that I would keep my word and only share this story with them.”

She also said that the Times failed to use numerous screenshots she provided to reporters to verify her account of the relationship.

“Where were the screenshots they’d said they would use? Or the mention that I’d supported local democrats and that most of my family (and husband) are liberal? The editors said it was too much, they explained,” she said. “The Times also failed to include any mention that I DID confide in multiple friends through the years that Graham had been abusive — long before he was running for office. Those friends confirm they told the Times so.”

Platner’s campaign has been plagued by revelations that he sent sexually explicit messages to multiple women while married and maintained an account on Kik, a messaging platform flagged by child-safe advocates for being associated with sexual predators.

***

When I clicked open an email from the Free Library of Philadelphia earlier this week, I figured one of two things had happened. Either I’d suddenly time-traveled back seven years, or I was hallucinating. Because isn’t DEI falling out of fashion lately?

There’s proof that it is. But clearly not at libraries. This was the image the Free Library chose to advertise its summer reading program:

The Free Library of Philadelphia is having a normal one. pic.twitter.com/J0PXrABHUB

— Amanda Harding (@iamdeeda) June 4, 2026

It honestly gets funnier the longer you look at it. Every progressive group is subtly represented in a program that, ultimately, is aimed at children. 

The accompanying activity tracker is full of ultra-woke suggested titles, including “Homebody” by Theo Parish, described as “a hopeful story of coming home to your nonbinary identity,” and “Into the Streets: A Young Person’s Visual History of Protest in the United States” by Marke Bieschke. 

Ubiquitous drag queen story hours nationwide, among other affronts to common decency, have already shown that public libraries were successfully hijacked by the radical Left years ago. But it’s still jarring to encounter something as benign as summer reading programs gone totally off the rails. 

The launch of these über-progressive summer reading initiatives comes at the same time Usha Vance, the second lady of the United States, is rolling out her summer reading challenge. The contrast is striking.

Calling all readers: My Summer Reading Challenge is back! Visit https://t.co/KqGhZTJjUu TODAY to download your reading log and get started. Your next summer adventure is just one page away! pic.twitter.com/isrw3QZ9FS

— Second Lady Usha Vance (@SLOTUS) June 1, 2026

Predictably, this launch has been mostly ignored by mainstream media. But ABC did interview the second lady to discuss the program.

“Last year it was an idea that we had really at the last minute as we were thinking about ways to enhance childhood literacy and get kids reading over the summer and sort of stave off some of the summer learning loss that traditionally happens every year,” Vance told the outlet. “So we did a little pilot program and it was a success beyond what we had hoped.”

“This year we’re having a big rollout all over the country,” she continued, mentioning partnerships with schools, libraries, and other institutions nationwide. (One of those is probably not the Free Library of Philadelphia, based on the type of content it’s promoting.)

Instead of recommending books about protests, gender fluidity, and whether rivers have feelings, Vance said the premise of the White House’s summer reading program is easy for parents to follow.

“Our summer reading challenge is really simple. All kids have to do is pick up 12 books, anything that they like,” the second lady told ABC. “If a kid likes reading about squirrels, as one did last year, read 12 books about squirrels. If a kid loves history, read books about history.”

“So you read those books, write them down on a log and send them to whitehouse.gov/read and we’ll receive them, send a certificate,” Vance added.

This basic and effective summer reading program doesn’t push an agenda. Instead, kids are encouraged to explore topics they care about and read books that correspond with their interests. Meanwhile, libraries nationwide are pushing progressive garbage to kids via summer reading programs. 

On the San Francisco Public Library’s list of 22 recommended books for grades 3 to 5, the only white character featured in the cover art is a girl learning the art of witchcraft. The Chicago Public Library suggests a children’s version of Michelle Obama’s memoir, “Becoming.” 

And then there’s the Phoenix Public Library, whose list of books for children in grades 6 through 8 includes “We’re in This Together” by activist Linda Sarsour, who is best known for co-organizing the Women’s March. 

“Sarsour shares the memories that shaped her into the activist she is today, and how these pivotal moments in her life led her to being an organizer in one of the largest single-day protests in US history,” the description reads. “From the Brooklyn bodega her father owned to the streets of Washington, DC, Linda’s story as a daughter of Palestinian immigrants is a moving portrayal of what it means to find your voice in your youth and use it for the good of others as an adult.”

Encouraging children to read in the summer is great. Subtly interspersing ultra-woke titles into their “to be read” piles is diabolical. This summer, it would be wise for parents to take a good, long look at their local library before signing up for any summer reading challenges. 

As for the Free Library of Philadelphia: 2019 called, and they want their performative activism back.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio has framed the Trump administration’s efforts as an existential campaign against a government he considers a direct threat to American security.

Secretary Rubio announced the designations under a May 1 executive order, targeting five Cuban entities and five individuals. At the top of the list: Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel and his wife, Lis Cuesta Peraza, along with their stepson — as well as Alejandro Castro Espín, the son of Raúl Castro and former head of Cuban intelligence, and Castro Espín’s son. The Castro name is now, once again, directly in Washington’s crosshairs.

“The Cuban people are the hostages of a brutal and repressive government,” Rubio declared. “Which disregards their safety and prosperity to advance the Castro regime’s true purpose: serving as an outpost for our adversaries and exporting radical left-wing violence and terror across our hemisphere.”

The sanctions also hit Cuba’s Ministry of the Revolutionary Armed Forces (MINFAR), which controls vast swaths of the Cuban economy through military-owned enterprises. Any entity owned 50% or more by MINFAR — or by the previously designated military holding company GAESA — is considered blocked as well, strangling the military cartel’s economic empire. Rubio has previously called GAESA “the heart of Cuba’s kleptocratic communist system.”

The State Department also sanctioned the Cuban Institute of Friendship with the Peoples (ICAP), a Fidel Castro-founded organization that U.S. officials say supports Cuban intelligence operations; the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution, Cuba’s neighborhood surveillance network; and Minera la Victoria, a Cuban-Australian gold mining joint venture whose profits flow directly to the regime.

Foreign banks and companies that continue doing business with any of the designated parties now face their own sanctions exposure — a warning shot aimed squarely at international firms still profiting from the regime.

“We will continue to take action,” Rubio had warned on X in early May, “until the regime takes all necessary political and economic reforms.”

Today’s sanctions demonstrate that the Trump Administration will not stand by while Cuba’s communist regime threatens our national security in our hemisphere. We will continue to take action until the regime takes all necessary political and economic reforms.

— Secretary Marco Rubio (@SecRubio) May 7, 2026

The appearance on MS NOW’s “All In with Chris Hayes” marked Platner’s first major national television interview since the New York Times published a lengthy report detailing allegations from former romantic partners just days before Maine Democrats head to the polls.

Asked directly whether he had exchanged sexually explicit messages with other women in 2023 and 2024 while married to his wife, Amy Gertner, Platner did not dispute the underlying conduct.

“At the beginning of our marriage, I made mistakes, and Amy held me accountable for them, and we worked through them,” Platner told Hayes. “The work that we did made our marriage significantly stronger.”

The admission comes after weeks of scrutiny surrounding reports that Platner exchanged explicit messages with multiple women after marrying Gertner in 2023. Hayes repeatedly pressed the Democrat on the timeline, asking when the behavior ended. “It happened soon after we got married, and we dealt with it very, very early in our relationship,” Platner said. “That’s when it stopped.”

Hayes: Were you sending sexually explicit messages to other women back in 2023 2024?

