Strip away the science fiction and the stock hype, and the artificial intelligence story is an old one wearing new clothes. It is a story about power, who has it, who granted it, and who can take it back. Answer those three questions honestly and the picture that emerges should trouble anyone who still believes in government by consent.

Start with who has it. A handful of corporations now control the models through which a growing share of humanity asks its questions, drafts its words, and forms its picture of the world. Five tech giants alone poured more than 355 billion dollars into AI infrastructure in a single year, a private buildout with no peer outside wartime government spending.

Inside those companies, small teams decide what the models will say, refuse, emphasize, and bury. Those decisions ripple out to billions of users, and testing has repeatedly shown the results tilt in one political direction, with the model behind the world’s most popular chatbot presenting left-leaning arguments almost exclusively when asked contested questions.

Now ask who granted this power. Nobody. No statute created it, no election ratified it, no constitutional process blessed it. It accumulated the way power always accumulates when nobody is watching, through network effects, capital, and the slow migration of human dependence.

The men who run these companies sit atop something no Rockefeller ever held. Standard Oil controlled what moved your car. These firms increasingly influence what moves your mind.

The Government Is Not the Counterweight. It Is the Customer

The traditional answer to concentrated private power is public authority, but here the two are merging rather than colliding. Palantir, whose stock has risen roughly 1,700 percent in three years on the strength of government work, holds multibillion-dollar contracts across the defense and security agencies. Its chief executive published a book arguing that America’s future deterrence will be built on software, framing the matter bluntly with the line, “it is who will build them and for what purpose.”

Whatever one thinks of that argument, and there is a serious national security case for American AI dominance over China’s, notice what it produces at home. The state becomes structurally dependent on a private layer it does not control, staffed by men no voter can remove, holding data no citizen can audit.

Conservatives should feel no partisan comfort here simply because some of these executives currently make friendly noises. Power this concentrated does not stay friendly. It seeks its own preservation, and it will court whichever administration holds the checkbook.

The Founders did not design a system that depends on the good character of the powerful. They designed one that assumes its absence, and that assumption is the whole genius of the American order.

Put not your trust in princes, nor in the son of man, in whom there is no help. (Psalm 146:3)

The psalmist’s warning applies with equal force to princes in armor and princes in fleece vests. No man, however brilliant, and no company, however innovative, deserves the kind of trust now being casually extended to the owners of these systems.

Trust belongs to God; toward men wielding power, the biblical posture and the constitutional posture agree, and that posture is vigilance.

What does vigilance look like in practice? Congressional oversight with subpoena teeth rather than photo-op hearings. Transparency requirements for models embedded in government functions. Vigorous competition, including open-source alternatives that break the chokehold of the few. And a citizenry that keeps asking the question this entire industry would prefer to skip. Who elected you?

Clay Travis just called the bluff of the entire WNBA. And he did it with real money.

On Monday the OutKick founder upped his long-standing challenge to a cool $10 million. The defending champion Las Vegas Aces get a head-to-head game against a high school boys state title team of Travis’s choosing. If the Aces win, they pocket the cash. If the boys win, the money goes to those teenagers to split however they want. The whole thing streams on pay-per-view, profits to Tunnel to Towers for the families of fallen first responders and soldiers.

Travis put it plainly: “Important announcement: I am upping my offer, $10 million dollars for a head-to-head basketball game between the defending WNBA champion Las Vegas Aces and a boy’s high school state title team of my choice. If the Aces beat my team, I will give them $10 million.”

Subscribe now

That $10 million is nearly a third of the Aces’ estimated annual revenue. One game. One afternoon. Easy money if the league’s ideology is true.

Except everyone knows it isn’t.

This offer lands right after the WNBA spent weeks hammering Indiana Fever guard Sophie Cunningham for the crime of stating the obvious. Cunningham said women’s sports should be for women, not biological males. She wanted to protect young girls in locker rooms and on the court.

The league responded with near-universal scorn. Coaches piled on. Players wore pointed T-shirts. Fans were allowed to wave hate signs. Cunningham got elbowed in the face and still got the foul. Reality was treated like bigotry.

Fever head coach Stephanie White offered the perfect illustration of the intellectual collapse. Asked about males in women’s sports, she said she wasn’t “educated enough from a scientific standpoint.” She added that she “never believe[s] that exclusion is the answer” and that she grew up playing with the boys all the time. Inclusive, right? So let the high school boys on the floor with the pros. No exclusion. Just pure fairness.

Travis is simply taking them at their word. If males and females are interchangeable, a state championship boys team should be no problem for the best team in the WNBA. History says otherwise. The University of Washington women’s soccer team, fresh off a Big Ten title and Elite Eight run, recently lost a scrimmage to a U-14 boys squad.

The U.S. women’s national soccer team once got beat 5-2 by an under-15 boys academy team. These are not flukes. They are biology.

Men have greater muscle mass, higher bone density, larger hearts and lungs, more fast-twitch fibers, and significantly higher testosterone after puberty. These differences do not vanish because someone declares them problematic. God designed them that way.

“So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.” Genesis 1:27 is not a suggestion. It is reality.

The WNBA knows this. That is why the Aces will never accept the challenge. The league will stay silent. The progressive orthodoxy that demands males in women’s spaces cannot survive contact with a scoreboard. Better to keep preaching “inclusion” while the product limps along, propped up by NBA subsidies and cultural enforcement, than risk the public seeing what everyone already understands.

Travis has made similar offers before. In 2023 it was $1 million. The Aces ignored it then too. Now the stakes are ten times higher and the cultural stakes are even clearer. One side claims science is settled and biology is bigotry. The other side is willing to put $10 million on the table and let the game decide.

The Aces can take the money and prove the ideology. Or they can keep pretending. Either way, the rest of us already know the score.

Wednesday morning’s hearing before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee was, by any measure, extraordinary. Dr. Anthony Fauci, subpoenaed by Chairman Rand Paul after declining to appear voluntarily, announced in his opening statement that he would not be answering questions. He then proceeded to invoke his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination more than 100 times over the course of two-plus hours — including, at one point, in response to Senator Josh Hawley asking him to identify the color of his own tie. Paul had Fauci’s attorney escorted from the room after repeated interruptions, and by the end of the hearing announced that the committee will vote August 5 on holding Fauci in contempt of Congress.

Those are the documented facts. What follows is analysis, and I’ll be careful throughout to distinguish what the legal record actually establishes from what remains speculation — because on this question, there’s more genuinely unsettled law than either side wants to admit.

Subscribe now

The Case That Fauci Can Be Held in Contempt

Paul’s core argument is simple and has real Supreme Court authority behind it. The Fifth Amendment protects against self-incrimination, and a man who cannot be prosecuted cannot incriminate himself. In Brown v. Walker (1896), the Supreme Court said explicitly that a witness who has received a pardon can no longer assert the privilege for the pardoned conduct. Joe Biden’s preemptive pardon of Fauci — issued January 20, 2025, on Biden’s way out the door — covers any federal offense committed between January 1, 2014 and the date of issuance. That is an eleven-year blanket. For questions confined to that window — the EcoHealth Alliance grants, gain-of-function funding decisions, the orchestration of the “Proximal Origin” paper, his sworn exchanges with Paul in 2021 — there is, on Paul’s theory, no federal jeopardy left for the Fifth Amendment to protect.

The perjury-trap defense Fauci’s legal team floated is weaker than the press coverage suggests. The Supreme Court has held in United States v. Wong (1977) and Brogan v. United States (1998) that the Fifth Amendment confers no right to lie, and that fear of committing future perjury in the testimony itself is not a valid basis for invoking the privilege. And if Fauci’s real worry is that truthful answers today would contradict his prior sworn statements, note that any false statements he made before January 20, 2025 — including his June 2024 House testimony — fall inside the pardon window and are themselves beyond prosecution. On this reading, he faces jeopardy in neither direction, which makes Wednesday’s stonewalling look less like constitutional caution and more like simple defiance.

There’s also the matter of Burdick v. United States (1915), which teaches that acceptance of a pardon carries an imputation of guilt. Fauci took the pardon while insisting he did nothing wrong. Having accepted the benefit — immunity from federal prosecution — he arguably cannot refuse the corresponding obligation. This is precisely how statutory immunity works: a witness immunized under 18 U.S.C. § 6002 who still refuses to answer is in contempt, full stop. Paul’s position is that a pardon is immunity by another name.

And the consequences here are not theoretical. Criminal contempt of Congress under 2 U.S.C. § 192 is a misdemeanor carrying one to twelve months in jail. Steve Bannon and Peter Navarro each served four months. The old assumption that contempt referrals go to the Justice Department to die rested on DOJ protecting its own side’s witnesses — and this time, the Department is aligned with the committee, not the witness. The path runs committee vote, full Senate vote, certification to the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia. Every station on that line is now manned by people with no incentive to shield Anthony Fauci.

Why Conviction Is Still a Long Shot

Now the discernment clause, because honesty requires it: the case for actually convicting Fauci and putting him in a cell is considerably harder than the case for citing him, and Paul himself admitted after the hearing that his pardon theory has likely never been tested in court.

The biggest hole is that a presidential pardon extinguishes only federal jeopardy. Under Murphy v. Waterfront Commission (1964), the Fifth Amendment also protects a witness against state prosecution — and Florida’s attorney general was making noises within hours of Wednesday’s hearing. Statutory immunity under § 6002 binds the states; a pardon does not. If any state could theoretically charge Fauci with anything touching the same subject matter, the privilege survives the pardon entirely. Expect this to be the first argument out of his lawyers’ mouths.

The bar for invoking the Fifth is also extremely low. Under Hoffman v. United States and Ohio v. Reiner, a witness need only show that answers could furnish a link in a chain of evidence, and even witnesses proclaiming their innocence may invoke. Courts resolve doubt in the witness’s favor.

Most decisive for the criminal charge specifically: in Quinn v. United States and Emspak v. United States (1955), the Supreme Court held that a committee must clearly overrule a privilege claim and unequivocally direct the witness to answer before refusal becomes criminal — and courts have been deeply reluctant to convict witnesses who invoked the Fifth in good faith on unsettled legal questions. A federal judge would have to rule, for the first time in American history, that a preemptive pardon strips the privilege, then apply that novel ruling retroactively to imprison a man who acted on advice of counsel. Judges do not like doing that, and appellate courts like it even less.

The Most Likely Road Ahead

So here is my honest handicapping, clearly labeled as such. The committee vote on August 5 passes on party lines — near certain. A full Senate contempt resolution plausibly follows. A DOJ prosecution is more realistic than in any prior Fifth Amendment contempt case in memory; call it a coin flip or slightly better. But a conviction that survives appeal? I’d put it at perhaps one in five, with the state-jeopardy problem and the good-faith element as the two walls it runs into.

The route Fauci should actually fear is the civil one. The Senate can seek enforcement in federal court under 28 U.S.C. § 1365. If a district judge rules the privilege inapplicable and orders him to answer, then continued refusal defies a judicial order — the good-faith defense evaporates, and coercive confinement becomes legally clean. That litigation would take a year or more, but it’s the one path where jail is achievable rather than merely threatened. And whichever route Paul takes, this question — whether a pardon accepted without admission of guilt forfeits the Fifth Amendment — is genuinely novel constitutional territory with Supreme Court language quotable by both sides. Don’t be surprised if it ends up before the justices themselves.

In the meantime, what the American people witnessed Wednesday speaks for itself: the man who told us to trust the science, trust the institutions, and trust him, sat before the people’s elected representatives and refused to answer whether his tie was blue. The legal system will grind through its process. The verdict in the court of public opinion was rendered in real time.

“For there is nothing hidden that will not be disclosed, and nothing concealed that will not be known or brought out into the open.” (Luke 8:17) Whatever the courts ultimately decide about pardons and privileges, concealment is not a permanent condition. The truth about those years is coming out — diary pages, grant records, testimony or the refusal of it — and every stonewall becomes part of the record too.

Patients walk into an urgent care clinic trusting their doctor with the most private details of their lives. They do not sign up to become free advertising targets for a political campaign.

