DAVID MARCUS: Democrat logic: Chicago raises hotel tax … to attract tourists

Just when you thought that the hare-brained schemes of the Democrats who run our beleaguered big cities couldn’t get goofier, Chicago has passed a new doozy. The Windy City is raising hotel taxes to, get this, increase tourism.

Ordinance 2026-0022544 will raise the tax on hotel rooms within that district to 19% from the rate of 17.5%, with the proceeds going to an organization called Choose Chicago, which will use the cash for tourism marketing campaigns.

The top target on Choose Chicago’s wish list of events is the 2028 Democratic National Convention, and now, everyone who books a room in Second City gets to chip in a bit on the effort.

It’s quite a thing: Only a leftist Democrat could possibly think that making it more expensive to visit Chicago will increase tourism. Maybe they should throw in a complimentary mugging to sweeten the deal.

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Now, everyday working-class tourists and business travelers will be paying directly out of pocket to pay for a campaign run by Democrats to attract the Democratic Party to town. 

What we are really seeing at play here is not so much an effort to woo travelers to Chicago, but rather a kind of Tammany Hall-style patronage program in which the Democrats who run the city hand out expensive jobs to their friends.

This is, on a somewhat smaller scale, is exactly the type of scandal that helped to sink Kristi Noem’s tenure as secretary of Homeland Security, after she allegedly gave advertising contracts worth hundreds of millions to those close to her and her reported paramour, Corey Lewandowski.

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Let’s be honest here, who are the Democrats who run Chicago likely to hire to attract the DNC? Probably exactly the same people who make their political ads.

It is telling that this costly effort to sell Chicago as a travel destination is not focused on the average family taking a trip to one of our nation’s great cities, but rather, on conventioneers racking up more hotel points.

It is the far-left Democratic Party in a nutshell: working class families paying the bills for the liberal elites.

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It is not just higher hotel taxes that keep the average Joe from packing up the minivan and heading to Chicago with the wife and kids. It’s that our urban centers are fast becoming playgrounds for the wealthy instead of family-friendly environments.

In big blue cities like Chicago, Portland, San Francisco and Philadelphia, one expects to walk over half-dead vagrants with needles in their arms, not a sight that any parent cherishes explaining to a young one.

But for the convention class, it’s no bother at all, they just step into their Uber X on the way to the steakhouse and fly right past the wrong sort.

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Chicago is sending the same message to working class Americans that Democrats all over the country are, that travel and tourism is not for you, that you should stay at home, watch Netflix and order UberEats while the rich people frolic.

Can Democrats just one time pass a city law that makes things less expensive for the middle class?

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The Left’s concept of governance seems to be to make everything basically free for the poor, and immigrants, show some thigh to the wealthy, and stick the ever-shrinking middle class with the bill.

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But don’t worry, the consultant class will do very well in this deal, as Choose Chicago offers them taxpayer-funded perks to bring their conventions which also pay the tax that goes right back to giving them perks.

Nice work if you can get it.

The family road trip is a staple of middle America, and Chicago, with its museums and fabulous architecture, should be the jewel of such trips. But the government of the city doesn’t seem interested in that. After all, those families have no political connections.

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If Chicago scores the DNC then I will likely be there, my company paying the new hotel taxes as I schmooze with expensive suits sipping pricey martinis. But if I want to take my son for a week, that just got more expensive.

It is the same old story with the Democrats, always taking money from hard-working Americans to hand over to their friends, and now, everyone who visits Chicago gets to chip in.

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BROADCAST BIAS: Media attack Cesar Chavez, but skip his big name Democrat fans

In the fall of 1989, Rev. Ralph Abernathy came out with a memoir about his time as a close aide to Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. Abernathy told the tale that Rev. King committed adultery with two women on the night before he was murdered. On NBC’s “Today,” Bryant Gumbel, then a co-host of NBC’s Today, lectured: “When the truth collides with a legend, print the legend.”

When Abernathy noted that King’s exploits were “common knowledge,” Gumbel retorted, “It would better stated, perhaps, to say that it was common accusation.” He claimed that those pages “just as easily could have been left out … one could argue that your writings prove nothing.”

All this came to mind on March 18, when The New York Times came out with an investigative report that Mexican-American labor leader Cesar Chavez, another “civil rights icon,” had not only committed adultery, but reportedly forced himself on girls as young as 12. Chavez died in 1993.

His top female ally in that farmworkers labor movement, Dolores Huerta, told the Times that Chavez had raped her in a truck in the winter of 1966, and had pressured her into sex in 1960. She said she had two children with him, who were given to other people to raise. Why didn’t this come out sooner? Huerta worried It might “hurt the Farm Worker movement.” So, print the legend.

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All the networks picked up the Times story on March 18, although the “CBS Evening News” only found space for 90 words. On the “PBS News Hour,” they interviewed Miriam Pawel, who wrote a book on Chavez and his movement in 2014. She said Chavez’s adultery was “well-known,” but that the new findings are “disturbing, and add a whole other dimension to what we have known about Cesar Chavez and to what in some sense has been an ongoing reassessment of his legacy over the last 20 years.”

ABC reporter John Quinones was stark: “Cesar Chavez has been a civil rights icon, a champion of farm workers and hero to millions of Latinos. But tonight, that legacy shattered after an explosive investigation by The New York Times detailing allegations Chavez groomed and sexually abused girls who worked in the farm workers movement.” ABC added that “Chavez has been honored with murals, schools and streets named after him, and annual Cesar Chavez Day celebrations.”

On March 19, Quinones landed an interview with Huerta, and when he asked her what she would say to Chavez today, she said, “How could you?” Huerta didn’t talk about her abuse by Chavez until she learned about the women who told the Times about their abuse as teenagers.

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She shocked Quinones when he asked how their supporters should feel now. She said “I think we have to remember the good that he did. I don’t know — about the terrible things that he did. I think we leave it up — in God’s hands. He was a great leader, but unfortunately he had an evil side to him.”

On “NBC Nightly News,” reporter Camila Bernal laid out the journalistic details about the alleged abuse of teenaged girls: “The Times said it found extensive evidence to support the two women’s claims through interviews with more than 60 people, union records, confidential documents.” She added “Neither the paper nor NBC News have been able to corroborate Huerta’s claims.” It’s hard to imagine her statement that “I chose to keep my pregnancies secret,” unless she disappeared from public view for several months each time.

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It’s unsurprising that NBC concluded with “Huerta says the farm workers movement has always been more important than any one individual.” If she really believed that, why did she just make her allegations now?

All this came to mind on March 18, when The New York Times came out with an investigative report that Mexican-American labor leader Cesar Chavez, another “civil rights icon,” had not only committed adultery, but reportedly forced himself on girls as young as 12. Chavez died in 1993.

We should be satisfied that the broadcast networks picked this story up instead of using the Bryant Gumbel standard and sticking with “the legend.” It didn’t hurt that the story came from The New York Times, which they think is the greatest newspaper in America. If this story had been published by a conservative newspaper or magazine or website, there would have been more hesitation, if not cries of fake news.

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None of these reports noted how President Barack Obama named a Navy cargo ship for Chavez in 2011. In 2012, Obama created the Cesar Chavez National Monument near Bakersfield, Calif., and gave Huerta a Presidential Medal of Freedom. None of them reminded viewers that President Joe Biden tweeted in 2023 that, “When I became President, I proudly placed a bust of César Chávez in the Oval Office — a constant reminder of the enduring values he embodied, the vision of freedom he fought for, and his commitment to social justice and equal dignity that we must uphold each and every day..”

Did Biden share the “values” Chavez embodied? Embarrassing Democrats is not something the broadcast networks define as news. 

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United Arab Emirates is no fragile mirage, it’s a fortress oasis

With Operation Epic Fury, an old claim has resurfaced: that the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and the Gulf monarchies are weak, artificial states that will fail under pressure. This argument has been proven wrong every time it has been tested. It is being disproved again now, as Iranian ballistic missiles cross Gulf airspace, UAE defenses intercept most of them, and daily life continues below. At this point, the fragility thesis doesn’t need a rebuttal; it needs a thorough examination.

This thesis usually comes from two very different groups: the Muslim Brotherhood and some Western academics. For the Muslim Brotherhood, the idea that Gulf monarchies are illegitimate and temporary is not just political messaging. It forms a core part of their worldview. In the early 20th century, Muslim Brotherhood founder Hassan al-Banna rejected hereditary monarchy as a valid Islamic model. The Brotherhood’s view of empowerment only holds if current rulers are seen as morally lacking and destined to fail. In this view, Gulf stability is not just an inconvenience; it poses a direct ideological threat.

This is especially true for the UAE. The Emirati model is not only anti-Brotherhood politically; it is also anti-Brotherhood in cultural terms. The UAE lives an Islam that is tolerant, orderly and comfortable with diversity and pluralism. This matters because it quietly undermines one of the Brotherhood’s key claims: that political Islam is the only way to achieve dignity, authenticity or justice in a Muslim society. A prosperous, stable Muslim-majority state that embraces religious coexistence doesn’t just challenge that idea; it shows it is outdated.

That is why symbols like the Abrahamic Family House are important. A mosque, church and synagogue on one campus in Abu Dhabi, the Abrahamic Family House isn’t just a branding effort. It represents a clear statement about the type of country the UAE is. It reflects values that Americans understand: religious coexistence, public order and the idea that prosperity and tolerance can support each other instead of competing. This shared value system is one reason the partnership between the U.S. and the UAE has grown steadily over the decades, from Desert Storm to the current conflict. It is these shared values of prosperity and pluralism and safety that make me, as a Jew, proud to call the UAE my second home. It is a country where I have never once felt physically unsafe to declare my faith and provides a unique opportunity to meet people from diverse cultures and a secure base from which global business can be conducted.

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The anti-UAE versions of the fragility story were pushed by prominent figures, not just fringe voices. In 2014, Qatar-based ideologue Yusuf al-Qaradawi condemned the UAE as anti-Islamic on Qatari television. In December 2024, his son, Abdulrahman, spoke in Damascus and expressed hope that the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Egypt would fall. Al Jazeera Arabic, especially under former director Wadah Khanfar, often provided a platform for this perspective, painting the UAE and the wider Gulf Cooperation Council as unstable and lacking moral integrity.

The Western academic version of this thesis had a different tone but often reached similar conclusions. In a book, :After the Sheikhs,” author Christopher Davidson, a Fellow at Durham University in the UK, predicted in 2012 that most Gulf regimes could collapse within two to five years. In 2011, Kristian Coates Ulrichsen, a fellow for the Middle East at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy, cautioned that a “perfect storm” could destabilize Gulf societies.

Later, the International Crisis Group, a conflict mitigation nonprofit, described the Gulf as divided and unstable.This was not a conspiracy but analysis based on a flawed assumption: that rentier states, reliant on oil wealth, must be weak at their core. The mistake was confusing governance issues with a lack of real state power.

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This error has become glaringly obvious during the current conflict. When Iranian missiles began to strike across the Gulf on March 1, the fragility narrative came up again. Analysts described Gulf economic models as weak and vulnerable. Tehran seemed to believe this too. Its decision to target Dubai, a city with limited direct U.S. military presence, was a calculated move, hoping that disruption would cause panic. Iran misjudged the Gulf’s business model, assuming it was also its weak point.

The UAE held its ground, as did the Gulf in general. Exchanges reopened, and airports resumed operations. Qatar, despite years of mediating between Tehran and Washington, D.C., shot down two Iranian Su-24s nearing its airspace. This was a significant event and showed that Gulf states aren’t passive under pressure. Given the right conditions, they will respond.

By March 10, the UAE had endured over 250 ballistic missiles, more than 1,400 drones and eight cruise missiles. Its layered air defenses, developed through extensive planning and investment, have performed at a level few countries could achieve. American THAAD and Patriot systems, South Korea’s Cheongung II in its first battle deployment, Israeli developed Barak-8 batteries and US-operated assets have intercepted over 90% of incoming threats. Fatalities have been minimal. Cafés remain open, roads are busy and people aren’t fleeing. Many openly express loyalty to the country.

These aren’t signs of a mirage. They indicate a state that was prepared.

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The explanation goes deeper than just military hardware. Yes, the UAE invested early, diversified wisely and built one of the most advanced defense structures in the region. At the same time, it also established something less measurable but equally important: a working social agreement. More than 200 nationalities live in the UAE. Most stayed during Covid, and they are staying through missile attacks, not out of obligation, but because they genuinely feel at home there. This quiet sense of belonging, within a confident Muslim-majority state that embraces differences, is a key foundation of Emirati resilience.

The UAE is not a fragile mirage. It is a fortress oasis: pluralistic, orderly, heavily defended and supported by one of the strongest security partnerships that the United States has in the region. Critics have repeatedly predicted its collapse. Instead, under pressure, it has demonstrated endurance, legitimacy and strength, along with the broader nations of the Gulf Cooperation Council.

Islamic Republic of Absurdity: Regime executes star wrestler, targets athletes

Wrestling, or “koshti,” is Iran’s national sport, rooted in its pre-Islamic Persian identity and cultural heritage. Its honor code of kindness, chivalry and humility has animated Iran’s epic poetry and prose, merging Iranian nationalism and heroism to emerge as one of Iran’s most enduring cultural treasures.

On March 19, just a day before the arrival of spring and the celebration of the ancient Iranian New Year Nowruz, the Islamic regime executed one of Iran’s most gifted wrestlers, along with two other young men — effectively punishing Iranians for honoring their pre-Islamic past.

The timing could not have been a coincidence. While smoke was still billowing from the barrels of military-style guns used to carry out the worst massacre in Iran’s modern history this past January, and while wary and wounded Iranians were preparing to welcome Nowruz in a show of resilience, the regime decided to remind Iranians of exactly who is in charge.

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The three young men, 19-year-old champion wrestler Saleh Mohammadi, 21-year-old Saeed Davudi, and Mehdi Ghassemi, were convicted of killing two police officers, inciting violence by joining protesters, and waging war against God. 

They were hanged in public in the city of Qom, the Vatican of Iran, the hub of Shi’a doctrines of morality and piety.

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The death toll following the massacres of this past January is still rising: soccer player Mohammad Hossein Hosseini, water polo goalkeeper Ali Pishevarzadeh, marathon runner Niloufar Pas, kickboxing champion Benjamin Naghdi, teenage soccer player Abolfazl Dokht, boxer Mohammad Javad Vafaei Sani and at least 20 others are reportedly detained in solitary confinement and are at risk of being executed.