Platner: At the beginning of our marriage, I made mistakes and Amy held me accountable for them, and we worked through them. And the work that we did made our marriage significantly stronger.… pic.twitter.com/1X5eInnI9K

— Acyn (@Acyn) June 5, 2026

Platner is also a registered user on Kik, which the National Center on Sexual Exploitation has described as a “predator’s paradise,” thanks to a number of features that allow underage users to join the app and communicate with adults, The Daily Wire first reported last weekend. 

Later in the MS NOW interview, Platner said the women he messaged after getting married were adults and that the exchanges were consensual. Asked whether he knew their ages, Platner replied, “Yes. Oh God, I mean, yes, of course.”

While acknowledging mistakes in his marriage, Platner attempted to draw a distinction between those actions and the more serious allegations contained in Thursday’s New York Times report, which was based on interviews with more than two dozen people, including six former romantic partners.

Some former girlfriends described Platner as caring and supportive. Others characterized him as “toxic,” “unsettling,” and volatile, alleging he drank heavily, was frequently unfaithful, and in some instances behaved aggressively toward women.

“There are some allegations in this piece that I just want to be kind of unequivocal about, are simply not true,” Platner said. “Anything alleging physicality, anything alleging that I knew what my tattoo was, these are the statements of someone who’s politically motivated.”

One former girlfriend alleged Platner physically intimidated her during arguments, including grabbing her wrist, putting his hands on her shoulders, and pushing her into a room before holding the door shut.

When Hayes asked whether those incidents occurred, Platner flatly denied them. Hayes followed up by asking whether the woman was lying about the allegations. “Yes, that is not true. No, it did not happen,” Platner responded.

Platner also revisited a controversy that has followed his campaign for months involving a tattoo of the Nazi Totenkopf, or “death’s head,” symbol.

The Times reported that a former partner claimed Platner referred to the tattoo as “my Totenkopf” years before he publicly stated he learned of its Nazi associations. Platner denied the allegation. “I had that tattoo for 17 years. It’s a skull and crossbones,” he said.

The Democrat argued that he could not have knowingly displayed Nazi imagery, noting that he obtained a State Department security clearance, reenlisted in the Army, and regularly spent time with Jewish family members while the tattoo remained visible.

“Any statement saying that I did know is, again, totally false,” he said.

The interview represented Platner’s latest attempt to reassure Democrats nervous about a steady stream of controversies surrounding his candidacy.

Earlier this week, Platner met privately with Senate Democrats in Washington after reports emerged that party leaders were increasingly concerned about whether additional damaging revelations could surface before the general election. Platner told the lawmakers that no credible new allegations were forthcoming and that “the worst of the rumors” circulating about him were false.

Platner has argued that voters should focus on his policy agenda rather than his personal life, while his wife has publicly defended him and criticized the publication of private communications.

But Thursday’s interview also underscored a political reality confronting the Democratic nominee: even as he disputes some of the most serious accusations against him, he is now openly acknowledging conduct that has become central to the growing controversy surrounding his campaign.

***

Welcome to the Bright Side, a weekly roundup of all the good news and ideas you might have missed from the past week.

It’s “lemonading” season

Summer invites us to take a break from the daily grind to enjoy life’s less structured pleasures, possibly via lake, beach, or hammock. But, like we’ve heard about turning lemons into lemonade, a science-backed “lemonading” mindset offers a mental vacation from negative thoughts. (That cocktail umbrella behind your ear finally makes sense!)

Research shows that a playful outlook actually helps frame challenging situations in a more positive light. More effective than the unrealistic “rose-colored glasses” approach, lemonading allows “creatively imagining and pursuing positive possibilities to cultivate adaptive, enjoyable experiences while maintaining a clear-eyed realism about challenges.” Effectively turning even small difficulties into opportunities, the strategy also develops personal resilience, deepens enjoyment, and allows us to flourish. Bartender at the swim-up pool bar, we’ll take a glass half-full of that!

 

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Best homemade hummus ever

Other than close friends, there’s not much I miss about Los Angeles since I moved to Nashville a few months ago. But I will forever crave Hummus Bar in Tarzana. It cost $20 a pop (don’t miss that!), but even my discerning Israeli friends praised the restaurant’s ridiculously silky, creamy hummus topped with pine nuts, sautéed mushrooms, or tender beef, and always drizzled with olive oil with hot za’atar laffa bread on the side. 

I may be in an awkward long-distance relationship with this restaurant, but what I do have in my possession is a good blender. And I found one hummus recipe that almost perfectly matches whatever magic they’re working at Hummus Bar. (All they’ll tell me is that they blend it forever!). Cookie + Kate’s Best Hummus Recipe incorporates a few different chef techniques for great results, like boiling chickpeas in baking soda until they’re mushy for maximum smoothness, using tahini from Ethiopian sesame seeds for the best flavor, and adding ice water as you blend for fluffier texture. 

 

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I’m no expert, and mine always turns out gorgeously smooth and full of garlicky, lemon flavor. If only it were this easy to bake flatbread on the side of a tandoor oven like a restaurant!

The era of the fashion hoof 

Style alert, y’all! Pig feet are so hot right now. Inspired by Hailey Bieber’s $1,000 Valentino stilettos that simulate the look of an animal’s hoof with a peekaboo style cutout over the first and second toes, I discovered the wonderful world of hoof manicures, AKA the relax-maxxing content you need right now.

I’ll be honest, I can’t stomach Dr. Pimple Popper videos, or stand listening to the whispering and clicky fingernails of ASMR. What I can do, however, is watch a professional farrier rejuvenate a horse, donkey, or cow’s hoof to full health. If you need a guy, Nate the Hoof Guy turns muddy, injured hooves into the pristine footwear Bessie needs when she’s hanging out with the gals around the farm. When you’re done with that, you can always switch things up with landscaping and pressure washing transformations that serve the kind of restorative calm that comes from everything being clean and in its right place.  

What to bring instead of “nothing”

Is everyone doing backyard barbecues right now? It stresses me out a little when even a casual dinner party invite includes “don’t worry about bringing anything!” My mind immediately goes to the episode of “Seinfeld” where Elaine gets stuck bringing cinnamon babka as a hostess gift, instead of her preferred chocolate. “We’ll be going in with lesser babka!” 

This isn’t to say you shouldn’t feel totally comfy just bringing yourself. But if you aren’t sure about showing up empty-handed, you can always add to the festivities. Suggesting you bring “nothing” is often the host’s way of letting guests off the hook and keeping things on theme. But “something” shows you appreciate the gift of a meal that you didn’t have to cook.

A classic bottle of wine works whether it gets opened or not. And a sweet and unfussy dessert says you’re not secretly trying to steal the spotlight. Most people would also gladly accept a scented candle, or flowers pre-arranged in a vase. Personally, I love Ina Garten’s strategy for bringing something the host family can casually enjoy the following morning, like coffee and homemade biscotti. But, as an experienced guest, I can confirm that cinnamon rolls from Whole Foods that come in their own pan (ready to bake and drizzle with icing) satisfy the assignment for a busy family that graciously invited you over for homemade pizza the night before.

Ronaldo the soccer playing dog

Real footballer Cristiano Ronaldo plays forward, but as soccer fans anticipate the start of the FIFA World Cup across North America this June, fútbol’s cutest viral sensation has become Ronaldo The Football Dog. He’s got stocky little legs, but he’s a natural at goal keeping.

A Chihuahua dachshund mix (known as a “Chiweenie”) from Lehigh Valley, Pennsylvania, six-year-old Ronaldo is less interested in fancy footwork and more into snatching softly inflated soccer balls midair with his mouth as they sail toward the net. As Ronald’s human relative Sam Katzman explained, “He pretty much just decided that he was a goalkeeper.”

 

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TBD on whether furry Ronaldo will be appearing at the World Cup, but just like the Super Bowl’s “Puppy Bowl,” the international football competition is set to feature a “World Pup” where rescue puppies will adorably battle it out on the pitch. It’s all part of the fun for a game that can last 90 minutes with zero scoring.  