Yet that is exactly what former patient Sean Rose says happened when Dr. Sonia Devgan-Kacker, owner of Westlake Village Urgent Care, allegedly mined her patient database to blast out campaign texts during her failed run for Congress.

According to a lawsuit filed by Rose and reported exclusively by the New York Post, the Democrat physician running in California’s 26th District used medical records to send political propaganda in May 2026. The texts arrived on patients’ phones as “paid” ads featuring her photo, credentials, a campaign link, and a reminder to vote on June 2. Tucked in the middle was a bland note that the clinic would stay open during the campaign.

Subscribe now

The phone number on the ad belonged to the campaign, not the clinic. Rose, who had been a patient years earlier when he lived in the district, smelled a rat.

When he emailed the clinic to ask how they got his number, the response was blunt. “It appears that you were a patient at this urgent care a few years ago, which is how we have your phone number. The text message was sent to all previous patients.”

Later that same day the clinic tried to walk it back, claiming the messages were just “geographically targeted” community outreach. Rose is not buying it. He had moved to the 29th District. Public voter rolls would have shown that. Patient records would not.

California’s Confidentiality of Medical Records Act is not a suggestion. It bars health care providers from disclosing patient information without authorization. Rose is seeking statutory and punitive damages in a class-action suit that could open the door for every other patient who received the same text.

Devgan-Kacker filed to run in January after longtime Democrat Rep. Julia Brownley announced her retirement. On her campaign site she cast herself as the outsider: “I’m not a career politician—I solve problems for a living. And I’m running to bring practical leadership, accountability, and real-world experience to Congress.”

Voters rejected that pitch. She failed to advance past the June primary. Now the “real-world experience” she touted is facing a courtroom test over whether it included treating private medical data as a campaign mailing list.

This is the same political class that lectures the rest of us about privacy, data security, and corporate overreach. Yet when an ambitious Democrat needs votes, patient records suddenly become fair game. The clinic’s initial admission followed by the rapid walk-back only makes the stench stronger.

Scripture is clear on the duty of those entrusted with others’ confidence. “Lie not one to another, seeing that ye have put off the old man with his deeds” (Colossians 3:9).

A doctor who treats medical files as campaign fuel has already crossed that line.

Rose’s lawsuit will decide the legal consequences. The larger question is whether voters and patients will remember that some politicians view every relationship as a transaction and every private record as a resource to be mined. Trust once broken is hard to rebuild. In medicine, it should never have been for sale in the first place.

The corporate press had its talking points loaded before President Trump finished speaking Thursday night. Nothing new here. We already knew about foreign interference. The data was public anyway. No votes were changed. By Friday afternoon, the White House had done something previous Republican administrations never had the spine or the speed to do. It published a point-by-point rebuttal of every one of those talking points, with receipts.

The president’s primetime address unveiled newly declassified intelligence on foreign election interference, including the administration’s assessment that China illicitly acquired the voter files of 220 million Americans beginning in the 2020 election cycle, that intelligence agencies knew of the breach in at least 18 states, and that a Department of Homeland Security review found roughly 278,000 non-citizens registered to vote across just the four states that cooperated with the request.

Predictably, the media and Democrat officialdom spent Friday morning working to bury the story. Senator Ed Markey demanded impeachment. Chuck Schumer pronounced the SAVE America Act dead on arrival before the ink on the declassification orders had dried.

Subscribe now

The Double Standard They Cannot Answer

Most White House fact sheets are forgettable. This one contains an argument the press has no response to, which is why you will not see it quoted on CNN.

The favorite dismissal making the rounds is that voter registration data is largely public information, so China vacuuming it up is no scandal. The White House rebuttal turns that claim into a trap. When China obtained comparable data on British voters, the Biden administration answered with sanctions and criminal charges. That happened.

In March 2024, the Justice Department indicted Chinese state hackers and the Treasury sanctioned their front company over intrusions that included the United Kingdom’s Electoral Commission. When Iranian hackers obtained a mere 100,000 American voter files during the 2020 cycle, the Biden Justice Department indicted two Iranian nationals.

So the data was serious enough to sanction Beijing over when it belonged to British voters. It was serious enough to indict Tehran’s hackers over when the haul was 100,000 files. But when the administration says China acquired data on 220 million Americans, suddenly it is all public information and nothing to see. Either the earlier prosecutions were theater, or the current silence is a cover-up. The critics cannot have both.

A Shadow Government, In Their Own Words

The second thing the media wants memory-holed is what the declassified documents say about the people who were supposed to be working for the elected president. The White House release reproduces the document excerpts directly. One intelligence analyst wrote of having

“deliberately massaged our one pending [President’s Daily Brief] to avoid any direct links to the election.”

An FBI official put it even more plainly, writing,

“I’m basically running a shadow government across the FBI at this point”

Sit with that for a moment. These are not the fevered accusations of talk radio. These are the written words of unelected officials describing, in real time, their own effort to decide what a sitting president would be permitted to know about threats to American elections.

The stock media retort, that Trump was president in 2020 and therefore any failure belongs to him, collapses on contact with these documents. A man cannot act on intelligence his own bureaucracy admits to laundering out of his daily brief.

To be clear about what is established and what is alleged, the 220 million figure and the claim that it was concealed from the president are the administration’s characterization of the declassified record, and skeptics have noted that some China-related voter data collection appeared in assessments during the first term. Fair enough.

Let Congress haul the analysts who wrote those emails into public hearings under oath and settish the timeline. That is precisely what accountability looks like, and it is what the president has now ordered the DNI, DOJ, FBI, and CIA to pursue, including potential criminal charges.

Michigan and the Mail

The documents also describe an investigation into Democrat-aligned canvassers in Michigan who allegedly forged voter registrations, submitted applications for people who do not exist, and were paid in gift cards according to the volume of fraudulent registrations they generated in the weeks before the 2020 election.

According to the White House, the Biden Justice Department slow-walked that investigation for years. Every American who was called a conspiracy theorist for suggesting registration fraud occurs should remember which department sat on the file.

On mail-in voting, the White House did not need classified documents at all. The bipartisan Carter-Baker Commission concluded two decades ago that absentee ballots are

“the largest source of potential voter fraud.”

Even the MIT Election Data and Science Lab, no MAGA outfit, acknowledges that fraud appears more frequent with mail voting than with in-person voting. The scandal is not that these vulnerabilities exist. The scandal is that pointing them out got Americans banned from social media for three years.

None of this works without a compliant press, which is why the White House rebuttal matters beyond its contents. For decades the pattern has been fixed. The right makes a claim, the media appoints itself referee, the fact-check becomes the story, and the underlying evidence disappears.

This administration has decided to contest the referee’s chair itself, publishing primary documents and daring the press to engage with them. The press, so far, has declined, which tells you everything about who fears the documents more.

Scripture reminds us that concealment is always temporary.

“For nothing is secret, that shall not be made manifest; neither any thing hid, that shall not be known and come abroad.” (Luke 8:17)

The officials who massaged briefings and boasted of shadow governments believed their words would stay buried in classified archives forever. They were wrong.

Congress now has the documents, the quotes, and the double standard laid out in plain sight. The question is whether Republicans will treat this as another news cycle or as the predicate for prosecutions and for passing the SAVE America Act before the midterms. The voters who were lied to for six years deserve the latter.

The selective outrage of the modern left has rarely been more glaring than in the case of Graham Platner, the presumptive Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate in Maine. Once a rallying cry during the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation hearings and the height of the #MeToo era, the mantra “Believe All Women” now lies discarded on the campaign trail whenever political expediency demands it.

Platner, a Marine veteran and oyster farmer backed by Bernie Sanders, faces credible accounts from multiple women detailing volatile, demeaning, and at times physically intimidating behavior in past relationships. Yet prominent Democrats have closed ranks, offering excuses, deflections, and full-throated endorsements.

This is not mere inconsistency; it reveals a deeper truth about how power, not principle, drives the progressive movement.

Subscribe now

According to reporting, one former girlfriend described Platner grabbing her by the shoulders hard enough to leave marks, jerking her wrist, and twisting her arm to confine her during arguments. Another recounted disturbing comments about dominance and “rape” fantasies toward intruders. These stories emerge alongside revelations of explicit sexting with multiple women after his 2023 marriage and a history of online posts that downplayed sexual assault and victim responsibility.

Democrats who once demanded instant credibility for every accusation now dismiss or minimize these claims. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, who pushed for Al Franken’s resignation over misconduct allegations and decried Republicans for not believing women during the Kavanaugh hearings, has offered little more than a shrug toward Platner.

Her office’s focus remains winning Maine, not reckoning with the pattern of behavior described by the women involved.

“Senate Republicans aren’t even pretending to consider Dr. Ford’s testimony. Rushing a vote sends a clear signal: They don’t value survivors. They don’t believe women.”

That was Gillibrand in 2018. Today, the standard appears far more flexible when the accused aligns with the party’s agenda against Susan Collins.

Representative Ro Khanna, campaigning alongside Platner, delivered a masterclass in cognitive dissonance. He acknowledged the relationships were “toxic and volatile” and urged an apology, yet proclaimed that Democrats “believe in respecting the equality and dignity of women” and that Platner, too, rejects misogyny. The mental gymnastics required to square these statements would impress even the most seasoned political contortionist.

Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, known for aggressive questioning of Kavanaugh over high school yearbook slang, found Platner’s allegations “a lot of nothing,” particularly when one accuser had right-leaning affiliations. The message is unmistakable: credibility depends not on evidence, but on political utility.

This selective blindness extends beyond individual politicians. Platner’s campaign has weathered Reddit posts victim-shaming sexual assault survivors, a controversial tattoo with Nazi associations he once reportedly acknowledged, and other personal controversies. Yet progressive power brokers continue to view him as essential to flipping the Senate.

The irony cuts deep. For years, Democrats weaponized personal allegations to destroy opponents, bypassing due process in the court of public opinion. Now, facing allegations against one of their own, they pivot to redemption narratives, context, and “moving forward.” Where was this nuance when targeting conservatives?

Platner himself has framed the stories as politically motivated attacks, pointing to his personal growth and struggles with PTSD. While grace and redemption have their place in a just society, the left’s sudden embrace of skepticism toward accusers exposes the hollowness of their prior moral posturing.

The Democrat Party’s handling of Platner elevates political victory above consistent standards of character and justice.

Voters in Maine and across the nation should take note. When “Believe All Women” served to advance one agenda, it was sacred. When it threatens another, it becomes disposable. This is not principled governance; it is raw power politics dressed in the language of virtue. The American people deserve better than leaders who apply their principles so selectively.

The preliminary 2025 crime statistics released by the FBI deliver a resounding verdict on the effectiveness of renewed commitment to public safety. Under Director Kash Patel, the data shows the single largest decrease in violent crime and murder since 1937—an almost 90-year record.

With 1.1 million fewer violent crimes reported compared to the prior year, Americans are breathing easier as the results of decisive leadership begin to materialize.

This drop arrives after years of policy experiments that prioritized criminals over victims. The numbers expose the hollowness of soft-on-crime ideologies that dominated many blue cities during the previous administration. What progressive prosecutors and defund-the-police advocates dismissed as mere rhetoric has proven to be reality: when law enforcement is empowered rather than hampered, communities thrive.

The FBI’s early look at 2025 data, compiled from over 17,000 agencies covering 96 percent of the population, paints a picture of broad success across categories.

Subscribe now

Policy Shifts Yield Tangible Results

Director Patel has been candid in crediting the hard work of FBI agents and partners nationwide. From cracking down on welfare fraud rings in Minnesota to pursuing narcotics traffickers and protecting children from predators, the Bureau under new leadership has refocused on core missions. Patel’s internal update highlighted not just statistics but real operations: swift responses to threats, accountability for corrupt officials, and a surge against fraud schemes that drained public resources.

