Category: blaze media

A 45-year-old male has been arrested and charged in connection with a wild brawl involving apparent high school students at a protest against Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Texas — much of which was caught on video.

Buda Police said Chad Michael Watts of Kyle was charged Tuesday with two counts of assault causing bodily injury.

‘We see that all the time in law enforcement — that videos start at the 10-second mark. What happened in the first 10 seconds?’

Police previously said students from Moe and Gene Johnson High School in Buda were conducting a “walkout” protest Monday — then officers were dispatched for a fight in progress just before 3 p.m. Buda is about 20 minutes southwest of Austin.

Arriving officers were notified that a juvenile female on the sidewalk and an adult male in a vehicle were engaged in a verbal argument, police said, adding that the argument escalated into a physical altercation involving multiple people.

The adult male departed the scene prior to officers arriving, but he was soon located and interviewed, police said. Since officers didn’t witness the brawl, the adult male and the juvenile female were identified and released; no arrests were made at the time, police said.

RELATED: Video: All-out brawl erupts between adult male with MAGA hat and more than a dozen apparent HS students at ICE protest

However police said further investigation determined that Watts was the primary aggressor in the physical altercation, and probable cause was established for two offenses of assault causing bodily injury, a Class A misdemeanor.

Hays County Jail records as of Wednesday morning indicate Watts has no bond and no release date.

Police said the investigation is ongoing to determine if additional charges will be filed.

“We’re trying to get to the original videos and have those submitted by those people that took the videos so we can have a solid case and have that chain of custody for our evidence,” Matt Schima, public information officer with the Buda Police Department, told KXAN-TV.

Schima added to the station that “we see that all the time in law enforcement — that videos start at the 10-second mark. What happened in the first 10 seconds? That’s very important as to what happened for the rest of the video. So I think a lot of the public is really taking the last part of the situation, and they’re making their judgments. So what we have to do to have a solid investigation is what initiated all of this.”

As police noted, the adult male was in a vehicle when he verbally argued with the juvenile female — and then things got physical. Indeed one clip recorded from a distance shows what appears to be the adult male on the street swinging at a female as they move from the street to the sidewalk and to the grass.

A second clip recorded very close to the fight shows what appears to be the adult male holding a MAGA hat while swinging at a female and pushing her backward as she fights back; she momentarily grabs the MAGA hat before she falls to the grass.

A third clip shows the bulk of the brawl, and the adult male is outnumbered. At least a dozen apparent high school students punch and kick him, knock him to the ground, and even put him in a headlock until he’s able to get up and retreat to his vehicle. Those fighting and watching the brawl are heard yelling, “What the f**k?” and “Get him!” and “F**k ICE! You’re a bitch!” and “F**kin’ kill yourself!”

Once the adult male is back in his vehicle, one individual from the crowd is heard yelling at him, “Hey, you want another ass-beating, come on out!” The adult male eventually puts the MAGA hat on his head.

It’s still unclear why the adult male got out of his vehicle in the first place.

When Blaze News asked police if the adult male indicated why he left his vehicle and physically fought the juvenile female, police replied that it’s still under investigation.

If the public has original evidence, witness statements, or relevant information they would like to provide, they can contact Hays County Dispatch at 512-393-7896 or do so anonymously through Hays County Crime Stoppers at 1-800-324-TIPS (8477), www.callcrimestoppers.com, or through the “P3 Tips” phone application, police said.

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​Crime, Physical attack, Ice protest, Ice, Immigration and customs enforcement, Texas, Buda, Police, Arrest, High school students, Argument, Physical altercation, Brawl, Politics 

Border czar Tom Homan has announced that the Trump administration will immediately reduce the number of federal immigration agents in Minnesota by roughly 26%, citing “unprecedented cooperation” from local officials.

Homan held a press conference in Minneapolis on Wednesday morning to provide an update on Operation Metro Surge, which has been met with unrest from some community members, leading to numerous anti-immigration enforcement protests.

‘President Trump fully intends to achieve mass deportations during this administration, and immigration enforcement actions will continue every day throughout this country.’