Thank you for spending a little time with us! Feel free to share your own good news and ideas in the comments (or email me). To paraphrase “SNL’s” Stuart Smalley, “You’re good enough, you’re smart enough, and doggone it, people like you!” — Lauren

During a recent book tour stop, Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT), a potential presidential candidate, said that money should be funneled to leftist activists to ensure that upcoming elections are “fair and free.” Murphy made the dramatic claims during a Q&A with ex-NBC journalist Katie Couric at Judson Memorial Church in Manhattan pushing his book “Crisis of the Common Good.” 

When asked if he had any national aspirations, Murphy said, “Here’s the honest truth: I don’t know that there’s going to be an election in 2028.” 

Couric interjected, “Don’t say that.” 

“I think there is, but we gotta do the work,” Murphy replied. “And so, I am spending all of my time trying to make sure that democracy still exists, trying to preserve what we have.”

He made the comments on May 26, just weeks after another attempted assassination against President Donald Trump.

At the same time as he warned of a dystopian future without elections, Murphy lambasted conservatives for believing that leftism was an “existential threat to the country” and called for Democrats to vote to “permanently eliminate [Trump’s] movement from positions of power.”

Murphy added that he had spent much of the money he raised on funding leftist activist organizations. 

“I’ve been spending most all of my money that I raise online in the last year and a half, sending out grants to local citizen-led organizations all over the country that are protesting what Donald Trump is doing and mobilizing citizens against his corruption and thievery,” he said. 

“We shouldn’t be raising money and hoarding it for the next election. We should be raising money and putting it immediately out onto the streets to help save our democracy,” Murphy added. 

Murphy was referring to his “American Mobilization Project,” which backs leftist organizations that participate in “on-the-ground organizing” that fight against Republican policies or push leftist voting and immigration initiatives. 

For example, the project has supported the group “Indivisible,” which describes itself as an organization fighting “against this fascistic clown show of a regime” and calls for defunding ICE and Border Patrol. 

Indivisible designed a script for activists to call lawmakers and tell them to “use their power as my elected official to demand dignity for immigrants and reject any expansions to Trump’s mass detention and deportation agenda.”

Multiple groups supported by Murphy’s project do immigration legal work. This includes the Minneapolis-based Advocates for Human Rights, which provides legal services to “people in immigration detention,” and American Gateways, which gives free legal services at the immigration courthouse in San Antonio, Texas. 

Another group is the Wisconsin-based Raìces Acciòn, which works to train “the next generation of bilingual organizers to build sustained political power up and down the ballot.”

Other groups protest cuts to welfare programs and public education or push young people to participate in political activism.  

A reality television star with no traditional political background forcing a runoff in one of the bluest cities in America should make every political consultant in the country stop and ask the same question: What are voters trying to tell us?

The answer is obvious. They’re tired of being told not to believe what they see with their own eyes.

For Democrats, Los Angeles should be a five-alarm warning. Simply having a “D” next to your name is no longer enough, not even in cities where Democrats have dominated for decades.

For years, too many big-city politicians have governed as if reelection were guaranteed. They’ve enjoyed the perks of power while residents have been left dealing with the consequences. Living amongst the homelessness crisis and open drug use, rising concerns about crime, animals suffering in heartbreaking conditions, and neighborhoods that feel like they are moving in the wrong direction.

But what has angered voters the most isn’t just that these problems exist. It’s that, too often, the people in charge seem more interested in explaining them away than in fixing them.

That’s where Pratt found an opening.

His campaign made a connection with the people because before promising solutions, he did something many politicians refuse to do: He admitted there was a problem. He didn’t tell frustrated residents their concerns were exaggerated or that everything was fine. He met them where they were.

Critics immediately attacked him for having “no political experience,” but that argument doesn’t hit the same way it used to. When voters are unhappy with the results delivered by career politicians, telling them someone has spent decades inside the same system they’re frustrated with isn’t exactly the winning message people think it is.

Experience matters, but results matter more.

And Republicans should not watch what happened in Los Angeles and learn the wrong lesson. This is not proof that voter frustration automatically translates into Republican victories. It doesn’t.

The same message applies to the Right: You have to earn votes.

A Trump endorsement remains the most powerful force in Republican politics, but it is not a campaign strategy by itself. Candidates cannot simply put “endorsed by President Trump” on a mailer, avoid the hard conversations, and expect voters to show up — especially not right now.

Americans are struggling. They are worried about grocery and gas prices, housing costs, and whether the American dream is slipping further out of reach. They are watching billions spent on conflicts overseas while wondering why life feels more expensive at home.

Voters want to know that the person asking for their vote understands what they are living through.

Trump’s political rise was built on recognizing something the establishment missed: millions of Americans felt ignored, talked down to, and forgotten. Candidates who want to benefit from that movement need to remember what created it in the first place.

It was never just about a name. It was about making people feel heard.

That is the real lesson from Los Angeles.

Democrats cannot assume blue cities will stay blue simply because they always have. Republicans cannot assume a red wave arrives because of endorsements, slogans, or frustration with the other side.

Voters are done handing power to anyone who thinks they are entitled to it.

The political ground is shifting. Party loyalty is weakening. People are more willing than ever to cross traditional lines when they believe someone is actually fighting for them.

The candidates who win the future will not be the ones who tell voters what they should care about. They will be the ones brave enough to admit what voters already know.

***

Vanessa Santos is a political communications specialist and the president and CEO of Renegade DC.

***

Are todays’ kids too badly behaved and poorly parented to share adult-oriented spaces, such as restaurants, weddings, and public transportation? Or do the childless adults demanding insulation from children’s antics as they sip their lattes, say their vows, or commute to work just need to get a grip and grow up already? 

This is one of those Internet Discourses in which people are talking endlessly past one another, ignoring that both things are true: Yes, American parents absolutely need to raise kids who behave better, and, yes, childless adults who want to live without interruptions from crying babies or laughing preschoolers need to be ignored like the overgrown toddlers they are.

A couple things are happening at once here, confounding our collective ability to see and act on the nuanced reality.

One, lack of accommodation for children and families is real, and it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy as fewer people have children and it becomes less common to see children out and about. It then also becomes less presumptive to take children into true and special consideration when making policy and other decisions.

Two, millennials, in mass thrall to gentle parenting and its lies about child development, have produced way too many badly behaved kids and not enough well-behaved ones. As a result, people see so little decent parenting in public that we’ve forgotten how varied even good child-rearing can look in relation to kids of different ages. 

Children should be expected to exist in public

A few weeks ago, I took my four children — ages 11, nine, five, and two — into the kind of Center City Philadelphia coffee shop where one does not typically see children (let alone four of them in one family). No one bothered us, and everyone was kind to us. But we sure got a lot of stares. You know who did not provoke that level of interest? The several dogs on leashes inside this same establishment. Why? Because that eatery, given its clientele, is clearly more commonly frequented by canines than by kids. 

Is this a problem, in and of itself? Of course not. But when children’s presence is alien to large and growing swaths of the population, an unfamiliarity with kids’ norms and needs takes root far beyond a few froufrou coffee shops. 

Take our response to the coronavirus pandemic. Remember how bars opened ahead of schools in many places? Remember how our inane decision to close schools at all was ultimately a regressive tax on poor and working-class children? Remember how senior citizens and childless adults tended to oppose the reopening of schools more than anyone else? When children are largely hidden from view — when their needs are not apparent to people beyond their parents — the devaluation of their well-being is normalized. 