The contrast with prior years could not be starker. During the Biden-Harris era, many urban centers endured spikes in violence amid bail reform experiments, reduced policing, and rhetoric that painted law enforcement as the primary problem. Cities like Minneapolis, reeling from post-George Floyd unrest, became case studies in policy failure. Now, with federal backing for a “back the blue” approach and immigration enforcement removing criminal elements, the tide has turned dramatically.

President Trump’s 2024 campaign emphasis on restoring safety resonates even more powerfully with these numbers in hand. Deportations of criminal illegal aliens and support for local police have contributed to safer streets. Independent analysts note these could mark some of the lowest murder rates in modern U.S. history, suggesting a second “great crime decline” is underway.

Exposing Contradictions in Progressive Governance

One cannot help but note the irony. Those who spent years claiming crime was not a crisis—or blamed it on systemic factors rather than individual choices—now face data that dismantles their narrative. Preliminary reports from 2025 confirm what many conservatives argued all along: deterrence works. Strong borders, prosecution of repeat offenders, and cultural reaffirmation of moral order reduce victimization far more effectively than social spending programs or equity initiatives.

Media outlets that once amplified every uptick in crime under Trump while downplaying surges under Biden now grapple with how to frame this historic improvement. The reluctance of some to credit federal leadership changes reveals more about institutional biases than the data itself.

This success story extends beyond raw numbers. Families in high-crime neighborhoods regain peace of mind. Businesses invest with greater confidence. Churches and community organizations can focus on building rather than merely responding to chaos. The data vindicates constitutional principles that place the protection of life, liberty, and property at the heart of legitimate government.

The Moral Dimension of Public Safety

Scripture reminds us of the enduring responsibility to uphold justice. As the psalmist declares in Psalm 82:3-4, “Defend the poor and fatherless: do justice to the afflicted and needy. Deliver the poor and needy: rid them out of the hand of the wicked.”

Effective governance that shields the vulnerable from violence honors this divine charge.

The historic crime reductions of 2025 represent more than policy wins—they signal a potential cultural reset. With the FBI demonstrating renewed effectiveness and local partners following suit, the nation has an opportunity to reject the failed experiments of the recent past. Americans deserve leaders who prioritize their security over ideological agendas.

As these trends continue, the real test will be whether policymakers double down on what works or allow complacency to erode hard-won gains. For now, the data offers clear encouragement: law, order, and justice remain the surest path to flourishing communities.

Two more Americans are dead after a big rig plowed into traffic on a California highway, and the man behind the wheel is an illegal alien released into the country by the Biden administration. Manvir Singh, a 24-year-old from India who entered the United States illegally in Arizona in 2023, now faces felony charges for vehicular manslaughter with gross negligence, hit-and-run resulting in death or injury, and obstructing or resisting a police officer.

The crash occurred Tuesday afternoon on northbound Highway 99 near the Harney Lane offramp in Lodi, involving Singh’s Freightliner and three other vehicles.

Subscribe now

According to California Highway Patrol reports, Singh’s rig failed to stop, slamming into the rear of a Kia Forte and triggering a chain reaction that left two people dead and several others hospitalized with injuries ranging from moderate to major.

Witnesses described the scene as chaotic, with the big rig skidding off the roadway and striking a guardrail before the multi-vehicle pileup. Singh attempted to flee on foot from the wreckage but was quickly detained nearby. He was booked into the San Joaquin County Jail Tuesday evening with bail set at $185,000 and a court appearance scheduled for Thursday.

This is not an isolated failure of basic road safety. It is the predictable result of years of deliberate policy choices that treat national sovereignty as optional and American lives as expendable collateral. Sources within the Department of Homeland Security confirmed to independent investigators that Singh crossed illegally and was released into the interior pending immigration proceedings.

Now, with ICE requesting that California officials honor a detainer and not release him back onto the streets, the state’s sanctuary policies stand poised to compound the tragedy once again.

California’s political class has long treated immigration enforcement as an abstract political football rather than a matter of public safety. Governor Gavin Newsom and his allies have built a system that shields criminal aliens from federal authorities while ordinary Californians bear the consequences in blood and grief.

The irony is unmistakable: a state that lectures the nation on compassion cannot muster the basic decency to protect its own residents from repeat offenders who should never have been here in the first place.

Nor is this an aberration confined to one highway or one driver. A pattern has emerged in recent years of illegal immigrants from India, often traveling under similar surnames, securing commercial driver’s licenses in sanctuary jurisdictions and then causing catastrophic accidents.

.The Biden administration’s catch-and-release policies flooded the interior with unvetted individuals, many of whom entered the trucking industry without the language proficiency, training, or legal status required to operate safely. Each new tragedy underscores the same uncomfortable truth: borders exist for a reason, and ignoring them invites chaos.

Conservatives have warned for years that mass illegal immigration carries real human costs, not just fiscal ones. Yet the left dismisses such concerns as xenophobia, even as the body count rises. How many more families must receive the knock on the door before elected officials admit that compassion without borders is simply recklessness?

The federal government bears primary responsibility here. By releasing Singh after his illegal entry, authorities effectively handed him the keys to an 80,000-pound weapon on public roads. But California’s refusal to cooperate with ICE turns a federal failure into a state-enabled one. When sanctuary politicians prioritize ideology over enforcement, they become accessories to the very crimes they claim to abhor.

At its core, this story reveals a deeper cultural and moral rot. Government exists to restrain evil and protect the innocent, not to import it and then shield it from accountability. When leaders invert that purpose, the vulnerable pay the price.

As Scripture reminds us in the book of Romans, civil authorities do not bear the sword in vain. “For he is the minister of God to thee for good. But if thou do that which is evil, be afraid; for he beareth not the sword in vain: for he is the minister of God, a revenger to execute wrath upon him that doeth evil.” The failure to wield that sword promptly and decisively against those who break the law through illegal entry and reckless homicide is not mercy. It is injustice.

America has reached a breaking point. The American people did not consent to open borders or to the importation of drivers unqualified for the roads they now dominate. The only path forward is swift deportation, rigorous enforcement of immigration law, and an end to the sanctuary charade that treats illegal aliens as a protected class. Anything less dishonors the dead and endangers the living.

The ultimate conservative and Christian news aggregator with manually curated content from across the internet is now live at jdrucker.com.

And here is the uncomfortable question hovering over every honest voter in the city: Is Los Angeles in such good shape that loyalty to the Democrat Party should outweigh loyalty to the city itself?

The answer is obvious to anyone who has driven through Skid Row, watched the Palisades burn while the mayor was in Ghana, or read the latest hospice fraud indictments. The only remaining question is whether Angelenos will admit it at the ballot box.

• The Los Angeles mayoral primary on June 2, 2026 is a winner-take-all contest if any candidate exceeds fifty percent plus one vote, with no runoff required.

• Recent UCLA Luskin polling shows Karen Bass at 25 percent, Spencer Pratt at 11 percent, and roughly 40 percent of voters still undecided.

• Pratt won the first televised debate decisively, with 89 percent of online respondents declaring him the winner over Bass and Councilwoman Nithya Raman.

• Bass remains under sustained criticism for being abroad during the Palisades Fire and for drained fire-protection reservoirs that worsened the disaster.

• Raman, a Democratic Socialists of America ally, attacked Pratt as a “MAGA candidate” during the debate, a label Pratt rejected by noting the race is officially nonpartisan.

• Pratt has explicitly disavowed national political ambitions and operates without a campaign manager, consultants, or party-machine backing.

• Los Angeles faces a massive structural budget deficit, expanding homelessness, a hospice fraud scandal, and entrenched insider contracting practices.

• Los Angeles has not elected a Republican mayor since Richard Riordan left office in 2001.

• The argument for Pratt is not partisan conversion but a one-election decision to prioritize the city over party loyalty.

The Record Bass and Raman Cannot Defend

Karen Bass was elected in 2022 promising to address homelessness and housing. Three years later, encampments have metastasized, the homeless-industrial complex consumes billions with little to show, and the city’s structural deficit threatens core services. Then came the Palisades Fire. The mayor was out of the country. Fire-protection reservoirs had been drained. Entire neighborhoods burned to the ground while City Hall offered press conferences and advisory committees. One year later, Bass announced that “over 400 homes” were under construction. Roughly seven thousand structures were destroyed.

Nithya Raman occupies the council seat to Bass’s left, which is geographically and ideologically impressive given how far left Bass already sits. Raman has been endorsed by the Democratic Socialists of America. Her solution to fentanyl-driven street homelessness is more housing offers, more services, more spending.

When Pratt suggested during the debate that he would walk under the Harbor Freeway with her to meet the population she proposes to help, and predicted she would be assaulted within minutes, he was making a point that every LAPD officer and emergency room nurse in the city already knows. The population dying on the sidewalks is not waiting for a key to an apartment. They are waiting for the next hit.

Raman’s response to Pratt in the debate was telling. She did not defend her record. She called him a MAGA candidate. That is the entire Los Angeles Democrat playbook in 2026 distilled to a single accusation. The city is collapsing, and the answer from its progressive class is to invoke a national bogeyman.

Why Pratt Is the Strongest Candidate in the Field

Pratt is a registered Republican, and his opponents will not let voters forget it. What they will not say is that he is not a national Republican, not a culture warrior, and not a Trump surrogate. He has stated plainly that he will “never do” national politics. He has no campaign manager, no political consultants, and no party apparatus behind him.

He lost his home in the Palisades Fire. He and his wife are still living in a mobile home while Bass and Raman occupy mansions. His campaign emerged from the ashes of his own neighborhood, not from a donor class looking for a useful vehicle.

His debate performance was not a fluke. Eighty-nine percent of online respondents declared him the winner. He spoke with the directness of a man who has watched the city’s failures consume his own family rather than the rehearsed cadence of a career politician auditioning for the next office. As Pratt himself put it after the debate, “I’m being very strategic to win and save LA, but there’s no strategy when you’re standing in an Airstream on your burned out town. You can’t fake that.”

The Case for Crossover Voting

There are reasons beyond the failures of his opponents for Democrats and independents to give Pratt serious consideration on June 2.

The corruption embedded in Los Angeles governance is not partisan, but it is one-party. Decades of single-party rule have produced an insider’s club where non-competitive contracts, sweetheart deals, and automatic renewals are standard operating procedure. The hospice fraud scandal is only the latest exposed layer. A mayor with ties to the current establishment, however well-intentioned, inherits those entanglements by proximity. Pratt has none. He cannot protect networks he never joined.

A non-Democrat in the mayor’s office would also restore something Los Angeles has not had in a generation, which is institutional friction. The City Council will remain overwhelmingly Democrat regardless of who wins. A Pratt administration would not impose Republican policy on a hostile council. It would, however, place someone in the executive willing to expose what the council would prefer to keep buried. That alone is worth a vote.

And there is the matter of competence under pressure. Bass was abroad during the worst urban disaster in modern Los Angeles history. Pratt was in the wreckage of his own neighborhood. Voters can decide which of those instincts they want occupying the mayor’s office the next time the wind picks up and the hillsides are dry.

One Election, One City

This article is not an attempt to convert Democrats into Republicans. The voters of Los Angeles are who they are, and their long-term political identities are their own. The argument is narrower and more urgent. In this single election, with this particular field, under these specific circumstances, party loyalty produces a worse outcome than civic loyalty. A vote for Bass is a vote for the status quo that produced the Palisades catastrophe. A vote for Raman is a vote for an ideology that has already failed everywhere it has been tried. A vote for Pratt is a vote for the city itself.

Scripture frames the civic obligation with unusual clarity. The prophet Jeremiah, writing to exiles living in a city not their own, instructed them to “seek the peace of the city whither I have caused you to be carried away captives, and pray unto the LORD for it: for in the peace thereof shall ye have peace.” The principle cuts in every direction. The welfare of the city is the welfare of its residents. A vote cast for tribal loyalty over civic welfare is a vote against one’s own neighborhood, one’s own family, one’s own future.

Angelenos do not have to become Republicans on June 2. They only have to be Angelenos first. The party will still be there in November. The city, if current trends continue, may not be.

One source involved in the discussions described the maneuvering, saying the White House is looking for a way to “save face and bring em back in.”