Homan explained that President Donald Trump had asked him to go to Minnesota to “help de-escalate” the situation and further streamline the targeted operation. He pleaded with critics of the enforcement activities to stop the “hateful, extreme rhetoric” against Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents.

He said that he warned in March that if the rhetoric did not stop, he was “afraid there would be bloodshed.”

“And there has been,” Homan remarked, presumably referring to the fatal shootings of Renée Good and Alex Pretti.

After “productive discussions” with local leaders, including Gov. Tim Walz (DFL) and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey (DFL), the administration decided to immediately withdraw 700 federal immigration agents, Homan declared. He cited increased cooperation that has allowed ICE agents to enter the jails and transfer illegal aliens to federal custody more safely.

He also noted the operation’s target list of criminal illegal aliens has decreased due to the successful arrest of many high-risk individuals.

RELATED: Majority of Americans approve of Trump’s response to anti-ICE protests in Minneapolis: Harvard poll

Photo by Stephen Maturen/Getty Images

Homan stated that about 2,000 ICE and Customs and Border Protection officers will remain in Minnesota for the time being. However, the administration aims to end the operation and withdraw agents as quickly as possible, returning the local field office to the pre-operation level of roughly 150 agents. He stated that the speed of the complete withdrawal will depend entirely on the cooperation of local officials and whether the threats and disruptions caused by protesters cease.

He also stated that the Department of Homeland Security has implemented a “unified chain of command” as part of the ongoing enforcement operation, at his recommendation.

RELATED: Memo to Trump: Stop negotiating and ramp up deportations

Photo by Octavio JONES/AFP via Getty Images

Homan rejected rumors that the Trump administration was abandoning its immigration enforcement goals. He described the changes as “smarter enforcement” and “not less enforcement.”

“President Trump fully intends to achieve mass deportations during this administration, and immigration enforcement actions will continue every day throughout this country. President Trump made a promise, and we have not directed otherwise. I heard rumors we have: untrue,” he remarked. “We’re not surrendering our mission.”

He announced that Operation Metro Surge has led to the arrest of 14 individuals with homicide convictions, 139 with assault convictions, 87 with sexual offense convictions, and 28 gang members.

“We’re taking a lot of bad people off the street. Everybody should be grateful for that,” Homan stated. “Everyone has a constitutional right to peacefully protest. President Trump and I, we completely support that. At the same time, professional law enforcement officers should, and need to be able to, perform their sworn duties without being harassed, impeded, or assaulted.”

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​News, Immigration and customs enforcement, Ice, Department of homeland security, Dhs, Tom homan, Trump administration, Trump admin, Customs and border protection, Cbp, Minneapolis, Minnesota, Tim walz, Jacob frey, Operation metro surge, Politics 

I remember being a young Hill staffer, cheerfully emerging from the staircase at the Capitol South Metro station. On the walk to work, you would pass a few far-left cranks waving scary, hand-lettered signs demanding REAL! CHANGE! NOW!

Back then, you could roll your eyes and keep moving. Today, the cranks work inside the building.

President Trump promised accountability. He has the mandate. He has the tools. He should use them now.

When I arrived in Washington 20 years ago, the baseline assumptions still held. America was good. The Constitution mattered. Terrorists were the enemy. That consensus has collapsed. Over the last several years, political violence has risen and elected Democrats have poured gasoline on the flames instead of trying to put them out.

If a radical had murdered Ann Coulter in 2006, Democrats in Congress would have condemned it. After Charlie Kirk’s assassination last year, Democrats offered little beyond silence, snide distancing, or moral equivocation — while much of the progressive ecosystem treated it as a punch line.

Americans have had enough. They’re sick of protesting without purpose, for-profit rioting, and the endless indulgence of radicals who would rather watch the country burn than let it thrive. That disgust helped carry President Trump back into office on a red wave. He promised to crack down on left-wing extremism. He needs to deliver now more than ever.

In recent months, reports have described widespread Somali-linked fraud in deep-blue Minnesota, elected Democrats flirting with open defiance, and physical attacks on federal law enforcement. Conservative voters keep asking the same obvious question: Why hasn’t the administration used federal tools — IRS audits, DOJ investigations, and financial tracing — to identify who finances this fraud and violence?