For example, my sons have provoked their fair share of adult upset over the years for existing in pools. In one memorable incident, an elderly woman came over to yell at my then seven-year-old and five-year-old (and me) because they were jumping repeatedly into the pool, giggling and splashing — and had gotten her wetter than she wished to be. I responded charitably due to her advanced age, but one has to wonder what manner of society produces senior citizens who enter pools of their own free choice during a time designated “family swim” and then publicly react in anger when they encounter, um, water.

Such a curmudgeonly attitude toward children’s noise and play in shared spaces, and our acceptance of it, reflects values that are exactly backwards. Children’s needs should be our top priority; childless adults’ desires should be our last. In a healthy culture, any adult who said or behaved otherwise would thereby forfeit her right to any regard or respect. 

Gentle parents are ruining America — and maybe your dinner

As I have written many times, gentle parenting — defined as prioritizing young children’s feelings over their behavior — has many unintended, negative consequences for kids and parents alike. A baseline of decreased tolerance for children in public spaces is one of them. 

There are two things at play here. One is that too many of today’s kids really are abominably behaved. A few months ago, I took my five-year-old in for a sleep study. The veteran nurse who cared for him shared with me that she could no longer count on children his age to sit still while she prepared them for evaluation. Many won’t listen when their parents instruct them to sit still. Some kick, scream, or hit. A substantial percentage need to be pacified with screens in order to complete their appointments. 

If you ever frequent restaurants, churches, or other public spaces where children are present, none of this will surprise you. Beleaguered parents weakly pleading with five-year-olds who don’t sit still to “make a better choice” over a plate of French fries at the local diner is common. Indeed, this kind of permissiveness and abdication cuts across enough demographic divides of class and political ideology that it’s no longer accurate to associate it only with those who profess “gentle parenting.” It is, per Hannah Spier, normative “millennial parenting.” This is a colossal and multifaceted problem that requires swift and thorough remediation.  

That said, the other aspect of decreasing tolerance for children in public spaces is childless adults’ determination to denigrate whatever inconveniences them without regard to the context — in other words, to be gentle parented by society, including by children, themselves. 

As Stephanie Murray has pointed out, the child throwing a tantrum at Target may actually have great parents. After all, he’s screaming because he isn’t getting what he wants, and that’s likely because the adult in charge isn’t giving in. Sure, the five or six-year-old screaming wildly outside the grocery store while his mom attempts to comfort him is almost certainly a gentle-parented disaster with overindulgent parents. But the two- or three-year-old screaming just as wildly? She usually isn’t!

Indeed, it’s the very parents who are willing to let their toddlers throw tantrums — in public and in private — who produce preschoolers who have long since stopped doing so. Children of such parents were told “no” constantly and consistently in toddlerhood, and they learned that tantrums neither changed “no” to “yes” nor garnered them any attention. 

So, yes, it’s on parents to ensure that preschoolers are civilized into the ability to behave appropriately enough in adult-oriented spaces. But it’s also on the rest of society to have the maturity, decency, and grace to remember that the well-named “terrible twos” should not involve house arrest for young families. Moreover, to any right-thinking person, running and laughing kids are not an affront to public peace but the primary reason to preserve it. The dad of a crying toddler on an airplane or the mom of a grade schooler who accidentally drops some books with a thud at the library, for example, should garner genuine smiles and sincere sympathy from other adults, not scowls and eye rolls. 

Frankly, we should all begin from a premise of gratitude to today’s parents for raising the next generation. After all, in this anti-child, anti-family ecology, that’s no longer a given.

***

Elizabeth Grace Matthew writes about books, education, and culture, including on Substack.

With just 58% of the vote reported Thursday evening, Republican Steve Hilton still leads the gubernatorial primary with 27.2% support, ahead of Democrat Xavier Becerra at 25.9%. Both were ahead of billionaire Democrat Tom Steyer, who was at 20.1%. On Wednesday evening, 55% of the vote had been counted.

Despite Hilton’s lead, millions of ballots are still uncounted, making it too early to determine the final order of finish. Under California’s top-two primary system, candidates from the same party can advance to a runoff in November’s general election if they finish in the top two.

In the Los Angeles mayoral race, just 66% of the vote had been counted by Thursday evening, up from 62% from Wednesday evening. Incumbent Democrat Mayor Karen Bass still leads with 35.1% support, followed by Republican Spencer Pratt at 29.4%. Far-left Councilmember Nithya Raman was third with 23.4%.

The top two votegetters in the mayoral primary, regardless of party, secure a place in the November runoff if neither receives more than 50% of the vote. Bass has already secured a spot in the runoff, according to projections.

Trump took to Truth Social late Wednesday night and again on Thursday to accuse Democrats of election fraud, asking, “Why the vote counting DELAY???”

“Look what’s happening in California, the Dumocrats, right before our very eyes, are stealing the vote,” Trump posted on Thursday.

Mayor Bass responded on X Thursday evening.

Trump only says this when MAGA candidates, like Spencer Pratt, start losing.

LA will count every vote. pic.twitter.com/gNi5m13uq7

— Karen Bass (@KarenBassLA) June 4, 2026

“Trump only says this when MAGA candidates, like Spencer Pratt, start losing,” she posted. “LA will count every vote.”

Delayed results are routine in California because of the state’s extensive vote-by-mail system, signature verification, and procedures for resolving ballot errors.

The final tally of California’s races could take as long as three weeks. Unlike many states that require mail ballots to arrive by Election Day, California accepts ballots that arrive up to 7 days later if postmarked on time. Then, those ballots have up to 7 days to reach a processing center. Counties must verify signatures, count provisional ballots, and allow voters to cure certain ballot defects before results are certified.

Staffers were directed Thursday to immediately begin removing Trump’s name from email signatures, letterhead, press releases, social media accounts, voicemail greetings, and other official materials, according to an internal memo obtained by Politico.

The memo sets a June 12 deadline to update signage, brochures, website pages, identification cards, forms, and other materials that currently reference Trump.

Employees were instructed to refer to the institution only as “The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts” or simply the “Kennedy Center.” 

The directive comes less than a week after U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper ruled that the Kennedy Center’s board lacked the legal authority to add Trump’s name to the institution.

“Congress named the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts for President John F. Kennedy by federal statute,” Cooper wrote in his decision. “The Center may not be officially named for anyone else except by an Act of Congress.”

The ruling dealt a setback to one of Trump’s most visible efforts to reshape the nation’s premier performing arts venue.

The White House announced in December that the Kennedy Center’s board had voted unanimously to rename the institution the “Trump-Kennedy Center,” arguing the move recognized Trump’s role in restoring the facility’s finances, reputation, and infrastructure. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said at the time that trustees believed the president’s leadership had helped save the institution.

The vote followed Trump’s sweeping overhaul of the center’s leadership. Earlier in 2025, Trump removed several board members, including chairman David Rubenstein, and replaced them with allies who subsequently elected him chairman of the board.

Within days of the vote, Trump’s name appeared prominently on the institution’s website and exterior signage. Justice Department attorneys later acknowledged in court filings that some of the signage appeared to have been prepared before the board formally approved the name change.

The renaming effort immediately sparked backlash from Democrats, members of the Kennedy family, and arts advocates who argued that the center was established by Congress as a living memorial to the late President John F. Kennedy and could not legally be renamed without congressional approval.

Rep. Joyce Beatty (D-OH), who serves as an ex officio member of the board through her position in Congress, filed suit shortly after the vote.

“Only Congress has the authority to rename the Kennedy Center. President Trump and his cronies must not be allowed to trample federal law and bypass Congress to feed his ego,” Beatty wrote when the lawsuit was filed.

The newly released memo suggests Kennedy Center leadership is complying with Cooper’s ruling while weighing possible next steps.

