Under oath, Meta’s Zuckerberg showed why Big Tech can’t police itself

Wednesday was a historic day as Mark Zuckerberg took the stand and faced a jury under oath to answer allegations that Meta knowingly designed and promoted products that hooked young users — including children — despite internal warnings about the risks, marking the first time he has testified before a jury in such a case.

While Zuckerberg’s testimony was often characterized by sidestepping and dodging questions — to the point that the judge instructed him to answer directly — he can’t deflect his way out of this one. The evidence in this social media trial speaks for itself.

The plaintiff’s attorney, Mark Lanier, focused on three central themes in his questioning: 1) addicting users; 2) allowing underage users access to the platform; and 3) making business decisions that put profits over safety.

Zuckerberg was presented with a 2015 email in which the CEO stated his goal for 2016 was to increase users’ time spent on the platform by 12%. Zuckerberg argued that Meta’s growth targets reflect an aim to give users something useful, not to addict them, and stated that the company does not seek to attract children as users.

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When asked whether he believes people tend to use something more if it’s addictive, he dismissed the premise. “I don’t think that applies here,” he said.

But it absolutely does apply. Meta’s entire business model is built on user engagement. Social media appears “free,” but a child’s time, attention and data are the product being sold. More hours with eyes glued to the screen mean more advertisements to sell. The user is the product. The incentive is to keep users engaged as much as possible.

As confirmed earlier in the trial by addiction expert Dr. Anna Lembke of Stanford University, social media meets the clinical criteria for addiction, according to her expert testimony.

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Lanier also questioned Zuckerberg extensively on Meta’s age-verification policies. He showed an internal Meta email from 2015 estimating that 4 million children under 13 were using Instagram — approximately 30% of U.S. children ages 10 to 12. One in three preteens.

Zuckerberg said the company removes identified underage users and includes terms about age requirements during the sign-up process. Lanier responded, “You expect a 9-year-old to read all of the fine print? That’s your basis for swearing under oath that children under 13 are not allowed?”

Zuckerberg added that some children “lie about their age in order to use the services.” During this exchange, he also said, “I don’t see why this is so complicated … we have rules, and people broadly understand that.”

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Waving his hand and saying “we have rules” is not an adequate defense. These are minors. It is the company’s responsibility to ensure the platform is effectively age-gated; otherwise, its stated age policy is meaningless.

In practice, age verification on most social media platforms relies largely on self-reported birthdates. A child can enter a false age, click to accept the terms and conditions and gain access within minutes. Critics argue that without meaningful safeguards, age restrictions amount to little more than an honor system.

Age of access is a key issue in this trial. The plaintiff, K.G.M., who got on Instagram at age 9, alleges that her social media use as a child and teenager led to body dysmorphia, suicidal thoughts, anxiety, addiction and depression. Her age when she began using the app — during a period of significant brain development between ages 10 and 12 — is central to the harms she alleges.

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Instagram should never have allowed her on the platform at age 9, the plaintiff argues. Whether the jury ultimately agrees remains to be seen, but the case places responsibility for those decisions squarely on Meta’s leadership.

Lanier ended his questioning by unrolling — with the help of six others — a 50-foot collage of every selfie K.G.M. had posted on Instagram, many with beauty filters. He asked Zuckerberg whether Meta ever investigated her account for unhealthy behavior. Zuckerberg did not answer.

Earlier, Lanier pressed Zuckerberg about his decision to allow beauty filters that mimicked plastic surgery after 18 internal experts warned they were harmful to teenage girls and could contribute to body dysmorphia, according to internal documents. Zuckerberg and Adam Mosseri, head of Instagram, ultimately reversed a temporary ban and allowed the filters on the platform. Plaintiffs contend that decision exposed vulnerable young users to tools linked to body dysmorphia and other mental health struggles.

Zuckerberg defended the decision by saying that after lifting the ban, Instagram did not create its own filters or recommend them to users. He added, “I think oftentimes telling people that they can’t express themselves like that is overbearing.”

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What a spin. Removing plastic surgery filters that harm young girls is, in his words, “overbearing.” Many parents would call it putting reasonable safeguards in place.

While Zuckerberg has publicly said Meta cares about children’s safety — telling Congress in 2024 that “Our job is to make sure that we build tools to help keep people safe” and that “We are on the side of parents everywhere working hard to raise their kids” — the internal evidence presented at trial suggests otherwise.

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Though he would not admit in court that he knew his products were addictive or targeted teens, he didn’t need to. The jury — and the public — can weigh his answers against the internal documents and decide for themselves. 

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MIKE DAVIS: Chicagoland, where teachers can support Charlie Kirk’s killing, but not ICE

This is the tale of two teachers in the leftist dump that is Chicagoland. One teacher supported Charlie Kirk’s assassination, as leading school-choice advocate Corey DeAngelis discovered for the world to see. She still has her job. Another teacher made a social media post supporting ICE. He no longer has his job. This situation is an indefensible disgrace. ​​There is a cancerous spread of Chicago’s radical leftist politics into the once-idyllic suburbs.

On Sept. 10, 2025, Tyler Robinson sat perched atop a roof on a Utah college campus. He allegedly aimed his rifle and fired, putting a bullet through the neck of the legendary Charlie Kirk, a model husband and father. Why? Robinson, who had a transgender lover, despised Kirk’s political views. Among those views was the commonsense belief that biological males should not compete in sports while masquerading as females and competing with biological females. Kirk sought dialogue with all sides; indeed, he was at Utah Valley University that tragic day to engage in it. Robinson, by contrast, is a leftist domestic terrorist. He has no interest in dialogue; rather, he believes that assassinating those with whom he disagrees is the proper course of action. Robinson hopefully will receive the death penalty if convicted for his barbaric act.

Lucy Martinez is a teacher at Nathan Hale Elementary School in Chicago. Like many radical leftists, Martinez attended one of the farcical “No Kings” protests that occurred across the country. Martinez, however, did far more than protest President Donald Trump, the object of the demonstrations. She was filmed pointing a fake gun to her neck. While doing so, she shouted “Bang, bang!” This protest occurred in October, the month after Kirk’s assassination. It does not take a rocket scientist to understand what Martinez was doing. She was mocking Charlie Kirk’s assassination, just as many so-called professionals — including doctors, nurses, lawyers and even a former official with the Carolina Panthers — had done. The difference between Martinez and other degenerates, however, is that she still has her job. There was little outrage in the community over her abhorrent conduct.

ICE is the federal agency tasked with enforcing our immigration laws. These brave men and women jeopardize their lives to rid our nation of illegal aliens, many of whom are violent — and all of whom are criminals. Radical leftists have doxed ICE agents and their families because these Marxists desire open borders and the resulting destruction of America. These Marxists have led anti-ICE protests across the country, most recently in Minneapolis. The Grammy Awards contained several anti-ICE diatribes, including one artist who profanely attacked ICE.

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James Heidorn was a physical education teacher at the Gary Elementary School in West Chicago, one of the aforementioned once-idyllic Windy City suburbs. He has a different view of ICE; that is, he supports the agency. Heidorn expressed his view with a simple post on Facebook: “GO ICE.” Nothing more. He expressed support for a law-enforcement agency. The reaction, however, was nothing like that which occurred after the Martinez fiasco. Outrage erupted from parents in the community. Illinois state Sen. Karina Villa, a pro-illegal alien leftist, railed against the post as hurtful. West Chicago Mayor Daniel Bovey held a listening session where people could come and whine about the post. All because a teacher expressed support for law enforcement.

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Heidorn got placed on leave after his post which, again, merely expressed support for a law-enforcement agency. Heidorn has since resigned. What if Heidorn had posted “ABOLISH ICE” instead? How about “ICE IS HORRIBLE!” There is no doubt that the school would have done nothing to him. In other words, this school — a government institution — would be just fine with a teacher who criticizes law enforcement. A teacher who supports law enforcement, however, is placed on leave and subject to an investigation. That teacher is now unemployed.

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Martinez was never placed on administrative leave after celebrating Charlie Kirk’s murder. Neither Villa nor any other leftist senator expressed outrage. The mayor did not hold a listening session. Instead, Martinez continues merrily along, entrusted with dozens of young, impressionable minds. These are the consequences for a teacher who supported an assassination. And the claim that she merely mocked it, and that mockery is different from support, is risible. Political violence must be condemned, for it tears at the very fabric of the Republic. Martinez’s conduct warranted termination because no one who supports murdering political opponents belongs anywhere near a classroom of young children. Anyone who supports the conduct Robinson is accused of is an utterly sick individual who needs profound help.

The education landscape in Chicagoland is simple and sad. A teacher can support the assassination of a political opponent and face no consequences. Another teacher can support law enforcement, face excoriation from local leaders, and lose his job. Chicago is a crime-infested hellhole, and it will remain so as long as the mentality of these leaders controls the machinery of government. This is clearly now spreading to the suburbs too. Heidorn deserves to be in a classroom; Martinez belongs nowhere near one. Yet, the opposite is reality. That reality illustrates Chicago’s leftist insanity.

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DAVID MARCUS: How Stephen Colbert conned Dem donors and burned Jasmine Crockett

Texas Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico’s campaign is $2.5 million richer this week and a bit closer to victory after Stephen Colbert, host of “The Late Show” on CBS, made up a ridiculous lie about being censored by President Trump.

It took a few days for the dust to settle, but now that we have a clear picture of what happened, it is about as bad as it can be. In fact, it would likely be a fireable offense if the ratings challenged Colbert was not already slated to get the ax in May.

According to Colbert’s version of events, which is falling apart faster than a house of cards in a wind tunnel, he was told by CBS lawyers on Monday, just minutes before he was set to interview Talarico, that he could not air the conversation. Why? Because of the Trump administration Federal Communication Commission’s new rules on equal time.

A petulant Colbert went on to tell his audience that he wasn’t even supposed to mention being censored to them, but, putting on his free speech super hero cape, he would do the interview anyway, defying his bosses and release it on YouTube.

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The only problem with all of this is that, according to both CBS and the FCC, nobody told Colbert the interview could not air. He just made it up. All that happened was that CBS lawyers told him if he had Talarico on, he might also have to give equal time to his Demcorat primary opponent, Rep. Jasmine Crockett, D-Texas.

It is not clear why Colbert would have any issue with having Crockett on, unless perhaps he and his friends in high places think the preppy White Bible school boy is more electable than the sassy Black finger-snapping lady.

Talarico was fundraising off of Colbert’s lie within minutes and raked in $2.5 million. Oh, and did I mention that early voting in Texas started on Tuesday, the day after this duplicitous debacle?

JAMES TALARICO ACCUSES CBS OF ‘SELLING OUT’ TO TRUMP AS NETWORK DENIES COLBERT’S CLAIM OF BLOCKING INTERVIEW

It truly was remarkable to watch. Even by Wednesday, when they knew quite well Colbert had not been censored, CNN had an entire panel that argued the Trump administration’s pressure on CBS had backfired because of the fundraising and the 5 million YouTube views the video got.

But there was no pressure on Colbert from the Trump administration. As FCC Chairman Brendan Carr told Fox News Channel’s Laura Ingraham, “CBS was very clear that Colbert could run the interview that he wanted with that political candidate. They just said, you may have to comply with equal time… But instead of doing that, they claimed that they were victims.”

All that the FCC has said, without taking any action, is that it may enforce equal time rules for talk shows, something it has not done in the past, but given how skewed late night comedy and daytime talk have become, it is worth considering.

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“The View,” ABC’s mid-morning girl gaggle, had 128 liberal guests in 2025 and only two conservatives, one of which was actress Cheryl Hines, who is actually not conservative, just married to Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. 

Put bluntly, the reason that the equal time rules have not been enforced on talk shows is that they never had to be, because Johnny Carson, Tom Snyder and Phil Donahue didn’t turn their shows into nonstop political ads. Obviously, that has changed.

Colbert has been very clear that he purposefully uses his “comedy show” to push a political agenda, in this case, to the benefit of James Talarico and the detriment of Jasmine Crockett, who is now in the awkward position of defending the Trump administration.

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However, wherever one comes down on the equal time rules, it is crystal clear that Colbert is just flat-out, stone-cold lying when he says they were used to ban his interview from the air. Sadly, it is a lie many Democratic voters may take to their deathbeds.

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There were two big victims to Colbert’s perfidy, the first being Crockett, who may be discovering that she is a little too Brown and uppity for the rich White men who still control liberal media and politics.

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The second victim was the average citizen, who was separated from their money based on Colbert’s lies to fill the coffers of Talarico.

Thankfully, we only have about two more months to deal with Colbert’s nonsense and lies, at least on CBS late night. After that he can go to YouTube and interview anyone he pleases, just as he could have on Monday night.

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Democrats turn their backs on DHS and ICE when America needs them most

As the debate over the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) funding bill continues, one truth is becoming increasingly clear: Democrats are refusing to stand with the very law enforcement officers tasked with protecting our communities. Instead of supporting DHS and ICE in carrying out their mission, they are pursuing a dangerous crusade to weaken enforcement and undermine the rule of law.

My Democratic colleagues are attempting to strip DHS enforcement authority, diminish operational capacity, and restrict cooperation with state and local law enforcement. At a time when border security and interior enforcement are critical to public safety, they are choosing politics over protection.

I refuse to accept that. I stand firmly with the courageous men and women of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). These professionals carry out a difficult and often dangerous mission to safeguard our communities. They deserve our respect, our gratitude and the resources necessary to do their jobs effectively.

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The DHS bill before us reflects those priorities. This is the same bill that both Republicans and Democrats negotiated in a bipartisan manner, and the same bill Republicans were ready to pass to ensure full-year funding for the department.

Instead of supporting DHS and ICE in carrying out their mission, Democrats are pursuing a dangerous crusade to weaken enforcement and undermine the rule of law.

The bill, as it stands now, provides the tools required for interior enforcement, enabling ICE agents to identify, detain and remove individuals who break our laws and pose risks to the public. But it’s important to understand that this legislation goes far beyond immigration enforcement. It includes vital funding for the various missions carried out every day by agencies like FEMA, TSA, Secret Service, the U.S. Coast Guard and so many more. The 260,000 individuals who work to counter cyberattacks, secure our borders and coastlines, and protect critical infrastructure—just to name a few.