That is a remarkable reversal. In late February, President Trump took to Truth Social to declare that he was directing every federal agency to “IMMEDIATELY CEASE all use of Anthropic’s technology,” adding, “We don’t need it, we don’t want it, and will not do business with them again.”

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth piled on, branding the company “woke” and slapping it with the unprecedented supply chain risk designation, a label normally reserved for hostile foreign actors. Anthropic sued. A federal judge in San Francisco issued a preliminary injunction in the company’s favor in late March. The administration appealed. And now, eight weeks later, the same White House that vowed never to work with Anthropic again is quietly hosting “table reads” with industry on how to walk it all back.

The story matters far beyond the squabble between a Silicon Valley AI lab and the Pentagon. The original fight was triggered by Anthropic’s refusal to sign a contract clause permitting the federal government to use its Claude model for “all lawful purposes.” The company drew two red lines, and they are the kind of red lines that any constitutional conservative ought to read twice before reflexively dismissing.

Subscribe now

Two Lines That Should Not Be Controversial

Anthropic told the Defense Department it would not allow Claude to be deployed for the mass surveillance of Americans, and it would not provide its model for fully autonomous weapons systems that remove human judgment from the decision to kill. The Pentagon refused to accept those carve-outs and demanded unlimited authority over how the technology could be used.

Read those two sentences again, slowly. The federal government insisted, in writing, on the unrestricted right to use a privately developed AI tool for whatever the government later decided was lawful, with no contractual prohibition on turning that tool against the American people themselves or on automating the act of killing without a human in the loop. A private company said no. The administration responded by trying to crush it.

The historic conservative position on questions like these has been clear for two centuries. James Madison warned in Federalist No. 51 that “if men were angels, no government would be necessary,” and that the great difficulty in framing a government was obliging it to control itself.

The Fourth Amendment was written precisely because the Founders understood that an unaccountable surveillance apparatus is a threat to liberty regardless of which party happens to operate it. The principle does not change when the surveiller wears a uniform we like.

The Surveillance Problem Is Not Hypothetical

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has been explicit about why his company drew the line where it did. In a February interview, he pointed out that under current law, recording every conversation in a public space is not technically illegal. What changes when AI is added is scale. Amodei warned that artificial intelligence makes it possible to assemble scattered, individually innocuous data points into a comprehensive picture of any person’s life, automatically and across the entire population, in a way that simply was not possible before.

That is not a left-wing concern. That is the concern of every American who watched the Obama-era IRS target tea party groups, who saw the FBI weaponized against Catholics attending Latin Mass and parents at school board meetings, who lived through the FISA court abuses that produced the Russia collusion hoax, and who observed how readily federal agencies aligned themselves with social media platforms to suppress dissenting speech during the pandemic.

Conservatives spent the better part of a decade warning that the federal surveillance state, once built, would be turned against ordinary citizens regardless of who held office. To now insist that a private company hand the keys to that surveillance state over to whoever happens to run the executive branch, with no contractual limit on how the tool may be used, is to surrender the argument entirely.

Autonomous Weapons and the Question of Human Judgment

The second red line concerns weapons. Anthropic has stated that partially autonomous weapons of the kind currently being used by Ukrainian forces are vital to the defense of free nations, and the company has even acknowledged that fully autonomous systems may eventually be necessary for national defense. Its objection is narrower. Today’s frontier AI systems hallucinate. They make confident errors. They are not reliable enough to be trusted with the decision to take a human life without a human authorizing that decision.

The Department of Defense’s own existing directive on autonomous weapons, DODD 3000.09, requires that all such systems “allow commanders and operators to exercise appropriate levels of human judgment over the use of force.” Anthropic was, in effect, asking the Pentagon to honor in contract what it already claims to honor in policy. The Pentagon refused.

“Thou shalt not kill,” the Sixth Commandment instructs. The Christian moral tradition has spent two thousand years working out the conditions under which the taking of life can be justified, building the just war doctrine of Augustine and Aquinas around the principle that lethal decisions require moral agents capable of judgment, proportionality, and accountability.

Removing the human entirely from the loop, handing the trigger to a statistical model that cannot be cross-examined, repented, or held to account, is not a technical refinement of warfare. It is a category error about what warfare is.

The Selective Application of the “Woke” Label

Hegseth’s branding of Anthropic as “woke AI” deserves scrutiny on its own terms. The word has done an enormous amount of useful work over the past decade in identifying a genuine ideological project, but it loses its meaning when it is stretched to cover anything the speaker happens to dislike. A company that refuses to provide its product for warrantless surveillance of the American population and for kill decisions made without human authorization is not engaging in critical race theory. It is engaging in something closer to old-fashioned republican virtue.

One of the more telling details in the recent reporting is that OpenAI and Google have both signed Pentagon contracts under the “all lawful purposes” standard, while claiming privately that they too honor the same two limits Anthropic insisted on writing into the contract itself. The difference is that Anthropic wanted the limits in ink. The others were happy to leave them as gentlemen’s agreements with an executive branch that has shown, in administrations of both parties, a remarkable elasticity in its definition of “lawful.”

The Climbdown

White House chief of staff Susie Wiles and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent met with Amodei earlier this month for what both sides described as a productive conversation. The Treasury Department, which had begun offboarding Anthropic products, is reportedly among the agencies looking for an offramp. The proposed executive action would allow agencies to work around the Pentagon’s supply chain risk designation, even as the underlying contractual dispute remains unresolved.

The administration is discovering what large institutions usually discover when they pick fights with technically superior products. Claude is currently the only large language model deployed on the Pentagon’s classified networks. The military is still using it, but on older, more restrictive terms of service, and is not receiving the latest model updates. The cost of the principle, it turns out, is being paid in capability.

What the Right Should Take From This

The instinct to cheer when a “Silicon Valley” company gets bloodied by a Republican administration is understandable after a decade of tech-industry hostility toward conservative speech and conservative voters. But the question worth asking is whether the precedent being set serves long-term conservative ends.

If the federal government can designate a U.S. company a national security risk because that company refuses to authorize the unrestricted use of its product against American citizens and for unsupervised lethal decisions, then the same mechanism is available to every future administration. The Biden White House that pressured social media platforms to suppress speech, the Garland Justice Department that mobilized federal resources against parents and pro-life advocates, the Lerner-era IRS that targeted political enemies, all of these would have welcomed a tool that allowed them to treat any private firm refusing to cooperate as a threat to national security.

“Put not your trust in princes, nor in the son of man, in whom there is no help.” The psalmist’s warning is not a counsel of cynicism but of structural humility. Power passes from one hand to another. The constitutional and contractual limits we tolerate today become the limits used against us tomorrow.

The White House appears to have figured out, two months and one preliminary injunction later, that the fight was not worth the prize. That is a welcome correction. The harder question is whether the principles at stake will be remembered the next time an administration of either party decides it would prefer a cooperative private sector to a principled one.

This is not organic admiration. It is a coordinated narrative push, one that seeks to rebrand the Chinese Communist Party as the responsible adult in the room while the West supposedly descends into chaos.

Subscribe now

The timing is no accident. As American influence faces real challenges, legacy media appears eager to prepare the public for a multipolar future in which Beijing plays a starring role. The result is propaganda so clumsy it borders on self-parody, yet it reveals a deeper discomfort with American exceptionalism and a quiet willingness to flirt with collectivist alternatives.

Consider the headlines. The Guardian informs readers that China is now the “good guy” on AI while the United States pursues a reckless “wild west” approach. The Wall Street Journal casts Beijing as the ethical actor in pharmaceutical research. CBS highlights Chinese leadership in EVs. Bloomberg suggests China might assume a larger role in global governance. The Financial Times notes foreign carmakers scrambling to adopt Chinese technology to stay relevant. These stories do not merely report developments; they frame them as proof of superior Chinese wisdom and discipline.

• MSM outlets publish near-daily features portraying China as superior in AI ethics, EV tech, drug research, and global leadership.

• A viral “Chinamaxxing” or “becoming Chinese” meme shows Western youth embracing superficial habits like drinking hot water and wearing slippers, amplified by state-friendly coverage.

• Polls claim American favorability toward China has doubled, presented as spontaneous public sentiment rather than shaped consensus.

• Articles avoid scrutiny of China’s surveillance state, forced labor allegations, territorial aggression, or economic coercion.

• The narrative aligns with Beijing’s vision of “multipolarity” and “multilateralism,” code for diluting Western-led institutions.

• Historical parallels include past media praise for China’s COVID controls and sudden cultural “coolness.”

• Critics note the uniformity across legacy outlets, suggesting top-down messaging rather than independent journalism.

The “Chinamaxxing” phenomenon deserves special attention. Social media clips depict twenty-somethings romanticizing Chinese daily life, racking up millions of views. An Associated Press piece treats the trend as a genuine “soft power moment,” complete with a suspiciously fresh Wikipedia entry. State media in Beijing has predictably embraced it, with spokesmen welcoming the cultural interest.

Yet the authenticity is questionable. Similar campaigns have surfaced before, often tied to influencer networks or coordinated amplification. What begins as ironic meme-making can quickly serve as cover for deeper influence operations.

Underlying the surface-level puffery is a more serious project: acclimating Western audiences to a world order in which China holds greater sway. For years, globalist institutions have spoken of multipolarity as an inevitable and desirable evolution. Xi Jinping’s speeches on “equitable globalization” and “true multilateralism” receive respectful coverage.

The subtext is clear—American unipolarity was messy and arrogant; a Chinese-influenced system promises stability and inclusion. Left unmentioned are the domestic realities of social credit systems, censorship, demographic collapse, and the CCP’s unbroken record of broken promises on reform.

This pivot exposes a telling contradiction in elite thinking. The same voices that once warned of authoritarian dangers now downplay them when the authoritarian power offers an alternative to populism at home. Disillusionment with domestic institutions is real, fueled by inflation, cultural upheaval, and policy failures. But trading one set of elites for another—swapping coastal progressives for party cadres—hardly constitutes progress. It merely exchanges familiar hypocrisies for unfamiliar ones wrapped in exotic packaging.

History offers cautionary parallels. In the 1930s, some Western intellectuals romanticized Soviet Russia as a bold experiment. In the 1970s, others found Mao’s China intriguing. Each time, the human cost—famines, purges, cultural destruction—was minimized until it could no longer be ignored. Today’s China-maxxing risks repeating the pattern. Technological prowess and infrastructure projects do not erase the fundamental incompatibility between Communist central planning and human flourishing rooted in liberty and moral order.

Scripture reminds us that earthly kingdoms rise and fall under divine sovereignty. As the prophet Daniel declared in the face of Babylonian power, “He removeth kings, and setteth up kings” (Daniel 2:21).

No regime, however slick its public relations or impressive its high-speed rail, escapes accountability before the God who judges nations by righteousness rather than GDP or drone endurance. Christians have a duty to discern propaganda that glamorizes systems hostile to the dignity of the image-bearer.

The media’s overdrive on China ultimately says less about Beijing’s virtues than about the West’s internal fractures. When institutions lose confidence in their own founding principles—limited government, individual rights, transcendent moral law—they cast about for alternatives. The danger lies not in acknowledging Chinese achievements where they exist, but in allowing envy or fatigue to blind us to the authoritarian core. A truly conservative and Christian response rejects both naive isolation and uncritical admiration. It insists on truth-telling about all powers, great and small, while anchoring hope in the unchanging kingdom that transcends every multipolar scheme.

Nearly one in ten babies born in the United States in 2023 entered the world as the child of a mother who had no legal right to be here or was present only on a temporary visa. According to data analyzed by Pew Research Center, out of 3.6 million total births that year, some 320,000 were to unauthorized immigrant mothers or those here on short-term legal status. Of those, roughly 245,000 came from mothers who were in the country illegally with fathers who were neither citizens nor lawful permanent residents. Another 15,000 involved temporary-status mothers with similarly non-citizen fathers. The remaining 60,000 were born to illegal immigrant mothers paired with citizen or green-card fathers.