“We are complying with the court’s order while evaluating all legal options to preserve this revitalization and recognize President Trump’s leadership,” Kennedy Center spokeswoman Roma Daravi told the Associated Press.

The memo also addressed a separate portion of Cooper’s ruling that blocked the board’s plans to close the center for two years during a major renovation project. While the court temporarily halted those plans, center officials indicated they are continuing to evaluate their options.

The White House has signaled it may continue fighting the decision. The Justice Department has pledged to defend Trump’s authority over the center’s operations, while Trump himself has criticized the ruling and suggested he could step away from his efforts to remake the institution if he is prevented from exercising authority over its future direction.

The amendment, sponsored by Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), failed in a 49-50 vote after nearly three hours of procedural wrangling on the Senate floor. All Democrats voted in favor, while Sens. Susan Collins (R-ME), Dan Sullivan (R-AK), and Jon Husted (R-OH) joined them.

It would have permanently prohibited any future administration from using the federal Judgment Fund to establish the Anti-Weaponization Fund. 

The vote highlighted growing political tensions surrounding the fund, which Democrats have repeatedly characterized as a “MAGA slush fund” and which some Republicans have privately worried could become a liability in the months leading up to the midterm elections.

The three GOP senators who voted with Democrats are all facing competitive re-election campaigns this November. Collins is expected to face one of the toughest races of her career in Maine, while Sullivan and Husted are also preparing for competitive contests in states Democrats hope to contest aggressively.

Democrats argued that verbal assurances from the Trump administration that the fund was dead were insufficient.

“It’s heinous and it won’t die until we permanently ban it by law,” Schumer said on the Senate floor ahead of the vote.

The amendment came despite repeated statements from Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche that the Justice Department has abandoned plans to move forward with the fund.

“We are not moving forward with the fund. Period,” Blanche told lawmakers during congressional testimony this week.

The Anti-Weaponization Fund was initially proposed in May as a mechanism to compensate Americans who believe they were improperly targeted by government agencies. Supporters argued that victims of politically motivated prosecutions, including some January 6 defendants, pro-life activists, and others who believed they had been unfairly targeted by the federal government, should have an avenue for restitution.

The proposal quickly drew backlash from both Democrats and several Senate Republicans, who expressed concerns about potential beneficiaries and the program’s projected cost.

Thursday’s vote also exposed divisions within the Republican conference. Several senators who opposed Schumer’s amendment nonetheless pushed for alternative language that would codify Blanche’s pledge not to pursue the fund.

Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-LA) reportedly threatened to support Schumer’s amendment unless Republican leadership allowed consideration of a separate proposal prohibiting the fund. Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC) similarly argued that formally eliminating the proposal would spare vulnerable Republicans from having to defend it on the campaign trail.

“Why not use this moment to codify that?” Tillis told reporters. “Otherwise, you’re exposing every one of our members who are in an election cycle to having to deal with this between today and Election Day.”

Ultimately, however, most Republicans voted against Schumer’s amendment, helping preserve the underlying $70 billion reconciliation package, which focuses primarily on immigration enforcement and border security.

The fight over the Anti-Weaponization Fund has become one of several politically charged issues Democrats hope to use to divide Republicans ahead of November. With control of both chambers of Congress at stake, Democrats have sought to force difficult votes on issues ranging from government spending and tariffs to immigration enforcement and Trump’s legal battles.

For Republicans, the challenge is maintaining unity while defending a narrow Senate majority in what is expected to be a difficult midterm environment. Thursday’s vote demonstrated that while some vulnerable GOP incumbents are willing to distance themselves from controversial Trump administration proposals, Republican leadership remains determined to avoid handing Democrats procedural victories that could derail the party’s broader legislative agenda.

And despite Democratic efforts to permanently kill the proposal, the amendment’s failure means Republicans avoided a headline-grabbing rebuke of the administration — even as the administration itself insists the fund is already dead.

The operation, dubbed “Operation Ghost Story,” targeted Burnstein von Seelen Precision Castings in Abbeville, a city roughly 86 miles from Columbia. Authorities said 48 workers were detained and are being investigated for potential immigration violations.

🚨HOLY CRAP!!!

An absolutely MASSIVE operation is underway as ICE has SURROUNDED a casting company in rural South Carolina.

A criminal search warrant is currently being executed for the alleged hiring of illegal aliens…

There are literally HUNDREDS of people in handcuffs!!! pic.twitter.com/lcBLPj7cKn

— Matt Van Swol (@mattvanswol) June 3, 2026

Officials also announced criminal charges against plant manager Christopher Ramey and human resources coordinator Sandy Willis. The two are accused of conspiracy, identity fraud related to employment, and forgery.

Four additional defendants were charged with supplying fake identification documents that workers used to obtain employment. One of the defendants, Jose Luis Aguilar Mejia, is currently at large and wanted by authorities.

ICE partnered with the Department of Homeland Security, the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division, the Abbeville and Greenwood County Sheriff’s Offices, the Eighth Circuit Solicitor’s Office, and other state and local agencies in carrying out the operation.

South Carolina Law Enforcement Division Chief Mark A. Keel called this raid “the direct result of an exhaustive, years-long investigation.” 

South Carolina Attorney General Alan Wilson said the operation demonstrates the state’s commitment to enforcing immigration and identity fraud laws.

“If you are unlawfully aiding illegal immigrants in South Carolina, you are going to be investigated and will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law,” Wilson stated in a press conference. “If you are taking advantage of hard-working Americans, stealing their identities, and are intentionally ignoring your responsibilities as an employer in an effort to circumvent the law, we are coming for you.”

Burnstein von Seelen Precision Castings manufactures precision pieces for major corporations such as General Electric, General Dynamics, and Siemens.

Her biggest concern at 13 years old wasn’t a pop quiz or whether her crush liked her back. It was a stranger — or strangers — on the other side of a screen, circling closer.

That’s the childhood these kids have. That’s the world we handed them on a silver, gold, or rose-gold platter. 

I am a social media influencer. I post for part of my living. My entire career is built on these platforms. And I am here to tell you, with zero ambiguity, that social media is a loaded weapon in the hands of a child, and we have spent the better part of a decade handing it to them and acting surprised when someone gets hurt.

Representative Erin Houchin (IN-9) is one of the only lawmakers in Washington actually trying to drag Big Tech and the rest of Congress into the 21st century on this catastrophe. While everyone else is riveted to AI doomsday headlines and the latest geopolitical chaos, have you checked in with your kid lately? Have you actually hung out with a teenager? These kids are a mess. Zoned out, anxious, depressed, and eerily indistinguishable from one another because they all think, talk, TikTok, and dress the same way.

The algorithm is the new parent, and it is doing a spectacularly terrible job.

Houchin can’t keep playing the lone wolf here, fighting the woke Left and Big Tech. Their reasons for keeping your 13-year-old scrolling are not benign. They are mercenary. Maybe I’m just an old-fashioned woman stuck in a 24-year-old’s body, but I say we make June “Put Down the Phone and Go Outside Month.” Celebrate touching grass. Riding bikes. Reading books. Let’s give kids a few more years of actual childhood before the algorithm owns their developing prefrontal cortex, because once you’re on social media, the psychological grip is almost impossible to break.

What Houchin is doing makes total sense, and the fact that it’s stalling is concerning.

She’s a mom of three from Indiana who has watched this wreckage up close. The current federal rule, straight out of 1998’s COPPA, sets a laughably inadequate minimum age of 13 for social media.

Thirteen. That’s when you can get on KiK and get sent messages by Graham Platner.

The legislation governing your child’s digital life predates the iPhone by nearly a decade. Houchin’s flagship RESET Act (H.R. 6488) would raise that floor to 16, force platforms to default to safer settings for minors, kill the dopamine-engineered algorithmic feeds, and give parents real, functional oversight. She introduced it in December 2025.