The Center for Human Rights in Iran (CHRI) has warned the international community that “Iran is facing the risk of a catastrophic human rights crisis,” and has denounced the swift trials as “sham trials based on torture and forced confessions.”

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This is not the first time the Islamic regime has killed its own athletes. Perhaps the most widely known case is Navid Afkari, a star wrestler who, despite a global campaign led by athletes and human rights organizations, was hanged in September 2020 for the alleged murder of a security guard.

Iranian journalist and activist Masih Alinejad has pointed to the broader regime strategy of eliminating Iran’s heroes so that it could crush Iranians’ spirit. “This is not just about sports,” she pleaded on X, “this is about human dignity. They hanged him without giving him a chance to say goodbye to his family.”

The revolution that toppled the Shah and ushered in “the age of extreme” of Ayatollah Khomeini was, at its core, according to Professor Ali Ansari, the director of Iranian studies at the University of St. Andrews, a battle to “redefine the Iranian identity.” Ayatollah Khomeini saw Iranian nationalism as a negation of Islam and sought to surrender Iran’s history and culture to the life of the prophet Muhammad and the rise of Shi’ism.

His sermons often ridiculed Iran’s pre-Islamic history. “Cyrus the Great was not that great if he allowed Jews to rebuild their temple,” he is quoted as saying in his compilation . Taking a direct jab at the beloved pre-Islamic king, Anushirvan the Just, he said, “He was Anushirvan the unjust because he didn’t know Islam yet. In fact, he was worse than Satan.”

Iranians have cleverly pushed back against the regime’s deliberate encroachment into their cherished history. At the outset of the revolution, they formed human roadblocks to stop bulldozers from reaching the ancient ruins of Persepolis, which dates back to the Achaemenid Empire. More recently, they gathered around the tomb of Cyrus the Great and other historical sites during Nowruz to chant pro-Iranian slogans.

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Perhaps the most telling sign that the Iranian people are winning the battle of nationalism vs. Islamism is in their choice of baby names. Shahan, the plural form of Shah, has replaced Mohammad as the most popular boys’ name in Iran.

It is sad but unsurprising that Iran’s wrestlers — the symbols of Iran’s ancient history of kings and paladins and the guardians of its “heroic sport” — have also become regime targets. Tehran sees more value in setting them as examples for the rest of Iranians than it does in them bringing Olympic medals back to their country.

Considering that wrestling has become the country’s most successful Olympic sport, accounting for 43 of its 69 total medals, according to United World Wrestling, the regime’s strategy of erasing one of the ancient pillars of Iranian identity is borderline comical — if it were not so tragic.

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The clerics and their henchmen are not after their wrestlers only. They are after making the absurd normal. As one former senior American diplomat told me in a phone call to wish me a happy Nowruz, the execution of Saleh Mohammadi and his two young friends is akin to the U.S. government sending its best Marine and his puppies to the electric chair on July 4th for the crime of complaining about the rising price of hot dogs. “It is absurd.” 

Welcome to the Islamic Republic of Absurdity.

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A brave Marine colonel took on the Pentagon — and paid the price for it

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Everything about how Marine Colonel Drew Cukor ran Project Maven, the Department of Defense’s upstart AI initiative, put a target on his back. He infuriated the acquisition community, which is a powerful enemy in the Pentagon. Ultimately, the firestorm of criticism triggered a series of unfounded but unrelenting IG reports that would harry Cukor until his retirement. Some of the details that follow may seem obscure, but they’re essential to understanding the bureaucratic inertia and pettiness that hold our military back.

When Cukor launched Maven in 2017, the government still bought software like it bought hardware. This posed a problem. The phases of a hardware program are research, development, test, and evaluation (RDT&E), followed by production and sustainment. Costs are very high initially, and then they decline. The Department of Defense treated software the same way. It paid a lot up front for a systems integrator to build software, then it paid very little when the software went into production for patches and minor security upgrades. Software was treated as a static, finished product once it entered production.

Here’s the problem: Software (at least, good software) is not static. It’s constantly improving, yet the cost is relatively flat across stages of development, which is why you pay a recurring subscription for commercial software instead of a large, upfront fee. This insight is the basis of the software-as-a-service model, and it enables constant improvement of the product. Development, testing and production of software happen simultaneously, all the time. Understanding this, Cukor made the heretical argument to Congress that Maven should be procured as a continuously evolving capability, with a similar cost over its lifetime. Cukor procured software using Broad Agency Announcements (BAAs), a flexible contracting vehicle that categorized software as RDT&E. Although this categorization wasn’t perfect, the BAA allowed the program costs to reflect how software was developed and deployed and allowed Cukor to make frequent changes to the product while it was in production.

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Cukor would soon run into other problems with categorizing software as RDT&E. The department’s general posture is that if the US government is paying for R&D, it should own the intellectual property (IP) that results from that work. The problem is that despite the categorization of the contract vehicle as R&D, Maven wasn’t paying for commercial companies to perform R&D. When Palantir or Microsoft or Amazon showed up on day one of their work with Maven, they showed up with products that had decades and billions of dollars already invested. The R&D was already done. Yes, that product would get fine-tuned during the program and the companies would learn from the government’s mission and data, but fundamentally, the government was paying for software, not R&D. To Cukor, the government’s obsession with owning IP was an “overstated matter” more likely to harm the companies, and therefore national security, in the long term. As Cukor correctly notes, “If you [the company] can’t monetize this after working with us, then what’s the use of doing this? Why would you hand over your IP ever?”

To be clear, the companies did not own the government’s data and were not free to, say, sell a terrorist-targeting algorithm to China. International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) were in place, and the government’s interests were protected. But a company that built a deep learning algorithm maintained the IP to its proprietary model weights. For Palantir, this meant that we retained the IP to our core platform while giving the government rights to Maven-specific logic configured on top of it.

It’s afe to say that Cukor’s approach was correct. Almost a decade later, Maven remains the best example of a robust ecosystem of leading commercial technology companies working with the government. Unfortunately, Cukor’s view on IP remains in the minority. It was heretical then, and it’s heretical now. For this heresy, Cukor was cast by his enemies as acting against the interests of the government. “I was considered to be just a horrific human being.… There’s a whole class of people in the government that will go to their grave hating me because I would not compromise on this topic: platform IP belongs to the vendor, configurations on top are the customer’s.”

What happened next is almost hard to believe, if you know little about how the government operates: Cukor was punished for being too effective at his job. He was very good at rapidly getting money for Project Maven because he knew how acquisition worked and because his program was delivering. What’s more, he viewed acquisition as a form of “maneuver warfare” and never underestimated its importance as a source of continuous, rapid change to solve the most difficult problems.

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In the Pentagon, the easiest way to attack someone is to accuse him of stealing money and issuing contracts illegally. For almost the entirety of Cukor’s time running Maven, a vicious stream of anonymous complaints were filed against Cukor. Some of these complaints were fueled by personal vendettas. It was a clear abuse of the process, but each allegation was treated with the utmost seriousness. Cukor was forced to face off against his mostly faceless opponents with little more than a heavily dog-eared copy of the Federal Acquisitions Regulation (FAR), the bible for procurement law and regulations. It had a permanent spot on his desk. 

One day, the under secretary — Cukor’s boss — received an anonymous, five-page letter with a litany of terrible accusations against Cukor: he was corrupt, with bags of government money in his house that he used to buy expensive cars. He was wining and dining people to get contracts to move faster. His use of BAAs was illegal. He was setting himself up for a plush job after Project Maven. He had created a command environment that did not respect rank. (To this charge, Cukor pleads guilty: “I had some very strong captains that would happily tell off a colonel or general if they were wrong. We had a climate of moving fast and getting things done.”) Worst of all, the letter alleged, Cukor was illegally harboring a family of foreigners in his basement. This last, fantastic allegation came about because Cukor sponsored the (very legal) immigration of exceptional foreign mathematicians.

Cukor explains why he was a target: “You just have to understand this: When one group of people in the Pentagon get ahead of everybody else, the natural reaction is to kill that thing and get everyone back in line. That’s the Pentagon.” One is reminded of the Soviet Union, where the central government suppressed exceptional individuals who threatened the state’s uniformity and control. Everyone was doing exceptional work, which meant no one was.

Cukor told his boss the allegations were patently false and demanded the identity of his accuser. But his boss insisted on a full investigation. An Army officer was hired to investigate Cukor. This was a bad omen. The Marines and the Army have a long-standing rivalry that became even more acrimonious when the Army advocated abolishing the Marine Corps during the reorganization debates in and immediately after World War II. Harry Truman, partial to the Army, famously said that the Marines “have a propaganda machine almost the equal of Stalin’s.”

The Army officer published his investigation, but the best he could find, in his opinion, was that Cukor had not properly enforced rank, thereby creating a command climate that the Army officer said was anti-military. There were no allegations of criminal conduct. What he “found,” essentially, was that Cukor let his captains loose and didn’t enforce niceties — hardly fireable offenses. And what about the crazy allegations of money laundering and human smuggling? The Army officer didn’t have the skills to look into these matters, so he recommended that the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS) do it instead.

At this point, Cukor’s ordeal turned from tragedy to farce. When an NCIS investigator showed up at Cukor’s 1,400-square-foot home in Northern Viriginia, where he lived with his wife and four kids, there were no bundles of cash, fancy cars, or illegal immigrants in sight (although there were a few modest vehicles, all with more than 100,000 miles). The investigator left in disbelief. How had Cukor managed to support all these people on a government salary in such a small house?

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That the NCIS found no incriminating evidence further enraged the establishment. Their options dwindling, they seized on a final chance to attack: Cukor’s retirement. After thirty years of exceptional service, Cukor had announced his intention to exit. Because of the baseless allegations, he knew there was no path for advancement. But instead of letting Cukor retire in peace, his critics went for his rank, threatening to demote him to lieutenant colonel!

At this point, any confusion on your part is excusable. Shouldn’t the Marine Corps be fighting for the person responsible for bringing AI to the Department of Defense? One of its own? Cukor finds the suggestion quaint. No, “the institution is always more important than the individual. We all know this; we sign up knowing this.” And Cukor was now associated, however baselessly, with money laundering, luxury cars, and undermining national security. He underwent two years of soul-crushing IG investigations that never really ended.

Cukor’s critics eventually gave up their campaign to take his rank, but he still suffered one final indignity on his way out the door. The last conversation that Cukor had before exiting the Pentagon was with the IG, who made clear that while Cukor was walking free today, the investigations would stay open for years. They could come after him at any point during that window.

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In 2022, after Cukor had retired, the Office of Inspector General finally published an unclassified but redacted version of its findings, “Evaluation of Contract Monitoring and Management for Project Maven.” The sanitized report contains no findings of fraud or impropriety. The primary conclusion is that Project Maven was indeed run “in accordance with FAR, DFARS [Defense Federal Acquisition Regulation Supplement], Defense Grant and Regulatory System, and contract requirements.” The worst the IG could find is that the “AWCFT did not document its approach to monitoring by formalizing the reporting metrics, processes, and procedures for monitoring and managing Project Maven contracts.” Cukor disputes even this one minor, critical finding. If you bother to read deeper in the report, it supports Cukor’s claim, too. Maven “actively monitored contract deliverables using AWCFT-developed reporting, metrics, processes, and procedures to meet Project Maven objectives,” and it scheduled “frequent and transparent programmatic reviews.” The IG admitted that monitoring and management techniques for AI and machine learning “are not captured in current procedures and best practices that are used by the DoD acquisitions community.” If only the IG applied such scrutiny and thoroughness to outcomes, rather than process. We should all be a little more concerned with whether a program actually works and a little less concerned with whether bureaucrats are checking the right boxes along the way.

The IG did, begrudgingly and in its own way, admit that Project Maven worked. It explained that documentation was needed, or else “future DoD acquisitions related to this complex, rapidly-moving technology may not benefit from the AWCFT’s monitoring and management lessons learned.” In other words, the IG criticized Maven for making it harder for other programs to learn from its example! The IG doesn’t write reports like this. It’s the equivalent of going before the Spanish Inquisition and coming away with a gold star for good behavior. 

By the time the report was published, Cukor had already been driven out of the military. He’d had several chances for promotion, but because of the litany of accusations against him he couldn’t even be on the list of potential candidates. By the time his name was cleared, it was too late. What type of people do get promoted? Per Cukor:

Those that ascend are a rare breed: they’ve figured out how to survive in an environment where people can log any complaint against them and start investigations that jam up everything. This often results in a risk-averse senior leadership who avoid controversy at all costs. And the IG process is an unfortunate reality that favors the status quo and instills institutional complacency.

By contrast, Cukor had relentlessly pushed a contrarian AI agenda. People didn’t like it when a colonel ran through their organization at breakneck speed, delivering new technology via real-word experimentation, unorthodox contract terms, and vendors far outside the Beltway.

As Cukor recounts this vendetta, he does so without bitterness. There’s passion in his voice, but no anger. There’s no victim mentality. It’s actually kind of weird. Most people would, understandably, be bitter. Cukor attributes his equanimity to his Marine stoicism. He knows what’s right and what’s wrong. “There are many of us like that in the military. That’s why you have people who literally jump on hand grenades. They’ll do anything because it’s what’s right.” What’s more, the bad actions of others were often a source of motivation. This is the reason he was able to continuously deliver Maven even while these investigations were ongoing. After the fact, people on Maven were shocked to learn he’d been under investigation for more than two years, because it hadn’t altered his focus or output one bit. One engineer said that Cukor so effectively shielded the team from the politics that he had a nickname for him: the “iron dome of Pentagon bullshit.”

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Project Maven was the culmination of Cukor’s military career. Fighting for better intel methods and technology, fighting for Legacy to get police intelligence on the insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan, fighting against non-performant programs such as DCGS — all of these experiences trained him to bring a revolutionary AI effort to the military when the cards were stacked against him.

Significantly, Cukor was in his seat for five years — long enough for it to count. Too many talented officers are rotated in and out of their positions every two years. How many potential Mavens has the military lost due to constantly rotating personnel policy? Cukor is also a prime example of why you can’t separate the role of creating requirements from the role of delivering capabilities: designer and builder must work together. Much like Rickover built and then operated nuclear submarines, Cukor created the specifications for the AI solutions he wanted to exist, coordinated them, and then built them.