Recent events here in West Virginia illustrate how effective enforcement can work when there is cooperation. In a statewide operation earlier this month, ICE agents partnered with state and local law enforcement to arrest more than 650 individuals illegally present in the United States, including those with serious criminal histories. This operation took place successfully with minimal disruption to the public. Furthermore, the operation stands in stark contrast to the unrest and disorder we have seen in other parts of the country—like Minnesota—where local cooperation has broken down and enforcement actions have been met with chaos and confrontation.

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Shutting down or hamstringing an agency of DHS’ size and importance does not make oversight easier. It does not strengthen accountability. And it certainly does not solve a single challenge we face at our borders or inside our communities. Instead, it jeopardizes our national security and weakens the very institutions responsible for upholding the rule of law.

Democrats have pushed repeatedly for provisions that would erode enforcement authority, restrict ICE operations, and block cooperation between federal, state, and local law enforcement. In doing so, they are not standing with DHS — they are actively working to undermine it.

That is why the demands coming from Democrats in this debate are so troubling. Rather than ensuring our national security personnel have what they need, Democrats have pushed repeatedly for provisions that would erode enforcement authority, restrict ICE operations, and block cooperation between federal, state, and local law enforcement. In doing so, they are not standing with DHS — they are actively working to undermine it.

West Virginians deserve better than political gamesmanship when it comes to homeland security. They deserve leaders who will stand unequivocally with the men and women of DHS and ICE, not wage an ideological campaign against them.

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I will continue fighting to ensure that ICE has the resources, the authority and the support it needs to do its job. Weakening enforcement is not compassion. It is neglect. And it is the communities we represent—from small towns in West Virginia to cities across the country—who will bear the consequences.

Protecting West Virginians will always be my priority. That starts with standing firmly behind DHS and ICE — and rejecting efforts to weaken them.

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MARK HALPERIN: Trump strategy super session plots midterm survival as history stalks GOP

Tuesday night at the Capitol Hill Club, just steps from the House office buildings and a world away from cable news hysteria, the senior Trump political command gathered its core team to talk midterms. It was not a rally. It was not a pep talk. It was a working session — about two hours, a chicken-and-steak buffet, roughly 75 to 100 people in the room, many of them Cabinet secretaries and their top aides, almost all political veterans.

The mood, according to one attendee, was not panicked. Not shaken. But not sanguine, either. Just focused. The kind of focus that comes from knowing that, at the moment, the patterns of history are not on your side.

Midterms are almost always brutal for a president’s party. Since World War II, the president’s party has lost House seats in all but a handful of elections. The average loss is measured not in single digits but in dozens. The modern political era is replete with examples: 1994 for Bill Clinton, 2010 for Barack Obama, 2018 for Donald Trump himself. The gravitational pull of backlash is real.

Which is why Tuesday night’s meeting mattered.

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Susie Wiles, the president’s chief political architect and one of the most disciplined operators in either party, hosted and spoke briefly. Then pollster and strategist Tony Fabrizio took over, presenting roughly 25 slides of data — demographics, issue salience, message testing, and a summary of what breaks through and what falls flat.

The headline: The economy will be THE issue at the polls this November.

Not immigration. Not foreign policy. Not Epstein or the border. Not investigations or indictments or Jan. 6 retrospectives. The economy.

Fabrizio’s data showed that certain messages resonated with key voters: banning stock trading for members of Congress; promoting greater transparency in health insurance pricing and claims reimbursement; lowering prescription drug costs; and protecting the Trump tax cuts. Housing affordability, especially for younger voters, looms large — a kitchen-table issue with generational bite, though one the administration has yet to solve, either politically or through policy.

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Notably, taking credit for closing the border does not resonate nearly as much as Republicans might assume. It’s not that voters oppose border enforcement; many simply see it as baseline governance rather than a life-changing economic intervention.

The persuadable universe is also narrower than partisans often imagine: men, moderates, true independents and Hispanic voters. These are the movable pieces on the board.

The battlefield, at least for now, is defined. There are 36 targeted House races and seven key Senate races that will determine the balance of power.

When addressing the group, Fabrizio was not pessimistic, but nor was he sentimental. He urged the team to prioritize specialized podcasts and social media over national news interviews. Paid media, he argued, should be highly targeted — digital, demographic and data-driven — rather than sweeping broadcast or even cable buys. Facebook remains king for voter reach, followed by Instagram and TikTok. The information ecosystem is fragmented and specific; campaigns that pretend it is still 2004, with its homey, conventional mainstream vibe, are wasting money.

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The battlefield, at least for now, is defined. There are 36 targeted House races and seven key Senate races that will determine the balance of power. The Senate math, as presented, is favorable to Republicans unless something dramatic shifts. One striking assertion: the only way Republicans lose their Senate majority is if Democrats take 50 House seats — a wave scenario of historic proportions, made difficult because redistricting has placed the vast majority of House seats safely in the hands of one party or the other, barring a massive tsunami.

After Fabrizio came James Blair, the White House’s political czar, armed with an ice-cold bucket of galvanizing history. It is rare — exceedingly rare, he told the assembly — for a president’s party not to lose a significant number of seats in a midterm.

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Blair pointed to the recent special election in Tennessee’s 7th Congressional District as a tale both cautionary and instructive. The race appeared headed for a loss until a late, aggressive push on messaging and grassroots organizing saved the seat for Republicans and generated lessons about what works — and what does not. 

You cannot argue voters into believing wages are up, he said. They have to feel it. Economic statistics do not automatically translate into economic security, nor do they take precedence over personal bank accounts and family budgets. And some good, old-fashioned opposition research painting Democratic candidates as out of step with the electorate can do wonders.

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Perhaps the most candid moment of the evening came when Team Trump acknowledged a central reality of this presidency: Donald Trump will do what he wants to do. He will say what he wants to say. He will not be governed by slide decks, message matrices or pleas from Republican candidates and strategists. The rest of the political apparatus, therefore, must be relentlessly data-driven and on message — two separate but related campaigns running in parallel: one instinctual and improvisational, the other disciplined and empirical.

The Trump high command expects Democrats to run largely on a “Stop Trump” message. History suggests that is not a foolish approach. Opposition parties in midterms often succeed by nationalizing the election as a referendum on the president. But referendums cut both ways. If voters decide the question is not “How do you feel about Donald Trump?” but “How do you feel about your cost of living?” the terrain shifts.

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Ironically, for all the caricatures of chaos, arrogance and impulse that surround Trump world, the Capitol Hill Club meeting was a sober, methodical session. Cabinet secretaries such as Scott Bessent, Howard Lutnick, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and Sean Duffy attended, along with senior aides — not to posture or network, but to listen.

No one in the room thought the midterms would be easy. No one suggested the president’s party was immune to natural political rhythms and swings. But neither did they prepare for inevitable defeat.

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The White House officials acted as an alert and cohesive team — one that understands the rules of the game and believes it can bend them.

In Washington, that counts as confidence.

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MORNING GLORY: What will President Donald Trump decide to do with Iran?

A major battle with Iran appears imminent.

Ought it to be called a war, a battle or a strike?

That depends on what the United States and Israel decide to do and what President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu call it.

It also depends on whether Ayatollah Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, orders the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and Iran’s proxy forces in Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis, as well as terror cells around the world, to mount counterattacks that kill Americans, Israelis or people in our Gulf allies.

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Whatever the president and the prime minister order, the ayatollah can trigger massive escalation with any counterattack that results in American or Israeli casualties.

In June 2025, Israelis called their attacks on Iran and Iran’s missile fusillades against the Jewish state “the 12-day war.” Americans called their B-2s’ obliteration of Iran’s nuclear weapons program an “operation”: “Operation Midnight Hammer.”

Operations and strikes occur in both battles and wars. What the United States has assembled in and around Iran is a concentration of military forces so immense that everything is on the list of possibilities awaiting President Trump’s order: a discrete one-day operation, numerous strikes over days or weeks, or an intense days, weeks or months-long “battle” to destroy Iran’s ballistic missiles and missile factories as well as facilities crucial to the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps and perhaps political leadership, or a war against the Islamic Republic along the lines of the wars conducted against Serbia in 1999 and against Libya

The NATO air campaign against Yugoslavia/Serbia (Operation Allied Force) lasted for 78 days, starting on March 24, 1999, and ending on June 10, 1999. The campaign was launched to stop actions against the ethnic Albanian population in Kosovo and concluded with the withdrawal of Yugoslav/Serbian forces from the region. Over 1,000 Serbian military personnel were killed and at least 500 civilians.

NATO’s air campaign against Libya and its dictator, Muammar Qaddafi, lasted for approximately seven months, from March 23 to Oct. 31, 2011, and included 7,000 bombing sorties from the air. A study of that air campaign concluded about 8,000 combatants on both sides died and Human Rights Watch concluded 72 civilians died in the bombings. Qaddafi himself was captured and killed on Oct. 20, 2011.

A second Libyan civil war began on May 16, 2014, when Khalifa Haftar launched Operation Dignity, later escalating with the formation of rival governments in Tripoli and Tobruk. The conflict concluded with a ceasefire signed on Oct. 23, 2020. That ceasefire is precarious and fighting between factions erupts periodically.

TRUMP VOWS TO ‘KNOCK THE HELL OUT OF’ IRAN IF NUCLEAR PROGRAM IS REBUILT AGAIN AFTER HIGH-STAKES MEETING

President Trump has laid down four red lines for Iran and Iran has violated all four: The regime is reported to have resumed efforts to enrich uranium and reach toward a nuclear weapon, to continue to build more and larger ballistic missiles, to fund its proxy forces across the Middle East and, of course, to continue to murder its citizens.

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Ayatollah Khamenei and his senior military commanders continuously taunt and belittle President Trump and the American military as well as Prime Minister Netanyahu and Israel. The classic “wounded beast” lashing out is playing out before our eyes, and all the honeyed talk from Iran’s diplomats crumbles under the weight of the regime’s leadership’s poisoned rhetoric.

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There is, of course, genuine risk to our troops and to our allies in Israel and the Gulf States. That is why when President Trump orders the American military to attack, it should be with overwhelming and sustained force. The president has given Iran opportunity after opportunity to stand down and stop its crazed behavior. Iran is incapable of doing that. Iran’s generals have not organized action against the theocrats pushing them and their troops to ruin.

Fanatics don’t reason, and the United States cannot afford to allow the world to see it deterred by the words and shaking fists of a second- or third-rate military equipped with bluster and ballistic missiles.

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SEN TOMMY TUBERVILLE: Bring back the ‘Miracle on Ice’ spirit to Team USA

Every four years, Americans of all backgrounds — Republican or Democrat, rich or poor, urban or rural — come together to cheer on the U.S. Winter Olympic team. The 2026 Olympics in Milan are in full swing and Americans are once again coming together to cheer on our nation’s athletes who have worked their entire lives to reach the pinnacle of their sport.

For generations, Americans tuned in to the Olympic Games with pride, eager to cheer on fellow American patriots who competed not only for medals, but for the nation itself. Back then, every American loved and was proud of our country — regardless of political disagreements — because they understood what it means to be an American. 

Unfortunately, that seems to have changed today. I have been extremely disappointed to see some American athletes expressing “mixed emotions” about representing the United States in this year’s Olympic Games because of their views on politics and — you guessed it — President Donald Trump.

SANDERS CALLS OLYMPIC SKIER ‘PROUD AMERICAN’ DESPITE HAVING ‘MIXED EMOTIONS’ ABOUT REPRESENTING US

One freestyle skier recently suggested he was representing only his friends and family rather than the country as a whole. Another athlete referred to herself as “woke” and said it has been a “hard time” for the LGBTQ community under this administration. A few members of the USA women’s ice hockey team felt the need to weigh in on ICE officers enforcing the law and deporting criminals.

Throughout U.S. history, representing the United States meant something bigger than personal branding or selling the world on your personal political agenda. Since our nation’s founding 250 years ago, America has been a shining beacon of democracy, freedom and individual opportunity. The United States is a global leader when it comes to civil rights. If you work hard, you can achieve the American dream, no matter what you look like or where you come from. That spirit of gratitude and national pride once defined our Olympic athletes as well. 

Throughout the 20th century, American Olympians understood the enormous responsibility it is to represent the United States. In 1936, Jesse Owens stunned the world by winning four gold medals in track and field in Nazi Germany. He didn’t even have to speak — his actions on the field were a clear rebuke of the Nazi propaganda and disgusting racism happening in Germany at the time. That same year, the working-class boys on the University of Washington rowing team, immortalized as “The Boys in the Boat,” defied the odds by capturing gold and once again demonstrated how putting your head down and working can sometimes send a stronger message than shouting into a microphone. 

Decades later, at the height of the Cold War, the 1980 U.S. men’s Olympic hockey team, comprised mostly of college students, defeated the seemingly unbeatable Soviet Union in what became known as the “Miracle on Ice.” These young athletes were not motivated by wealth or personal fame. They played for love of country, love of sport and the opportunity to represent the United States during one of the tensest periods in our nation’s history. I’m sure all of these young men didn’t agree on everything — but their shared patriotism brought them together on the ice. Their victory brought hope to millions of Americans and embodied what this country is all about: grit, determination and hard work.

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Those moments are remembered not because of the medals won, but because of the intense patriotism displayed by the athletes who understood the responsibility of representing their country. They understood that stepping onto the Olympic stage meant carrying the hopes and pride of millions back home. They embraced the responsibilities and challenges that came with it and proudly wore the American uniform. 

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Today’s Olympians benefit from resources previous generations could only dream about. When I was growing up, the Olympics were for amateurs. But many of today’s Olympians are professionals who are blessed with elite training facilities, advanced sports science, college sports development pipelines, lucrative sponsorships and other financial incentives. The United States invests heavily in preparing our athletes for success, providing opportunities unmatched by most of the world. Despite all of these privileges, some of the U.S. Olympians on this year’s team seem to have forgotten what an enormous privilege it is to be an American.