It’s stalled, sitting in committee.

She co-led the bipartisan Parents Over Platforms Act, which closes the loopholes that kids, including her own daughter, exploit to bypass controls. It squeaked through the subcommittee. House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Brett Guthrie (R-KY) authored the KIDS Act, which includes Houchin’s two bills — AWARE and SAFEBOTs — that require warnings on AI chatbots and protect kids from deceptive bots. It cleared the House Energy and Commerce Committee in March 2026.

Progress? Sure. But none of this is law yet. RESET hasn’t moved an inch. Congress is too busy grandstanding while kids’ brains quietly melt. 

And we don’t have to speculate about the damage anymore. The CDC’s 2023 Youth Risk Behavior Survey shows 40% of high schoolers reporting persistent sadness or hopelessness. Twenty percent seriously considered suicide. Nine percent attempted it. Young girls are disproportionately devastated. More than three hours a day on social media doubles the risk of depression and anxiety. Suicide rates for teens exploded alongside smartphones, up over 57% from 2007 to 2017. An estimated 500,000 active predators are online daily. Forty percent of children have been approached by strangers attempting to groom them. One in seven minors has been solicited for explicit images. The victims are overwhelmingly young girls.

Where is the outrage? I thought the Left hated child predators? Or do they only care when the predator’s name is Jeffrey and selectively ignore when the predator is from below the southern border or on a platform run by Big Tech? 

To be clear, no one is yanking your child’s phone out of their hand and burning it in the street. Free speech is freer than ever. Parents who decide their kid is mature enough can still grant permission. That’s the entire point of parental oversight. But the inconvenient truth is that these kids are sophisticated and sneaky little operators. They are running circles around their parents through loopholes, secondary accounts, VPNs, and borrowed devices, and hurting themselves in the process.

The law isn’t there to replace parenting. It’s there because platforms have deliberately engineered their products to circumvent it.

The ugliest dimension of this fight is that a sizable portion of the Left wants to keep that access age low precisely because they want the indoctrination pipeline wide open. Online furry spaces, LGBTABCDEFG+ echo chambers, and trans-activist corners thrive on vulnerable preteens. 

Imagine if the 16-year-old, transgender, Denver, Colorado shooter was restricted in his online access during those earlier ages and wasn’t exposed to all of that hatred and indoctrination at such an early age? Maybe things would be different. 

We know that algorithms push division, rage, and identity crises that turn confused kids into activists, or worse, isolated and radicalized. Social media is not neutral; it’s a culture-war supercharger creating echo chambers that breed anxiety, self-harm, and societal fractures. Some on the Left are perfectly comfortable with platforms functioning as unregulated youth indoctrination zones.

They call it inclusion. It’s not; it’s reckless exploitation with better marketing.

And to Big Tech: I genuinely wish you the best in the A.I. arms race against China. I mean it. Build great things and make America more awesome. I’m a big fan.

But your social media business model for children runs on addiction, dopamine manipulation, and harvesting data from developing brains. For children, this part is simply not a public good.

Apple, Meta, Google: build real parental controls, default them to “on,” and keep the predators and the algorithmic psychological warfare away from kids who can’t yet drive a car, sign a contract, or vote.

I vividly remember getting my iPhone 5C in fifth grade at 11 years old. This was life-changing in the best way. I could text my friends, call them, and make plans. But social media came later, so despite the phone, I still ran around outside, read actual books, had awkward face-to-face conversations with acne all over my face, and no beauty filter in sight. I experienced the profound indignity of a middle school crush who did not reciprocate. I wasn’t addicted. I was a kid. My self-worth wasn’t being quantified in likes. My sense of beauty wasn’t being calibrated against an algorithm’s highlight reel. I had the extraordinary, irreplaceable gift of boredom, and it made me interesting and interested.

We owe the next generation that same fighting chance.

Erin Houchin is in that fight. The rest of us, parents, lawmakers, social media users who know better, and yes, even the self-proclaimed “pro-children” Left, need to show up.

June is here. Be proud of your low screen time. Put the phones down. Go outside.

Your kids are waiting.

The Daily Wire obtained a list of the businesses that were suspended from the program. Most of the suspended firms were visited by The Daily Wire and showcased in our Medicaid Millions series. The now-suspended firms flagged in our stories collectively billed taxpayers more than $322 million since 2019.

Some of the largest billers came from our story on Bhutanese refugees with the name Adhikari. Dr. Mehmet Oz, head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid, made reference to our findings about Roshan Adhikari’s life of luxury, saying there will no longer be people drinking “champagne on private jets” with the money they made off Medicaid fraud.

Among the suspended businesses are three firms — Americare ($128 million), Serenity Home Health ($74 million), and Medina Home Healthcare ($22 million) — all owned by Dilli Adhikari, who was found to be involved with charities that appear to be funneling money overseas.

Others came from our story examining seven properties owned by one landlord, containing 288 Medicaid companies between them that billed $250 million.

Another firm that was suspended was Merciful Home Health, which was owned by Mohammed Ahmed and billed $10 million to Medicaid. When The Daily Wire visited Merciful, the man who opened the door for us falsely claimed he was not an employee and said he did not know what the company did for its money. That moment was featured in The Daily Wire’s documentary on Medicaid in Ohio.

The story contained graphics showing the owners of the companies billing Medicaid in each of the buildings, which were identified through data analysis as hotspots for home health companies.

Another suspended firm, ZNC Home Health, was owned by Isaac Omoako and billed $11 million to Medicaid. ZNC had 93 claims in September 2018, then suddenly 1,065 the next month, according to the data.

An audit found that 56% of ZNC’s Medicaid payments didn’t match up with its staff’s electronic records; the auditor did not recommend any repayments after ZNC said its “employees are confused.”

Horizon Home Health, owned by Joana Quainoo and paid $5.8 million in Medicaid payouts, was highlighted by The Daily Wire for wildly inconsistent billing. It billed $155,000 in October 2022, $75,000 a month for most of 2023, and $180,000 a month for most of 2024.

When The Daily Wire showed up at the business, Horizon turned out to be based out of what appeared to be a closet — a door with no window inside of another room. It was dark inside, and no one answered a knock.

Then there was 6555 Busch Boulevard, the “black box” highlighted in “He Was Convicted For Defrauding The Government. Now Medicaid Pays His Wife Millions.” The story noted that Omega Home Health was created by a wife after her husband had already been convicted of billing the government for fake elder services.

Both Omega Home Health, which billed Medicaid $5.7 million, and Confidential Home Health, which billed $3.1 million, were suspended by Ohio.

SUSPENDED:

• Advanced Home Health (Devendran Sriramanane) – $6 million
• Royal Home Health (Tony Diran)
• Great Home Health (Khadra Jama) – $4.6 million
• Horizon Home Health (Joana Quainoo) – $5.8 million
• Pacific Home Health (Duran Guled) – $8.1 million
• Remedial Home Health (Hilda Agbor) – $7.1 million
• Dynamic Home Health (Said Ahmed) – $10 million
• Right Choice (Jodi Kail) – $1.2 million
• Midwest Home Health ($8.2 million)
• Nimoo Home Health ($506,000)
• New Generations Home Health ($1.2 million)
• LA Home Health ($8.2 million)
• Customized HH ($660,000)
• Progressive Home Health ($97,000)
• FullCare Home Health ($6 million)
• Global Home Health
• Progressive Home Health ($97,000)
• Zenith Home Health
• ProCare ($565,000)

Parker Thayer, an investigator for the Capital Research Center, contributed reporting.