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Cukor insists that while he and his team accomplished something exceptional with Maven, it need not be the exception. There are many others like him out there, just waiting for a chance and a climate that doesn’t presume they’re guilty until proven innocent. In many ways, Cukor views himself as a typical Marine: he came from a humble background, imbibed the service’s values, and put his training to good use.

Perhaps most important, Cukor is living, breathing proof that herculean effort and selfless service are still possible in government — even in as flawed and sclerotic an institution as the Pentagon. We think of titans like Rickover as existing solely in a bygone and inaccessible age. Cukor shows that isn’t true, either. Cukor had a book about the Yazidis, a basement office, and a righteous fire burning within him. That was enough for him to revolutionize the Pentagon and the way we fight wars forever.

First Breakfast

DAVID MARCUS: The MAGA ‘civil war’ over Iran is a myth

To read the mainstream news today, or to dip into the, shall we say, eccentric world of alt-right social media, one would think that the war in Iran has created a major fissure within the MAGA movement. Both the polling and the word on the street put the lie to this notion.

Take a Washington Post headline from this week that blared, “Vance Is In A Bind, Supporting A War That Could Cost Him Politically.” Pretty stern stuff, except that the very same day a new poll from L&V showed that 83% of Republicans support the war, only 9% oppose.

The same poll asked who GOP voters trusted more on the Iran conflict, President Donald Trump or the podcasters Tucker Carlson and Megyn Kelly who have been leading the isolationist charge. This was even more decisive, 83% to 6% in favor of the president.

Another poll, from Politico, focused directly on MAGA Republicans, the ones we are given to understand are starting to revolt. The result was that 81% support the Iran strikes, only 2%, presumably mostly podcasters, oppose them.

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It is easy to see why the liberals in legacy media and the relatively few anti-war conservative podcasters are licking their chops here. It does feel like Trump has broken a promise, and he can no longer claim to have started new wars. But Iraq this is not.

Let’s all catch a breath here, three weeks does not a “forever war” make.

If, six months from now, we are in an unpopular boots-on-the-ground quagmire in Iran, such as George W. Bush found himself in 20 years ago, then things might change. But right now, every indication is that Republicans are lined up behind their president.

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In part, this is because, unlike in Iraq, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, who learned the lessons of that mess personally, has laid out four clear goals for this operation, all of them achievable in relatively short order.

These are:

To deny Iran a nuclear capability

To debilitate Iran’s long range missile capability

To destroy Iran’s navy

To disrupt its ability to fund proxy terror groups.

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Even though these goals have been repeated again and again by almost every official in the administration, the liberal media and alt-right podcasters simply refuse to hear them, insisting this a war with no clear goal.

Further gas was poured on the false flames of widespread MAGA discontent last week with the resignation of Joe Kent as director of the National Counterterrorism Center, where he worked for Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, who is famously anti-war.

It was telling that no sooner had Kent resigned than he was making the rounds of the right-wing anti-war podcasts, and perhaps more telling that he was immediately included in the lineup for a Steve Bannon-backed anti-Israel Catholic Conference in Washington, mostly made up of recent converts.

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The anti-Israel, pro-isolationist wing of MAGA isn’t new. I saw all of these people from Kent to Bannon to the podcasters hanging out at CPAC parties four or five years ago. The point is that, at least on this issue, they have little sway among actual MAGA voters.

But, you ask, how can this be? All of these podcasts have millions and millions of clicks, but nobody actually knows what a click is, or if they are coming in their hundreds of thousands from foreign information operation bot farms.

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Here is a question: If there are so many conservatives furious over the Iran conflict, where are they in real life? Why aren’t they marching in the streets? Why aren’t they filling convention halls? Why don’t I meet them in diners?

I posit, as do the polls, that it’s because very few of them actually exist.

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My conversations with voters on the ground don’t always match up with polling, but in this case, they do. MAGA voters, even those who were opposed to an attack prior to Operation Epic Fury, trust not only Trump’s motives, but his ability to contain and end  this conflict.

As the great social commentator Chuck D of Public Enemy once famously put it, “Don’t believe the hype.” The MAGA movement is squarely in Trump’s corner on the Iran conflict, and Trump has plenty of runway to achieve his war goals, end the conflict and prove his doubters, yet again, to be wrong.

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I played Division1 volleyball — NIL chaos is out of control. The SCORE ACT will save sports

As a former Division I women’s volleyball player at the University of Wisconsin and Kansas State University, I understand the value of fair play. All college sports depend on the enforcement of rules that can be applied equally and consistently. That’s why referees exist — to protect the integrity of the game and maintain a standard of fair competition. 

The same approach should govern the name, image and likeness (NIL) rights of student-athletes, and that’s what federal NIL reform through the bipartisan Student Compensation and Opportunity through Rights and Endorsements (SCORE) Act will deliver.

For the past few years, student-athletes have navigated a chaotic system without clear guardrails. NIL expansion affirmed long-overdue rights that student-athletes deserved and enabled young Americans to finally monetize their talents. But its introduction was unbalanced, resulting in significant uncertainty and confusion. 

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The current environment involves endless lawsuits, differing NIL laws across states, and institutions seeking to gain a competitive advantage. The ongoing regulatory nightmare is anything but fair for more than half a million student-athletes who play college sports each year.

Congress is the only body capable of intervening to establish uniformity, stability and fairness that student-athletes have demanded.

I’m especially concerned about NIL’s impact on traditionally non-revenue sports, like the one I played, if no action is taken to rein in the system. 

Women’s and Olympic sports are often the first to face budget cuts due to financial pressures. These programs represent the diversity of sports that make college athletics unique and prepare elite athletes for international competitions. Take my sport, volleyball: in the 2024 Summer Olympics, the entire U.S. women’s indoor volleyball roster consisted of college athletes.

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Courts, state legislatures and institutions can’t be counted on to permanently fix these long-standing issues. Congress is the only body capable of intervening to establish uniformity, stability and fairness that student-athletes have demanded. Division I, II and III commissioners, whose memberships include schools of all sizes, recently sent letters to lawmakers urging swift action.

I’m glad the SCORE Act is gaining traction and moving closer to a vote. This bill will create enforceable national standards that level the playing field while preserving the educational mission of college sports. It also includes protections such as funding for women’s and Olympic sports, and investments in healthcare and athlete well-being.

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Another key safeguard in the bill relates to employment status. I went to Kansas State with a clear purpose: to attain a college degree while achieving athletic success. Never did I fathom becoming an employee of my school — a move that is unpopular among both institutions and athletes.

Student-athletes would face the most detrimental consequences of moving college sports to an employer-employee model, as their relationships with coaches would become less about mentorship and development.

Members of Congress acknowledge college sports are a prized American institution, one that instills civic values such as teamwork and dedication. But without legislative action, it’s just empty rhetoric. The longer action is delayed, the more key sports programs will erode, athletic scholarships will decline, and fewer young Americans will be able to use their athletic gifts as a pathway to higher education.

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Ultimately, college sports can only thrive when fair competition meets academic opportunities — a balance that the SCORE Act aims to strike. 

As our country prepares to celebrate its 250th birthday, we should strengthen every institution that makes us exceptional and prepares our next generation of American leaders. That starts with restoring the mission of college athletics and finally delivering federal NIL reform.

NEWT GINGRICH, TED ELLIS: There’s a nuclear solution to recharging American industry

In February, the United States airlifted a nuclear microreactor for the first time. It was more than a technical achievement – it was a symbol of transformation, akin to the launch of the first steam-powered sailing ships that reshaped global commerce. And just as we couldn’t build the progress of the 20th century on the back of wind-powered ships, we can’t power the 21st-century economy with unreliable, weather-dependent energy sources. America’s future prosperity requires abundant, affordable and reliable power to complement America’s vast reserves of fossil fuels. The solution is clear: a new generation of advanced nuclear reactors.

America is entering a new era of industrial revival, powered by a surge in domestic manufacturing and the rise of artificial intelligence. This surge is creating an unprecedented thirst for electricity. After a decade of flat demand, America’s industries are roaring back to life. But grid operators are warning of a looming “reliability crisis” as reliable power plants are retired far faster than they are replaced. 

Meanwhile, the demand from AI, electrification and resurgent manufacturing is projected to add as much as 166 gigawatts (15 times what New York City requires) of new peak load by the end of the decade – an unprecedented surge that will strain existing infrastructure.

For decades, nuclear power has stood as an unassuming giant in the power sector, providing nearly 20% of America’s electricity with unparalleled reliability. Today, a new generation of advanced reactors – small modular reactors (SMRs) and microreactors – is poised to expand nuclear energy’s role. These reactors are designed to be built in factories and assembled on-site, dramatically reducing construction times and costs.

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Their smaller size allows them to be deployed in more places, including at retiring coal plants to reuse existing grid infrastructure and skilled workforces. A single SMR module can power a large data-center campus or a cluster of factories.

Beyond electricity, these advanced reactors can provide high-temperature heat needed to make steel and fertilizer, a crucial industrial input that solar and wind cannot meet. SMRs can even power desalination plants to turn arid landscapes into thriving communities. Microreactors are already being developed to provide secure, resilient power to remote military bases like Eielson Air Force Base in Alaska, freeing them from dependence on the grid.

The primary obstacle to this promising future isn’t physics or engineering; it’s a half-century of suffocating government bureaucracy. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s (NRC) licensing framework was designed for the large reactors of the 1970s and is inadequate for today’s advanced designs.

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Congress ordered the NRC to create a modern, streamlined process, known as Part 53. But instead of a clear path forward, the draft rule is becoming another layer of complex, burdensome requirements that could delay innovation rather than enable it. This moves us further from, rather than closer to, the energy dominance agenda. Instead, we should end local bans on nuclear power and lower barriers to startups seeking to increase competition and innovation.

We must also reject outdated fears about nuclear energy. Today’s advanced reactors are not our grandparents’ power plants. They possess inherent safety features that make accidents exceedingly unlikely, if not physically impossible.

They also help us steward our environment responsibly: they produce immense quantities of energy from a tiny amount of fuel, with a minimal physical footprint, and no air pollution. This stands in stark contrast to solar and wind, which require vast tracts of land and large-scale mining for their construction and deployment.

Public perceptions must also evolve. There are some that still raise concerns about nuclear safety and waste. But the entire amount of used fuel from America’s nuclear industry over 60 years could fit on a single football field.

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This material, far from a crisis, is a manageable byproduct and can even be reprocessed to yield valuable minerals and re-usable uranium. The far greater crisis is a lack of energy, which consigns billions of people to poverty globally and threatens the stability of our own economy.

Beyond electricity, these advanced reactors can provide high-temperature heat needed to make steel and fertilizer, a crucial industrial input that solar and wind cannot meet. 

This is not just an economic issue – it is a national security imperative. While America’s nuclear industry is tangled in red tape, Russia and China are aggressively moving to export their own reactors across the globe, using state-backed financing to create decades-long dependencies.

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Every market we concede to them is a loss for American influence and security, and every time an American SMR developer is stalled by bureaucracy, it is a victory for Moscow and Beijing. We can either lead the world in setting the gold standard for safety and non-proliferation, or we can cede the future of global energy to authoritarian regimes.

America has always thrived when it embraced bold technologies and rejected complacency.  So now is the time to be bold.  The AI boom and the return of manufacturing represent a historic opportunity. But to seize it, we must have the energy to power it. The servers processing complex algorithms and the factories forging new products all depend on a simple input: energy that is always powered on.

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Attending the Super Bowl is bucket-list experience that is unaffordable for most Americans

Think your favorite team has improved its Super Bowl odds through free agency? Better start saving. 

Many hopeful NFL fans spend the offseason dreaming about their favorite team making the Super Bowl as they monitor offseason transactions and gear up for the NFL Draft. But attending the Super Bowl in person is a bucket-list item that will never get checked off for most American sports fans. 

The dream is becoming more of a nightmare. The median household income was about $83,730 in 2024, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. With prices of almost everything going up, the idea of the average American football fan attending the Super Bowl appears to be more of a fairy tale.

Financial guru Ted Jenkin said the average American simply can’t realistically afford to attend the Super Bowl on a whim if their favorite team makes it. 

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“The Super Bowl has become the biggest corporate hospitality event in America. When you look at resale tickets today, with prices for the Super Bowl being somewhere between $7,000 to $10,000, that means for the average American to attend, they would be spending four months of mortgage payments. Or if you look at the median income… two tickets to the Super Bowls is basically a fifth of your income,” Jenkin told Fox News Digital. 

Finder, a company designed to help consumers make informed financial decisions, published shocking data last month that revealed Super Tickets cost “approximately 7.1% of a projected annual median household income.”

The average ticket for the 2026 Super Bowl was $5,567 on the secondary market with the lowest-price seats going for nearly $4,000 and some premium tickets skyrocketing to over $30,000, according to TicketiQ.

Jenkin, the founder of Exit Stage Left Advisors, estimates that between corporate sponsors, NFL partners and hospitality, he estimates that 75% of the tickets for the Superbowl don’t even go up for resale. In addition to the rising cost of the actual ticket, Jenkin said that flights, hotels, food, souvenirs and other entertainment will also add up quickly. 

“That’s probably another couple thousand as well. So, you could spend easily, for one ticket, almost $20,000 in a weekend,” Jenkin said. 

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Jenkin understands that in a perfect world, the NFL would work to make it easier for the average American to attend a Super Bowl. However, he’s a capitalist at heart and understands the NFL is a business. 

“It isn’t just the Super Bowl. If you look at the Masters or Formula One, or the NBA All-Star game, these have become luxury corporate events and the average American who wants to attend these things just simply can’t afford to go to any of them,” Jenkin said. 

University of South Carolina professor Stephen L. Shapiro, who serves as chair of the Tepper Department of Sport and Entertainment Management, believes the Super Bowl is simply an “ultra-premium event” that relegates average Americans to their couch. 

“The average fan, if their team makes the Super Bowl, it’s going to be a pretty steep investment for them to be able to go to the game,” Shapiro told Fox News Digital. 

“Each year the Super Bowl gets bigger and bigger in terms of a global spectacle,” he added. “I think there’s definitely a push to have more corporate hospitality and VIP experiences. So, you see a lot more catering to a premium audience, whether that be a corporate partner or whether it be people that are wealthy.”

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Shapiro also said the rise of an established secondary market for tickets is also working against the average fan.