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Before I became a U.S. senator, I spent nearly 40 years coaching. I used to tell my players this all the time: if you were lucky enough to be born in the United States, you have already won the lottery. But the only thing this country owes you is an opportunity. The rest is up to you. This is especially true for our Olympic athletes. Representing your country on the world stage is one of the highest honors in athletics. Getting to wear the red, white and blue is a privilege, not a right.

If you aren’t proud to represent this country, you shouldn’t be on our Olympic team. If standing on the podium and hearing our national anthem blasted over the speakers doesn’t bring you to tears, you don’t deserve to wear our great flag. And if you hate this country so much, no one is stopping you from moving somewhere else. Americans will always celebrate athletic excellence. But what has historically made U.S. Olympians truly inspiring is their willingness to put personal differences aside and represent the values that make this country great. I hope to see a change in attitude from our U.S. Olympians, a renewed sense of pride in this country and a return to the unity that once defined the American Olympic spirit. 

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STEVE FORBES: Don’t crush homeowners to pay for NYC’s out-of-control budget

New York City finds itself, once again, at a political and fiscal crossroads. Mayor Zohran Mamdani has unveiled a $127 billion preliminary budget for fiscal year 2027, warning of a $5.4 billion shortfall and asserting that, absent new revenue tools from Albany, the city may have to raise property taxes — possibly by as much as 9.5 percent — on millions of residential and commercial properties. 

This is a grave mistake — not merely for its economic consequences, but for what it signals about governing philosophy in the nation’s largest city.

Property taxes are the most regressive form of taxation in local government. Unlike a tax on incomes or profits, property levies are indiscriminate: they hit long-time homeowners on fixed incomes, working-class families striving to build equity and small business owners who are the backbone of local communities. These levies are not tied to one’s ability to pay, but to a valuation often disconnected from cash flow. For a city already straining under affordability pressures and an elevated cost of living, this is a recipe for further exodus and economic stagnation. 

FREE BUSES, REAL COSTS. INSIDE MAMDANI’S SOCIALIST DREAM TO SHAKEUP TRANSIT FOR NEW YORKERS

To be sure, Mayor Mamdani frames this as a “last resort” or even a strategic lever to pressure Albany to raise taxes on the wealthy and on profitable corporations. But calling it a “last resort” does not mitigate its harm. Mayors and governors negotiate hard — that’s politics. But the collateral damage from a property tax hike would be felt in neighborhoods across all five boroughs: rents edged upward as landlords pass costs through to tenants, small business margins hollowed out and families forced to choose between property ownership and financial survival.

It’s worth recalling that New York City has not raised property taxes in any significant way since the Bloomberg era in the early 2000s, a moment of crisis that demanded extraordinary action. This current proposal comes not in response to an unprecedented calamity, but a political impasse. It is precisely the kind of fiscal brinkmanship that punishes ordinary citizens for elected officials’ inability to craft more responsible solutions.

Proponents of the hike will suggest that property taxes are the only lever left, since the city cannot unilaterally raise income or corporate taxes without Albany’s blessing. But that is an abdication of responsible budgeting, not a defense of it. A mayor who claims to inherit a “historic” budget gap that was sharply reduced — with assistance and careful revenue calibration — undermines the crisis narrative. Indeed, Governor Kathy Hochul has already committed substantial state aid to the city, cutting the gap and undermining the argument that dramatic, city-wide tax increases are imperative. 

Rather than squeezing more out of homeowners and Main Street merchants, City Hall should be scrutinizing wasteful and non-essential spending, streamlining operations, and finding efficiencies within the $127 billion bureaucratic behemoth. The budget reflects priorities — and if spending choices fail to reflect prudence in lean times, that is a political decision, not a fiscal necessity.

‘ZOHRANOMICS’: NYC MAYOR ZOHRAN MAMDANI’S SOCIALIST MATH DOESN’T ADD UP

Another troubling dimension is the broader economic signal this tax hike would send. New York City already competes fiercely with other global cities for business investment, talent and jobs. Other states with far more competitive tax regimes — including zero income tax states — have lured residents and corporations away from New York for decades. A new, steep property tax increase only reinforces the narrative that economic prosperity in New York comes with a punitive price tag, accelerating demographic and business departures in a state that can least afford it. 

More fundamentally, this episode highlights a deep misunderstanding of what good governance requires: balance, creativity and fairness. True leadership doesn’t simply balance books on paper; it balances the economic health of a city with the vitality of its workforce and the sustainability of its middle class. That means resisting the impulse to raise taxes as the first line of defense and instead engaging in genuine spending reform and economic growth strategies that don’t crush taxpayers.

Yes, cities must sometimes make tough choices. But pitting property owners and small businesses against the perceived wealthy is a false dichotomy. A thriving New York — one with robust job creation, resilient communities and inclusive opportunity — is not built by relentless tax increases. It is built by unleashing economic potential, encouraging investment and ensuring that governance is efficient and fiscally disciplined.

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New Yorkers know this instinctively. They are hardworking people who have endured years of rising costs and economic pressures. They simply want the city to spend wisely, and leadership must respect that.

Mayor Mamdani should go back to the drawing board and work with the City Council, stakeholders and the state to find pro-growth solutions. Raising property taxes — not to mention wealth taxes — should not be on the table — least of all as a bargaining chip in political negotiations. Let us pursue growth, reform and opportunity — not tax hikes that risk sending New York backward.

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Creators of JFK Jr TV series respond to Kennedy heir denouncing show as ‘grotesque’

The producer of a new series detailing the love story between John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy is speaking out against backlash from a member of the Kennedy family.

FX’s nine-part series “Love Story: John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette” premiered on Hulu Thursday. It follows the life of JFK Jr. and Bessette from when they first fell in love to their death in 1999.

Jack Schlossberg, grandson of former President John F. Kennedy, publicly denounced the show, calling it a “grotesque” way to make money off his uncle’s legacy.

“For the record, I think admiration for my Uncle John is great,” he said in a video on his Instagram story Thursday, according to Entertainment Weekly. “What I don’t think is great is profiting off of it in a grotesque way.”

JOE BIDEN, JOHN KERRY AMONG HIGH-PROFILE ATTENDEES FOR JFK’S GRANDDAUGHTER’S PRIVATE FUNERAL

Schlossberg has also revealed that the Kennedy family was not consulted about the show’s production.

“The right to privacy, which includes the ability to control your own name, image and likeness, doesn’t survive death in the state of New York,” he said. “For that matter, he’s considered a public figure, so there’s not much we can do.”

Fox News Digital has reached out to Schlossberg for comment but did not immediately hear back.

JFK’S GRANDSON JACK SCHLOSSBERG DOUBLES DOWN ON ATTACKS AGAINST RFK JR, WARNS OF ‘DANGEROUS’ AGENDA

Executive producer Brad Simpson responded to Schlossberg’s criticisms, insisting the show is a “sincere” reflection of his uncle’s life.

“What I hope is that when people watch the show, they will see our sincerity. They will see that we’ve approached this with love, and that we were trying to celebrate the life of Carolyn Bessette and JFK Jr,” Simpson told The Hollywood Reporter (THR).

“I can understand why somebody could have a reaction before they see it, but I would say, ‘watch the show,’ because I think they’re going to be surprised at how sincere it is,” Simpson said.

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Actress Sarah Pidgeon, who plays Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy, also responded to Schlossberg’s comments.

“I don’t know what it’s like to have a TV show or a book or movie written about my family, and I understand the sensitivities,” Pidgeon told THR. “He has every right to share how he feels about it.”

DAVID MARCUS: If Democrats do him dirty, Stephen A Smith could be the next RFK Jr

As sports media star Stephen A. Smith teased talk of a presidential run in 2028 this weekend, there is one thing that he and those advising him must surely know: The Democratic Party does not nominate outsiders.

This is a lesson that Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., learned in both 2016 and 2020 as his populist socialist movement was blocked at every turn by party leaders. To his credit as a politician, Sanders and the socialists, after a decade of work, have now all but taken over the party.

The more relevant example to Stephen A’s would-be grab for the golden ring in 2028 is not Sanders, it is Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., whose mistreatment by the DNC led him to endorse President Donald Trump in 2024.

Smith, tellingly, told CBS News that he wants “to be on the debate stage,” when Democrats compete for the nomination starting next year. This is exactly the ask that RFK Jr. made two years ago when he was, not so cordially, told to kick rocks.

STEPHEN A SMITH DEFENDS POLITICAL COMMENTARY APPROACH, SAYS IT ‘ENCOURAGES’ DIALOGUE FROM BOTH SIDES

What Kennedy intuitively understood and what Smith seems to as well, is that a heterodox, actual centrist on a presidential primary stage is a nightmare for what we used to call the Party of Jefferson and Jackson.

Central to the Democrats’ national narrative is the increasingly strained idea that figures like Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger or even former Vice President Kamala Harris, are somehow centrists compared to Sanders, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., and the Squad.

Owing to a compliant news media, this story has been working, even if it’s a lie. Immediately after being elected, Spanberger raised taxes and threw her support behind a slew of progressive bills. But hey, she looks and sounds kind of normal.

STEPHEN A SMITH SAYS TRUMP RIGHT TO SECURE BORDER, SAYS ‘EMERGENCY EFFORTS WERE NECESSARY’ AFTER BIDEN’S TERM

Part of the reason this ruse works is that it goes unchallenged within the party itself. But that all goes out the door the moment that the combative Smith steps into the fray.

Without Smith there, a so-called centrist might get away with a weak non-answer on men in womens’ sports, for example. But can you imagine Stephen A, with his arsenal of insults and pained facial gestures just letting that slide?

When it comes to President Donald Trump, the Democrats’ whole identity is predicated upon his allegedly being a criminal authoritarian. But Smith doesn’t see it that way. He calls balls and strikes, and that kind of common sense makes hair-on-fire progressives look downright silly.

THE DEMOCRAT JAMES CARVILLE THINKS IS WORTH WATCHING IN 2028 WILL SURPRISE YOU

Democrats have a real problem here, because if they use their usual backroom self-dealing tricks to deny Smith a place on the debate stage, he can do exactly what RFK Jr. did, and say, “I gave it a shot, but these people are crazy. At least I can talk with Republicans.”

When Kennedy pulled that trigger, he brought with him to Trump’s side an army of Make America Healthy Again moms across the nation who may well be the biggest reason Trump lives in the White House today.

Smith also has influence over a key demographic: the original manosphere, that of sports talk radio and media. Forget about the alt-right influencers on social media. Every 27-year-old dude with a FanDuel account knows and respects Stephen A.

‘ROCK STAR’ NEWSOM STEALS THE SHOW AT DNC SUMMIT AS DEMOCRATS HUNT FOR 2028 CONTENDER TO TAKE ON TRUMP

In fact, there was a moment in the 2024 race when political sharps knew it was over. It was when the International Brotherhood of Teamsters’ internal polling showed that President Joe Biden’s double-digit lead over Trump among members, flipped into a 20-plus-point Trump lead with Harris atop the ticket.

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That kind of shift, that fast, almost never happens. So how do the Democrats get Teamsters back? Well, Teamsters drive trucks a lot, and guys who drive trucks a lot also tend to listen to sports radio a lot. Smith, literally, speaks their language.

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Interestingly, back in 2015, the first public figure who I heard say that Trump would win, not that he had a chance, but would win, was Mike Francesa, the pope of New York City sports radio. Later, I realized these hosts talk to working-class guys all day for their job, so, of course, it gives them insights into voters.

Democrats are in a tricky spot here. They really can’t allow Smith to shine and expose just how far left they have lurched. But if they do him dirty, he is not without leverage. In fact, he very well could give one whopper of a speech for the nominee at the 2028 Republican National Convention.

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Green rhetoric, polluted water: The Left’s DC sewage failure is a disgrace

As the Washington, D.C. region thaws this spring, the lead-up to America’s 250th birthday will bring renewed attention to the capital’s monuments, parks and waterways — symbols of national continuity and civic pride. Along the Potomac River, however, the thaw will also bring something else: the unmistakable stench of raw sewage.

Following a catastrophic failure in a major sewer line, hundreds of millions of gallons of untreated wastewater spilled into the river, making it one of the largest sewage releases in U.S. history. The environmental damage is immediate, visible and inescapable.

President Donald Trump announced that he would call in FEMA to assist with cleanup and response efforts — a move that should be applauded. Whatever one’s politics, federal intervention signals recognition that this is not a minor bureaucratic mishap but a major environmental crisis. In contrast, the governors of Maryland and Virginia and the mayor of Washington, D.C. — all Democrats, some with ambitions for higher office, who routinely champion aggressive climate policies — have been silent. For leaders who speak often about environmental justice and public health, their silence has been striking.

OBAMA-ERA GREENHOUSE GAS RULES GONE AS EPA’S ZELDIN SIGNS ‘SINGLE LARGEST DEREGULATORY ACTION’ IN HISTORY

One might expect such a disaster, unfolding just miles from the seat of federal power, to dominate the national environmental conversation. Instead, it has struggled to break through the noise. There have been no sweeping reckonings about aging infrastructure, no sustained outrage cycles and no urgent moral declarations from the climate establishment.

The muted response is especially striking when set against the intensity of reaction to a very different development in environmental policy the same week as sewage spilled into the river surrounding the nation’s seats of power.

This week, the Trump administration announced its decision to rescind the EPA’s 2009 “endangerment finding,” the legal determination that greenhouse gases threaten public health and welfare. The response from progressive leaders and advocacy groups was swift and dramatic. Former President Barack Obama warned that undoing the finding would make Americans “less safe, less healthy, and less able to fight climate change.” Major media outlets framed the move as a fundamental assault on science and environmental protection.

The juxtaposition is revealing. A historic sewage spill into a major American river — an event with clear, measurable consequences for ecosystems and public health — has barely registered in the national discourse. Meanwhile, a regulatory shift whose effects will unfold gradually and remain contested has been treated as an existential emergency.

Over time, federal emissions rules have produced an expanding system of “off-cycle credits,” which reward automakers for technologies that reduce emissions under specific testing conditions rather than across a vehicle’s full life cycle. One of the most visible results is the now-ubiquitous stop-start feature that shuts off a car’s engine at red lights and restarts it moments later.