In what is being called “The Sacramento Pitch,” the city plans to raise $ 1.8 billion to fund a stadium and team. $800 million of the proposition would come from land and tribal investments, while the remaining billion would come from tax-increment financing from the stadium, parking, and hotels currently or soon to be in the area. 

West Sacramento Mayor Martha Guerrero seemed unbothered by the large-scale gamble when discussing the plan.

“Over 40 years, the ballpark district will lead to $1.77 billion in new revenue for the entire city, Yolo County, and our schools,” Mayor Guerrero stated in the announcement of the bid. “One billion of that will be dispersed to the City of West Sacramento and reinvested into the ballpark district. This one billion investment would be generated solely by activity in the ballpark district.”

The area around the proposed stadium will use taxpayer dollars to fund the tax-increment financing that is discussed in “The Sacramento Pitch.” While Mayor Guerrero mentions that they will not tap into the general fund and no taxpayer vote will be necessary, concerns are still being raised about whether public resources are being committed indirectly. Future increases in property taxes may be used for stadium upgrades down the line if the ballpark is built in West Sacramento.

This tension between economic development promises and the public’s part in the project is what led officials to propose the stadium initiative in the first place, as they attempt to structure financing in a way that appears fiscally neutral while still making the project viable.

West Sacramento’s proposition was born after the current MLB commissioner expressed his desire to expand the league to 32 teams before he retires in January of 2029. Sacramento is among Salt Lake City, Nashville, and Portland as potential cities looking to add a team. 

Currently, the capital region is home to the San Francisco Giants’ Triple-A affiliate, the Sacramento River Cats, as well as the former Oakland Athletics, who are waiting to relocate to Las Vegas in 2028. The support for baseball for a major league team that isn’t even theirs sparked the plan.

“The momentum around the team is growing, attendance is increasing, and community enthusiasm is building because people are starting to think that if we do a lot for the Athletics, we’re also demonstrating to Major League Baseball that Sacramento is ready,” president and CEO of the Greater Sacramento Economic Council Barry Broome told Fox News.

Regardless of how ready Sacramento believes they are for a baseball team, gambling close to $1 billion in tax-increment financing is not always the safest way to spend a city’s money.

As Chu accused Trump of launching an “illegal” war and rattled off price increases, Bessent calmly interupted, asking: “Congresswoman, who was the president during World War I?”

Chu blinked.

“I don’t know,” she admitted — apparently unaware that Woodrow Wilson, one of the most celebrated Democratic presidents in American history, led the country into that conflict. She tried to pivot: “Clearly you’re not answering my question.”

The impact of our failed education system just revealed itself in this congressional hearing, and it shows how incompetent people have become.

Bessent: “Who was the president during World War I?”

Rep. Chu: “I don’t know.”

This woman is a FEDERAL LEGISLATOR responsible for… pic.twitter.com/lXaTKAY3BJ

— Andrew Kolvet (@AndrewKolvet) June 4, 2026

Bessent was happy to answer — and then some. He explained that Wilson took the country into World War I on principle, even though Germany hadn’t directly attacked the United States. The parallel was obvious: sometimes a president makes decisions with an eye toward catastrophic future risks, not just today’s grocery bill.

“Americans’ financial situations would be devastated if Iran got a nuclear weapon and there was a permanent, permanent shutdown of the flow of energy out of the Middle East,” Bessent said. “I promise you that.”

Then he systematically dismantled Chu’s inflation narrative, number by number.

When Chu triumphantly declared beef was up 15%, tomatoes up 40%, and bread and milk up 8% and 5% — then twisted the knife with “I know that would be hard for a billionaire like you to imagine” — Bessent didn’t flinch.

“Food at home is up 2.5% since President Trump took office,” he replied. “I know that’s an inconvenient fact for you. You’re from California — maybe you care about avocado prices, maybe you want them higher — but they’re down 19%.” He landed the kill shot: “You don’t get to pick and choose. It is a basket, and the basket is up 2.5%. During the Biden era, it was 5%.”

When Chu insisted wages weren’t keeping up, Bessent was equally blunt: “I’m afraid you’re incorrect. We had real wage increases every month since President Trump took office except for the month of April. I know the facts don’t align with your narrative — you’re entitled to your opinion, not your own facts.”

Rep. Kevin Hern (R-OK) piled on afterward, reminding Democrats of their own inconvenient history: “In the four years of Joe Biden, we had a 25% increase in prices. No way did the wages keep up. The highest gas prices we’ve seen in the last decade were under Joe Biden — but my colleagues have gotten amnesia.”

The Democrat who doesn’t know who Woodrow Wilson was tried to lecture the Treasury Secretary on economic history.

It did not go well.

Enten discussed the Bidens and their apparent waning popularity even as former first lady Jill Biden continues to do press for her new memoir, “View From The East Wing” — and as Joe Biden is expected to release a memoir later in the year.

WATCH:

Americans have one message for the Bidens: Go away.

Joe Biden left office tremendously unpopular & remains so (-19 pt net favorable).

He’s by far the least popular of any former Dem prez at this point after their presidency.

Jill Biden was the least popular Dem first lady. pic.twitter.com/gpJK8bzM1D

— (((Harry Enten))) (@ForecasterEnten) June 4, 2026

Anchor John Berman asked Enten how the Bidens were doing in terms of popularity following Jill Biden’s book release, and the short answer was clear: not well.

“The American people have one message for the Bidens that is: go away!” Enten said, repeating, “Go away!”

“I mean, just look at this. Look at Biden’s net favorable rating in January of 2025; it was -22 points. Has it gone any better? No, not really,” Enten continued. “He’s still way underwater here at -19 points. He’s 28 points underwater with independents. Joe Biden ended his term as president as quite unpopular. And he remains quite unpopular.”

Enten went on to reveal why even some Democrats who might personally like the former president would still prefer that he remained out of the public eye: “He is an anchor to the Democratic Party and potentially their fortunes in the 2026 midterm elections.”

Berman asked how Biden compared to other former presidents — particularly Democrats — and the news did not get any better: former Presidents Barack Obama (+31), Bill Clinton (-3), and Jimmy Carter (+22) all fared much better than Biden.

The former first lady was in the same proverbial boat as her husband, Enten added.

“Jill Biden – obviously not Joe Biden, though they are married – okay, just look at this. Was she a popular first lady? Dem first lady’s net favorability at the end of their final term? She was just two points above water. Obviously, not as bad as Joe Biden, but Michelle Obama was 43 points above water. Hillary Clinton was 13 points above water,” he said.

James “Weston” Higginbotham, a 20-year-old from Birmingham, has been missing since May 29. Higginbotham never returned from a train station in the Kyoto area. His mother, Nancy, said in a Facebook post her son may be in “emotional distress,” calling the search “urgent.”

Weston decided to go explore on his own after an argument with his mother, saying he needed some space. Nancy told CNN she grew concerned when his phone location was turned off. She told the outlet that a disagreement arose between them over the use of ChatGPT to help navigate their trip.

“It’s not unusual for Weston to blow off steam going to the woods and just exploring. That’s his happy place,” Higginbotham told CNN. “I’m thinking … he’s just off in the woods, and he got lost.”

Reality quickly set in by 2 a.m. local time. Weston’s parents reported him missing, and Nancy and Keith are not leaving Japan until their son is found. Their determination to find their son is helping the search for him grow.

Local police said Weston left Kyoto Station alone at 6 p.m. Friday and was last seen on surveillance footage around 8 p.m. in Yamashina. Weston was on a path that led to a hiking trail in the nearby woods, per CNN.

Now dozens of Japanese authorities are assisting in the search in the Yamashina area as it approaches the one-week mark.