“Once ticket resales went online with StubHub, it kind of changed the game. And so, now you have this dynamic where there are people purchasing tickets as brokers with an intention of reselling them for a profit rather than attending the game,” Shapiro said. “That market helped push up an already high-priced ticket for an event like the Super Bowl.” 

Shapiro believes NFL owners should be concerned that average fans have access to attend games live in order to cultivate new long-term consumers, at least for regular-season contests. 

“As for the playoffs and certainly the Super Bowl, it’s a premium event. I think it would be very challenging for the NFL to make these tickets affordable with the amount of people that want to go,” he said. 

The NFL Annual League Meeting is set to begin on March 29, free agency began earlier this month, and the NFL Draft is set for late April. All the offseason wheeling and dealing occurs with a common goal of reaching the Super Bowl – regardless of who can afford to attend. 

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Super Bowl LXI is set for Feb. 14, 2027, at SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, California, and fans shouldn’t expect the game to become more affordable anytime soon.  

“I think for most Americans, here’s the way to solve your problem. You may not be live at the event, but you can always buy a 100-inch screen TV. It’ll be about 20% of the price, and you’ll probably have a better experience,” Jenkin said. 

DAVID MARCUS: Liberal wives, not conservative husbands, rule the political roost

Conservative radio host Erick Erickson raised eyebrows this week with a rather politically incorrect social media post about how conservative men, referring to Joe Kent, who recently resigned from the Trump administration, may be impacted by liberal wives.

Here is the post:

“There’s a rule in conservative politics that a man is rarely to the right of his wife. Joe Kent lost his first wife in war and remarried a woman who now works for a far-left anti-Israel, pro-Iran website. Kent should have never been appointed to anything in the Trump admin.”

At first blush this seems jarring, especially at a time when so many are trying to cool the political temperature. But on the other hand, Kent is not the only example of this phenomenon of lefty wives influencing their husbands that we’ve had just this week.

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So, could it be that far from the stereotype of brutish MAGA men forcing their wives to vote for President Donald Trump, it is the liberal wives who are controlling the Overton window in the home?

Take the viral video from Bill Maher’s show this weekend, in which actor Jerry O’Connell admits to being all but physically assaulted by his wife and daughters for a slight criticism of Kamala Harris last election night.

After stating the obvious fact that Harris’ campaign was, shall we say, lackluster, O’Connell dramatically told Maher, “Without saying anything, [They] became physical…They were filled with rage.”

He went on, “Yes, I live in California. I live with not one, not two, but three people [women] who, if I made any kind of joke that they would, um, they’d become very angry with me, you know.”

Meanwhile, comedian Rob Schneider spilled some similar tea regarding rabidly anti-Trump late night talk show host Jimmy Kimmel, and he did not hold back.

After alleging that Kimmel’s liberal wife had confiscated a pair of the one-time comedian Kimmel’s anatomical items, he said, “His wife is the head writer of the show. She used to be an ‘assistant writer.’ Now she’s the writer. And I think that’s completely ruined him. I do. I’m sorry, Jimmy. Maybe I’m wrong, but I think I’m right. Liberal women who have lost their minds are controlling these men.”

BILL MAHER FEARS LOSING FRIENDSHIP WITH JIMMY KIMMEL OVER TRUMP VOTER ULTIMATUM BY ABC HOST’S WIFE

All of these recent examples bring to mind a controversial and hilarious ad from the 2024 campaign, in which timid White women gave each other strength, secretly, at the ballot box to defy their awful MAGA husbands and vote for Harris.

In the spot, movie star Julia Roberts, no less, gravely tells the gals, “In the one place in America where women still have a right to choose, you can vote any way you want and no one will ever know.”

I cannot recall meeting a liberal White woman in the last decade who let me know, usually quite explicitly, exactly how they voted, but let’s put that to one side.

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The whole ad was a fantasy, a stereotype of misogyny pushed by strident women who, in reality, try to control their husbands’ votes.

This is where all the weird semiannual campaigns to deny sex to men to achieve political goals come from, and it’s not new. Aristophanes came up with the idea in 411 B.C. in the play “Lysistrata,” notably the only time the tactic has ever worked.

The point that Erickson is making, that all of these examples flesh out, is that in a marriage, it is just as likely, maybe even more so, that a liberal wife will be the political bully rather than the conservative husband.

This is a trope in our society now. Many women think they have no conservative guy friends. I often ask if they have any guy friends who are just nice and never talk about politics at all. When they say yes, I say, “Those are your conservative guy friends.”

Usually this is met with a subtle facial expression of recognition. I kinda feel bad for outing them.

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It should not be suggested that a lefty woman and a MAGA man cannot have a healthy, loving and robust marriage, even if they work in politics. But every societal pressure today, from standing up to alleged fascism on one side, to calling out communism on the other, makes that situation harder and harder.

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In the end, the best answer may be, not surprisingly, to bring down the temperature, not just in the halls of power or the studios of big media, but by the hearth at home as well.

In the meantime, we cannot blame conservative voters who look a bit askance at a GOP politician with a wife in a pink hat, because, let’s face it, for all the political power in the world, these guys still have to go home at night.

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WILLIAM BENNETT, ROB NOEL: America’s moral decline demands action. What conservatives must do now

On Sunday night, Hollywood delivered its latest verdict on American character.

The Academy Award for Best Picture went to “One Battle After Another,” a film portraying border agents and conservatives as neo-Nazi caricatures while casting violent progressives as moral heroes. The standing ovations and gold statues delivered an unmistakable message: Conservative America is not just wrong but morally grotesque.

That message is nothing new from our cultural elites, and it has found its audience. A first-of-its-kind Pew survey this month revealed that 53% of Americans view their fellow citizens as morally bad, with the perception far worse among Democrats (60%) than Republicans (46%). Why wouldn’t it be?

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It is the inevitable outcome of the left’s campaign to paint traditional values as oppression. It’s what happens when universities peddle moral relativism and identity grievance, when legacy media portrays law and order as fascism, and when Hollywood casts conservatives as bigots or—as in this Oscar winner—as cartoonish, mustache-twirling villains.

This campaign of moral confusion has degraded the shared standards of right and wrong that once allowed us to presume basic decency in one another. Notably, it appears to be a uniquely American phenomenon.

The American people crave not just unifying values, but moral normalcy. When we can’t get it from Hollywood or our institutions, we must find it in each other—and build it with our own hands and hearts.

Of the 25 nations surveyed in the Pew poll, the United States was the only country where a majority held negative views of national morality. In Canada and Indonesia, for example, 92% viewed their fellow citizens as morally good.

America has its moral problems, but this is more a crisis of perception than reality.

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Our people still lead the world in goodness and character by most available metrics. We give to charity at a per capita rate about twice as high as Canada and three to 15 times that of other developed nations (with Republicans giving the most). We also lead most Western peers in helping strangers, volunteering time, donating blood and other measures of generosity.

Yet perception is still revealing—not only of how our cultural institutions drive hatred, but of how severely our civic life has eroded.

It clarifies the disastrous consequences of replacing traditional sources of connection—faith, family and community—with political obsession and online life. Social media has siloed us into alternative moral universes, demolishing our shared convictions and trust in one another.

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That problem will grow worse until it is stopped. Without a common moral vocabulary rooted in American tradition and common decency, we cannot sustain the republic. Polarization will harden into hatred.

What, then, are we to do?

A good place to start is to take time to stop and observe reality. Goodness and virtue still bind most communities together, if not our social feeds or national discourse.

STOP TRUSTING POLITICAL PARTIES TO SAVE URBAN AMERICA. IT’S TIME FOR US TO RISE AND REBUILD

In a town near us, a preschool teacher recently lost her home in a house fire. The outpouring of support was swift and overwhelming, including from those who had very little to give. No one asked her political affiliation before helping. That is the America that always was—and still is.

But in our public and civic lives, we must also undertake the hard work of moral restoration. And conservatives must lead it.

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We must demand an education system that teaches the classical virtues—honesty, courage, hard work, responsibility—rather than replacing them with trendy relativism. We must strengthen families and faith communities as the first and best schools of character. And we must refuse to let Hollywood or the media define the American people by their worst caricatures.

Already, many Americans reject the narratives of our cultural elites. “One Battle After Another,” despite being showered with awards, flopped spectacularly at the box office. Meanwhile, audiences flock to those occasional films that celebrate national pride and values—such as “Top Gun: Maverick” or Clint Eastwood films. Hollywood refuses to receive the memo, to its own detriment.

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Similar stories can be told of progressive media outlets shedding viewers, or even the migration of students from the Northeast to Southern state schools, choosing a traditional college experience over the political activism of elite universities.

The American people know who we are. We crave not just unifying values, but moral normalcy. When we can’t get it from Hollywood or our institutions, we must find it in each other—and build it with our own hands and hearts. That is how we’ll reclaim our shared morality and prove that our virtues endure.

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I’m a mayor trying to follow law but California is making it impossible for cops

Last summer, a member of the El Cajon City Council asked California Attorney General Rob Bonta a question: Can our police officers conduct welfare checks on unaccompanied children using information provided by federal authorities?

The answer should have been yes. Instead, the attorney general’s office warned that even confirming a child’s location to federal officials could violate SB 54 — the state law that limits local cooperation with immigration enforcement. In other words, checking on a kid who might be in danger could put our officers on the wrong side of California law.

The city of El Cajon is caught between a state government building an extensive legal wall between local police and federal immigration authorities, and an obligation to follow federal criminal law that conflicts with those same state policies.

We are a city of about 106,000 people trying to keep our residents safe and follow the law — all of the law.

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That’s why today, we are asking Bonta to address a question the state has so far avoided: Do California’s sanctuary policies conflict with 8 U.S.C. § 1324, the federal statute that makes it a felony to encourage or induce someone to reside in the United States unlawfully? Our letter lays out the case that California’s sanctuary laws — restricting the ability of our police to follow federal law — do exactly that.

It’s not a new question. We sent the attorney general’s office a letter in December 2024 asking about the boundaries of SB 54. The response cited court opinions but did not answer our core concern that conflict between state and federal law leaves cities like our stuck in the middle. Subsequently, in February 2025, our City Council passed a resolution that declared our intent to comply with federal immigration law to the legal extent permissible.

Consider this confusion from a patrol officer’s perspective. SB 54 says our officers cannot inquire about immigration status, cannot honor ICE detainer requests without a judicial warrant and cannot use city resources to assist with federal immigration enforcement. Meanwhile, the U.S. Department of Justice has signaled that officials who obstruct federal immigration operations could face prosecution. Our officers didn’t sign up to be referees (or punching bags) in a fight between Sacramento and Washington.

The ambiguity has consequences beyond law enforcement. When the state tells us that a wellness check on a child — who may have been trafficked or abandoned — could violate SB 54 because it might result in sharing information with federal authorities, something has gone wrong. Public safety should trump a permission slip from the attorney general’s office.

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The Ninth Circuit upheld SB 54 in 2019 against a different federal challenge that never addressed Section 1324. The legal question we’re raising is new, and it deserves a response.

When lawmakers passed SB 54 and related bills, they stated that the goal was to ensure residents could live and work “without fear of deportation.” And state officials repeatedly cite the economic contributions of undocumented workers as a reason to shield them from enforcement. But when a state openly pursues a strategy of helping people remain in the country unlawfully, it raises a serious question under federal law.

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El Cajon is one of the most diverse cities in San Diego County; about 30% of our residents are Hispanic and another 30% trace their roots to the Middle East. We are a city built by immigrants, and none of what we are asking for changes that. We are asking the state to tell us, clearly, how to follow the law when the law appears to contradict itself. Our officers, city staff and residents deserve that much.

We’ve asked nicely, more than once. We’d appreciate a real answer.

MORNING GLORY: Israel is America’s best ally — we must reject the evil of antisemitism

The stunning and ominous rise in antisemitism in the United States cannot be disputed, but can be resisted. It is particularly the obligation of genuine Christians to participate in the repression through education of the ancient evil. It is the particular obligation of Christian institutions — churches, colleges, publishers and more — to do their part in making this sin once again an obvious source of shame and to help cure those who suffer from it and, where it cannot be cured, to force it back by shaming and shunning into the deepest shadows where it belongs.

Christianity didn’t invent antisemitism. It existed before Christ and the empires of the ancient world would target Jews for many reasons. But, once Christianity rose to dominate Europe, antisemitism spread alongside and within a vast portion of the Church.

Some, but not enough, of the Church always spoke out against antisemitism and its costumed version of today — anti-Zionism — and continues to do so. Saint John Paul the Great and Pope Benedict were the most visible and outspoken opponents of antisemitism from within the Catholic Church of my lifetime, but many others have noted the obvious intractable hostility of real Christianity to the sin of hatred embedded in hatred of Jews or their country.

JEWISH SAFETY IN NEW YORK DEPENDS ON CLEAR LINES AND MORAL COURAGE FROM MAMDANI

When Colorado Christian University — originally founded in 1914 as Denver Bible College, but now a flourishing university in Lakewood, Colorado — invited me to a day of teaching, feasting and lectures, I chose as my topic the reasons why Americans of all faiths, or none at all, ought to support Israel. I included in those remarks the obvious: It is sinful for Christians to hate Jews or Israel.

That’s hardly a lightning bolt for even the “slightly churched.” But. I wanted primarily to stress that America is an ally of Israel for non-theological reasons — reasons with which Christians ought to be familiar. It is bad writing to reproduce speeches and brand them columns, but here in condensed form is the argument I made.

First, in a dangerous world, even the dominant superpower — the United States — needs allies, especially as the People’s Republic of China stretches to become a peer in military and intelligence matters as well as economic influence.

The State of Israel is, objectively, the most important ally of the United States. It is a nuclear power. It is the equal of any military on the globe in its ability to strike far and hard and to dominate its region. It’s an intelligence superpower and an engine of technological excellence and ever-increasing breakthroughs. If any country had to pick one strong ally not named the United States, it would pick Israel.

PARENTS ARE FIGHTING BACK AGAINST THE SYSTEMIC ANTISEMITISM POISONING CLASSROOMS

Israel is also a reliable and fully-integrated-into-our-military ally. Israel takes what the United States makes and improves on it, as had been the case with the F-35 fighter. It sometimes takes the rudiments of a technology and develops them to scale and deploys them, as with Iron Dome and soon Iron Beam. Those advancements will return to America as the Golden Dome and the Golden Beam. Would that Israel got into the ship building business at scale, but we have allies in South Korea and Japan that are doing just that.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, Israel shares America’s founding values of individual liberty and democratic governance. Israel is as politically fractious as the U.S., but freedom of speech is as robust there as it is here. Human rights are respected there as they are here. It is a “Western nation” in every respect, despite having to have fought for its very life since the state’s modern founding in 1948.