The feature is widely disliked by drivers, but its popularity with regulators has little to do with consumer experience. Mechanics and automotive analysts have increasingly raised concerns that repeated forced shutdowns and restarts place additional strain on engines, batteries and starter systems. That strain leads to higher maintenance costs, more frequent mechanical failures and shorter vehicle lifespans — outcomes that run counter to the environmental goal of reducing resource consumption over time.

Like paper straws that disintegrate before a drink is finished, these measures offer the appearance of environmental action while shifting costs and inconvenience onto consumers. Once embedded in regulatory frameworks, however, they are rarely subjected to the same scrutiny that accompanied their adoption.

EPA ADMINISTRATOR ZELDIN: WE FINALLY DEMOLISHED THE DEMOCRAT CLIMATE INSANITY

This pattern reflects a broader tendency in progressive environmentalism: “Following the science” often means invoking scientific authority to justify new mandates, but far less often using evidence to reassess whether those mandates are working as intended. Regulatory success becomes a matter of compliance and symbolism rather than measurable environmental improvement. Environmental concern turns performative — focused on visible lifestyle controls — while less ideologically convenient problems receive less attention.

The silence surrounding the Potomac sewage spill underscores the point. Infrastructure failures do not lend themselves to moral theater. They implicate governance, maintenance, budgeting and long-term competence — areas where responsibility is harder to shift and political rewards are limited.

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Public trust depends on consistency and proportionality. When policymakers devote enormous energy to marginal regulatory changes while downplaying acute environmental crises under their own jurisdiction, skepticism is not cynicism — it is common sense.

Environmental science should guide priorities, not serve as a selective rhetorical tool. If leaders want Americans to accept costly and disruptive regulations in the name of environmental protection, which they routinely do, they owe the public proof that all environmental harms are treated with equal seriousness.

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Hundreds of millions of gallons of sewage in a river should command at least as much urgency as tailpipe rules.

As the nation approaches a milestone anniversary meant to celebrate progress and stewardship, the contrast is difficult to ignore. Real environmentalism means fixing broken pipes and maintaining infrastructure, not just rewriting regulations. It means accountability for local failures as well as federal debates. And it means recognizing that sometimes the most immediate environmental threats are not abstract carbon models, but raw sewage flowing through the capital of the United States.

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GIANNO CALDWELL: My brother would have been 22 today. We must defeat the violent crime epidemic

On Wednesday, Feb. 18, my younger brother Christian would have turned 22 years old.

It’s hard to believe that in just a few months, it will be four years since he was tragically murdered on the South Side of Chicago. Christian had just graduated from high school. He had his whole life ahead of him. He dreamed of attending UCLA. We even took a college tour together.

Instead, on June 24, 2022, my brother was murdered while standing with friends on a city street.

A black SUV pulled up. Several unidentified men opened fire. Fifty shell casings were later recovered at the scene. Three people were rushed to the hospital. Only two survived.

GIANNO CALDWELL SEEKS JUSTICE FOR BROTHER KILLED IN BLUE CITY ‘ENAMORED WITH CRIMINALS’ RIGHTS’: ALDERMAN

Police described it as “wrong place, wrong time.” In places like Chicago, the wrong place and wrong time could be a person lying in their bed and a bullet flying through their window.

That phrase has haunted me ever since. Because four years later, not much has changed.

Nationally, crime has shown signs of decline over the past year, thanks to President Donald Trump. But in places like Chicago and other liberal cities, violent crime is systemic and stubbornly persistent. Last month alone, 123 people were shot in Chicago.

CHICAGO KIDS ARE DYING WHILE MAYOR JOHNSON FIGHTS TRUMP, ICE AND REALITY

Violent crime is not a partisan talking point. It is an epidemic sweeping our nation.

And for my family, justice has still not come.

I am blessed to have a career that gives me a platform and access — to policymakers, to media, to the national conversation. With that blessing comes responsibility. I refuse to let Christian’s face be forgotten or his story dismissed as an anomaly.

CHICAGO BRACES FOR DEADLY JULY 4 WEEKEND AS FOX NEWS ANALYST TAKES ACTION IN BROTHER’S UNSOLVED MURDER

I’m deeply grateful to my Fox News family for allowing me to share his story and to remind America that what happened to my brother is happening every single day to families just like mine.

This is why I wrote my book, “The Day My Brother Was Murdered: My Journey Through America’s Violent Crime Crisis.” While it tells my family’s story, it also honors the lives of eight other innocent individuals who were murdered on the very same day as Christian — across the country, in unrelated, random acts of violence.

They were different races. Different backgrounds. Different ages and life circumstances.

AN ILLEGAL IMMIGRANT KILLED MY DAUGHTER — LEFTISTS MARCH FOR RENEE, NOT FOR KATIE

Their only commonality was that they were innocent. And they were murdered.

This is not a race issue. This is not a targeted issue. This is an American issue affecting every single person in this country.

That reality is also why I launched the Caldwell Institute for Public Safety in June 2024, two years after my family lost Christian, alongside its sister organization, the Caldwell Foundation for Public Safety. Our mission is simple but urgent: to confront violent crime honestly and to tackle it at its root while ensuring victims and their families are the priority.

NATIONAL DAY OF REMEMBRANCE FOR MURDER VICTIMS REMINDS US OF ‘SOFT-ON-CRIME’ POLICIES’ DEADLY CONSEQUENCES

A major driver of this crisis is policy.

Across our cities, well-intentioned but deeply flawed policies have shifted the balance of justice — placing more rights in the hands of criminals than of victims. Soft-on-crime policies, weak enforcement and a lack of accountability have emboldened repeat offenders while leaving law-abiding citizens vulnerable.

America must confront its violent crime crisis now, before more birthdays go uncelebrated, more futures are stolen and more families are left asking why.

On Tuesday, Feb. 24, the Caldwell Institute for Public Safety and the Caldwell Foundation for Public Safety will host their second annual gala at Mar-a-Lago, “Securing America’s Future: The Roadmap to 2026 and Beyond.” The event will bring together national leaders, distinguished guests and concerned citizens with one shared purpose: confronting America’s violent crime crisis head-on and honoring the victims whose lives were taken far too soon.

CHICAGO SHOOTING DEATH OF FOX NEWS ANALYST GIANNO CALDWELL’S BROTHER REACHES YEAR WITHOUT ARREST

This evening is for people like my brother Christian and all victims of senseless violent crime whose names rarely make headlines but whose loss forever changes families and communities. We will honor them and work to ensure their names are never forgotten.

We have a massive year ahead of us — not just for this election cycle, but for generations to come. Public safety is shaped locally. Prosecutors, judges, city councils and lawmakers determine whether violent offenders are held accountable or released back onto our streets time and time again.

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Americans must get involved. They must understand the real-world consequences of soft-on-crime policies that give career criminals chance after chance — until one day, someone else’s loved one pays the ultimate price.

Policies matter. Enforcement matters. Accountability matters. When rules are weakened and consequences disappear, violent offenders are released again and again, and tragedy follows. We’ve seen this play out on camera across the country.

Honoring victims means more than remembrance. It means action. It means demanding leadership that puts public safety first.

Christian would have been 22 years old today. I cannot bring my brother back, but I can fight to ensure fewer families endure the pain mine lives with every day.

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America must confront its violent crime crisis now, before more birthdays go uncelebrated, more futures are stolen and more families are left asking why.

We owe it to Christian — and to every victim of violent crime — to do better.

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Former body-positivity influencer says movement became ‘radical,’ admits feeling ‘brainwashed’

Former body-positivity influencer Gabriella Lascano spoke to The New York Times in an article published Monday about her journey from “championing” the body-positivity movement to renouncing it for pushing an unhealthy lifestyle.

Lascano described beginning her online career in 2010, adding that while she never planned on becoming an influencer, she began intentionally pushing the message to “love yourself at any size” after receiving support from other plus-sized women.

Over time, however, she found that she was gaining more and more weight and became unable to do activities she enjoyed, such as traveling or riding roller coasters.

FOLLOWERS FEEL ‘ABANDONED’ AS PLUS-SIZE INFLUENCERS EMBRACE WEIGHT LOSS, BLAME TRUMP FOR CULTURAL SHIFT    

“Some days, I would look at photos and not even recognize myself,” Lascano said. “I’m only five feet tall and at my heaviest, I was close to 400 pounds. I started to wonder if loving myself at any size had become an excuse to ignore how big I was getting. I felt like I saw myself being brainwashed, essentially. Meanwhile, the language around body positivity began sounding more extreme online.”

Lascano said that she eventually saw the body-positivity community become hostile toward weight loss and exercise, even for health purposes, which led to her turning on the movement.

KATE WINSLET SLAMS HOLLYWOOD’S ‘TERRIFYING’ OBSESSION WITH BOTOX AND WEIGHT-LOSS DRUGS

“But as the body-positivity community became more radical, I was scared to say the wrong thing, so I stayed silent. Then, my friend died. She was a body-positivity influencer, who founded the world’s first plus-size salon,” Lascano said.

In 2023, she posted a video denouncing body positivity, saying she felt “guilty” for being a part of the movement and adding that it’s “not fatphobic to care about your health.”

Lascano claimed she has since become a pariah to the body-positivity community, though she has also lost weight and felt more like herself.

FLASHBACK: SAN FRANCISCO ‘WEIGHT CZAR’ DECLARES THAT NO ONE HAS TO BE HEALTHY

She still supports a “body positive” message, particularly with the rise of the “SkinnyTok” online trend, but she emphasized that any movement would need to acknowledge the severe health risks that come from obesity.

“We can still be body positive, while acknowledging these risks. We can still love ourselves even if we want to lose weight. That’s what real body positivity should stand for. Loving yourself at any size and having the freedom to change it.”

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Fox News Digital has reached out to Lascano for a comment.

America’s churches under siege as violence increasingly invades sacred ground

In the America of our childhood, churches were untouchable ground – sanctuaries of refuge, worship, community and peace. They were the one place where the noise of the world fell silent and reverence took its rightful seat. They were the last places anyone imagined would require security plans and emergency drills. Today, those sacred walls are under threat, not in theory, but in cold and documented reality. The data delivers an uncomfortable truth: houses of worship are being targeted with increasing frequency, severity and lethal intent.

Over the past 25 years, nearly 380 violent incidents at religious institutions have produced almost 490 deaths and hundreds of injuries. These attacks have not been confined to troubled neighborhoods or high-crime areas. They have erupted during quiet Sunday services, in rural chapels and suburban parishes alike. Evil has shown up where grandmothers pray, where children sing and where families gather in faith.

These are not abstract statistics. They are real people, real congregations and real communities – forever scarred. A few recent tragedies stand as stark reminders of just how vulnerable houses of worship have become.

The deadliest attack on an American house of worship within the past decade occurred in November 2017, at First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs, Texas. A gunman opened fire during Sunday services, murdering 26 people and wounding 22 others.

FAITH, FREEDOM AND THE FIGHT AGAINST RISING ANTISEMITISM

One year later, in October 2018 at the Tree of Life congregation in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, worshippers were again targeted simply because of their faith. Eleven people were killed as they gathered for prayer and fellowship.

More recently, in August 2025 at Annunciation Catholic Church and School in Minneapolis, violence invaded a place dedicated to children and learning. A shooter attacked the church school community, killing two young students and wounding 21 others.

Only weeks later, in September 2025 in Grand Blanc Township, Michigan, worshippers at a Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints chapel were targeted in another shocking assault. An attacker crashed a vehicle into the church building during Sunday services, set it on fire and opened fire on congregants. The attack left four people dead and eight injured, transforming a peaceful morning of worship into chaos and grief.

PASTORS WARN OF ‘CHILLING EFFECT’ AFTER ANTI-ICE AGITATORS STORM MINNESOTA CHURCH SERVICE

These are only a few examples among hundreds. They illustrate a painful reality: no denomination, no region and no community is immune.

The pattern is impossible to ignore. Violent acts against houses of worship have occurred in more than 30 states, crossing denominational lines and geographic boundaries. No church is too quiet, too humble or too far off the cultural radar to be considered untouchable.

Violence in churches may occur less frequently than other crimes, but frequency is not the point. Consequence is. When violence invades a house of worship, the damage is catastrophic and deeply personal. These are not anonymous buildings. They are sacred spaces filled with families, children and elders who assume, reasonably, that they are safe.

GUNFIRE, ARSON AND VANDALISM: TRACKING POLITICAL VIOLENCE IN AMERICA

An attack on a church is not merely a crime. It is an assault on the very idea that holy ground still exists in America.

This trend did not emerge in a vacuum. It reflects a broader cultural decay – a society increasingly indifferent, and at times openly hostile, to faith and tradition. In too many corners of society, disrespect for the sacred eventually becomes permission for the profane. Words create climates and climates eventually produce actions.

The deadliest attack on an American house of worship within the past decade occurred in November 2017, at First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs, Texas. A gunman opened fire during Sunday services, murdering 26 people and wounding 22 others.

The conclusion is unavoidable. The comforting mantra that “it can’t happen here” has become indefensible. Churches need protection, not merely prayers and platitudes, but practical, responsible security measures that recognize the world as it is rather than as it used to be.

This is not a call for fear. This is a call for clarity. Acknowledging that evil exists is not paranoia; it is common sense. And evil, when it strikes, does not aim at hardened targets. It aims at the most vulnerable – families in pews, children in Sunday school and the faithful bowed in prayer.

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Churches must be proactive guardians of their flocks, not passive observers of risk. This is bigger than a psalm or a sermon. This is about the soul of America.

Just as schools train for modern threats, churches must implement layered security, establish trained safety teams, coordinate with law enforcement and rehearse emergency response. Security should be as intentional as the sermon and as disciplined as the choir. Preparation is stewardship.

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When the places where we pray, teach our children and sing our hymns are under siege, the question is no longer about church security, it is about the character of a nation that still claims to cherish freedom.

This is our moment to wake up, to think clearly and to act boldly. Not just to protect churches, but to protect the idea that Americans can openly worship without fear. That idea is not optional. It is foundational.

ALEX BERENSON: I warned about cannabis dangers 7 years ago and nobody wanted to listen

Suddenly warnings about cannabis are everywhere.

At the beginning of February, researchers reported severe mental illness has spiked in young people in Canada alongside access to high-potency cannabis.