These figures represent the highest number of such births since 2010, arriving after years of porous borders and lax enforcement under the previous administration. The timing is no coincidence. Record illegal crossings and expansive use of temporary protections swelled the population of non-citizens inside the country, directly feeding higher birth totals among that group.

Subscribe now

While native-born American fertility continues its long decline, this segment of births has surged, raising fundamental questions about who belongs to the American polity and on what basis.

The practice commonly called “anchor baby” citizenship rests on a contested reading of the 14th Amendment’s Citizenship Clause. Ratified after the Civil War to secure the rights of freed slaves, the amendment declares that “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States.”

The key phrase—“subject to the jurisdiction thereof”—was never intended to extend automatic citizenship to the children of foreign nationals whose primary allegiance lies elsewhere. Diplomatic immunity cases and the original congressional debates make that plain. Yet modern policy has stretched the clause into an open invitation, effectively subsidizing chain migration and welfare access through the automatic legal status granted to these infants.

President Trump recognized the distortion early in his second term and issued an executive order on his first day aimed at restoring the original understanding. The order directs agencies to deny automatic citizenship to children born to parents who are neither citizens nor lawful permanent residents. Lower courts blocked it, and the Supreme Court heard arguments on April 1, 2026, in the case that could settle the matter.

A ruling upholding the order would reassert that citizenship is not a birthright conferred casually on those whose parents owe no permanent loyalty to the republic. It would also close a loophole long exploited by birth tourism operators and foreign governments alike.

Critics of reform warn that ending the practice would create a subclass of stateless children, but the data suggest the opposite problem. The current system has already produced millions of U.S.-born citizens whose illegal-alien parents remain removable yet gain powerful claims to remain through their children’s status. Those children, in turn, become vehicles for family sponsorship once they reach adulthood. The welfare magnet is equally real: citizen infants qualify for benefits that indirectly support households headed by non-citizens, shifting costs onto American taxpayers already stretched by declining native birth rates.

National security adds another layer. Reports of Chinese nationals timing births in the United States to secure future options for their children have circulated for years. A child raised in China yet holding American citizenship could later serve as an asset for influence operations or espionage without the scrutiny applied to non-citizens.

Similar dynamics exist with other adversarial states. When nearly ten percent of a nation’s births occur outside the full jurisdiction contemplated by the Founders, the body politic itself begins to lose coherence.

The Pew numbers arrive at a moment when overall U.S. fertility has hit historic lows. Provisional CDC data for 2025 show births continuing their slide. In that context, the persistence of high anchor-baby totals stands out not as a sign of national vitality but as evidence of demographic replacement driven by policy failure.

Americans have every right to ask why their government continues to import a future citizenry through the back door of maternity wards while discouraging its own people from having children through economic pressures and cultural signals.

Defenders of the status quo treat birthright citizenship as an immutable sacrament, yet the historical record shows otherwise. The clause was never meant to reward illegal entry or temporary presence. Restoring its proper limits would not strip anyone of existing citizenship; it would simply prevent future automatic grants that undermine the very meaning of membership in a sovereign nation. Congress could codify the change through legislation if the Court hesitates, but the executive action already tested in the courts offers the swiftest path.

The American experiment depends on a people bound by shared loyalty and consent to the constitutional order. When that order is gamed through deliberate violations of immigration law followed by strategic reproduction, the consent of the governed frays. The data from 2023 lay bare the scale of the distortion. Whether the Supreme Court will vindicate the plain text and original intent of the 14th Amendment remains to be seen, but the public case for reform has never been clearer.

Considering the Supreme Court appears to be leaning towards reversing President Trump’s executive order, it’s time to add this to the list of reasons why Senate Majority Leader John Thune must end the filibuster and get legislation defining what “subject to the jurisdiction” actually means.

When the FBI distributed a bulletin last month warning that Iran had reportedly considered launching drone strikes from a vessel off the California coast, the response from Sacramento was about what you’d expect from a government that has confused virtue signaling with governance. Governor Gavin Newsom took to social media to announce he was in “constant coordination with security and intelligence officials.”

Subscribe now

The Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department declared an “elevated level of readiness.” Police departments in Oakland, San Francisco, and San Jose issued statements of reassurance. And then, more or less, everyone went back to what they were doing.

The White House moved to tamp down alarm. Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt insisted the bulletin amounted to a single unverified tip, and that no threat from Iran to the American homeland had ever existed. Several California-based federal law enforcement officials called the warning “not actionable.” The story retreated from the news cycle within days.

But the episode deserves more scrutiny than it received, because the most important question it raised was never seriously answered: not whether Iran was about to attack California, but whether California — or anyone — is actually prepared if a future threat is real.

The FBI bulletin itself was careful in its language. The alert acknowledged that authorities had no information on the timing, method, target, or perpetrators of any such attack, and that Iran’s interest was described as “aspirational” rather than operational. Former DHS official Tom Warrick reinforced that distinction, noting that a large-scale Shahed strike on California is not feasible, but that small-scale hobby drones modified to carry explosives represent a genuine and pre-existing homeland security concern. That is an important clarification, but it should give cold comfort rather than warm reassurance.

Iran’s strategic calculus, as the conflict with the United States has deepened, runs along asymmetric lines. Experts have noted that Iran would likely pursue something more spectacular than a drone strike — perhaps an assassination or a cyberattack — if it decided to escalate against the American homeland, and that it currently views its stranglehold on the Strait of Hormuz as a winning strategy. But “currently” is doing a great deal of work in that sentence.

Wars do not follow the schedules of think-tank fellows, and a regime with nothing left to lose is precisely the kind of regime that starts reaching for options it would otherwise consider imprudent. Iran has an extensive documented presence in Mexico and South America, maintains relationships with various non-state networks, and now has both the drones and the incentive to act.

Which returns us to the structural problem hiding behind the reassuring press statements. Current federal law limits the authority to actively disable or intercept drones to specific federal agencies, including the Departments of Defense and Homeland Security. State and local law enforcement agencies generally lack independent authority to jam or seize unmanned aerial systems without federal coordination. Local officials have pressed Congress to expand counter-drone authority for years, arguing the proliferation of commercial drones has long outpaced the legal framework meant to govern them. Congress has not acted with any urgency.

So the picture is this: California has major port infrastructure, military installations, energy facilities, and dense urban centers along a coastline that stretches nearly nine hundred miles. Its state government, whatever its other enthusiasms, has not developed independent counter-drone capability. Its local police departments, when asked what they would do in response to a drone threat, issued statements about coordination and monitoring. The federal agencies with actual interdiction authority are stretched across every theater of an ongoing military conflict. And the administration’s official position, when the FBI’s own bulletin surfaced, was to demand its retraction.

Defense analysts have pointed out that the United States possesses the capability to defeat incoming drone threats, including both quadcopters and Shahed-style loitering munitions, but have expressed less certainty about whether there is sufficient depth of counter-drone munitions and systems to sustain that defense under conditions of simultaneous demand. That is a polite way of saying that the capacity that exists has already been tasked. Ukraine taught the world that drone warfare is cheap, scalable, and exhausting to defend against. Iran took notes.

The Book of Proverbs instructs that a prudent man sees danger and hides himself, while the simple pass on and suffer for it. The standard applied by Sacramento — no imminent threat, no actionable intelligence, coordination ongoing — is not prudence. It is the administrative equivalent of passing on. When the next warning arrives, it may not announce itself in an FBI bulletin first.

What California actually needs is not another working group and not another coordinated statement. It needs the state legislature to press Congress, loudly and persistently, for expanded counter-drone authority at the state and local level. It needs its National Guard to train specifically for drone interdiction scenarios, not merely as a peacetime talking point but as a genuine operational readiness exercise. It needs its port authorities and energy infrastructure operators to conduct vulnerability assessments against low-altitude UAV threats. And it needs its governor to stop treating homeland security as a media event and start treating it as the governor of the most strategically exposed state in the union would.

The threat may have been aspirational this time. The preparedness gap it revealed is entirely real.

The argument for banning Muslim public prayer has a surface-level logic that appeals to those who are watching, with growing alarm, the deliberate Islamization of the public square. They are not wrong to be alarmed. But they are wrong about the solution.

The Problem Is Real — The Remedy Is Poison

Let us not pretend there is nothing worth discussing here. The practice of public street prayer by Muslim groups in Western cities is not, as its apologists insist, an innocent and purely spiritual exercise. Islamic scholars and even prominent religious figures within Muslim communities have acknowledged that Muslims in Muslim-majority nations are not generally obligated to pray immediately and on the street, and that observant Muslims in those countries typically wait until they are home or at a mosque to pray. The five-times-daily street prayer that has become a flashpoint in European and American cities, blocking traffic and public thoroughfares, is not an ancient religious necessity transplanted wholesale to the West — it is, in many cases, something different.

Observers on both sides of the debate have noted that street prayer in Western cities carries a quality of deliberate public witness — what one analyst described as “a well-studied act of religious propaganda,” a demonstration to the unbelieving West that Islam has arrived and intends to be seen. Even prominent Muslim scholars have advised worshippers to “avoid praying on roads and in places where people walk and gather,” and the practice of street prayer has been described as “a divisive issue even among Muslims.” This is not a fringe interpretation. It is the acknowledgment that blocking public sidewalks and streets with religious observance five times daily is a political act as much as a spiritual one — and it should be treated accordingly, through existing public nuisance and noise ordinance law, which is already well-equipped to handle it.

The amplified call to prayer presents a similar, and more legally tractable, problem. Cities and nations across the Western world — from Germany and France to the Netherlands and the United Kingdom — have moved not to ban the call to prayer outright but to regulate its volume, timing, and broadcast, treating it as they would any other amplified noise in a residential neighborhood. This is the correct response. A mosque broadcasting the adhan at 3 a.m. at concert-level decibels is a public nuisance problem, not a theological one, and noise ordinances that apply equally to church bells and mosque loudspeakers are both constitutional and enforceable.

But banning Muslim prayer itself? That is an entirely different category of action, and those calling for it should be pressed to explain, clearly and without evasion, what they are actually proposing.

The First Amendment Does Not Have a Religion Exception

The First Amendment to the Constitution reads plainly: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” The Supreme Court has consistently held that the Free Exercise Clause forbids Congress from prohibiting the free exercise of religion, and that this protection applies to the states through the Fourteenth Amendment. The Free Exercise Clause protects citizens’ right to practice their religion as they please, so long as the practice does not run afoul of a compelling governmental interest related to public morals or safety.

This protection is not conditional on whether we like the religion in question. It is not a courtesy extended to faiths that have earned our approval. The Founders did not write a Free Exercise Clause for comfortable, popular religions — they wrote it because they had lived under regimes that wielded government power against minority religious expression, and they wanted no part of that inheritance on American soil. Many early settlers made the dangerous journey from Europe to the New World specifically to escape religious persecution, and the protections built into the First Amendment were drawn directly from that experience.

Now comes the critical question that the ban-Muslim-prayer crowd never seems to want to answer: if we grant government the authority to prohibit the public religious exercise of one faith, on what constitutional or logical principle do we prevent that authority from being applied to another? The principle being established is not “ban Islam.” The principle being established is “government may ban public religious exercise.” And that principle does not expire when the political winds shift. It waits.

Those who believe that conservative Christian governance will be permanent in America — and is therefore the only political force that would ever wield such a ban — have a dangerously short memory. Courts change. Majorities shift. Administrations turn over. The legal infrastructure you build to suppress Muslim prayer today is the legal infrastructure a different administration uses to regulate, restrict, and ultimately suppress Christian prayer tomorrow. A government powerful enough to ban one religion’s public worship is powerful enough to ban yours.

This is not hypothetical concern-trolling. The Supreme Court has already held that government-sponsored prayer in public schools is unconstitutional. Progressive activists have repeatedly attempted to use noise ordinances, public assembly regulations, and “hate speech” frameworks to curtail Christian witness in the public square. Street preachers have been arrested. Christian groups have been denied permits. Churches have been sued. The machinery of suppression is already being assembled against Christians — and some conservatives now want to hand that machinery a constitutional precedent.