I also reminded the audience in quick fashion that, as a matter of American law, both constitutional, statutory and treaty-based law, that the United States recognizes Israel as a nation state with all the rights and responsibilities of a nation state.

THE FIREBOMBING OF BETH ISRAEL IN MISSISSIPPI STRIKES AT THE HEART OF RELIGIOUS FREEDOM, DIGNITY AND PEACE

“Zionism” — the term that originated in the late 19th century movement to re-establish the Jewish homeland in the ancestral lands of the Jews — is not some ideological outlier, but very much a historical movement that culminated in the United Nations’ recognition of Israel as a nation state via actions of both that body’s General Assembly and Security Council. The United States participated in that process and voted for it. While theology might underlay some Americans’ support for Israel, belief in the rule of law is the best and enduring case for most Americans to stand by and with Israel because American law is pledged to respect Israeli nationhood.

After the invasion of Israel by Hamas from Gaza on October 7, 2023, and the massacre and kidnapping that followed, one would have predicted the death of much of antisemitism in the West, so awful was the cruelty of that day and so evil and hideous the unmasked face of Jew-hatred.

Instead, and to the shock of many, Israel’s just war to recover its captives and destroy the threat to the state posed by Hamas triggered not just more attacks on it from Hezbollah nested in Lebanon, the Houthis embedded in Yemen and the “head of the snake” in the Islamic Republic of Iran, but also a geyser of Jew-hatred in the United States.

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What had been marginal and a marginalized, weird, cultish and conspiracist belief system suddenly went mainstream and apparently became a much larger phenomenon than most Americans believed possible (or at least seemed that world in the fun house mirrors of the web.) Antisemitism and the subset of the ancient evil under the name of anti-Zionism is still very much an outlier in American public opinion, but the damage this loathsome ideology has wrought post 10/7 to the collective American psyche is significant as those possessed by this repugnant hatred feel free to express it in public.

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So it is long past time for Americans, and especially mainstream Christian Americans, to make the theological case against antisemitism — it is a grave sin, indeed, for Catholics, a “mortal sin” — and just as importantly if not more so, the secular case for being pro-Zionist laid out in brief above.

America needs a healthy polity, one free of all racial and religion-based hatred, and it needs allies as strong and reliable as Israel. The two arguments cannot be made often enough in too many places, but both ought to be made especially on and within any institution identifying itself as “Christian.” I thank Colorado Christian University for giving me the opportunity to do so.

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SEN JOHN KENNEDY: Democrats are gambling with our lives by not funding DHS

My Democratic colleagues have opposed President Donald Trump’s agenda at every turn, and that’s their right. But their decision to shut down the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) isn’t some harmless act of political gamesmanship; it’s incredibly dangerous.

In the one month since Democrats voted to deny funding to DHS, the United States has faced at least four apparent terrorist attacks.

On March 1, a gunman wearing a “Property of Allah” shirt killed three Americans and wounded 13 others outside Buford’s Backyard Beer Garden in Austin, Texas. On March 7, two men tossed explosives into a crowd of protesters near Gracie Mansion in New York City. The men told the New York Police Department that they had pledged allegiance to the Islamic State. They had hoped to kill more people than the Boston bombers, but the courageous acts of NYPD officers on the scene foiled their attack.

DHS HAMMERS DEMS OVER AIRPORT SECURITY LINES AMID FUNDING LAPSE

On March 12, a gunman — who had been released from prison after providing material support to ISIS — entered a classroom on the campus of Old Dominion University, shouted “Allahu Akbar,” and opened fire. He killed an ROTC instructor before brave students stopped him. That same day, a man in West Bloomfield, Michigan, injured one security guard when he rammed his vehicle into the Temple Israel synagogue while preschool was in session. According to the Israeli government, the suspect — who apparently shot himself amid a shootout with the Temple’s security — had a brother who was a member of the terrorist group Hezbollah.

These terrorists killed four Americans and injured dozens more. It makes me nauseous to imagine how many more could have died if not for the bravery of local law enforcement officers, the Temple’s armed security and Old Dominion’s ROTC students.

These attacks on American soil all occurred against the backdrop of President Trump’s decisive action in Iran. To be clear: President Trump had no choice but to strike Iran. He wasn’t trying to start a war; he is trying to end one. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei — who shared the same affinity for killing Americans as the terrorists who just struck within the United States — wanted to resume building nuclear weapons, and he would have been able to do that if we didn’t stop Iran’s missile and drone production soon.

I’m confident our airmen will annihilate Iran’s missile supply, but that won’t eliminate the threat to the American people. The ayatollah may have used his last rotten breath to trigger sleeper cells within the United States. These lone-wolf terrorists may be plotting additional attacks here at home, and we have no clue how many terrorists may be living among us because President Biden left our border wide open for four years.

During that time, the Biden administration released at least 99 known individuals from the terrorist watchlist into the country — and those are just the suspects we know about. It will take an all-hands-on-deck effort to find and deport every terrorist lurking among the estimated millions of unvetted people that the Biden administration released into our country.

Yet DHS, which employs the very people who should be hunting these lone wolves, is shut down because my Democratic colleagues have been throwing a month-long temper tantrum.

At the heart of this meltdown is the fact that many of my Democratic colleagues want open borders. They don’t think we should deport anybody, and they’re holding funding for DHS hostage because they hate the idea that officers at Customs and Border Protection or Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) might actually enforce our immigration laws.

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In turn, they’ve made a series of demands to resume funding. Some of the requests were reasonable, and the Trump administration agreed to implement them as soon as possible. For example, all ICE officers will wear body cameras during future operations. They’d do it right now, but it’s hard to buy cameras when Democrats won’t approve their funding.

The remaining Democratic demands are weapons-grade stupid. For example, they want to forbid ICE officers from wearing masks and force them to display their names on their uniforms. These policies would endanger the lives of ICE agents and their families. We can’t expect these law enforcement officers to focus on hunting terrorists when anti-ICE lunatics are following their vehicles or showing up at their churches.

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We all know some Democrats hate President Trump more than the Devil hates holy water, but we’ve seen four apparent terrorist attacks in two weeks. The Department of Homeland Security isn’t a pawn in a political game. We need these officers focused on spotting sleeper cells, not their missing paychecks. 

To my Democratic colleagues: Don’t wait for another attack to get serious about protecting America’s security. Reopen DHS today.

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JONATHAN TURLEY: Comey loved singing Beyoncé but he might have leaked a pop secret

Former FBI Director James Comey has been called many things by critics and fans alike. However, it appears that his stab at being a pop singer did not pan out. Comey recently raised eyebrows with an account of his singing Beyoncé’s “Sandcastles” to FBI officials in a classified briefing … only to be met by a stony silence.

It appears that some of his agents may have viewed the occasion as grounds for intervention rather than for rendition. In fairness to the agents, they were likely unaware of Comey’s use of beaches to uncover hidden intelligence and messages.

Comey has periodically popped up in the press with bizarre or self-edifying posts. However, this one left many scratching their heads. Yet, it was vintage Comey, including a surprising admission about his handling of classified information.

Comey recalled the moment from a classified FBI briefing when he realized that a secret program being discussed was named after a favorite song. He wrote:

JAMES COMEY ADMITS TO SINGING BEYONCÉ SONG DURING SENSITIVE FBI BRIEFING

“One morning, I was sitting at the head of a big table in a crowded room to get briefed on a particular piece of work. The briefer started by saying, the operation was codenamed ‘Sandcastles.’ Now, this was 2016, and you may know that Beyoncé’s album ‘Lemonade’ had come out with a track called ‘Sandcastles.’ So, I said, ‘Oh, like the Beyoncé song.’ Blank stares all around the FBI conference room. So, I did the natural thing. I think I sang, ‘We rebuild sand castles that washed away.’ Nope, nothing — dead silence. ‘Never mind,’ I said, ‘continue.’ Only when I got home and told my family the story did I get the reaction I was looking for. When I write, I listen to classical or jazz because, in ways I can’t explain, the music unlocks something. It frees me.”

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It also apparently freed Comey from security protocols. His charming story included the fact that, disappointed by his audience at the FBI, he decided to repeat it to his family. In doing so, he may have revealed the code name of a classified FBI program to uncleared individuals in an unsecured location. This is no indication from Comey whether the code name was considered sensitive information by the FBI before his encore performance.

The Justice Department has fought in court to withhold code names as sensitive national security matters, including during Comey’s tenure as director.

FORMER TRUMP LAWYER HALLIGAN DEFENDS US PROSECUTOR STATUS IN WAKE OF COMEY, JAMES DISMISSALS

For example, in N.Y. Times v. DOJ, 2023, it was uncontested that the FBI could withhold code names because “specific code names that [the] FBI used for certain FBI programs and that disclosure of these things ‘would risk circumvention of the law by revealing FBI processes and potential issues related to relationships with foreign countries.’”

This is not the first time Comey has raised concerns of his violation of FBI protocols and procedures regarding classified material. The Justice Department inspector general issued a scathing account of how, after being fired by President Donald Trump, Comey improperly removed FBI files and then arranged for the information to be leaked to the media to undermine Trump.

The media immediately came to his defense despite his having led investigations into leakers in the past. On CNN and MSNBC, legal experts dismissed the arguments that this was improper or FBI material.

The memos clearly reveal that Comey was likely aware they contained possible classified information. Comey wrote in a Jan. 7, 2017, memo that “I am not sure of the proper classification, so I have chosen secret.” The four memos, including two given to his friend to leak to the media, were later found to be classified.

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Comey has periodically popped up in the press with bizarre or self-edifying posts. However, this one left many scratching their heads. 

What was notable about the leaks was Comey’s obsession with his own public persona. He took FBI material to bolster his image with the media. He later published “A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership,” which portrayed him in heroic terms without addressing allegations that he was a leaker. During his term as director, the Justice Department investigated and prosecuted FBI personnel for leaks. The “higher loyalty” shown by Comey often seemed to be his blind loyalty to his own image.  

Comey has previously recounted his obsession with Taylor Swift as well as Beyoncé, but insists that “I can’t explain, the music unlocks something. It frees me.”

Given his history of leaks and other violations, it may be time to try a new musical genre. It appears that pop is a bit too liberating for James Comey.

In the meantime, Comey may be misinterpreting tears of joy rather than regret when he made it to the line from “Sandcastles”: “I made you cry when I walked away.”

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DAVID MARCUS: Senate GOP should take Fetterman’s deal on voter ID

Over the next several days, perhaps even stretching into next week, the United States Senate, that grave and august deliberative body, will performatively waste time with impassioned speeches over the SAVE America Act, which they all know will never pass.

There may, however, be an off ramp to this Mobius loop of legislative futility: A proposal from Sen. John Fetterman, D-Pa., would have the upper body vote on a clean, simple, voter ID bill, without provisions regarding mail-in ballots or citizenship.

Make no mistake, President Donald Trump is correct that all the provisions of the SAVE America Act, including one banning men from women’s sports have broad popular support, and are of vital importance. But if the bill cannot pass, then so what?

The reason the act can’t pass, as we all know by now, is that the filibuster rule can only be overcome with 60 votes, which frankly might as well be a million in today’s fractured Senate, and GOP leadership values this restrictive parliamentary procedure more than protecting American elections.

FETTERMAN SLAMS DEMOCRATS’ ‘JIM CROW 2.0’ VOTER ID RHETORIC AS PARTY UNITY FRACTURES

To the average voter this sounds like the Senate is saying, “Sorry we can’t do anything, but, you see, we made up this rule that says we can’t do anything, so our hands are tied.”

One must ask though, isn’t the whole point of the filibuster to push senators toward compromise, toward a bill both popular and sound enough to carry the 60 votes needed?

This is where Fetterman’s clean voter ID legislation comes in.

REPUBLICANS SHRED ‘NONSENSE’ DEM CLAIMS AGAINST TRUMP-BACKED VOTER ID BILL

Even without the provisions regarding citizenship and mail-in voting, a law requiring a valid ID to vote in federal elections would be a major victory for Republicans, and potentially a first step toward greater election reform.

Politically speaking, such a clean voter ID bill would put Democrats in a much tougher bind than they are in today, because they lose every one of their somewhat plausible-sounding objections to the SAVE America Act.

As silly, and frankly condescending, as Democrats’ arguments that married women and poor people are too dumb or frazzled to obtain proof of citizenship are, we have all stood in line at the DMV or passport office and can glimpse the grain of truth in it.

TRUMP-BACKED VOTER ID BILL FACES GOP RESISTANCE AS TILLIS VOWS TO STOP IT

But a clean voter ID bill that accepts military and a variety of other forms of identification takes all of these objections off the table. It would force Democrats to admit they do not want even the slightest scrutiny over who votes.

To put it bluntly, if Democrats in the Senate cannot say yes to basic voter ID, which truly does have the support of 80% of Americans, then it is reasonable to conclude that it is because they want to cheat in elections.

The American people are frustrated. They are poking the Senate with a stick and saying, “Do something,” but instead, they are treated to name-calling and meaningless oratory.

TRUMP WARNS HE WON’T ENDORSE LAWMAKERS WHO OPPOSE SAVE AMERICA ACT

The only thing that is giving Democrats in the Senate and their friends in the media any cover on the voter ID issue is the breadth and scope of the SAVE America Act. If Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., lacks the will to break the filibuster, he can at least expose the truth.

Senate leadership can, with a single swipe, take away all of the excuses that Democrats have for opposing the same ID requirements to vote that we have to buy a pack of smokes.

Politics, they say, is the art of the possible, not the perfect. But it is also the art of the passable, both in the sense of a milquetoast disappointment and a bill signed into law.

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Fetterman has become like a big old sweatshirt-wearing lighthouse in the Senate, a beacon of sanity and common sense, and his plan for a clean voter ID bill seems like the only path forward that GOP leadership has left.

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If nothing happens, if the SAVE America Act fails and nothing is passed in its stead, the reaction from voters will almost certainly be a pox on both your parties, but with a little extra venom for the one at least nominally in charge.