The next day came the release of “A Killing In Cannabis,” a book about a 2019 murder in California — and the violence that plagues the marijuana business and that legalization has not resolved.

Then, on Feb. 9, the New York Times dropped its support for full cannabis legalization. Writing that the United States has “a Marijuana Problem,” the paper admitted cannabis addiction and psychosis have become a crisis. It called for a ban on THC extracts, a move that would recriminalize much of the legal industry. (THC is the chemical in the plant that gets users high, and vapes offering near-pure hits of THC are now popular among users — and a big driver of industry profits.)

NY TIMES WALKS BACK STANCE ON MARIJUANA LEGALIZATION, ADMITS LOOSENING OF POLICIES HAS MADE COUNTRY WORSE OFF

I don’t want to say I told you so.

But I did.

In 2019, I wrote “Tell Your Children,” meticulously documenting the decades of research linking cannabis and THC to mental illness, especially psychosis and schizophrenia.

DIALING DOWN DOPE: TRUMP WHITE HOUSE MOVES TOWARD EASING RESTRICTIONS ON MARIJUANA

The runaway legalization of cannabis risked the mental health of teens and young adults, I wrote. And cannabis advocates and companies had spent a generation pretending the drug was a medicine, not a recreational intoxicant. That marketing trick encouraged its use in the most dangerous way, for conditions like anxiety and depression by people already at high risk of mental illness.

When “Tell Your Children” came out in 2019, the industry tried to discredit it, as I’d expected.

But I didn’t expect the Times and other supposedly independent, fact-driven legacy media outlets would help them.

The Times refused to review “Tell Your Children,” even though I had been a reporter there for a decade and the book offered new research on an important issue. Outlets like NPR scheduled and then canceled interviews with me. The Washington Post outright attacked it, calling it a “polemic.”

As I wrote in “Pandemia,” the storm over “Tell Your Children” showed me personally just how bad the woke groupthink in the legacy media had become. Reporters at the Times believed — wrongly — many Black Americans were in prison for minor cannabis-related crimes. Therefore, cannabis legalization was an issue of racial equality. Any debate over it ended there. And anyone who said otherwise was a racist.

I suspect that the real reason people are waking up to the psychiatric harms of cannabis is that they have seen the problems for themselves — in their friends, their cousins, their siblings and their children.

So, I took my lumps. And I waited for the truth to come out.

FATAL CRASH REPORT FINDS NEARLY HALF OF DEADLY WRECKS TIED TO ILLEGAL DRUG

Now it has.

But why?

The wall of woke media groupthink is still mostly intact.

CATHOLICVOTE LAUNCHES CAMPAIGN URGING TRUMP TO REJECT MARIJUANA RESCHEDULING PLANS

I suspect that the real reason people are waking up to the psychiatric harms of cannabis is that they have seen the problems for themselves — in their friends, their cousins, their siblings and their children.

On Feb. 10, conservative commentator Brett Cooper offered personal testimony to the drug’s psychiatric risks.

In a post on X, Cooper wrote she had learned that cannabis has caused her brother’s schizophrenia, the devastating brain disease, marked by episodes of hallucinations, delusions and paranoia in its sufferers. Later, in a podcast, she did not disguise her pain as she spoke about his episodes of homelessness.

BLUE CITIES U-TURN ON DISTRIBUTING DRUG SUPPLIES TO ADDICTS AFTER PROGRESSIVE POLICIES FAIL TO STEM EPIDEMIC

Unfortunately, Cooper’s story is all-too-typical. People with schizophrenia rarely work, marry or have kids. Many spend their lives shuttling through institutions and taking antipsychotic drugs that have serious side effects. The disease frequently devastates their families, too.

Cooper’s post has been seen almost 5 million times on X.

And despite the Times’s reach and the importance of the Canadian research, her words may have more impact than anything else over the last two weeks.

USING MARIJUANA TO COPE WITH STRESS OR TRAUMA MAY BACKFIRE, STUDIES WARN

First-person stories have an emotional impact that the most thoughtful editorial or research paper cannot match. As a friend of mine told me many years ago in critiquing something I’d written, “People like to read about people.”

The Times refused to review “Tell Your Children,” even though I had been a reporter there for a decade and the book offered new research on an important issue. 

We are a long way from undoing the mess of cannabis legalization and unrestrained commercialization — and President Donald Trump’s decision in December to “reschedule” cannabis is a step in the wrong direction.

But it has been clear to me for years that the fight over cannabis is fundamentally cultural and medical, not legal and political. A majority of Americans now support full legalization. Most of them do not use cannabis and do not realize how dangerous it can be, particularly for young people who use heavily.

HOUSE REPUBLICANS DEMAND TRUMP REVERSE COURSE AFTER ‘STRONGLY CONSIDERING’ MARIJUANA EXECUTIVE ORDER

Only when they see for themselves — or hear from people that they trust — that the industry has lied will support for legalization decrease.

That cycle seems to be starting, because the risks that I wrote about in “Tell Your Children” are becoming too obvious to be ignored. Even before the flurry of the last two weeks, sales were ticking up, an unusual gain for a book released over seven years ago. I can only assume that parents are seeing their teenaged and young adult children fall victim to the harms of cannabis and looking for answers.

And now, with the sudden wave of attention, “Tell Your Children” is out of stock on Amazon. (It will be back.)

MIKE TYSON PRAISES TRUMP FOR CANNABIS EXECUTIVE ORDER, PREDICTS IT WILL ALLOW 500,000 JOBS TO BE COUNTED

What happens next?

Nothing right now.

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A majority of Americans now support full legalization. Most of them do not use cannabis and do not realize how dangerous it can be, particularly for young people who use heavily.

This particular wave of attention to the harms of cannabis will fade. And the industry still has powerful momentum after decades of propaganda, paid and free, about the drug’s wonders.

But for the first time since I wrote “Tell Your Children,” I wonder if the pendulum is swinging back, reality is overcoming the myths so many legacy outlets have offered and the billions spent to promote commercialization.

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Only time will tell. But voices like Brett Cooper’s are hard to ignore.

Tell Your Children.

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MORNING GLORY: Just say no to the ‘Talking Filibuster’ — it’s a waste of time

Time is not fungible.  The time you spend reading this column cannot be “reclaimed.”  It is gone and it won’t be back.

 Which is why the “talking filibuster” proposal for the United States Senate is such an awful idea.

I wrote the first paragraph fully aware of the jests it will bring forth — thank you for underscoring my point by posting a comment along the lines of “That’s five minutes I will never get back.” You are correct. You won’t get it back. Hold that thought. It applies to the United States Senate too.

TRUMP TAKES AIM AT SENATE ‘BLUE SLIP’ TRADITION AS GOP RESISTS CHANGE

Another debate has come around about the rules of the United States Senate. The debate is welcome provided it occurs in columns and in studios and doesn’t take up “floor time” in the Senate. “Floor time” in the Senate is a subset of time, a particularly valuable subset. It, too, cannot be gotten back once it passes.

“Floor time” in the Senate is a precious commodity. It is the “rare earths minerals” of the legislative process. Nothing, absolutely nothing, gets done in the Senate unless it is done out in the open, on the Senate floor, after every procedural hurdle is crossed, and there are many such hurdles. The Senate’s rule book evolved over the 161 years since the Civil War ended to protect the rights of the minority party as well as some prerogatives of individual senators. These rules are many and obscure, but they all act together to slow down everything the Senate and thus the Congress does.

The Senate is anti-majoritarian and purposefully so. It was an essential element to the founding of the country. The only part of the Constitution that cannot be amended is the makeup of the Senate. Article V ends with the absolute statement “that no State, without its Consent, shall be deprived of its equal Suffrage in the Senate.” Thus, states like Delaware and Wyoming get two seats in the Senate and so does California. In a recent interview, former President Barack Obama said this needed to be amended, but the former constitutional law professor had forgotten Article V. The Framers set up the Senate to “check” the population-driven House. The two senators per state provision? That cannot be amended without the consent of every state.

Among the Senate’s many traditions is one protecting “unlimited debate,” a feature, not a bug, woven deep into the institution’s fabric. The House has strict time limits on debate but not the Senate. Everything procedural done in the Senate must proceed by unanimous consent or, lacking that, very, very slowly if at all.

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For most of our country’s history, the Senate is where milestone legislation is forged because the tradition of unlimited debate and the rules protecting the power of the minority party force compromise.

That is a good thing. The Senate’s rules on debate and legislation force those compromises or, when an important compromise doesn’t appear, an impasse becomes visible to the public that may tilt elections, depending on just how much visibility is generated by the deadlock and how that deadlock appears to the electorate. The Senate doesn’t have to be passing bills to move the country’s debates forward.

Democrats tried to argue in 2024 that the Republicans had blocked legislation necessary to close the border. Their argument not only failed, it failed spectacularly, and President Donald Trump and a 53-47 Republican Senate and a GOP House majority resulted from the November 2024 election. Voters are smart.

(It also turned out that legislation wasn’t necessary to close the border. President Trump did that without any new grant of authority from Congress.)

Whenever one group of activists from either side of the political spectrum really, really, really wants something, the Senate rule requiring 60 votes to proceed to consideration of a bill causes heartburn among those activist groups and the senators who agree with them. That 60-vote threshold is routinely called “the filibuster.” Like clockwork, calls from the most frustrated Democrats or the most frustrated Republicans are issued to do away with or at least “reform” the filibuster whenever frustration over stalled legislation peaks.

Right now, many Republican senators really, really want to pass the “SAVE Act” — the “Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act” — and some of them are demanding that Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., either do away with the rules which protect the minority party by ending the filibuster, or at least change the rules under which the filibuster operates.

The Wall Street Journal’s Kimberly Strassell explained at length why the “talking filibuster” is a spectacularly bad idea and I recommend her work to you. (The Journal is a sister publication to this one.) Strassel’s piece is dispositive on why the talking filibuster is a terrible idea. But I have a shortcut to the “No. Not now. Not ever. No” answer on the talking filibuster.

Fourteen years ago, it was Oregon Democrat Jeff Merkley who was arguing for “The Talking Filibuster” in a Dec. 12, 2012, memo to his 99 colleagues. (Merkley routinely scores as among the 10 most liberal members of the Senate.) If Merkley is arguing for a rules change, just vote no. It’s that easy.

“When the filibuster is used routinely, it becomes an instrument of mass legislative destruction,” Merkley argued more than a decade ago. The Republicans were in the minority then, and they used the filibuster to slow down or stop President Obama’s legislative agenda. “This paralysis is unacceptable,” Merkley argued.

Not only was that “paralysis” not unacceptable. It was urgently needed, and bravo to then-GOP Senate Leader Mitch McConnell for organizing the Republican caucus to block the radical agenda of Obama, the man who used his party’s fleeting 60-vote majority to inflict Obamacare on a trusting nation.

Merkley argued and argued in 2012, but he did not persuade. The legislative filibuster — the 60-vote threshold — remains in place and there is no “talking filibuster.”

Eventually, the late Harry Reid, then the majority leader of the Senate, would invoke “the nuclear option” to change the Senate’s rules on voting on judicial nominees to a simple majority vote. The result of Reid’s raw power play was the most spectacular backfire in Senate history, with three nominees of President Trump confirmed to the Supreme Court with less than 60 votes.

McConnell warned Reid not to change the rules. Reid ignored him, and we have the “originalist” majority on the court as a result.  Every time a progressive vents over a Supreme Court decision, remind them it is all because of Harry Reid.

Which brings me back to “floor time” in the United States Senate. Candid proponents of the talking filibuster will admit a change to their vision for the Senate would eat up huge gobs of the very limited “floor time.” The majority leader of the Senate controls the calendar and thus the floor time. A talking filibuster would wrest that control from him or her and vest it in the minority party for slabs of the time the Senate is in session. “Like sands in the hourglass” the hours and then days and weeks the Senate would have to do its business would slip away.

Business that includes lifetime appointments to the federal courts. There are at present 37 total vacancies on the federal courts. Only three of the 37 have nominees, but President Trump never met a judicial vacancy he didn’t try to fill because he knows that serious judges are the cement holding his domestic policy agenda in place. He and the judicial nominations team have to pick up their pace and when they do, every federal district court judicial nominee will require at least two hours of floor time and every appellate court nominee will require up to 30 hours of floor debate. If there is a retirement — or two — from the Supreme Court this spring? Thirty hours of debate after cloture for each would be required and would begin only after what would inevitably be excruciatingly long and contentious hearings and procedural maneuvers.

That’s just the time required for judges and justices. Every nominee to every job requiring Senate confirmation will take time as well, from two hours for the obscure appointees to 30 hours for the highest-profile Cabinet nominees. If President Trump is to continue to staff the executive branch, he’s going to need Majority Leader Thune to control floor time in the Senate.

President Trump and Majority Leader Thune have worked very well together since “45” returned as “47.” The enormously successful “Working Families Tax Cut,” aka the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” is the best evidence of that, but so too are the 11 of 12 appropriations bills the president has signed — a triumph of “regular order” not seen in decades. The enormous expenditure of funds to rebuild the military has just begun. It absolutely needs another National Defense Authorization Act and another Department of War funding bill. These and other urgent, but ordinary, business of the Senate is all before the Senate GOP.

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Should the “talking filibuster” ever make it through a rules change — very, very unlikely, but concede that point for a moment — the GOP will regret it as much as the Democrats rue the “Reid Rule” changing the votes needed for judicial confirmation. The “talking filibuster” would haunt the GOP conference just as the ghost of Harry Reid haunts the Democrats’ every conversation about the Supreme Court.

Reclaim your reading time now, but if the topic of the “talking filibuster” comes up, remember it was originally a Democrat idea put forward in service of Barack Obama’s hard left vision for the country. And just say, “No.”

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RICHARD FOWLER: I ran into Jesse Jackson —and into history: the man who shaped a nation

I once ran into Rev. Jesse Jackson. Literally.

It was either 2003 or 2004 at the NAACP Fort Lauderdale Freedom Fund Dinner. I was a high school student and a member of the NAACP Youth Council, running late — moving too fast across the parking lot, out of breath and worried about missing the start.

Then I collided with him.

I looked up, and there he was: the Rev. Jesse Louis Jackson Sr.