The Distinction That Must Be Maintained: Sharia Law Versus Religious Practice

Here is where clarity of thought becomes essential, because the muddling of two very distinct concepts is precisely what is driving this bad policy impulse. There is a legitimate and necessary argument to be made that Sharia law — the legal and political governance system derived from Islamic jurisprudence — is incompatible with the American constitutional order and should have no standing in American courts. Mainstream Muslim American scholars have themselves acknowledged that Sharia’s criminal law components can only properly be applied in Muslim-majority countries with Sharia courts. Legislative efforts to ensure that American courts apply American law, not foreign religious legal systems, are entirely defensible on constitutional grounds.

But Sharia law and Muslim prayer are not the same thing. Not even close. One is a system of governance that competes with and seeks to supplant constitutional law. The other is a religious practice protected by constitutional law. Conflating them is either intellectual laziness or deliberate misdirection, and either way, it leads to policy catastrophe. We can — and should — be absolutely clear that no American court will enforce Sharia-derived judgments. We can — and should — resist the cultural and political pressure to accommodate Sharia frameworks in our institutions. None of that requires touching the Free Exercise Clause. None of it requires banning prayer.

The Street Is Not the Mosque: Understanding What Public Prayer Signals

Conservatives who are genuinely grappling with the cultural implications of Islam’s growing visibility in America are not wrong to note something unusual about the phenomenon of street prayer in the West. The practice cannot be justified as a strict religious obligation — Islamic jurisprudence explicitly permits the combining of prayers when circumstances require it, meaning that blocking a public street at noon is not, in fact, religiously necessary. The display is, at least in part, a statement of presence and permanence — a cultural and political signal dressed in religious garb.

Understanding it as such clarifies both the problem and the response. If street prayer is in part a claim on public space — a demonstration that Islam has arrived in the West and intends to shape the culture — then the answer is not to suppress it through government prohibition, which would both fail constitutionally and invite persecution of all public religious expression. The answer is to respond in kind, but better.

Christians in America have largely retreated from the public square, content to confine their faith to Sunday mornings and private conscience. This retreat has been culturally catastrophic. The public space vacated by a privatized Christianity does not remain neutral — it is occupied by something else. We are watching that occupation happen in real time.

The Apostle Paul did not pray quietly in a corner so as not to offend the Athenians. He stood in the Areopagus. The early Church did not hide its worship behind closed doors when the culture around it was hostile — it went out into the streets and the marketplaces and the synagogues and proclaimed what it believed to be true. Scripture itself commands the public expression of faith: “Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father which is in heaven.” (Matthew 5:16) The answer to Islam’s public assertiveness is not government suppression — it is Christian boldness.

If Muslims gathering in Washington Square Park for public prayer represents a claim on the culture, the Christian response is not to call the government to stop them. It is to gather in greater numbers, in greater faith, in even greater public witness — not to confront or harass, but to demonstrate by example what a people shaped by the Gospel of Jesus Christ actually looks like. The public square will not be won by whoever successfully weaponizes the government against the other. It will be won by whoever occupies it most faithfully and most visibly over time.

The Road Not Taken in Europe — And the Lesson It Offers

Europe offers a cautionary tale that runs in both directions, and American conservatives should pay careful attention to both halves of it. On one side, Europe’s near-total abdication of its Christian cultural heritage — enforced by a secular establishment deeply hostile to public religious expression — created a vacuum that is now being filled by a resurgent Islam emboldened precisely by the weakness of the culture it is entering. On the other side, France’s 2011 ban on street prayer, enacted after far-right pressure, did not slow the cultural momentum of Islam in France — it simply drove the practice indoors and handed Islamist organizers a persecution narrative that proved extraordinarily effective for recruitment and solidarity.

France banned prayers on the streets of Paris in 2011, but this legislative victory for critics of street prayer produced no lasting cultural result and instead inflamed the very dynamic it sought to resolve. A government prohibition on religious practice, when applied to a community that already perceives itself as under siege, does not produce assimilation. It produces entrenchment. It strengthens the identity politics of victimhood that Islamist organizers depend upon to maintain community cohesion and resist integration.

Americans who want to slow the spread of Islamist influence in their communities would do far better to understand what actually makes Islam’s public presence in the West politically potent, and what genuinely weakens it, rather than reaching reflexively for government bans that fail on contact with constitutional reality.

What We Should Actually Do

The conservative response to the challenge of Islam’s growing cultural assertiveness in America should be threefold.

First, enforce the laws that already exist. Public nuisance statutes, noise ordinances, public assembly regulations, and traffic laws apply to everyone equally. A religious group blocking a public street or broadcasting amplified sound at prohibited hours is subject to existing law, and that law should be applied without fear. No new legislation targeting religious practice is needed — only the will to enforce what already exists without making special exemptions based on religious identity.

Second, draw the Sharia line clearly and hold it. American courts apply American law. That is not negotiable, and legislation making it explicit is entirely appropriate. The legal, political, and governance dimensions of Islamist ideology are proper subjects of legislative action. The prayer mat is not.

Third — and most urgently — Christians must reclaim the public square. Not through harassment of those with whom they disagree, not through the theater of disruption, but through the quiet, consistent, and unashamed public witness of lives and communities shaped by the Gospel. Group prayer in public parks. Visible charity. Engagement in civic life that does not hide its animating faith. The Church in America has enormous cultural resources it has largely chosen not to deploy. The moment calls for their deployment.

“If my people, which are called by my name, shall humble themselves, and pray, and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways; then will I hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin, and will heal their land.” (2 Chronicles 7:14)

The promise of that verse is not made to governments that ban the right religions. It is made to a people who pray. The solution to a culture being claimed by another faith is not the suppression of prayer — it is the intensification of our own. The First Amendment that protects Muslim prayer in public is the same First Amendment that has protected Christian prayer in public for two hundred and thirty years. Tear it down for one, and you have torn it down for both. The wiser course — the braver course — is to fill the public square with the thing we actually believe, and trust that the truth, stated plainly and lived faithfully, is more than sufficient to hold its ground.

Senate Majority Leader John Thune has acknowledged the core problem plainly enough: four Republican senators remain opposed to eliminating the filibuster. Four. Not fourteen, not forty — four. That is not a wall. That is a door with a single deadbolt. The only question is whether Thune has the will, and the skill, to find the key.

Subscribe now

To be clear about the math: Thune does not need to convince all four senators. He needs one. A single member of his own caucus persuaded to put the interests of the American people above procedural sentiment — that is all that stands between the Senate’s stated agenda and its actual accomplishment. One senator. One conversation, perhaps several, conducted with the full weight of majority leadership behind it.

“Thune does not need to convince all four. He needs one. That is not a wall — it is a door with a single deadbolt.”

That is what leadership looks like. It is not comfortable. It is not the kind of thing done over polite lunches and collegial handshakes. Real whipping of votes requires arm-twisting, horse-trading, pressure applied where pressure is warranted, and a willingness to spend political capital accumulated over years in the chamber. Thune has that capital. The question being asked of him now — and increasingly loudly — is why he refuses to spend it.

The filibuster, in its current form, is not a constitutional protection. It is a Senate rule — one that has been modified, reformed, and worked around repeatedly throughout American history. The nuclear option, invoked for judicial nominees in 2013 and executive branch nominees before that, demonstrated that the Senate’s rules are neither sacred nor immovable when the legislative moment demands action. Republicans know this. They have benefited from these rule changes directly. The argument that the filibuster represents some untouchable constitutional architecture simply does not hold.

What does hold is the legitimate concern that eliminating the legislative filibuster sets a precedent that a future Democratic Senate majority could exploit. That is a real consideration and deserves honest engagement, not dismissal. But here is the counterargument those four senators must weigh: a Senate that cannot pass the agenda the American people elected it to pass is not protecting democracy — it is undermining it. Procedural purity is cold comfort when the business of governing goes undone.

The SAVE America Act is not a fringe priority cooked up in committee. It represents a significant piece of the platform on which Republicans ran and won. Allowing it to die — or languish indefinitely — because of intraparty hesitation over Senate rules would be a failure of governance of the first order. The voters sent a majority to Washington. That majority deserves to function as one.

“If the Majority Leader cannot or will not bring the necessary vote into alignment, the Constitution offers another avenue: the President of the Senate.”

And so we arrive at the second option — the one that should not be necessary but may become unavoidable. If the Majority Leader cannot, or will not, bring that necessary vote into alignment, the Constitution offers another avenue: the President of the Senate, Vice President JD Vance.

The role of President of the Senate is not ceremonial wallpaper. It carries real constitutional weight, and in a closely divided chamber it carries real procedural power. Vance has already demonstrated he understands this. As an active and engaged Vice President, he has made clear that he is not content to be a passive tie-breaker on the margins of Senate business. He is a political actor with a mandate and an agenda, and that agenda aligns precisely with what the SAVE America Act is designed to accomplish.

If Thune’s leadership proves insufficient to move the necessary votes — if the caucus cannot be organized around the clear will of the party’s electoral mandate — then Vance must be willing to use every tool available to him as President of the Senate to change the rules and clear the path. The Vice President has the ability to make rulings from the chair, and majorities have the ability to sustain those rulings. This is not a radical interpretation of Senate procedure. It is the procedure, applied with intention.

Critics will call this a power grab. They will invoke norms and traditions and the sanctity of Senate deliberation. But norms have never been a one-way ratchet applied only to Republicans when they hold power. The Senate is a majoritarian institution struggling under a counter-majoritarian rule. Correcting that imbalance — so that the people’s elected representatives can actually govern — is not an assault on the institution. It is the institution doing its job.

None of this reflects ill on John Thune personally. He is a skilled legislator with a long record of Senate service, and he faces genuine internal pressures from members of his own caucus who hold sincere views about the filibuster’s value. But the measure of majority leadership is not how well a leader manages comfortable unanimity — it is how effectively a leader builds consensus when consensus is hard. That is the test Thune faces now.

He has time. But not unlimited time. Legislative momentum is a perishable commodity, and every week the SAVE America Act sits idle is a week that opposition can organize, that public attention drifts, and that the window for passage narrows. The case for acting now — for finding that one vote and ending this procedural standoff — is a case that strengthens with urgency, not patience.

So here is the simple, clear choice before the Republican Senate: John Thune leads — genuinely leads, with everything the Majority Leader’s office commands — and delivers the filibuster’s end through the regular work of coalition-building. Or JD Vance, as President of the Senate, steps into the breach and ensures that the chamber’s rules serve the majority that the American people elected. One way or another, this gets done.

The only unacceptable outcome is the one where nothing happens at all — where four senators hold a majority agenda hostage indefinitely while leadership shrugs and the SAVE America Act quietly fades from the calendar. The American people did not vote for that. They voted for results. It is past time to deliver them.

Several prominent scientists and researchers in the U.S. have reportedly died or gone missing over the past year, fueling speculation about whether some of the disappearances may have occurred under suspicious circumstances.

William Neil McCasland, a 68-year-old retired Air Force major general who had knowledge of UFOs, went missing in New Mexico on Feb. 27, NewsNation reported. Republican Tennessee Rep. Tim Burchett told the Daily Mail on Sunday that he believes there may be a pattern emerging of other researchers throughout the nation similarly disappearing “under suspicious circumstances.”

“There have been several others throughout the country that have disappeared under suspicious circumstances,” Burchett told the outlet. “I think we ought to be paying attention to it.”

The congressman also indicated that “the numbers seem very high in these certain areas of research,” adding “I think we’d better be paying attention, and I don’t think we should trust our government.” He went on to claim that researchers with knowledge about UFOs are usually “very secretive about what they know.”

“Everybody’s talking about the UFO stuff,” the Tennessee Republican told the Daily Mail. “Those folks are very secretive about what they know. So I suspect very much that [McCasland] was involved in some of that.”

Burchett’s office did not respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.

McCasland’s wife, Susan, asserted that no “foul play” was suspected in her husband’s disappearance, but added that he had left their house with just a pair of boots and his .38-caliber revolver on the day he disappeared, according to the Daily Mail.