The American people neither need nor desire a week of pointless speeches about a bill that can’t pass. Instead, let the Senate do some actual work, and at the very least pass a simple, popular and effective voter ID bill.

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Winning the battles, losing the war? America must define the endgame in Iran

The Pentagon’s briefings on Operation Epic Fury leave no room for debate: the U.S.-Israeli air campaign has hammered Iran. War Secretary Pete Hegseth confirmed more than 15,000 targets were struck. Tehran’s air defenses are in ruins. Its navy is wrecked. Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Dan Caine reported Iran’s ballistic missile launches against Israel and Gulf partners are down 90% since the first day of the war. By every battlefield measure, this campaign has delivered a punishing blow to the regime.

But wars are not won on target lists. They are won when military force produces a durable political outcome. More than two weeks into this campaign, that outcome remains undefined. That is the problem.

Consider the economic fallout. The Strait of Hormuz — the choke point through which roughly one-fifth of the world’s daily oil supply moves — is effectively closed. Tanker traffic has stopped. Oil has blown past $100 a barrel, with Brent crude touching $119 before Iran’s new supreme leader doubled down on keeping the strait shut. The International Energy Agency called it the largest oil supply disruption in the history of the global oil market. That is not a rounding error. That is inflation, economic drag and political pressure on every Western government involved.

TRUMP SUDDENLY SEEMS ANXIOUS TO END THE WAR AS AMERICAN CASUALTIES MOUNT AND IRAN FINDS WAYS TO HIT BACK

The military cost is just as serious. Tomahawks, Patriots, long-range strike missiles — the precision weapons that define American warfighting — are being burned at extraordinary rates. The Pentagon told Congress this week that the first six days of Operation Epic Fury cost more than $11.3 billion, and that figure does not include pre-deployment costs or munitions replacement. Defense analysts and current officials warn the Iran campaign is drawing down the precise weapons stockpiles the United States would need to deter China in the Pacific — and that depleted inventories will take years to replace. Every Tomahawk fired over Tehran is one less available for the Taiwan Strait.

The human cost is real and irreversible. At least seven American service members were killed in combat operations before Thursday. Then all six crew members of a KC-135 aerial refueling aircraft were confirmed dead after the tanker went down over western Iraq while supporting combat strikes. Secretary Hegseth acknowledged the loss, saying “war is hell, war is chaos” and calling the airmen “American heroes, all of them.” They are also sons and daughters of American families — a fact that demands an honest accounting of what we are asking them to achieve.

Despite the pounding, the Iranian regime has not collapsed. Tehran installed Mojtaba Khamenei — the slain supreme leader’s son, described by analysts as a hardliner with deep IRGC ties — as the new ruler within days of the war starting. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps backed him immediately, and he has already vowed to keep the Strait of Hormuz closed and promised to attack every U.S. base in the region. This is not a regime on the verge of surrender.

The IRGC and Iran’s ruling clerics do not view this war purely as a geopolitical contest. They see it as a religious fight — a defense of the Islamic Republic against what they describe as an American-Zionist assault. Regimes that fight in God’s name are not easily coerced by bomb tonnage. That is not an excuse for weakness. It is a reality that must shape strategy.

EX-NAVY SEAL WARNS WITHDRAWING FROM IRAN NOW WOULD HAND ‘VICTORY’ TO REGIME

History drives the point home. Conventional airpower has never toppled a determined government by itself. Not in World War II. Not in Korea, Vietnam, Kosovo, Iraq or Afghanistan. Air campaigns degrade capability and shape battlefields. They do not deliver political collapse — not without a ground force or an internal revolt. Neither is coming.

That raises the central strategic question: what exactly is the United States trying to achieve? President Donald Trump set clear objectives — deny Iran nuclear weapons and destroy its ability to threaten its neighbors with missiles and drones. After almost three weeks of strikes, those goals are within reach. But Trump has also suggested he wants to approve Iran’s next leader and questioned whether the Islamic Republic itself should survive. That is not counterproliferation. That is regime change — and regime change requires far more than an air campaign.

The question now is not whether America can keep striking Iran. Of course it can. The question is whether more strikes move the country toward a defined end state — or simply run up the cost of a war with no finish line.

Three steps point the way out.

First, complete the remaining military objectives: suppress residual missile launch capability, clear Iranian mines threatening the Strait of Hormuz, and finish the nuclear infrastructure work. Get the job done, then stop.

Second, define publicly what “done” looks like. The administration has been deliberately vague on the campaign’s end point. That ambiguity may serve short-term messaging, but it rattles markets, unnerves allies and leaves the American public in the dark about what this war is for.

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Third, shift from large-scale strikes to sustained pressure: maritime security operations to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, aggressive sanctions enforcement, interception of Iranian weapons transfers and a credible deterrent posture against renewed aggression. Keep the boot on Tehran’s throat without an open-ended air campaign.

In plain terms: finish the military mission, then stop widening the war.

The United States and Israel have won the opening rounds of this fight. The danger now is the pattern that played out in Iraq and Afghanistan — early military success followed by years of costly, inconclusive war that erodes the original victory. America has the firepower to keep striking Iran indefinitely. What it needs is the strategic discipline to stop when the mission is accomplished.

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The men and women executing this campaign deserve more than tactical wins. They deserve a strategy as disciplined as their service.

And so does the country.

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The sound of freedom: Cuba’s regime is running out of time — now the US must act

A Cuban night is no longer quiet. It is filled with the metallic rhythm of thousands of families striking spoons against empty pots in the darkness. This is the sound of a funeral for a failed ideology. The brutal communist regime imposed on Cuba by the Castro family is collapsing in real time. Its economy is in free fall, its people are hungry and the dictatorship is running out of money and fuel.

After more than six decades of repression, the corrupt regime is weaker today than at any point in my lifetime. I know that personally. I lived under it. I fled it. Today I am the only Cuban-born member of the United States Congress.

This moment demands clarity and resolve from the United States. We are closer than ever to ending the tyranny imposed by the Castro family and their loyal enforcers in Havana, but only if we maintain a firm strategy. My message to the world, to those forced from their homeland, and to the regime is simple. There will be no major investments, no bailouts and no economic lifelines unless there is dramatic political change on the island.

FLORIDA LAUNCHES PROBE AFTER CUBA KILLS 4 ABOARD US-FLAGGED SPEEDBOAT NEAR KEYS

Any discussion with the bankrupt dictatorship in Havana must begin from a position of strength. Economic relief should only follow real change. The regime must release all political prisoners, restore human rights and dismantle the totalitarian structures of the Castro dictatorship, as demanded by U.S. law codified in the LIBERTAD Act of 1996, which outlines the conditions for lifting the economic embargo on the regime.

At this moment, the regime carries roughly $46 billion in foreign debt, while its principal sources of revenue have collapsed. Remittances have dropped nearly 70%. Tourism income has fallen more than 68%. Revenue from exporting medical professionals has declined more than 53%. At the same time, the island’s crumbling power grid has collapsed, plunging millions of Cubans into constant blackouts.

These numbers reveal the truth about the economic model imposed by the Castros. The crisis is not the result of outside pressure. It is the outcome of decades of a failed ideology, corruption, central planning and economic mismanagement. For more than 67 years, the regime drained the country’s infrastructure while enriching its henchmen.

Thanks to the leadership of President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the United States has restored a clear policy toward authoritarian regimes. Dictatorships that abuse their people will not be rewarded with economic lifelines.

MILLIONS LOSE POWER ACROSS CUBA AS TRUMP SANCTIONS CONTINUE TO FUEL ONGOING ENERGY CRISIS

We have seen this approach produce results elsewhere. In Venezuela, sustained pressure exposed the fragility of the Maduro dictatorship and forced negotiations it long resisted. In Iran, sanctions and diplomatic pressure constrained the regime’s ability to fund destabilizing activities abroad. Authoritarian regimes that depend on outside resources become vulnerable when the democratic world acts with unity and strength.

The dictatorship in Havana is no exception. The Castro regime needs the United States far more than the United States needs the regime. Havana depends on foreign currency, imported food, fuel and international legitimacy. President Trump’s decisive actions give the United States critical leverage to affect change in Cuba.

Every night, thousands of Cubans take to the streets in towns across the island. In the City of Moron on the eastern side of the island, the townspeople even set fire to the Communist Party’s headquarters during a massive protest.

CUBAN PRESIDENT ADMITS TALKS WITH TRUMP ADMIN AS FUEL BLOCKADE CHOKES DOMESTIC ENERGY SUPPLY AND ECONOMY

The dictatorship has responded in the only way it knows: repression. More than 1,400 political prisoners remain behind bars, patriots whose only crime was demanding freedom. President Donald Trump has an opportunity to help change the course of history. If the regime once again resorts to massacring its own people, as it has in the past, the United States must make clear that such brutality will not be tolerated.

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I urge President Trump to send a stark and unmistakable warning to the regime in Havana about the consequences they will face if they continue to repress the Cuban people.

Yet the courage of the Cuban people continues to shine through the darkness. Across the island, the cry of Patria y Vida grows louder every day.

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To my brothers and sisters on the island. We hear your pots and pans echo through the night. We see your courage in the darkness. Your voices carry across the Florida Straits and into the hearts of millions who still dream of a free Cuba. Every protest and every chant for Libertad brings the island closer to the freedom its people deserve.

The night imposed by the Castros has lasted far too long. But the Cuban people have never stopped believing in the sunrise.

5 disturbing examples that show why parents can’t trust Fairfax County schools

Last Friday, appalling news broke that a 19-year-old illegal immigrant student in the United States was criminally charged with nine counts of assault and battery for allegedly groping girls in the halls of a Fairfax County, Virginia, high school.

According to the mother of one of the alleged victims, the accused “sneakily walked up behind [the girls] and put his hand between their legs. It was not just a butt smack or a butt grab. It was a groping of a private area. It had been occurring for months.”

What is even more shocking is that Fairfax County Public Schools (FCPS) told parents of the alleged victims that the alleged assailant would be allowed to return to school upon his release.

ILLEGAL IMMIGRANT RELEASED UNDER BIDEN CHARGED WITH GROPING FEMALE STUDENTS AT VIRGINIA HIGH SCHOOL

This is just the latest disgrace for Virginia’s largest public school system — a district that has led the way in implementing far-left policies focused more on virtue signaling than on educating children.

The results are predictable and daunting: students are put in danger, teachers’ hands are tied, parents are kept out of the loop, and the quality of education steadily declines in a county where academic achievement was once heralded.

These are five examples of FCPS’s insanely misplaced priorities:

1. Illegal Immigrants Over Student Safety 

FCPS officials proudly boast of their “Trust Policy,” which cites “a climate of fear and stress that would affect all students” if ICE were to detain parents while children are in school. To that end, FCPS Superintendent Michelle Reid has pledged to “do all that we can — to the fullest extent allowable by law” to make FCPS a safe space for students and families who are in the country illegally. Law-abiding families are ignored.

MIGRANT ACCUSED OF GROPING MULTIPLE HIGH SCHOOL GIRLS FACES CHARGES AS DHS WARNS SPANBERGER AGAINST RELEASE

The result of this policy is clear: when the assailant accused of groping is released, FCPS will welcome him back into its taxpayer-funded school system while continuing to expose every other student to uncertainty, if not danger.

FCPS said in a statement, “While Fairfax County Public Schools (FCPS) is unable to comment on specifics due to federal and state privacy laws, we prioritize student and staff safety and fully investigate any time someone reports an incident or says they do not feel safe at school. We are grateful to our law enforcement partners, who continue to work swiftly and thoroughly when there are safety concerns in our schools. The safety of all FCPS students and staff remains a top priority.”

2. Race-Based Discipline Policies 

FCPS handles student discipline through an “equitable lens” designed to eliminate “discipline disproportionality” among students of different races. In plain terms, this means that if one racial group is disciplined at a rate higher than its share of the student population, FCPS will ease discipline for that group to bring the percentages into alignment, regardless of whether that discipline was warranted. 

This outcome-based approach to discipline is not only arguably illegal but also renders schools demonstrably less safe. FCPS appears unconcerned with either outcome.

PARENTS, NOT BUREAUCRATS, RAISE AMERICA’S CHILDREN AND THE SUPREME COURT AGREES

3. Boys in Girls’ Locker Rooms and Bathrooms 

FCPS mandates that students be allowed to use the bathrooms and locker rooms corresponding to their self-selected “gender identity.” It is the student who objects to sharing a bathroom or locker room with a member of the opposite sex who is instructed to comply or use an alternative private facility.

The consequences of this policy are already playing out. Just last year, a boy with facial hair and described as wearing “pants so tight they clearly outlined his genitalia,” began using a girls’ locker room at West Springfield High School, where he watched girls change in “various stages of undress.”

FCPS investigated the matter and concluded that all was well because the boy self-identified as a girl. In fact, FCPS is so committed to this policy — and so dismissive of its dangers — that it has refused to comply with the U.S. Department of Education’s demand to rescind it, risking millions of taxpayer dollars in federal funding in the process.

4. Keeping Secrets From Parents 

FCPS has established a system designed to withhold information from parents when a child seeks to “socially transition” to a different sex while at school — whether by using a different name, different pronouns, or the bathrooms and locker rooms of the opposite sex. Under this system, FCPS educators are instructed to exclude information related to a student’s new “gender identity” from official records and to limit parents’ visibility into their children’s records, making them viewable only by district officials.

SCHOOL DISTRICT IN THE HOT SEAT AMID FRESH ALLEGATIONS OF HIDING STUDENTS’ GENDER TRANSITION

This scheme may circumvent the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, which grants parents the right to access their children’s official school records. FCPS is likely familiar with this federal law. 

This practice is a clear attempt to cut parents out of decisions regarding their children’s health, emotional upbringing and education. It also conflicts with recent Supreme Court decisions in Mahmoud v. Taylor and Mirabelli v. Bonta.

5. Possibly Selling Data to Communist China 

It should be evident from the policies detailed above that FCPS appears to prioritize students in the country illegally over American students and gives short shrift to the constitutional rights of parents. But FCPS’ “America Last” mindset takes things to an entirely different level.

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As reported by National Review, the watchdog group Parents Defending Education claims that FCPS provided intellectual property to the Chinese Communist Party. According to reports, a nonprofit associated with Thomas Jefferson High School — FCPS’s top-ranked STEM school — has received millions of dollars from CCP-affiliated entities, including one known as the “TJ Fund,” in exchange for information that amounts to a blueprint for China to replicate Thomas Jefferson High School and its educational success. 