REV JESSE JACKSON, CIVIL RIGHTS LEADER AND RAINBOW PUSH FOUNDER, DIES AT 84

When you’re a teenager and you unexpectedly bump into someone whose voice has shaped American public life for decades, it recalibrates your sense of scale.

For many Americans, Jackson was a political figure — debated, dissected, sometimes polarizing. But in foreign capitals and in parts of America often overlooked or mischaracterized by the mainstream media, he occupied a different role. He was a bridge.

Abroad, when American hostages were detained and formal diplomacy stalled, Jackson stepped into rooms the U.S. State Department couldn’t enter. He helped secure the release of Americans in Syria, Cuba and elsewhere when official channels had reached their limits. Governments that distrusted Washington still engaged him. He wasn’t viewed merely as a partisan emissary but as a moral interlocutor.

At home, through Operation Breadbasket and later the Rainbow PUSH Coalition, Jackson built campaigns that used shareholder pressure and economic leverage to move corporate America. With disciplined strategy and an unflinching voice, he pushed Fortune 500 companies to hire Black executives, expand minority contracting and invest in some of the nation’s most diverse communities — opening economic doors that had long been closed. He understood that protest without leverage rarely changes systems.

When family farmers faced foreclosure in the 1980s, Jackson showed up in rural America, forging alliances that cut across race, ethnicity and region. In his view, economic justice wasn’t confined to one community — it was a shared national interest.

His presidential campaigns in 1984 and 1988 reshaped the Democratic Party’s coalition and the nation’s political system. He energized young voters, working-class voters and Black voters who had long felt peripheral to power.

FROM SELMA TO CHICAGO, MLK’S LEGACY IS BEING BETRAYED BY GRIEVANCE POLITICS

At the 1988 Democratic National Convention, Jackson framed the broader vision plainly, saying, “Our flag is red, white and blue, but our nation is a rainbow — red, yellow, brown, Black and White — and we are all precious in God’s sight.”

For many Americans, Jackson was a political figure — debated, dissected, sometimes polarizing. But in foreign capitals and in parts of America often overlooked or mischaracterized by the mainstream media, he occupied a different role. He was a bridge.

That wasn’t just rhetoric. He laid out a plan steeped in electoral math. Jackson articulated what he called a Rainbow Coalition, a multiracial, multi-class governing majority. When Black voters turned out in large numbers, Hispanics gained influence. When Black, Hispanic and progressive White voters showed up together, women gained ground. And when women gained ground, children and workers benefited, Jackson said in that same 1988 address.

That coalition model would later become a winning strategy for Bill Clinton’s victories in the 1990s, Barack Obama’s wins in 2008 and 2012, and Joe Biden’s coalition in 2020.

Often remembered for the tears he shed on that cold November night in Grant Park as Barack Obama became the nation’s first Black president-elect, few know what was running through Jesse Jackson’s mind. But it is not hard to imagine that it included a memory of April 4, 1968 — the balcony of the Lorraine Motel, where Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated.

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Without Jackson’s courage, his electoral roadmap and his push to open American politics to those long excluded, there may not have been a President Obama or the tangible fulfillment of King’s unfinished dream. Jackson spent much of his life trying to bend the country — and in many ways the world — toward what King called the Beloved Community, a democracy expansive enough to include everyone, even when inclusion was unpopular.

That is why he was among the first national leaders to confer dignity on those confronting HIV/AIDS at a time when stigma silenced too many. It is why he insisted LGBTQ Americans were part of the democratic project, not outside of it, as that project now approaches its 250th year.

And whether it was the striking American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees sanitation workers in Memphis in 1968 or educators, healthcare workers and public servants on modern picket lines, Jackson stood with them — not only in speeches but in the places where dignity and livelihood were on the line.

Some will debate his tactics. Some will critique his politics. But none can deny his reach.

As the son of immigrants, I’ve long believed America works best when it expands the circle of belonging rather than shrinking it. Out of many, one. Jackson lived that tension — imperfectly, loudly but persistently.

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That afternoon in Fort Lauderdale, I was a high school kid trying not to be late. He was composed, steady, unhurried. I thought I was rushing into history. In reality, I had just run into a man who had already helped shape it — in neighborhoods, in rural towns and in diplomatic spaces most Americans never see.

And whether you agreed with him or not, Jesse Jackson spent his life insisting that America could be larger than its divisions — at home and abroad. And for that, we thank him by simply saying, “Keep Hope Alive.”

Italy cheers faith and flag in Milan after Paris’ ‘woke’ Olympic spectacle sparked culture clash, experts say

Paris and Milan-Cortina delivered two sharply different Olympic spectacles, one that ignited culture-war backlash and another that leaned into heritage and national pride, a contrast some observers say mirrors the political paths of Emmanuel Macron and Giorgia Meloni.

Olympic opening ceremonies rank among the world’s most-watched cultural broadcasts, making them powerful stages for nations to project how they see themselves and how they want to be seen. “Paris tried to reinterpret tradition. Milan showcased tradition,” Hugh Dugan, an Olympic Truce advocate and former U.S. diplomat, told Fox News Digital, framing the contrast between the ceremonies as part of a broader debate over the role of culture, politics and identity in the Games.

Dugan described the 2024 Paris ceremony as “a deliberately disruptive, decentralized, urban spectacle… visually bold but polarizing,” built around a narrative collage of modern France, diversity and reinterpretation of history. He said choreography and costuming “often carried explicit social commentary,” fueling debate over whether parts of the ceremony were intentionally provocative or ideologically driven.

OLYMPICS INTERNATIONAL SKATING UNION DEFENDS CONTROVERSIAL OLYMPIC JUDGING THAT DENIED AMERICANS ICE DANCE GOLD MEDAL

The 2024 Paris opening ceremony, staged along the Seine, sparked controversy after a segment widely interpreted as referencing Leonardo da Vinci’s “Last Supper” drew criticism from Christian groups and conservative commentators before organizers clarified the intent and apologized for any offense. 

The moment became a flashpoint in France’s wider culture-war debate over identity, religion and the meaning of public symbolism. The Conversation reported that the ceremony triggered a national discussion over “woke ideology” and France’s cultural direction.

Emma Schubart, a research fellow at the U.K.-based Henry Jackson Society, told Fox News Digital, “The Olympics have become a stage for cultural politics as much as sport.”

She continued, “President Emmanuel Macron’s France leaned into progressive, ‘woke’ politics and post-national symbolism, while Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s Italy emphasized heritage, tradition and unapologetic national pride. These aesthetic choices reflect a widening divide over Europe’s cultural and political future.”

Dugan praised the Italian games, saying the Milan-Cortina Winter Games ceremony highlighted “tradition, harmony, co-existence and the Olympic truce,” emphasizing heritage, landscapes and the athlete procession over political messaging. He called the Italian approach “panoramic, heritage-driven, classical,” compared with Paris’ “maximalist, narrative-driven, experimental” style.”

IOC CHIEF LAMENTS ‘DISTRACTING’ NEWS CYCLE AHEAD OF 2026 WINTER OLYMPICS

Reporting on the Milan ceremony described it as a unity-focused event celebrating Italian culture, design and scenery while pushing past pre-Games tensions and highlighting the Olympic ideal of connection and peace. Coverage emphasized tradition and spectacle rather than ideological symbolism, with performances rooted in classical imagery and national identity.

Dugan, who recently launched a Truce Compliance Index tracking how countries observe the tradition, argued the difference reflected two distinct philosophies about what Olympic ceremonies should represent.

Paris leaned into modern identity and pluralism, he said, presenting an ambitious cultural narrative that some audiences found bold while others viewed it as politically charged. Milan, by contrast, centered its message on timeless themes tied to heritage, human connection and the Olympic truce.

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The contrast between the ceremonies highlights a broader evolution of the Olympics themselves. Host nations increasingly use opening ceremonies to project national identity and values, whether through modern reinterpretation or traditional symbolism.

Mississippi’s school miracle shames failing Chicago leaders on education

As I walk across Mississippi in my “Walk Across America” campaign to help reverse the fortunes of my South Side Chicago neighborhood, I see something powerful unfolding. This state, often dismissed by other parts of America as backward, has turned its schools into engines of progress. Children are no longer trapped in failing schools but are moving toward promising futures. Meanwhile, back in Chicago’s South Side, schools in my own neighborhood continue to let kids down. The contrast couldn’t be starker, and it forces a hard question: If Mississippi can make such dramatic gains, why does a city like Chicago, with far greater resources, continue to fail its children?

The stereotype that the South is ignorant while the North is enlightened is crumbling before my eyes.

Mississippi’s transformation, often called the “Mississippi Miracle,” is not an accident. In 2013, the state ranked 49th in fourth-grade reading on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP. By 2024, fourth graders ranked ninth in the nation in reading and 16th in math. Adjusted for demographics and poverty, Mississippi fourth graders ranked first nationally in reading and math, according to the Urban Institute. The state achieved its highest-ever rates of students scoring proficient or advanced across tested grades and subjects. Fourth-grade reading proficiency reached levels where Mississippi students outperformed the national average for the first time. Black fourth graders rose to third in the nation in both reading and math, while low-income and Hispanic students ranked among the top performers nationally in key categories.

HERE’S THE SECRET BEHIND MISSISSIPPI’S EDUCATION MIRACLE — AND WHY IT’S NO ACCIDENT

The foundation? The 2013 Literacy-Based Promotion Act, which mandated evidence-based phonics instruction, early identification of struggling readers, literacy coaches and retention in third grade for students not reading at grade level.

We can’t wait for broken systems to fix themselves. At Project H.O.O.D. in Chicago we will be working to create a model that equips kids with skills, faith and opportunity — something Mississippi proves is possible when priorities align.

Former State Superintendent Dr. Carey Wright emphasized the deliberate work behind it: “Educators do not call these achievements a ‘miracle’ because we know Mississippi’s progress in education is the result of strong policies, the effective implementation of a comprehensive statewide strategy, and years of hard work from the state to the classroom level.”

CHICAGO KIDS ARE DYING WHILE MAYOR JOHNSON FIGHTS TRUMP, ICE AND REALITY

Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves has celebrated the sustained gains, noting how conservative reforms and a focus on phonics have made Mississippi a national model. Even with a slight dip in 2024-25 state accountability grades — 80.1% of schools and 87.2% of districts earning a C or higher, down from the previous year — the long-term trajectory shows what evidence-based reform can achieve, even in a state with high poverty.

By contrast, Dulles Elementary School in Chicago’s Woodlawn neighborhood —right in the heart of the community I serve — presents the opposite picture. The school, serving mostly Black and low-income students in grades pre-K through 8, ranks in the bottom 50% of Illinois elementary schools. In recent data, only about 1% to 5% of students scored proficient in math, and 3% in reading, on state assessments. In the 2024-25 school year, just 3.9% were proficient or better in mathematics and 13.8% in English language arts — far below Chicago Public Schools district averages (27.3% in math, 42.8% in ELA) and state averages (38.5% in math, 53.1% in ELA). Chronic absenteeism remains high, often between 25% and 40%, and the school struggles across student subgroups. It is labeled “Commendable” in Illinois’ system, but those numbers don’t lie. Far too many children are leaving without the foundational skills they need to thrive.

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That’s why Project H.O.O.D. is building the Leadership and Economic Opportunity Center down the block from this elementary school. The $45 million center will include a private Christian school for boys from single-parent households, and I am working to learn as much as possible from Mississippi’s success so that our school can follow a similar model. I am driven by the urgent need to reverse these fortunes. We can’t wait for broken systems to fix themselves. We will be working to create a model that equips kids with skills, faith and opportunity — something Mississippi proves is possible when priorities align.

The contrast between Mississippi and Chicago is so stark that I am tempted to call what’s happening in Chicago criminal. It borders on educational malpractice. Mississippi succeeded with clear standards, teacher retraining in the science of reading, accountability through letter grades and the courage to hold students back until they master the basics — policies rooted in what works, not ideology. Chicago, despite vast funding and talent, remains mired in bureaucracy, diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) mandates, resistance to proven methods and excuses about poverty. It doesn’t help that Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson focuses on blaming phantoms of White supremacy instead of doing the real work and confronting academic failure head-on.

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That’s the true backwardness — not the South, which has shown wisdom in embracing evidence over excuses. From these Mississippi roads, the message is clear: The chains of low expectations can be broken anywhere — with bold policy, hard work and faith in children’s potential. 

Mississippi is proof. Chicago can follow. Project H.O.O.D. will help lead the way.

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DAN GAINOR: From secretary of state to secretary of memes, Rubio wins over MAGA

The social media star of the Trump administration is naturally President Donald Trump. What’s surprising is the one who comes in second place — Secretary of State Marco Rubio. You can hardly visit an online platform without seeing our new secretary of memes, even more often than the memeworthy vice president. It will probably happen even more now that he is fresh off a major speech to the Munich Security Conference that Politico called part of “America’s charm offensive.” 

Rubio has become such a social media celebrity that Trump bought into the fun. One Truth Social poster wrote that “Marco Rubio will be president of Cuba.” Trump responded, “Sounds good to me!” That set in motion a regional freakout as Cuba’s communist government gets increasingly worried it will go the way of Venezuela.

But the No. 1 way Rubio is making his mark is with what is known as the “Marco Rubio realizing” meme, where a picture of Rubio sitting on a couch is doctored with him wearing every costume imaginable as he takes on even more roles for the administration. His list of potential jobs is seemingly endless — president of Venezuela, the ayatollah of Iran, even the new food pyramid. Following Trump’s post about the Obamas, another poster had Rubio realizing he was taking over the president’s social media accounts.

MARCO RUBIO EMERGES AS KEY TRUMP POWER PLAYER AFTER VENEZUELA OPERATION

“Marco Rubio after being told he has to run Greenland now,” has him decked out in a furry, hooded parka and mittens, like the clothes worn in “The Empire Strikes Back” from “Star Wars.” Another has him dressed like Frodo Baggins from “The Lord of the Rings” with the caption, “Rubio realizing that only he can destroy the ring of power.”