“As the missing young man is unfamiliar with the area, we consider it vital to locate him as soon as possible and are doing everything possible to ensure his safe recovery at the earliest opportunity,” a Kyoto prefectural police officer in charge of the case told CNN.

Crews on Thursday were forced to search through waist-high mud for Weston after a typhoon hit the area earlier in the week.

Weston’s mom said in a statement that search dogs and helicopters have also been deployed, adding that the area where she believes Weston is missing has plenty of water and some berries for food.

“There is still hope,” Nancy said.

The heartbroken mother is encouraging Americans to share Weston’s photo on social media. She said that is the best way to get his face out to people in Japan. The search will resume on Friday, with Japanese police planning to use additional surveillance footage to follow up on another lead. Nancy added that authorities are also deploying a smaller team to the forest.

“Our emotions are all over the place and every time we lose hope for a second, we receive an encouraging message from you,” Nancy said. “It keeps us going. We will find Weston.”

The Times report centers on three of Platner’s former girlfriends, who described volatile and “toxic” relationships with the Senate hopeful, claiming he demeaned women, became physically threatening, and was repeatedly unfaithful.  

Lyndsey Fifield, a Virginia conservative who dated Platner from 2013 to 2015, recalled him as “cavalierly contemptuous of women’s emotions,” according to the Times.  

Fifield also alleged that Platner knew full well the meaning behind his infamous Nazi tattoo, saying he referred to the symbol as “my Totenkopf.”

The accusation cuts against Platner’s previous claim that he did not understand the significance of the symbol, which was used by Nazi Germany’s SS.

Fifield, who has worked for Republican campaigns, also claimed that Platner regularly grabbed her by the shoulders hard enough to leave marks. She recounted an incident in which he allegedly twisted her arm behind her back, shoved her into a bedroom, and held the door shut, telling her to stay there until she was “calm.” Fifield said she eventually fell asleep and left the next morning, according to the Times. 

“It didn’t cause an injury, it didn’t break my arm,” she told the Times. 

The Platner campaign strongly disputed claims of physical intimidation, according to the Times. 

“I take responsibility for all of that, and wish I had been better,” Platner said, according to the Times. “Any characterization beyond that is false, and I believe, politically motivated. I’m not proud of who I was then, but I am proud of the work I’ve done since, and the movement we are building in Maine.”

Fifield went on to describe Platner as a troubled veteran with “warrior ethos” who would contemplate killing people he considered a threat. 

“He said this a lot: If anybody ever broke in here, I would rape them,” she recalled, saying that he added that it would not be in “a sexual way, not in a gay way.”

“He was like, I would rape them to show them that I’m dominant,” she told the Times. 

A second woman, Jenny Racicot, 41, a Maine Democrat who said she dated Platner on and off from 2019 to 2021, said his uncovered social media posts disparaging women sounded all too familiar.

“When I saw the old comments that he made online,” she said, “I recognized a version of him that I had experiences with.”

Both women agreed that the oyster farmer, who is challenging Senator Susan Collins (R-ME), has a deep disdain for women.

Platner’s odds to pick up the seat for Democrats have plunged in recent days, according to prediction markets. 

The new revelations come hours after leftist influencers appeared to be bracing for another Platner scandal, preemptively warning their followers not to buy into the next shoe to drop.

Out of the blue, left-wing political commentator Kyle Kulinski on Thursday claimed, “The New York Times is about to run an anti-Platner smear” from a “right-wing operative.”

The Bernie Sanders-backed leftist is working overtime to salvage his campaign. Platner recently traveled to Washington to rally establishment support as waves of opposition research raise questions about his suitability to serve in the U.S. Senate.

“I’m not confident of anything,” Sen. Sanders (I-VT) said when asked about potential new Platner revelations. “I didn’t get any assurances, alright, we got other things to worry about right now. We’re worried about massive income and wealth inequality and a corrupt campaign finance system. Why don’t you write about that?”

The 67-year-old socialite was originally scheduled to serve as grand marshal of the event, but an outpouring of backlash forced event organizers to move in a different direction.

Hilton was also accused by one of her “RHOBH” co-stars of using a homophobic slur in the past, which also led to activists demanding that her invitation be rescinded. 

“Wtf she literally parties at mar-a-lago,” one person wrote on Instagram in response to the news that Hilton would serve as grand marshal. 

“MAGA Kathy Hilton?? Have you all lost your MIND??” another commenter shared. 

She denied using the slur, and Bravo executive Andy Cohen said that the results were inconclusive following an in-depth HR investigation.

Event organizers said in their official statement, “The announcement of Kathy Hilton as Grand Marshal Icon for the 2026 WeHo Pride Parade has generated a range of perspectives across our community. In recent days, community members have shared thoughtful feedback regarding the role and significance of Pride honorees.”

“The City of West Hollywood is grateful for the respectful and sincere dialogue that has taken place,” the statement continued. “These conversations reflect the passion people have for WeHo Pride and underscore the importance of ensuring that WeHo Pride continues to honor the history, values, and diverse voices of the LGBTQ+ community.”

Hilton also shared a statement in response to the news. 

“I am honored to have been considered for this recognition and appreciative of the support I have received from members of the community throughout the years. My reason for wanting to be involved in this year’s WeHo Pride weekend was simple: to celebrate, support, and share in the joy of a community that means a great deal to so many people. Pride is, and always will be, about celebrating and uplifting LGBTQ+ voices, experiences, and achievements,” the reality star said. 

“I respect the thoughtful conversations that have taken place and remain deeply committed to supporting LGBTQ+ causes and visibility,” she added, listing several LGBT organizations she’s been involved with.  

“My support for the community and WeHo Pride is unwavering. This monumentally important event has always had a special place in my heart, and I will always cherish the experience I had acting as Grand Marshal of the LA Pride parade with my daughter in 2005. Thank you to everyone who works so hard to make it happen, and I wish the community nothing but love, joy, and a fantastic WeHo Pride weekend.”

Hilton is associated with Trump through social and professional connections in New York City. She and her husband Rick Hilton have not publicly endorsed candidates or revealed their political affiliations, but they have been known to socialize with the Trumps over the years.

Morris Katz, who has also worked for New York City’s Democratic socialist Mayor Zohran Mamdani, published the 112-page book titled “Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Puberty ― and Shouldn’t Be Googling: For Curious Boys” in 2020.

As the New York Post reported, Katz made the revelation in a footnote below a series of images using snakes and butterflies, among other things, to depict physical changes to male genitalia during puberty: “At first, we were going to use images of my penis to get this point across but the publisher said it was inappropriate so here we are, with some fruit and animal metaphors.”

Billed as a “puberty book written by the cool older brother,” the Amazon description says that it provides “facts about developmental changes to tween and teen boys’ bodies and brains are spelled out in fun, familiar, boy-speak and illustrated in edgy graphic novel format.”

The Platner fixer made headlines earlier in the week when the Bangor Daily News first reported that he’d been behind threats aimed at a former staffer who contributed to reports exposing Platner’s explicit text messages sent to multiple women while he was married.

The message, sent through a third party, was directed at former state Rep. Genevieve McDonald, a Democrat, over her cooperation with The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal.

“Just want to be clear on where we are right now,” he wrote, adding that Katz warned her that she would face a smear campaign if she assisted with the story. “If the story goes in its current iteration we’ll communicate directly on the record, and by name, that Genevieve violated the personal trust of Amy and Graham and shared explicit falsehoods to sabotage the campaign.”

He also appeared to lash out at her in an X post, although he did not mention her by name, once the story went public: “It’s no one’s f*cking business what happened in Graham & Amy’s marriage before he was ever a candidate for office. There should be no place in our politics for incompetent, opportunistic operatives who violate privacy, betray trust, and prioritize vengeance over decency.”