A spokesperson for FCPS told National Review, “The TJ Fund is a separate and independent 501(c)(3) entity that is not overseen by FCPS.”

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The list could continue, but the bottom line is clear: FCPS’s track record makes it an untenable choice for families who expect their children to be protected. 

Parents should avoid this school system if they can, and if they cannot, they must be extraordinarily diligent in protecting their children from a district that has repeatedly demonstrated it will not.

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Trump’s strait showdown: Five bold moves to crush the Iran threat now

“It won’t be long now.” That was President Donald J. Trump, speaking on the timeline for commercial traffic to flow again through the Strait of Hormuz at the White House on Tuesday. U.S. forces are “knocking the hell out of the coast,” Trump said. “As soon as that war is over, which it will be soon, prices are going to drop like a rock,” he added.  “You watch.”

Control of the Strait of Hormuz is a top geopolitical prize, and one of the core objectives of Operation Epic Fury. On a good day, 130 ships transit the Strait every 24 hours, moving cargo and about 20 million barrels of oil products. Currently, about 6 million barrels per day of oil from Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates have been rerouted to Red Sea pipelines. 

China takes 40% of the oil flowing through the strait. All told, 89% of the oil transiting the strait goes to Asian markets. In contrast, U.S. crude oil imports coming through the Strait of Hormuz are at a 40-year low, accounting for just 2% of U.S. petroleum liquids consumption, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. 

You can see the potential for leverage with China. 

MULTIPLE ALLIES DECLINE US CALLS FOR STRAIT OF HORMUZ SUPPORT AMID RISING MIDDLE EAST TENSIONS

From March 1 to 9, only an estimated 10 tankers and 39 cargo vessels transited. Two Indian tankers carrying LPG, made it through, along with several sanctioned, shadow-fleet vessels likely carrying Iranian oil. The bulk carrier Iron Maiden, registered in the Marshall Islands, slipped through by describing itself as “all Chinese-crewed,” according to a Maritime Executive report.  

But most of the big VLCC tankers are still on pause because Lloyd’s of London and other insurers jacked up oil cargo insurance rates. They fear a repeat of the 1980s tanker war, when Iran’s navy attacked 168 ships. One was the oil and bulk ore carrier Norman Atlantic which was set ablaze after attacks by Iranian gunboats on Dec. 6, 1987. The burning hulk was towed out of the shipping lane and sunk off Oman. 

With more than 100 Iranian ships destroyed so far in Operation Epic Fury, there is practically no way Iran can sustain naval attacks. In fact, no ship has been targeted since March 12. 

However, the persistent tactical problem is that large ships following a predictable route are easier to target, even given Iran’s degraded status. The strait is 104 miles long, and just 21 miles wide at its narrowest point. The shipping channel is even tighter. There is an inbound lane and an outbound lane, each two miles wide. As Trump put it on Monday afternoon, “literally a single terrorist can put something in the water, or shoot something, or shoot a missile, a small missile, and it’s really close range, because it is a tight area.” 

TRUMP WARNS NATO OF ‘VERY BAD’ FUTURE IF ALLIES DON’T HELP SECURE STRAIT OF HORMUZ

On Monday, Trump warned he would “strongly encourage other nations whose economies depend on the strait far more than ours” to help out. He’s steamed at the slow response and no wonder. Last year, more than 20 nations participated in Operation Prosperity Guardian, a maritime task force countering Houthi attacks in the Red Sea from 2023 to 2025. Japan and South Korea import 70% of their oil via the strait. 

“We thought that Europe would help, because they do have some minesweepers,” Trump said Tuesday. “I think it’s very unfair to the United States,” he complained. 

So, the world is waiting for U.S. Central Command to announce a plan. This won’t be like the convoys you see in World War II movies. Surveillance, rather than side-by-side vessel escort, will be the basis for assisting merchant traffic. 

Here are five technologies essential to control of the Strait.

Maritime Moving Target Indicator. As seen in the Caribbean, the U.S. Navy has crystalline maritime surveillance. Technologies blend visual, heat detection and subtle radar shifts to cover wide areas or drill down on specific targets. Maritime moving target indicator (MMTI) on planes like the Navy’s P-8 and the MQ-4C, a high-altitude drone with a 130-foot wingspan, are normally used to keep tabs on China’s navy. They know how to cut through the coastline clutter of radar return and atmospheric distortion and find any IRGC small boats still in the strait. 

Airpower. To get after drones and shoreline anti-ship cruise missiles, “the United States will be bombing the hell out of the shoreline, and continually shooting Iranian boats and ships out of the water,” as Trump said Thursday.

Mine Counter Measures Ships. Drifting, moored or placed on the sea bottom, mines are a high anxiety threat, but one well-known to the U.S. Navy. Iran has 3,000 to 6,000 mines of Russian, North Korean and Chinese origin, including China’s nasty EM-52 bottom mine with a 600-pound warhead. U.S. Navy Independence-class littoral combat ships like USS Tulsa, carry sensors and unmanned vessels that locate, identify and destroy mines. 

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Underwater Drones. For hunting mines, its U.S. Navy underwater drones to the rescue. They range from the 12-foot-long MK 18 Mod 2 Kingfish, which looks like a torpedo, up to the new, massive Orca, a 54-foot autonomous submarine that lurks underwater to carry out “diverse missions.” Consider, too, that China has an estimated 50,000 to 100,000 naval mines, and the Navy has been training to defeat them in the Pacific. You can bet the U.S. will know exactly what types of mines Iran tries to emplace, and will find and neutralize them.

The Marines. Much more than a technology, the 31st Marine Expeditionary Unit embarked on USS Tripoli, is in high-speed transit en route to the U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) area of responsibility in the Middle East. It will provide options for interdicting any ships unwise enough to cause mischief. Tripoli also brings more F-35B fighters. Historical fact:Tripoli, was hit by an Iraqi contact mine years ago during Operation Desert Storm in 1991 but was back in action in less than 24 hours. 

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Global shipping does not turn on a dime. Vessels are on precise schedules down to the minute for entering and departing harbors. A rerouting decision takes time to correct.

Still, I have no doubt that in a matter of days, shipping traffic will ramp up, with the U.S. in control of the Strait of Hormuz. And China will just have to watch.

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BROOKE ROLLINS, ROBERT KENNEDY JR: We’re bringing families more healthy foods in a SNAP

As we prepare to celebrate 250 years of freedom this summer, America should resolve to once again be a healthy nation. Chronic disease has been rapidly increasing for decades, and for far too long, the federal government’s approach to nutrition has been part of the problem. Empowered by President Donald Trump’s leadership, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) will soon publish a final rule that will more than double the amount of healthy food that many retailers in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) are required to stock.

Since its inception, SNAP has helped our most vulnerable citizens afford the essential and nutritious food they need. At least, that is what the program is supposed to do. Over time, however, SNAP has been taken advantage of, allowing many to game the system and leaving millions of vulnerable Americans without healthy, nutrient-dense food options. 

This has accelerated the health crisis that our nation is up against. Every year, 90% of the nearly $5 trillion the United States spends on healthcare goes toward treating people with chronic conditions. And of the roughly 73 million children under age 18 in the United States, the CDC reports that over 40% have at least one chronic health condition, while more than 350,000 American children have been diagnosed with diabetes.  

The consequences are far-reaching and have even put our national security at risk. Due primarily to obesity, poor physical fitness, and/or mental health challenges, more than 75% of Americans aged 17 to 24 are ineligible for military service — a staggering and dangerous reality.

WHOLE MILK HEADED BACK TO SCHOOL CAFETERIAS AFTER TRUMP SIGNS LAW AS EXPERTS TOUT BENEFITS

Rising rates of childhood chronic disease are driven by a combination of factors. Improving SNAP — which covers 15.6 million children, or about 39% of all SNAP participants — is a terrific place to start. When it comes to a lack of healthy options for both America’s children and adults, the stocking standards that classify the foods retailers are required to stock to redeem SNAP benefits are a key culprit. 

The current stocking standards were established when SNAP was used quite differently. Today, too many taxpayer dollars are spent on highly processed products loaded with empty calories. With nearly 266,000 retailers nationwide redeeming nearly $96 billion in SNAP benefits in fiscal year 2025, we can’t afford not to act. 

To take just one example of SNAP misuse, retailers have been able to qualify for SNAP by selling jelly, passing it off as a “fruit,” and making a quick buck off it. This was never the intent of SNAP, and the Trump administration is laser-focused on restoring the program to its original mission.

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Our pending final rule raises the bar for stocking by strengthening requirements for retailers and closing loopholes that have allowed certain snack foods to count as staple foods. This rule requires all retailers to carry a minimum of 28 varieties across the four staple food groups — more than double the 12 they are currently required to carry. This will mean more real food like eggs, chicken, whole grain breads, fruit and yogurt on store shelves and on Americans’ plates. 

Americans on SNAP deserve even more than 28 varieties, but this is a long overdue step in the right direction. It is also the very least retailers can do in exchange for receiving federal taxpayer dollars, since public money should go toward supporting the national interest. And retailers participating in SNAP should feel obligated to offer a variety of healthy foods, period.

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At long last, we are modernizing SNAP to responsibly steward taxpayer dollars, promote healthy eating and empower Americans to lead better lives. This pending final rule squares with the latest Dietary Guidelines for Americans’ call to eat real food by ensuring low-income Americans have healthy options available wherever they shop.

There is no better 250th birthday present we can give America than making our nation healthier through real food grown by our incredible farmers, ranchers and producers. Stay tuned — there is much more to come before July 4th. 

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TikTok restores Brooke Slusser account after ‘permanently’ banning her after videos on SJSU volleyball scandal

Former San Jose State University volleyball star Brooke Slusser was temporarily banned from TikTok after posting several videos discussing her alleged experience sharing a team and apartment with a transgender teammate. Her account, which was “permanently banned” according to screenshots obtained by Fox News Digital, was later restored Tuesday after publication.

Slusser provided screenshots to Fox News Digital showing the notification of her banishment and an unsuccessful appeal. The notifications cite violations of “community guidelines.” 

“We ask that all users follow our Community Guidelines to help us maintain a safe, respectful TikTok community,” the notification read. 

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Fox News Digital has reached out to TikTok for comment as to why her account was banned and then restored, but has not received a response. 

“I’m pretty mad about it,” Slusser told Fox News Digital after the initial ban occurred. 

TikTok previously banned the activist sportswear brand XX-XY Athletics, which Slusser is signed with, after it posted an advertisement video advocating for the protection of women and girls’ sports from biological male trans athletes.

TikTok was previously owned by the Chinese company ByteDance, before finalizing a $14 billion deal to shift its U.S. operations to a new entity, TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC, to avoid a federal ban. However, ByteDance still owns approximately 20% of the company. 

Slusser has been the target of a viral left-wing hate campaign on TikTok and X over the last week after she began to speak out about her alleged experience at SJSU. Her content started coming out after the university, and the California State University (CSU) system, filed a lawsuit against the federal government to challenge a Department of Education investigation that determined SJSU violated Title IX in its handling of a transgender volleyball player. 

On X, the left-wing attacks on Slusser came in response to an interview with Fox News Digital in which she reflected on living in the same apartment with a transgender teammate, Blaire Fleming.

“You find out you’re just chilling in a bed with a man that you have no idea about… I [was] unknowingly sharing a bed at that time with a man,” Slusser said in the interview, also alleging that SJSU volleyball coach Todd Kress encouraged her to live in the same apartment as the trans teammate when another group of players was also looking for a final tenant. 

The fallout of the interview has prompted high-profile activists, lawmakers and even an actor to speak out, taking a side behind or against Slusser.

A coalition of “save women’s sports” activists rushed to Slusser’s defense, with OutKick host Riley Gaines, XX-XY Athletics founder Jennifer Sey, Sen. Tommy Tuberville, R-Ala., women’s tennis legend Martina Navratilova and former ESPN star Sage Steele leading the charge to defend Slusser from the pro-trans detractors.

“I would just say people that don’t know my life or my trauma don’t have room to say how good or bad my time at SJSU was. I hope they never have to understand going through something as awful as that,” Slusser previously told Fox News Digital of the backlash.

TRUMP ADMIN RESPONDS AFTER SJSU SUES TO CHALLENGE TITLE IX INVESTIGATION INTO TRANSGENDER VOLLEYBALL SCANDAL

After the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights (OCR) announced at the end of January that an investigation into the university for its handling of a trans athlete and other players concluded that the school violated Title IX, SJSU and the California State University (CSU) system declined to resolve the violation. 

Instead, SJSU President Cynthia Teniente-Matson announced Friday that the school and the CSU system are suing the federal government to challenge the investigation.

“Because we believe OCR’s findings aren’t grounded in the facts or the law, SJSU and the CSU filed a lawsuit today against the federal government to challenge those findings and prevent the federal government from taking punitive action against the university, including the potential withholding of critical federal funding,” Teniente-Matson said Friday.

“This is not a step we take lightly. However, we have a responsibility to defend the integrity of our institution and the rule of law, while ensuring that every member of our community is treated fairly and in accordance with the law. Our position is simple: We have followed the law and cannot be punished for doing so.”

The school is also requesting that OCR rescind its findings and close its investigation. 

Teniente-Matson affirmed the university’s commitment to defending the LGBTQ community in the announcement.

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“Our support for the LGBTQ members of our community, who have experienced threats and harms over the last several years, remains unwavering. We know the attention the university has received around this issue and the investigative process that followed have been unsettling for many in our community,” the university president said.

Among the Education Department’s findings, it determined that a female athlete discovered that the trans student allegedly conspired to have a member of an opposing team spike her in the face during a match. The department claims “SJSU did not investigate the conspiracy, but later subjected the female athlete to a Title IX complaint for ‘misgendering’ the male athlete in online videos and interviews.”

Why I refuse to stay silent as Jews are scapegoated by left and right

I am tired. My tiredness is not from the road that my Walk Across America has brought me to the beautiful city of Shreveport. I need to speak plainly about something that has been weighing on my mind and my heart for too long. My tiredness comes from watching Jewish people get attacked from every direction and seeing those attacks go unchallenged by people who should know better.

On the left, too many Black ministers have betrayed the Bible for a political and ideological worldview that casts Israel as the perpetual villain no matter what and ignores the barbaric slaughter of innocents, including Oct. 7.