Rubio memes were flying fast and furious across the internet in time for the Super Bowl. Rubio dressed as a U.S. Olympic skier in response to the whines from the ski team. “Marco Rubio realizes he needs to replace the entire US Olympic ski team because they’ve been seditious overseas.” Another had him dressed as a one-man band to perform the half-time show to replace lefty weirdo Bad Bunny.

Rubio is clearly living his best life and enjoying the meme-ish notoriety. At one point, he responded to one of the sports memes like this: “I do not normally respond to online rumors but feel the need to do so at this moment I will not be a candidate for the currently vacant HC and GM positions with the Miami Dolphins.”

That’s downright Trumpian in his sense of humor.

DAVID MARCUS: WHAT JD VANCE TOLD ME ABOUT 2028, RUBIO AND THE FUTURE OF MAGA

As with many things on social media, there’s a method to the madness. At one point, Rubio held four different jobs under the Trump administration — secretary of state, national security advisor, head of the National Archives and interim head of USAID. To underscore that point, the Miami Herald ran this headline in August: “Marco Rubio hands off one of his four jobs in Trump administration.”

In early January, new “CBS Evening News” anchor Tony Dokoupil did a piece about the rise of Rubionic memes. “Only in America: the many lives and many jobs of Marco Rubio.” As Dokoupil explained, “now AI memes have added to that portfolio, casting Secretary Rubio as the new governor of Minnesota, the new Shah of Iran, the prime minister of Greenland and the new manager of Manchester United.” The chyron called it “Marco Rubio’s ‘Moment.’”

Newsweek declared, “Marco Rubio Memes Conquer the internet.” Counting him virtually in charge of at least three enemies of the U.S. — Iran, Venezuela and Cuba — throw in Greenland, Minnesota and maybe they are right.

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But Rubio might be conquering far more than many realize. He might also have won over MAGA conservatives to his side. It wasn’t long after Trump’s re-election in November 2024 that the press was reporting on opposition among the base voters. Politico declared, “Rubio news triggers MAGA backlash.” And the Hill went a similar route, claiming, “Trump’s Rubio pick divides Republicans.”

That no longer seems the case. Rubio has earned his many jobs because he’s been a reliable and successful proponent for America First. Voters might have been skeptical, but many now share the memes both for fun and because they’d be comfortable with the secretary of state taking on almost any job.

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Dokoupil said, “These memes might not add up to much.” That could prove incorrect. The 2028 election still seems decades away, but Rubio’s popularity might signal conservative voter support for him to at least have one more job — a spot on the ticket, perhaps with his meme popularity partner Vice President JD Vance.

No matter what, Rubio won’t ever sit on a couch without someone declaring it a seat of power.

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LIZ PEEK: At Munich showdown AOC serves word salad as Rubio channels strength

Secretary of State Marco Rubio and New York Democrat Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are both hopeful about becoming their party’s presidential nominee in 2028. They both have a shot. Odds-makers place the New York congresswoman second only to California Gov. Gavin Newsom in the race to be the Democratic nominee, while President Donald Trump, asked whether Vice President JD Vance is his chosen successor, has more than once suggested that Rubio is also in the running.

Recently, both spoke at the Munich Security Conference. While Rubio earned well-deserved applause from policymakers at home and abroad for his speech, Ocasio-Cortez showed she was not ready for prime time — not even close.

In what may prove a preview of the presidential race two years from now, Rubio and Ocasio-Cortez squared off on geopolitics. For Rubio, the occasion was another opportunity to articulate President Trump’s foreign policy vision — one that embraces American leadership powered by a strong military, a forceful trade agenda, energy independence and a robust economy. And, as we have seen, the Trump White House is not shy about using that military.

SEN MCCORMICK: SECRETARY RUBIO SETS THE COURSE FOR NATO’S FUTURE. WILL EUROPE LISTEN?

Trump has also declined to surrender national sovereignty to global treaties such as the Paris climate accord or institutions such as the United Nations and the World Health Organization — bodies he has deemed anti-American. In the case of the United Nations, the recent elevation of Abbas Tajik, Iran’s representative to the United Nations, to serve as vice chair of the 65th Session of the Commission for Social Development — a group purportedly “tasked with promoting democracy, gender equality, tolerance and non-violence,” as one critic described it — proves once again the debasement of the institution’s integrity. Iran, which only recently crushed protests and slaughtered tens of thousands of its own innocent, unarmed citizens, should be thrown out of the U.N., not rewarded. And certainly not congratulated by U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres on the anniversary of the 1979 Islamic Revolution — which he did even as his own Human Rights Council passed a resolution condemning the mass murders.

Rubio’s speech was challenging, calling out European allies for succumbing to climate zealotry, encouraging mass migration, exporting industrial self-sufficiency and investing “in massive welfare states at the cost of maintaining the ability to defend themselves.” But it was also conciliatory, emphasizing that “we are connected spiritually and we are connected culturally,” and reviewing the many bonds that link the United States and Europe. It was an inspiring call for unity and progress, assuring the appreciative audience that “our destiny is and will always be intertwined with yours.”

The Wall Street Journal Editorial Board described Rubio’s speech as drawn from Ronald Reagan’s playbook, arguing that Trump’s “greatest failure as president is that he won’t, or can’t, articulate his larger principles.” I would argue that Trump is putting those principles into action, coherently and consistently, and that Rubio brilliantly summarized the Trump doctrine.

DAVID MARCUS: WHAT JD VANCE TOLD ME ABOUT 2028, RUBIO AND THE FUTURE OF MAGA

Meanwhile, Ocasio-Cortez delivered remarks at a forum on the sidelines of the Munich conference and reminded us why she should not be allowed anywhere near the Oval Office. Former Vice President Kamala Harris introduced Americans to the magic of word salads — the endless spewing of language that says nothing while helpfully obscuring vast pits of ignorance — but AOC has perfected the art.

Ocasio-Cortez is known as a fierce critic of Israel but otherwise is not known for her geopolitical views, having largely spent her career railing against corporations and the evil rich. But if she wants to run for president, it is important for her to demonstrate some basic foreign policy chops. Hence, the trip to Munich. Unhappily for her, the foray into the world of diplomacy did not go well. Even The New York Times had to admit that she had some “shaky moments.”

Asked whether the United States should come to Taiwan’s aid if China attempted to seize the island, Ocasio-Cortez hesitated for several uncomfortable minutes. Even the description from anti-Trump left-wing Bloomberg, whose reporter had posed the question, said the response was “flubbed,” and wrote: “Normally quick to respond, Ocasio-Cortez was at a loss for words, saying, ‘this is such a, a, you know, I think that, this is a, um, this is of course, a, ah, a very longstanding, um, policy of the United States.’” Hilariously, the piece added that AOC regrouped with what it called a “cogent response,” saying the United States should “avoid any such confrontation and for that question to even arise.” That’s cogent?

TRUMP HAILS RUBIO AS DIPLOMATIC MENTOR AS SECRETARY OF STATE’S POWER GROWS

The Times, too, admitted the Munich outing “demonstrated the relative foreign policy inexperience of Ms. Ocasio-Cortez”, and that she “struggled at times to formulate succinct answers.” But the Times excused her incapacity, describing the questions posed as “probing and specific.” Asking her policy vis-à-vis Taiwan is hardly “probing”; this issue is, along with our relationship with Israel, fundamental.

Ocasio-Cortez also mixed up the trans-Atlantic partnership, referring to it as the “Trans-Pacific Partnership,” and scoffed at Rubio’s claim that American cowboy culture came from Spain. (It did.) But the corker was another response she gave, enthusiastically endorsed by the Times, about President Trump’s foreign policy, “They are looking to withdraw the United States from the entire world so that we can turn into an age of authoritarians that can carve out a world where Donald Trump can command the Western Hemisphere and Latin America as his personal sandbox, where Putin can saber-rattle around Europe.”

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Yes, AOC, Trump is withdrawing the U.S. from the “entire world” by trying to end the war between Ukraine and Russia, deliver the people of Iran, Venezuela and Cuba from authoritarian regimes, confront China, protect Christians in Nigeria, strengthen Western defense capabilities and pursue peace in the Middle East. Former President Joe Biden declared that “America is back,” but did nothing to protect our interests around the globe.

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Under President Trump, the U.S. is not only “back,” it is also in the lead and moving persuasively forward.

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AI out of control? How a single article is sending shock waves with an apocalyptic warning

Be afraid. Be very afraid.

That’s the message that has caught fire in the media-tech world when it comes to artificial intelligence (AI).

This column, for what it’s worth, is being written by a fallible human being on a battered keyboard with no technological assistance.

It’s extremely rare–once in a blue moon–that I read a piece that completely changes my view of an issue.

Like most people, I have viewed the rise of AI with a mixture of concern, skepticism and bemusement.

DEMOCRATS ARE LOSING AI BECAUSE OF A BIG MESSAGING PROBLEM

It’s fun to conjure up images on ChatGPT, for instance, and I get that some people use it for hyperspeed research. But then you hear anecdotes about AI screwing up math problems or spewing stuff that’s simply untrue.

Sure, we’ve all seen warnings that this fast-growing technology will cost some people their jobs, but I assumed that would be mainly in Silicon Valley. The era of plane travel didn’t wipe out passenger trains or buses, though it was curtains for the horse-and-buggy business.

But now comes Matt Shuman, who works in AI, and he’s not simply joining the prediction sweepstakes. He tells us what is happening right now.

Last year, he says, “new techniques for building these models unlocked a much faster pace of progress. And then it got even faster. And then faster again. Each new model wasn’t just better than the last… it was better by a wider margin, and the time between new model releases was shorter. I was using AI more and more, going back and forth with it less and less, watching it handle things I used to think required my expertise.”

On Feb. 5, two major companies, OpenAI and Anthropic, released new models that Shuman likens to “the moment you realize the water has been rising around you and is now at your chest.”

Bingo: “I am no longer needed for the actual technical work of my job. I describe what I want built in plain English, and it just … appears. Not a rough draft I need to fix. The finished thing. I tell the AI what I want, walk away from my computer for four hours, and come back to find the work done. Done well, done better than I would have done it myself, with no corrections needed. A couple of months ago, I was going back and forth with the AI, guiding it, making edits. Now I just describe the outcome and leave.”

Wait, there’s more. The new GPT model “wasn’t just executing my instructions. It was making intelligent decisions. It had something that felt, for the first time, like judgment. Like taste. The inexplicable sense of knowing what the right call is that people always said AI would never have. This model has it, or something close enough that the distinction is starting not to matter.”

This goes well beyond the geeky world of techies, in case you were feeling immune. “Law, finance, medicine, accounting, consulting, writing, design, analysis, customer service. Not in ten years. The people building these systems say one to five years. Some say less. And given what I’ve seen in just the last couple of months, I think ‘less’ is more likely.”

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My knee-jerk reaction is, well, I’ll be okay because no super-smart bot could talk about news on TV or podcasts with the same attitude and verve that I do. Then I remember, even as a writer, that news organizations are increasingly relying on AI.

What about musicians who bring soul to their rock ’n roll or bop to their pop? Well, the most popular AI singer is Xania Monet. Some fans were stunned to discover she wasn’t real, though created by an actual poet, Telisha “Nikki” Jones, and most listeners didn’t care. In fact, “Xania” now has a multimillion-dollar recording deal.

One other sobering thought: “Dario Amodei, who is probably the most safety-focused CEO in the AI industry, has publicly predicted that AI will eliminate 50% of entry-level white-collar jobs within one to five years.”

Gulp.

This has really hit the media echo chamber, reverberating from Axios to The New York Times to The Wall Street Journal, among others.

The fact that Matt Shuman presents this in a measured tone, not a sky-is-falling shout, adds to his credibility.

Anthropic, for its part, released a study that defended its Claude Opus model, “against any attempt to autonomously exploit, manipulate, or tamper” with a company’s operations “in a way that raises the risk of future catastrophic outcomes.”

The report added: “We do not believe it has dangerous coherent goals that would raise the risk of sabotage, nor that its deception capabilities rise to the level of invalidating our evidence.”

95% OF FACULTY SAY AI MAKING STUDENTS DANGEROUSLY DEPENDENT ON TECHNOLOGY FOR LEARNING: SURVEY

Meanwhile, National Review provides a counterweight to what’s called “doomerism.”

For one thing, “most predictions anticipate that AI will be a top-down disruption rather than a bottom-up phenomenon.”

For another, writes Noah Rothman, “there is almost no room in the discourse for undesirable outcomes that fall short of catastrophism. After all, modesty and prudence do not go viral.”

And what about the positive impact?

“Rather than wiping out whole sectors, it is just as possible that the workers displaced by AI will be retained in the sectors in which they’re already employed.

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“It defies logic to assume that an industry that grows as rapidly as AI is predicted to will not need human data scientists, research analysts, specialized engineers, and, yes, even support and administrative staff. In addition, sectors such as health care, agriculture, and emerging industries will require as much, or even more, human talent than they currently employ.”

The conservative magazine is also annoyed that “participants in this debate default to the assumption that the only solution to AI’s disaggregating potential, whatever its scale, is big government.”

Well, take your pick.

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If AI, which can now code well enough to reproduce itself, doesn’t wipe out zillions of jobs, or society finds ways to adapt, we can all breathe a very human sigh of relief.

And if artificial intelligence is as destructive as Shuman’s alarming article says it already is, we can’t say we weren’t warned–but perhaps we can harness it to do our jobs for us while we work three days a week with three-hour lunches.

I’m agnostic at this point, except to say it’s going to be a wild ride.

It’s not students organizing ICE walkouts — here’s who’s really behind the nationwide protests

Across the country, mass chaos is erupting in classrooms. Students are being encouraged and aided in walking out during school hours to protest American law enforcement. 

And we’re told these “demonstrations” are organic expressions of “student voice” and civic engagement.

They are not.

Public schools are being used as indoctrination camps to turn children into social justice foot soldiers to carry out a Marxist agenda and cause maximum disruption for President Donald Trump and his administration.

CONSERVATIVE ICON RIPS TEACHERS’ UNIONS AS SCHOOLS TURN INTO ‘PROPAGANDA AGENCIES’

If one thing is clear, it should be: Children do not design national protest strategies, coordinate messaging across states or time walkouts for political effect. Adults do.