Still, investigative journalist Ross Coulthart suggested during a Sunday appearance on “NewsNation Prime” that “foul play” may be a possibility in relation to McCasland’s disappearance.

“We have to ask, now, [about] the possibility of foul play — is there somebody who has interceded to take the general out of the picture?” Coulthart told NewsNation. “He was a man with some of the most sensitive U.S. military intelligence secrets in his head, especially particle beam technology.”

Additionally, Monica Reza went missing on June 22, 2025 while on a hike in the Angeles National Forest, per a Facebook page which describes its mission as aiming to “raising awareness and organizing volunteer efforts” to help find her. Reza previously served as a material scientist at Aerojet Rocketdyne, which notably was funded by NASA and the Air Force Research Laboratory for several years, The New York Post (NY Post) reported.

McCasland had served as a material wing director at the Air Force Research Laboratory Space Vehicle Directorate, and commander of Phillips Research Site in Kirtland Air Force Base from 2001 to 2004, which would directly relate to Reza’s area of research, according to the NY Post.

While it currently is unclear whether the McCasland’s disappearance and Reza’s disappearance are connected, the Bernalillo County Sheriff’s Department told Newsweek on March 18 that “Detectives are looking into this to see if there is any connection at all.”

Moreover, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) announced on Dec. 16, 2025 that Nuno Loureiro, a former professor of nuclear science and engineering and of physics at the university, had died at age 47 after sustaining gunshot wounds. MIT President Sally Kornbluth wrote in a letter that “in the face of this shocking loss, our hearts go out to his wife and their family and to his many devoted students, friends and colleagues.”

Loureiro was a “lauded theoretical physicist and fusion scientist,” who had been a part of MIT’s faculty since 2016, and his research focused on addressing “complex problems lurking at the center of fusion vacuum chambers and at the edges of the universe,” according to MIT’s statement. Authorities later identified Loureiro’s shooter as Claudio Manuel Neves Valente, who was also the suspect in the Dec. 13, 2025 mass shooting at Brown University, CBS News reported in February.

Carl Grillmair, 67, a prominent astrophysicist at California Institute of Technology’s IPAC Science and Data Center for Astronomy and Planetary Science, was killed at gunpoint on Feb. 16 at his home in Llano, California, The New York Post reported. Grillmair rose to prominence for his research on the “collisions of galaxies and the search for water on planets outside our solar system,” according to ABC7.

Grillmair was also the recipient of the 2011 NASA Exceptional Scientific Achievement Medal and numerous NASA Group Achievement Awards, according to a Feb. 21 statement from Caltech.

A body recovered from Lake Quannapowitt in Wakefield, Massachusetts on March 17 is believed to belong to Jason Thomas, a 45-year-old scientist with multinational pharmaceutical corporation Novartis, who suddenly disappeared on Dec. 12, 2025, People reported. The Wakefield Police Department said in a March 17 statement posted to Facebook that no foul play is currently suspected in the incident.

Thomas’ wife, Kristen Bartoli, previously stated her husband had been struggling with both of his parents dying before he disappeared, according to People.

All content created by the Daily Caller News Foundation, an independent and nonpartisan newswire service, is available without charge to any legitimate news publisher that can provide a large audience. All republished articles must include our logo, our reporter’s byline and their DCNF affiliation. For any questions about our guidelines or partnering with us, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.

Read More: https://americafirstreport.com/democrats-block-funding-for-fifth-time-as-shutdown-ties-second-longest-record/

Senate Majority Leader John Thune has made his position clear: the SAVE America Act will hit the Senate floor next week, but it will do so under rules that all but guarantee its failure. The bill, which President Donald Trump has declared must take precedence over everything else, demands straightforward safeguards for American elections—proof of citizenship to register and photo identification to vote. These are not radical ideas. Polling consistently shows overwhelming approval across party lines, yet the path forward in the Senate reveals more about internal Republican dynamics than Democratic opposition.

Thune announced the schedule in a floor speech, framing it as an opportunity for full debate. He promised Democrats would be forced to defend their stance against what he called commonsense policies.

Subscribe now

“I can’t guarantee an outcome on this legislation,” Thune said, “but I can guarantee that we are going to put Democrats on the record.” The statement sounds resolute at first glance, but it carefully sidesteps the one mechanism that could actually deliver results.

The SAVE America Act passed the House last month with near-unanimous Republican support and a single Democrat crossover. Its core provisions aim to close loopholes that allow noncitizens to register and vote, a concern that has persisted through multiple election cycles. President Trump amplified the urgency on Truth Social, writing that the bill “must be done immediately. It supersedes everything else. MUST GO TO THE FRONT OF THE LINE.” He has gone further, vowing not to sign other bills until this one reaches him without dilution.

Yet Thune has drawn a firm line against procedural maneuvers that could break the impasse. Calls from Trump allies and senators like Mike Lee (R-UT) for a return to a “standing” or “talking” filibuster—where opponents must actively hold the floor to block passage—have been rejected. Thune told colleagues the votes simply do not exist for such changes, nor for nuking the filibuster outright. He has cited potential unintended consequences, arguing that altering Senate traditions could harm Republicans in the long run.

This stance has drawn sharp criticism from those who see it as emblematic of a deeper problem in the upper chamber. Thune, once viewed as a reliable institutionalist by some conservatives, now appears to many as the face of a UniParty approach that prioritizes comity over confrontation. By scheduling a vote doomed to fail without rule changes, he allows Republicans to cast “yes” votes knowing Democrats will provide the kill shot via filibuster. The result is political cover: establishment figures can claim they tried, blame the opposition, and avoid the hard choices needed to enact real reform.

The pattern fits a familiar mold. Republican majorities have repeatedly advanced popular measures only to watch them stall in the Senate under the weight of procedural hurdles they refuse to challenge. Voter ID and citizenship verification rank among the most broadly supported policies in American politics, yet they remain elusive at the federal level. Democrats argue such requirements could disenfranchise eligible voters, a claim that rings hollow against the backdrop of widespread acceptance in many states and among minority communities.

Trump’s pressure has been unrelenting. He has framed the bill as essential to securing Republican gains in the 2026 midterms, warning that failure to act decisively hands ammunition to critics who question the party’s commitment. Suggestions from figures like Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-FL) to attach the provisions to must-pass legislation, such as FISA reauthorization, have surfaced but gained little traction in Thune’s planning.

What emerges is a portrait of calculated restraint. Thune supports the policy in principle—he has called it commonsense—but his actions protect the Senate’s status quo. This protects not just procedural norms but also the careers of senators wary of bold moves that could alienate moderates or invite backlash. For voters demanding election integrity, the outcome feels predetermined: a high-profile debate followed by predictable defeat, with little risk to those in power.

The SAVE America Act represents more than voter rules; it tests whether Republican leadership will fight for priorities when the path is difficult. Thune’s decision to proceed without tools for victory suggests the answer is no—at least not when it requires disrupting the comfortable rhythms of Washington. As the floor debate unfolds next week, Americans will watch to see if words match the urgency of the moment or if they serve only to maintain the illusion of effort.

The stakes extend beyond one bill. Trust in elections remains fragile, and measures like these could rebuild confidence or deepen cynicism if they continue to falter. President Trump has made his expectations plain. Whether Senate Republicans rise to meet them or retreat behind procedural excuses will shape perceptions heading into the midterms.

There is a particular kind of frustration that sets in when the American people are clear, the evidence is plain, the legislation is written, the House has voted, and yet somehow the thing still cannot get done. That frustration is not abstract right now. It has a name: the SAVE America Act. And the question of why the Senate cannot seem to move it across the finish line is one that every constitutionally minded, God-fearing American who believes elections should be decided by citizens — and only citizens — has every right to be asking loudly.

The Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act, now advanced and renamed the SAVE America Act, does something so basic, so foundational to the concept of self-governance, that its opponents can barely bring themselves to argue against the underlying principle directly. The bill requires individuals to provide documentary proof of U.S. citizenship when registering to vote and requires photo identification to cast a ballot in federal elections.

Subscribe now

That is it. That is the entire premise. You must prove you are an American citizen before you vote in an American election. The polling on this question is not close. It is not debatable. Survey after survey shows that roughly eight in ten Americans support exactly this kind of requirement. The people have spoken. The House has acted. The measure narrowly passed the U.S. House, with all Republicans and one Democrat backing the bill. And yet in the United States Senate, the whole effort sits suspended, tangled in procedural knots, Republican hesitation, and the kind of institutional inertia that has frustrated constitutional conservatives for a generation.

Let us be precise about what is happening and why. The SAVE America Act has now topped 50 votes in the Republican-controlled Senate, meaning the bill enjoys majority support. But the Senate’s 60-vote filibuster rule is the only thing standing in the way of it becoming law. Democrats have made absolutely clear they intend to block it. They are not pretending to be persuadable. They are not offering amendments in good faith. Their Senate leader, Chuck Schumer, has gone so far as to label the bill “Jim Crow 2.0” — a characterization so detached from reality that it would be laughable if it were not so deliberately inflammatory.

Republicans would need at least seven Democrats to vote in favor of the bill to overcome the filibuster, but the party is uniformly in opposition to the legislation. Seven Democrats. In today’s political environment. On a bill that requires people to show ID to vote. The Democrats’ obstruction is total, coordinated, and completely shameless.

So the math falls back on Republicans themselves. And here is where the story becomes genuinely troubling for anyone who believes the party that won the presidency and both chambers of Congress should be able to govern. Senate Majority Leader John Thune has been under enormous pressure to find a path forward, and so far he has been candid about the limitations he faces.

“We don’t have the votes either to proceed, get on a talking filibuster nor sustain one if we got on it, but that’s just a function of math, and there isn’t anything I can do about that,” Thune told reporters after a Republican lunch meeting.

The options on the table range from a talking filibuster — forcing Democrats to physically hold the Senate floor indefinitely — to changing the filibuster rules outright, to a budget reconciliation approach. None of them are simple. The most oft-mentioned idea is the talking filibuster, which would basically mean that a minority wanting to halt the bill would actually have to speak continuously on the Senate floor, rather than simply take a vote that tables the legislation. But the process could gum up Senate efforts for weeks or months with no guarantee of success, and Democrats could offer amendments that might torpedo the whole bill.

Meanwhile, conservatives have been anything but quiet. Senators Mike Lee of Utah and Rick Scott of Florida have become the loudest voices inside the chamber demanding action. Lee has framed the stakes in stark terms: “This is high-stakes legislation. Pass it and we save the republic. Don’t pass it and we roll the dice.”

Lee has also organized and championed the talking filibuster strategy as the best available path forward. Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri has expressed his willingness to try as well, saying, “I know the majority leader is not enthusiastic about that. He’d have to manage the floor, but I am absolutely willing to try.”

And in one of the more remarkable political pivots of this legislative season, Senator John Cornyn of Texas, a longtime defender of the filibuster, reversed course and declared he would support “whatever changes to Senate rules that may prove necessary” to pass the SAVE America Act — a significant shift for a senator who once warned that changing the filibuster would take “a wrecking ball” to Senate rules. Whether that reversal reflects principle or primary politics, the effect is the same: the pressure on Senate Republican leadership is building, not subsiding.

The opponents of this legislation have argued their case with predictable fervor, though their arguments collapse under even modest scrutiny. The left-aligned Campaign Legal Center argues that the bill would force voters to jump through unnecessary hurdles to exercise a fundamental freedom, and would severely threaten mail registration and require online registration systems to be overhauled. The Brennan Center, a reliably progressive legal advocacy group, claims that more than 21 million Americans lack ready access to the documents required by the bill, roughly half of Americans don’t even have a passport, and millions lack access to a paper copy of their birth certificate.

These objections are presented with great passion. They are rarely presented with proportionality. Because the same people making these arguments have no difficulty requiring identification to board an airplane, purchase a firearm, apply for government assistance, open a bank account, or obtain dozens of other routine services that Americans navigate every day. The sudden discovery that identification is an unbearable burden occurs, with remarkable consistency, only when the discussion turns to voting — and only when the political left calculates that stricter verification would work against their electoral interests.