On the right, some prominent voices traffic in antisemitism dressed up as populism. They protest that they are just asking questions. They lie that they cannot criticize Israel. We see through their disgusting grift.

MIKE PENCE: NO PLACE FOR ANTISEMITISM IN AMERICA TODAY, TOMORROW OR EVER

The Jewish people are being abandoned, scapegoated and demonized from both sides of the aisle, and I will not stand for it. I will not be silent anymore. I will not betray them.

That is a promise.

The Black church and the Jewish people share a bond forged in fire. Jews helped found the NAACP. They marched with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in Selma. They died for Black voting rights. The names of Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner are forever linked in blood with their brother James Chaney. 

MORNING GLORY: 2026 SHOULD BE YEAR ANTISEMITISM BECOMES UNACCEPTABLE IN AMERICA AGAIN

The Rev. Dr. King locked arms with Rabbi Heschel because they both answered the same prophetic call. The civil rights foot soldiers sang of Exodus deliverance because they recognized in the Jewish story their own. That alliance was not accidental. It was born of a shared and timeless yearning to be free.

That history demands something of us today.

Yet too many woke pastors in the Black church have blinded themselves to this biblical heritage. They have chosen to align with the Palestinian cause not through Scripture but through liberation theology stretched far beyond its proper purpose.

JEWISH SAFETY IN NEW YORK DEPENDS ON CLEAR LINES AND MORAL COURAGE FROM MAMDANI

Author James Cone’s work on Black liberation theology drew from real suffering and real oppression, and in its proper context it carries weight. But there is very little of that context today. What we have instead is the collapse of entire nations and entire races of people into cartoon roles. 

I have always judged people and nations by character and actions, not by color. That standard does not change based on who is asking me to abandon it.

Israel is cast as the White supremacist oppressor because of its perceived whiteness. Palestinians, because of their brown skin, are cast as perpetual victims who can do no wrong, including on Oct. 7. That is not prophecy. That is ideology.

PARENTS ARE FIGHTING BACK AGAINST THE SYSTEMIC ANTISEMITISM POISONING CLASSROOMS

Where was the outrage among these Black pastors over Oct. 7? Families slaughtered. Children taken hostage. Rapes. Mutilations. The most horrific massacre of Jewish people since the Holocaust. If any of them offered condemnation, it was done in passing before pivoting immediately to Israel’s response. This is empathy dictated by politics, not by Scripture.

Jesus was a Jew in Judea. Bethlehem sits in the land promised to Israel. Genesis 12:3 does not bend to political fashion: “I will bless those who bless you, and him who dishonors you I will curse.” Psalm 122:6 does not offer an exemption: “Pray for the peace of Jerusalem.” These are not suggestions. God’s covenant with the Jewish people is eternal — not conditional on perfect behavior and not suspended when the cultural winds shift.

CHRISTIAN PASTORS, INFLUENCERS JOIN 1,000-STRONG ISRAEL MISSION BACKING JEWISH STATE, FIGHTING ANTISEMITISM

Supporting Israel does not mean ignoring Palestinian suffering. It means refusing to demonize a people God has preserved through millennia of persecution, exile and genocide. It means seeing Israel’s full reality as a diverse nation that includes Ethiopian Jews, Mizrahi Jews and people of every background who have faced their own oppression. 

It means holding Hamas accountable for a charter that calls openly for destruction and refusing to let that truth be buried beneath a narrative decided before the facts were examined. It also means holding both the left and the right in America responsible for their lies about genocide, apartheid and colonialism.

I have always judged people and nations by character and actions, not by color. That standard does not change based on who is asking me to abandon it.

There is a reason the enemies of freedom have always come for the Jewish people first. Antisemitism is not just hatred. It is a warning sign. Every civilization that has turned on its Jewish citizens has turned on its own foundational values shortly after. 

The same principles that gave birth to America — belief in human dignity, the rule of law and the protection of minorities against the mob — are the principles that demand we stand against this hatred today. 

When we abandon the Jewish people, we do not just betray a community. We betray the idea of America itself. This is not only a biblical obligation or a civil rights legacy. It is a test of whether we still believe what we say we believe as a nation and as a civilization.

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To my Jewish brothers and sisters, I see what is happening. I see the attacks coming from pulpits that should know better. I see the attacks coming from political commentators who have dressed hatred in the language of free thought. I see you being made a target from the left and the right simultaneously, as though the oldest hatred in human history has simply found new hosts on both ends of the political spectrum.

I will not look away. I will not equivocate. I will not trade our shared legacy for a political moment.

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As I walk across this country, I carry that commitment with every step. Return to biblical truth over trendy ideology. Reclaim the Black and Jewish legacy of resilience and solidarity. Stand with Israel because Scripture demands it, history proves it and basic human decency requires it.

Unity beats division every time. God bless you, and God bless America.

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I run a fracking company — New York banned the industry and stuck the poor with the bill

New York is making its poorest residents pay for a political fantasy. The Cuomo administration banned shale fracking in 2014, bowing to the noise of “fracktivists.” Hochul kept the ban and doubled down. The result: energy poverty for the people who can least afford it.

Twenty-six percent of New York City children live in poverty. Statewide, 2.7 million residents. Politicians respond with more taxation and finger-pointing at the Feds — but the real answer is sitting right underneath their feet. Trillions of cubic feet of natural gas, untapped, while Albany digs the hole deeper with bad policy and fills it with tax dollars.

The numbers tell the story. A 2025 Heritage Foundation study found that New York’s fracking ban has created a wealth gap of $11,000 per person — $27,000 per family — compared to Pennsylvania neighbors just across the border where fracking is allowed. Before the ban, those counties were economic equals. Since then, Pennsylvania landowners have been collecting thousands of dollars per acre in lease payments and a sixteen percent cut off the top of all gas sales. New Yorkers get nothing for their rich reserves. It’s state-sponsored pauperism.

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE HELPS FUEL NEW ENERGY SOURCES

If fracking were allowed, New York would receive billions in royalty payments. Tax receipts would swell from high-paying jobs and well-capitalized drillers. The tide from those trillions of cubic feet of natural gas would lift all boats.

I know this because I frack wells in New York. Mine might be the last company still standing. Over two decades, my company has fracked thousands of wells — no groundwater contamination, no low birth rates, no nosebleeds, no apocalypse. Nothing. Because fracking is safe. The data backs it up. But data deniers won’t have it, and so neither will the state’s neediest residents.

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The green alternative isn’t clean — it’s just cleaner-looking. Renewable mandates come at the cost of massive land use, strip mining, toxic battery production and a waste stream all their own. And every solar farm and wind turbine still has to be backstopped by natural gas or coal when the sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow. Albany knows this, but presses on anyway — leaving New Yorkers with residential electric costs 40% above the national average and natural gas prices 23% higher. The state imports nearly 80% of its energy, much of it from Pennsylvania. It’s the equivalent of bumming cigarettes instead of buying them. The smoke still fills your lungs.

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Cuomo and Hochul are masters of importing energy and exporting opportunity. They’ve bent before an unkind ideology at the expense of their poorest constituents. Natural gas is the lowest-hanging fruit New York has. It’s right there.

And this is still the “before” scenario. When AI data centers turn energy into a full-blown battleground — and they will — New York’s self-inflicted power shortage won’t just hurt the poor. It will hand the future to whoever has the gold. Governor Hochul, the fanatics you’ve been appeasing don’t pay those utility bills. Your constituents do. Open the taps.

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MORNING GLORY: What will Donald Trump’s legacy be as a wartime president?

Every American alive today has been living in wartime. Every president since December 7, 1941, has been a wartime president. All of them. They can, and should, be judged by how they have waged war, both “cold” and “hot,” against imposing foes and against dangerous irritants. Provided he remains tough, determined and ruthless in this conflict with Iran, President Donald Trump will be the equal of any of them and far superior to most.

There have been stretches of time of largely noncombatant war since the conclusion of World War II, stretches that look a lot like the “peacetime” of the 1920s and 1930s.

From the fall of the Berlin Wall to 9/11 — 25 years ago this September — for example, the illusion of “peace” was pervasive. Indeed, a “peace dividend” was demanded and paid via deep cuts in defense spending because of that illusion.

LIZ PEEK: IRAN WAR COULD BECOME THE ACHIEVEMENT THAT ENSURES TRUMP’S LEGACY

That illusion survived the United States invasion of Panama and the first Gulf War, the American cruise missile strikes on Iraq in 1993 which President Clinton ordered, the dozen years of conflict with Saddam that followed under both the first Bush and Clinton with the “no-fly zones,” Operation Infinite Reach — when Clinton ordered cruise missiles fired at al Qaeda targets in Afghanistan and Sudan — and NATO’s Operation Allied Force which was the 78-day NATO bombing campaign against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia from March 24 to June 10, 1999.

Not until 9/11 did most of America collectively conclude that the world contained very bad actors and would never leave us alone or allow us to be indifferent to rising threats.

After 9/11, through the debacle of our collapse in Afghanistan in 2021, no one doubted we were in wars. There were obvious reminders in the tragic killings and wounding of American service members in both the Afghanistan and Iraq theaters. And there was the no-longer-possible-to-ignore threat posed by the rise of China into our “pacing threat,” the descent of Russia into dictatorship and the successful lunge of North Korea for a nuclear arsenal.

Through both the long period of illusory peace and the obvious wartime of 2001 to 2023, the Islamic Republic of Iran has been at war with the United States. It has been thus since the hostage crisis of 1979, through the bombing of the Marine Corps barracks in 1983, the bombing of the Khobar Towers in 1996 and the long shadowy campaign of Iranian surrogates against our military in Iraq which killed and wounded thousands of our troops. The fanatics in Iran have not stopped chanting “Death to America” since 1979. They have always meant it.

TRUMP’S OPERATION EPIC FURY PROVES REAGAN-STYLE PEACE THROUGH STRENGTH IS BACK

Iran’s grand plan was to gain nuclear weapons. Its secondary plan was to amass a missile force so vast and threatening to its neighbors (and eventually Europe and perhaps even America) to assure that the United States and Israel would never strike at the nuclear weapons assembly line. With the immunity that comes with nuclear weapons, the ayatollahs would have been free to pursue their agenda of the destruction of Israel and America.

Presidents before Trump have all vowed that Iran would not be allowed to have such weapons. All of them since Iran set out on this path. None of them acted. They did not act either against Iran’s expeditionary force of terrorists — the Quds Force of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard built and deployed in the first instance by Qassem Soleimani — or Iran’s proxies. Until Trump.

President Carter was paralyzed by the mullahs. President Reagan, intent on confronting the Soviets, withdrew from the confrontation with a much smaller threat in the 1980s, and while President George H.W. Bush destroyed Saddam’s army in 1991, he did not advance to Baghdad, much less beyond and into Iran.

MORNING GLORY: PRESIDENT TRUMP AND THE US ARE WAGING A RIGHTEOUS BATTLE — AND WINNING

President Clinton could not stop North Korea from acquiring nuclear weapons because he believed the cost to be too high. He would not concern himself with a distant threat when he could not contain the immediate one. North Korea became a nuclear power on Clinton’s watch.

President George W. Bush was a superb wartime president as he battled Islamist extremism and eventually won through to stability in Iraq. He and every other leader in the West were wrong about WMDs, but he persevered, and the Iraqi people have a much brighter future ahead than they would have had under Saddam’s sadist sons. The conclusion of Bush’s intelligence community was that Iran, afraid and chastened, had abandoned its nuclear ambitions. That “IC” was wrong.

President Obama has been the worst of the post-war presidents because he failed even at doing nothing. He did worse than nothing. He acted to legitimize Iranian ambitions and made a $1.7 billion dollar down payment on his policy of appeasement followed by billions of dollars more in sanctions relief through the meaningless promises of the “JCPOA” — the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action negotiated by Secretary of State John Kerry with the ayatollahs in 2015.

TRUMP VOWS TO HIT IRAN ‘VERY HARD’ AFTER OBLITERATING NEARLY ’90 PERCENT’ OF REGIME MISSILES

When Trump gained the presidency in 2017, ruthless realism returned to the Oval Office. Trump tore up the JCPOA — as it had not been a treaty but simply an “Executive Agreement.” It was, of course, his right to do so.

Trump struck Syria twice for using chemical weapons, restoring a “red line” Obama had erased. (Will the new Obama Library have a “Red Line” room into which visitors disappear?) Trump also ordered the destruction of Russia’s “little green men” who dared to attack U.S. forces in Syria. And when Iran would not stop trying to kill Americans in Iraq, Trump ordered Soleimani killed in January 2020, when the Iranian terrorist set foot in Iraq.

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Then the 2020 election and the disaster for the world that was the long regency of whomever was running Joe Biden around while the sadly diminished Biden inhabited the Oval. We won’t know for years who designed the national security policy in those years, but we know whoever was making the decisions oversaw the debacle in Afghanistan which led to the second Russian invasion of Ukraine —the first had come under Obama — and Iran’s lurch towards nuclear weapons and more and more missiles with which to defend that lurch.

ALL 4 IRAN WAR ASSUMPTIONS DEAD WRONG — TRUMP PROVES EXPERTS GOT FOOLED AGAIN

Five months after he returned to power, Trump ordered Operation Midnight Hammer and the Iranian nuclear weapons program was obliterated. At that point, Trump gave the theocrats in Tehran a choice — abandon your ambitions or face another round of punishment. Ayatollah Khamenei misjudged Trump. The Iranians began again to seek nuclear weapons and, this time, to also produce so many ballistic missiles that no one dared stop them.

Trump, along with the Israeli prime minister, dared. Iran’s military, including their nuclear weapons facilities and their missile factories are in ruins. The ongoing campaign is leveling the regime’s ability to rebuild others, and it may yet destroy the oil infrastructure it would need to begin to pay to start again down this path.

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By being tough with the mullahs, indeed ruthless and transparent, Trump has already done the world a great favor. The “Alliance of Tyrants” has suffered blow after blow since Trump returned and more are coming as Iran shudders and communist Cuba teeters on the brink of throwing off their dictators.

President Trump really would like to leave a legacy of peace. But he is the sort of tough and indeed ruthless commander in chief the U.S. needs to put away its enemies, not merely put them in timeout. Here’s hoping he sees this battle through until Iran cannot menace us, Israel, the Gulf Nations or anyone for a generation or three.

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