To be specific, what is being represented as an organic, grassroots movement is being orchestrated by adults who run the same teacher unions and activist networks that have blurred, and now erased, the lines between education and political warfare.

This distinction matters because when schools across the country become staging grounds for political demonstrations, students aren’t being empowered to speak their mind.

JOHNNY CAN’T READ — EVEN IN COLLEGE. I LEAD A UNIVERSITY AND IT’S TERRIFYING

They’re being used.

Student proficiency scores in reading and math have never been lower, yet the people in charge of education have taken it upon themselves to encourage students to leave the classroom. 

This is not harmless symbolism; it’s negligence.

According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), U.S. high school reading and math scores are at their lowest levels in decades, with only 35% of seniors proficient in reading, and 22% proficient in math.  

Nearly a third of students can’t even read “basic” level, while 45% fall below basic in math. 

These aren’t abstract numbers. They are the direct result of an education system that has overlooked academics and replaced it with ideology.

CAMPUS RADICALS: DEMS TARGET MILITARY SCHOOL, CHICAGO TEACHERS WREAK HAVOC, COLLEGE NURSE’S VIRAL SCANDAL

But the damage doesn’t stop there.

Chronic absenteeism has become a national crisis, and it did not happen by accident. 

Before COVID-19, 15% of students were chronically absent.

WASHINGTON POST RIPS CHICAGO TEACHERS UNION FOR PURSUING SOCIAL JUSTICE INITIATIVES AS STUDENTS STRUGGLE

Public schools are being used as indoctrination camps to turn children into social justice foot soldiers to carry out a Marxist agenda and cause maximum disruption for President Donald Trump and his administration.

Then, teachers unions forced schools to shut down, kept classrooms closed long after evidence said it was safe to reopen, and taught an entire generation of children that school was optional. 

Today, chronic absenteeism has doubled to around 30%, meaning millions of students now miss a month or more of school every year. 

The “student” walkouts against ICE follow the exact same playbook unions used during Trump’s first term with COVID-19 — disrupt, destabilize and weaponize public institutions against our government.

PRESIDENT OF LARGEST TEACHERS UNION SET TO SPEAK AT ‘POLITICAL REVOLUTION’ EVENT TARGETING ICE

Promoting walkouts — whether it’s over COVID, ICE, Venezuela or whatever political conflict comes next — sends a message that skipping school is not only acceptable, it is virtuous, as long as your politics are “correct.”

If parents encouraged their child to miss class repeatedly, schools would call it truancy. 

When unions do it, they call it activism and applaud anyone who dares.

CHICAGO TEACHERS UNION SPARKS BACKLASH WITH VIDEO HARASSING TARGET EMPLOYEES OVER ICE AS TEST SCORES PLUMMET

You cannot claim to care about student outcomes while actively pulling students out of classrooms to fight your political battles.

Here is the hard truth unions refuse to admit: Public schools do not belong to unions or political movements. They belong to families and taxpayers. 

Student proficiency scores in reading and math have never been lower, yet the people in charge of education have taken it upon themselves to encourage students to leave the classroom. 

Parents trust schools to educate their children, not to recruit them into national political battles or leverage them as pawns against our government.

NEA INSIDER BLOWS WHISTLE ON ‘TOXIC’ CULTURE AND FAR-LEFT POLITICS INSIDE TEACHERS UNION: ‘IT’S A CULT’

The reason unions don’t want parents involved in education is because parental involvement would complicate their narrative, and unions know it.

These ICE walkouts are not neutral. They are protests designed to mobilize students against our government.  

Portraying law enforcement officers as villains to developing minds, while encouraging them to protest during school hours, is at the very least reckless.

MINNEAPOLIS TEACHERS UNION CHIEF ADMITS ELECTED OFFICIALS IN ANTI-ICE SIGNAL CHATS

And as parents — as American citizens — we need to recognize these walkouts are not isolated incidents. They are a part of a bigger plan to politicize classrooms, coordinate protests and turn our children against our country and president.

The goal has never been better education. It has always been maximum disruption. And we are just now seeing it play out. 

Students have become the most effective tool in their strategy because criticism is immediately framed as “anti-student” or “anti-democracy.”

TEACHERS UNION PRESIDENT CALLS TRUMP A ‘DICTATOR’ ON UNEARTHED CALL WITH ANTIFA-LINKED GROUP

That rhetorical shield is intentional; they took it right out of Karl Marx’s playbook.

If unions truly believed in authentic student voices, they wouldn’t script it.

If they respected parents, they’d ask permission.

And if they cared about education, they wouldn’t keep a system in place that only benefits them.

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Students need more time in classrooms, not less. They need teachers focused on reading, writing, math and science, not organizing protests. They need schools that prioritize learning over headlines.

If these protests teach us one thing, it is that our children deserve better.

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And that is something that will never be able to happen with our schools under union control.

The only way to stop the destruction we are seeing on the news is to defund the people who are inciting it. 

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I went from preacher’s kid to meth addict — then everything changed

I grew up as the son of a traveling evangelist. My mom is truly one of the kindest people you’ll ever meet. Sadly, beneath her elegant facade was a deep fear-driven need to appear as though everything was OK. Our life was far from it. The man I grew up watching speak behind a pulpit was not the same man at home behind closed doors, where I had a front-row seat to the physical abuse he heaped on my mother.

Keeping the secret of Dad’s abuse was our No. 1 rule as a family. No one could ever know. I remember a time when someone at a camp meeting asked my mom about her black eye. I was young, barely tall enough to come up to her elbow, and I was overcome by dread. Would our family secret be exposed? Before my mom could reply, my dad jumped in: “She fell in the shower.” As I heard those words, my whole body trembled with disbelief and anger. Watching my father tell a cowardly lie to protect his image — and my mom sheepishly pretend she was a dumb wife who fell in the shower — was unbearable to watch. At such a young age, I didn’t know how to process any of it.

As I stepped into my preteen years, I became a wrecking ball of bad decisions. In my mind, both my earthly and heavenly fathers were the villains in my story. By the time I was 11 and 12 years old, I was smoking cigarettes, stealing and drinking alcohol. 

As a teenager, I stayed up almost every night, snorting cocaine, drinking, smoking pot and, finally, taking painkillers to get to sleep. When I was 17, someone introduced me to a drug called crystal meth. This was a new low. Looking back, it feels like an out-of-body experience. How could I have made such monumentally destructive choices? I had built an entire life around my trauma, my hurt, my anger and my addiction.

CHRIS PRATT ON FINDING GOD DURING SON’S LIFE-THREATENING CRISIS AND HOW IT TRANSFORMED HIS SPIRITUAL LIFE

At 3 a.m. one night, I was in a dark place when Jesus revealed himself to this wounded preacher’s kid. Right there, that night, I put my faith in Jesus. I share more about my transformation — and how Jesus changed my life overnight — in my new book,“Radically Restored: How Knowing Jesus Heals Our Brokenness.”

This is why I believe God heals, and that He still performs miracles. I believe because I follow the same Jesus who “cast out the evil spirits with a simple command, and he healed all the sick” (Matt. 8:16 NLT). But what about deep wounds left by trauma? What if those wounds are caused by a parent or a spouse — someone we should have been able to trust, someone who should have been a safe place? We all know those wounds go much deeper.

ANCIENT CHRISTIANS LIVED ALONGSIDE FOLLOWERS OF MYSTERIOUS FAITH 1,500 YEARS AGO, ARCHAEOLOGISTS SAY

When asked whether God can heal emotional trauma, Christians might give a knee-jerk church answer: “Yes — and won’t He do it!” We want to assure others — and maybe ourselves — that we’re saved and believe without doubts. We tend to avoid asking difficult questions because, as Christians, we’re not sure it’s allowed. 

As I stepped into my preteen years, I became a wrecking ball of bad decisions. In my mind, both my earthly and heavenly fathers were the villains in my story. By the time I was 11 and 12 years old, I was smoking cigarettes, stealing, and drinking alcohol. 

My perspective is that honest faith does ask questions, but it doesn’t question who God says He is. That might sound contradictory, but it’s not. God wants authenticity, yet we must trust Him even in painful experiences. When we are authentic and we trust, God reveals the chains that bind us so we can lay them at the foot of the cross and walk away in freedom.

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That’s easier said than done — especially if those chains were put there by people we once considered safe, or by a parent or spouse we should have been able to trust. Unresolved trauma became my prison. I didn’t know how to be set free. The hardest part is that even after the physical abuse stopped, my father never addressed what happened. In my childhood, his presence was massive and terrorizing. But throughout my teens and early 20s, he was there — but not really there. In the movie of our lives, he became less of a monster and more of an extra who blended into the background. His absence during those years was a new and different kind of wound.

I wonder whether my father’s detachment was because he believed that, after all he’d done, he no longer had the right to be my father. Maybe he didn’t talk about the past abuse or make amends because he would have had to own what happened. He would have had to drag it out of the shadows and into the light. I don’t know the answer for my dad; I only know he pretended it never happened.

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But it did happen. And at some point — for my father and for the rest of us — everything we try to hide will be laid bare. Jesus said, “For everything that is hidden will eventually be brought into the open, and every secret will be brought to light” (Mark 4:22 NLT). Everything — even the things we want to keep hidden in the dark — will be brought into the light. That might sound scary, but it doesn’t have to be. When we willingly bring those hidden things into the light to confess, repent and make amends, they begin to lose their power.

Unfortunately, my dad could never bring himself to face what he had done. I believe this kept him imprisoned by guilt and shame. If you relate, please know Jesus loves you and is fighting to set you free and heal every broken piece of you. This promise isn’t just for sons and daughters who have been hurt. It’s also for the father, mother, spouse or anyone who has harmed others. Jesus doesn’t just heal and restore the bad things that happened to us. He also mends the unthinkable things we may have done to others. When we feel chained to guilt and shame, real healing and freedom await on the other side of something called repentance.

EPA ADMINISTRATOR ZELDIN: We finally demolished the Democrat climate insanity

For 16 years, the so-called Endangerment Finding has been the weapon of choice for climate change zealots in Washington. Created by the Obama EPA in 2009, it justified trillions of dollars in regulations, restricted which cars could be manufactured, and drove up the cost of living for American families. It pushed this country toward an unpopular electric vehicle mandate, imposed crushing compliance requirements, and promoted a new level of government overreach that has made hardworking Americans’ blood boil.

On Thursday, standing alongside President Trump in the White House, I was proud to announce that the Endangerment Finding has been eliminated — and with it, all federal greenhouse gas emissions standards for vehicles and engines that followed.

This is the single largest deregulatory action in U.S. history, and it will save American taxpayers over $1.3 trillion. The action will result in an average savings of more than $2,400 per vehicle. By eliminating regulatory compliance costs, we are making it easier for families to buy the car they actually want — improving affordability and helping Americans reach jobs, grow small businesses and participate fully in the transportation and logistics systems that power the U.S. economy.

OBAMA-ERA GREENHOUSE GAS RULES GONE AS EPA’S ZELDIN SIGNS ‘SINGLE LARGEST DEREGULATORY ACTION’ IN HISTORY

As an added bonus, the incentive for one of the most unpopular features in modern vehicles — the automatic start-stop system — has been eliminated. I heard how much Americans hate this feature while visiting all 50 states this past year. The system shuts off the engine at red lights, drains batteries faster and delivers no meaningful environmental benefit. It was nothing more than a climate participation trophy — a regulatory incentive that let automakers claim green credits on paper without delivering real-world results.

Automakers should never be forced to adopt — or be rewarded for — technologies Americans don’t want. The Trump EPA will choose consumer choice over climate posturing every time.

Let me be clear about why we took this action: The American people demanded it, and the law required it. The Obama administration stretched the Clean Air Act beyond recognition to claim that carbon dioxide from tailpipes — combined with five other gases, some of which vehicles do not even emit — constituted “air pollution” that contributed to global climate change and endangered public health and welfare. For decades, the EPA understood that the Clean Air Act addressed pollution that directly harms people’s health in their communities — not global climate policy. But the Obama-Biden administration twisted the law to seize power it was never given, and the Endangerment Finding was its weapon of choice.

Since then, the Supreme Court has made clear in landmark decisions such as Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo and West Virginia v. EPA that agencies cannot twist statutes to seize power Congress never granted. Major policy decisions of this magnitude belong to Congress, not unelected bureaucrats. Unlike our predecessors, the Trump EPA follows the law as written and as Congress intended — not as climate activists might wish it to be.

TRUMP ESCALATES BATTLE WITH NEWSOM, SHUTTING DOWN GOVERNOR’S LEFT-WING RULES ROCKING CAR INDUSTRY

These same activists do not want Americans to know that their wildly unfounded predictions never came true. The Endangerment Finding was built on projections and assumptions that did not materialize over the past 16 years. The same types of models relied on by previous administrations and climate activists to bolster the Endangerment Finding failed to withstand scrutiny. The Trump EPA now finds that even if the United States eliminated all greenhouse gas emissions from every vehicle on the road, there would be no material impact on global climate change — the core assumption used in 2009 to justify these regulations.

Let that sink in: Trillions of dollars in unnecessary costs were imposed on American families. Americans lost freedoms that should never have been taken away. The Trump EPA creates policy rooted in reality, not ideology.

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This was not a decision we made lightly. We conducted a transparent rulemaking process with a 52-day public comment period, four days of virtual public hearings where more than 600 people testified, and roughly 572,000 public comments. We listened, made substantial updates and delivered.

Affordable vehicle ownership is at the heart of the American Dream. It is how families get to work, how small businesses move goods and how millions of Americans in rural communities without public transit access health care, education and opportunity. It remains one of the primary drivers of economic mobility in the United States.

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The regulations built on the Endangerment Finding placed new vehicles further out of reach for American families. The Obama and Biden administrations’ push toward EV mandates pressured automakers to scale back traditional gasoline and diesel trucks and reengineer fleets toward technologies they argue are uneconomic and infeasible. The cost of these climate policies fell hardest on Americans who could least afford it.

President Trump promised to unleash American energy, revive the American auto industry and put the American people first. Today, we delivered on that promise in what we believe is the largest deregulatory action and cost-saving measure for Americans in U.S. history. The era of government-knows-best climate regulation is over. The American Dream is back. Promises made, promises kept.

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