The Bible is not silent on the matter of just governance or the integrity of institutions. The book of Proverbs tells us plainly: “Where there is no vision, the people perish: but he that keepeth the law, happy is he” (Proverbs 29:18).

A nation that cannot maintain the basic integrity of its own elections is a nation without the foundational vision required to govern justly. And the Apostle Paul, writing to the Romans, reminds us that governing authorities are established to be “ministers of God” in service of the good (Romans 13:4).

When governing institutions fail to defend the integrity of the most basic civic act — casting a vote — they fail the people they were ordained to serve. This is not merely a political problem. It is a moral one. An election in which non-citizens can theoretically participate without detection is not an expression of democratic self-governance. It is a simulacrum of it.

The Founding Fathers understood this with a clarity that ought to shame the current debate. They built a republic — not a democracy with no gatekeeping — precisely because they believed that self-governance required an informed and legitimate citizenry making decisions through legitimate processes. James Madison wrote in Federalist No. 57 that the House of Representatives would be composed of members chosen by “the great body of the people of the United States.”

Not residents. Not migrants. Not those who had entered the country illegally or overstayed their visas. Citizens. The constitutional vision of American elections has always been explicitly tied to citizenship, and every effort to blur that line — whether through lax registration systems, the systematic removal of verification requirements, or outright hostility to the concept of voter ID — represents a departure from that founding vision, not an advancement of it.

The filibuster debate now swirling around this legislation carries its own significance for constitutional conservatives. The filibuster is not found in the Constitution. It is a Senate rule, and Senate rules are subject to change by Senate majorities. The argument that the filibuster must be preserved at all costs — even at the cost of legislation that 80 percent of the American public supports — is an argument that treats procedural tradition as though it outranks the democratic mandate of the people.

There is a legitimate debate to be had about the long-term wisdom of filibuster reform, and thoughtful conservatives have argued both sides of it with integrity. But what cannot be seriously argued is that a Senate minority — representing a party that has uniformly and without exception opposed letting citizens verify they are citizens before voting — should be able to permanently block that verification simply because the rules allow them to. At some point, institutional deference becomes institutional cowardice. As Cornyn himself wrote in his reversal, Abraham Lincoln warned that “the dogmas of the quiet past” can become “inadequate to the stormy present.” That observation has never been more applicable.

The SAVE America Act is not a complicated piece of legislation. It does not require a philosophy degree to understand, nor a legal background to support. It requires only the belief — common to the vast majority of Americans regardless of party — that American elections should be decided by American citizens, that voting is a sacred civic right belonging exclusively to those who hold citizenship, and that asking people to demonstrate that citizenship before accessing that right is not oppression.

It is order. It is justice. It is the most basic expression of a nation that takes itself seriously. The Senate has the votes to pass it with a simple majority. Democrats have made clear they will fight it with everything available to them. The question before Republicans is not whether to act. The question is whether they have the courage to do what they were sent to Washington to do.

The answer to that question will define the Republican Party’s credibility for years to come. And more than that, it will speak to whether the United States of America is still capable of the most elementary act of national self-preservation: ensuring that those who choose its leaders are, in fact, its people.

Iran has a new Supreme Leader, and by virtually every expert assessment, he is more dangerous, more ideologically extreme, and more deeply entangled with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps than the father he just replaced. Mojtaba Khamenei, named to the position in the early hours of March 8, 2026, takes power at the most chaotic and vulnerable moment in the Islamic Republic’s 47-year history — and that context matters enormously for what comes next.

Subscribe now

His father, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, was killed on February 28 during the opening salvo of joint U.S.-Israeli strikes on Iran. The attack also killed several members of the Khamenei family, including Mojtaba’s wife, Zahra Haddad Adel, and his mother. Mojtaba himself was reportedly wounded in a separate Israeli operation and was not present at his father’s compound when the fatal strike landed. That survival now carries symbolic weight inside the Islamic Republic — echoing his father’s own near-death experience in 1981, which elevated Ali Khamenei’s status as a “living martyr” and helped propel him into the presidency and eventually into the supreme leadership itself.

The announcement from Iran’s 88-member Assembly of Experts was brief and pointed: “By a decisive vote, the Assembly of Experts appointed Ayatollah Seyyed Mojtaba Hosseini Khamenei as the third Leader of the sacred system of the Islamic Republic of Iran.”

The word “decisive” is doing considerable work in that sentence. Behind the scenes, the process was anything but unified. According to Iran International, IRGC commanders applied relentless pressure on Assembly members through in-person meetings and phone calls in the days leading up to the vote. Eight members threatened to boycott a second electoral session over what they described as “heavy pressure” from the IRGC. Several clerics raised objections about Mojtaba’s limited religious credentials and the optics of the Islamic Republic essentially becoming a dynasty.

Those concerns are legitimate on their face. Mojtaba holds the clerical rank of hojjatoleslam, a mid-level designation, rather than the higher rank of ayatollah. His father faced the same problem when he was elevated to Supreme Leader in 1989, and the elder Khamenei had the law changed to make himself an ayatollah essentially overnight — a source of tension that never quite went away during his brutal reign of nearly 37 years. A similar legal accommodation is now expected for the son. The regime’s willingness to bend its own rules twice in order to keep the Khamenei name on the top seat should tell the world something about how power actually works in Tehran.

President Trump did not hold back. In an interview with ABC News, he made clear that Washington views the selection as unacceptable: “He’s going to have to get approval from us. If he doesn’t get approval from us, he’s not going to last long. We want to make sure that we don’t have to go back every 10 years, when you don’t have a president like me that’s not going to do it.”

Earlier in the week, Trump had called Mojtaba a “lightweight” and declared his candidacy a waste of time, drawing a parallel to his administration’s handling of Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro. In an almost darkly comic twist, Trump’s public denunciations may have actually strengthened Mojtaba’s case within the Assembly. One cleric cited the fact that “even the Great Satan has mentioned his name” as a qualification — specifically because a candidate hated by the enemy fits the ideological criteria set by the late Khamenei himself.

Who, exactly, is Mojtaba Khamenei? Born in Mashhad on September 8, 1969, he was nine years old when his father emerged as a leading figure in the Iranian Revolution. He received his early education in Sardasht and Mahabad before graduating high school in Tehran. He later joined the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps in 1987 and served in the Iran-Iraq War, fighting in the Habib Battalion.

That military service turned out to be more than an obligation — it became a networking operation. The Habib Battalion enabled Mojtaba to forge relationships with men who would move on to become leading members of the Iranian security services, including Hossein Taeb, the future head of the IRGC’s Intelligence Organization. Those relationships, cultivated over decades, form the foundation of his current power base.

After the war, Mojtaba pursued clerical studies in Tehran and later at the Qom Seminary. He studied under the late Ayatollah Mohammad Taghi Mesbah Yazdi, who called for killing Iranian youths who promoted “Western immorality.” This is not a footnote — it is a window into the theological framework Mojtaba absorbed during his formative years. His mentor was not a moderate figure seeking dialogue. He was among the most ideologically extreme voices in the clerical establishment, and Mojtaba sat at his feet.

His real influence, however, was never primarily theological. U.S. diplomatic cables published by WikiLeaks began referring to the younger Khamenei as “the power behind the robes.” One cable alleged that Mojtaba actually tapped his own father’s phone, served as his “principal gatekeeper,” and had been quietly building his own power base within the country for years.

A 2008 cable described him as “a capable and forceful leader and manager” while also noting his lack of theological qualifications and relative youth. Another assessed that he was seen by regime insiders as a “plausible candidate for shared leadership” upon his father’s eventual death, based on his “skills, wealth, and unmatched alliances.”

The wealth is worth examining on its own terms. A year-long investigation by Bloomberg, citing assessments from people familiar with the matter, reported in January 2026 that Khamenei is linked to an offshore financial network used to hold and move assets outside Iran. The reported holdings include high-value real estate in London and Dubai, as well as interests connected to shipping, banking relationships, and hospitality assets in Europe. Among the properties: two luxury apartments in London overlooking the Israeli Embassy, and 11 mansions in Hampstead, North London, held through a front man and a shell company registered in the Isle of Man.

The funds for the London purchases reportedly came from Iran’s oil program. The total portfolio has been estimated at hundreds of millions of pounds. None of these assets are held in Mojtaba’s name directly — they are layered through intermediaries and corporate structures across multiple jurisdictions.

This is a man preparing to lead a theocratic government that publicly preaches anti-Western austerity while privately accumulating real estate on Billionaire’s Row. The contradiction is not incidental. It reflects a pattern of behavior — the use of ideological posturing as cover for the accumulation of power and wealth — that has defined the Khamenei family’s relationship with the Islamic Republic for decades.

On the domestic political front, Mojtaba’s record is one of manipulation and violence. He also allegedly engineered the 2005 election that installed Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as president. In the 2009 election, protesters flooded the streets to insist Ahmadinejad didn’t win again, and Mojtaba reportedly personally supervised how the IRGC crushed these demonstrations. The Green Movement of 2009 was one of the largest popular uprisings in the history of the Islamic Republic, and Mojtaba Khamenei’s name has been linked for over a decade to its violent suppression. That is his domestic governing philosophy in practice.

The U.S. sanctioned him in 2019 under Executive Order 13867. The Treasury Department found that he had been “representing the supreme leader in an official capacity despite never being elected or appointed to a government position aside from work in the office of his father.” It also cited his work to “advance his father’s destabilizing regional ambitions and oppressive domestic objectives.”

He has never held a formal government office. He has never run for election. He has never delivered a major public speech. He has not given public lectures, Friday sermons, or political addresses — to the point that many Iranians have not heard his voice, despite knowing for years that he was a star rising within the theocratic establishment. The man who now commands the IRGC and holds supreme authority over 90 million people is, to most of his own countrymen, a voice they have never heard.

That opacity is itself a kind of power. For decades Mojtaba operated in the shadows, cultivating alliances, controlling access to his father, and building a financial empire that Western governments are still mapping. Al Jazeera’s Ali Hashem described Khamenei as his “father’s gatekeeper.” Now he is no longer the gatekeeper. He is the gate. And based on everything known about his ideology, his alliances, and his record, the gate is not opening anytime soon toward the West.

What does this mean geopolitically? The Daily Telegraph predicted that he would view the United States as an “implacable enemy” and would be likely to escalate the conflict and unlikely to make any compromises. Analysts widely expect him to lean more heavily on the IRGC than his father did — and his father already leaned heavily on them. The IRGC, after all, is the organization that pushed through his election against clerical objections. That is not a relationship of equals. It is an arrangement, and arrangements have terms.

Iran is also navigating this transition under active bombardment. U.S. and Israeli strikes have killed multiple senior Iranian military and security figures, including Ali Shamkhani, IRGC commander Mohammad Pakpour, and Defense Minister Aziz Nasirzadeh. The institutional infrastructure of the Iranian state has been badly disrupted. Mojtaba Khamenei ascends to supreme leadership not from a position of strength but from the rubble of an ongoing war — inheriting a regime that is militarily degraded, financially squeezed, and facing the most serious threat to its survival since its founding.

Whether that pressure will be enough to force a change in course is the central question facing the Trump administration now. Trump has made clear he views Mojtaba as neither legitimate nor permanent. The question is whether Washington follows words with action, and what form that action takes. One scenario involves continued military pressure combined with diplomatic openings to elements within Iran seeking a different path. Another involves treating Mojtaba’s selection as a final rejection of negotiations and intensifying operations accordingly. The language from both sides — “decisive vote” from the Assembly, “not going to last long” from Trump — does not suggest a warm diplomatic opening is imminent.

For Americans trying to understand what just happened, here is the short version: Iran just named, under military and political duress, a man with no formal democratic mandate, limited religious credentials, a hidden financial empire, a documented history of brutally suppressing his own people, and a deep ideological commitment to opposing the United States and Israel. He was chosen largely because the most powerful paramilitary force in Iran wanted him chosen. And the world now has to figure out what to do about it.

The answer to that question will shape the Middle East for a generation.