RELATED: Trump has the chance to end the welfare free-for-all Minnesota exposed

Photo by Brendan SMIALOWSKI/AFP via Getty Images

None of this looks organic. It looks organized. Someone trains the activists, coordinates the logistics, pays the legal bills, and bankrolls the infrastructure.

Recent reporting by Gabe Kaminsky at the Free Press suggests senior advisers and Republican donors have urged restraint, warning that investigations of left-wing networks will trigger retaliation when Democrats regain power.

President Trump should reject that advice — decisively. No more playing Mr. Nice Guy with these maniacs.

Democrats don’t need “provocation” to use government power against their enemies. They do it because it works. They did it under Obama. They expanded it under Biden. They will do it again the moment they get the chance.

Trump should listen to the silent majority of law-abiding Americans who are tired of watching violence, fraud, and abuse go unpunished while ordinary citizens get lectured to accept disorder as the price of “progress.”

The pattern isn’t subtle.

During Obama’s first term, the IRS targeted Tea Party groups for lawful political activity. The people responsible faced little accountability. Many stayed in government. Senior leadership protected them after Lois Lerner’s misconduct became public. Our enemies in the corporate left-wing press called it “scrutiny.”

Under the next phase, left-wing NGOs leaned on social media companies to suppress conservative viewpoints and blacklist influential outlets. Under Biden, federal law enforcement treated ordinary dissent as suspicious. Justice Department initiatives, such as “Arctic Frost,” and task forces consistently aimed their rhetoric — and often their resources — at the right. Merrick Garland’s Justice Department smeared concerned parents as domestic threats for protesting radical gender ideology in public schools.

Americans don’t want persecution. They want basic law enforcement.

They want an IRS that applies the same level of scrutiny to left-wing networks that obstruct law enforcement as it applies to small business owners and seniors who make honest accounting mistakes. An agency that can ruin someone’s life over paperwork can spare resources to investigate whether donors and nonprofits fund violent criminal activity.

If top Treasury officials like Ken Kies and Kevin Salinger cannot meet that simple standard, they need to go.

RELATED: Trump declared war on leftist domestic terror. The IRS didn’t get the memo.

Photo by Nathan Howard/Getty Images

This isn’t a witch hunt. Legitimate questions exist about whether charitable dollars move through nonprofit networks to finance criminal obstruction, coordinate rioting, or facilitate fraud against U.S. taxpayers. If charitable organizations fund efforts to intimidate and obstruct ICE agents, the public deserves to know. If nonprofit lawyers coach migrants on how to defraud federal programs, consequences should follow — including professional discipline.

Equal justice under law means equal. It can’t mean impunity for the left’s allies while government reserves its full weight for targeting conservatives.

President Trump promised accountability. He has the mandate. He has the tools. He should use them now.

We’re no longer dealing with a few amateurs loitering outside the Metro station. The extremists moved inside the institutions. If the administration still acts like the old norms apply, it will lose the country it just barely won back.

​Left wing violence, Radical left, Ice, Dhs, Ice protests, Riots, Democrats, Opinion & analysis, Political violence, Donald trump, Antifa, Charlie kirk, Assault, Assassination, Immigration and customs enforcement, Mass deportations, Lawfare, Weaponization of the federal government 

Atheism likes to present itself as the adult in the room. Faith, by contrast, is cast as a childish indulgence for people afraid of the dark.

Christopher Beha’s “Why I Am Not an Atheist” examines this framing and demonstrates, with real precision, why atheism itself may be the most adolescent worldview of them all.

Atheism has a curious habit. It borrows Christian language — dignity, justice, compassion — while denying the metaphysical foundation that gives those words meaning.

This isn’t a book of defensive apologetics. Beha doesn’t hurl Scripture at doubters or claim that God can be demonstrated like a physics equation. Instead, he treats atheism as a coherent position and then tests it against reality. He walks its reasoning to its natural conclusion and reports back on the damage. What he finds there isn’t liberation but emptiness — sometimes dressed up as sophistication, sometimes as certainty, but emptiness all the same.

Godless

Beha’s journey begins in familiar territory. Like many sane, decent people, he wanted honesty. He wanted to “look the world frankly in the face,” to set aside inherited beliefs that, at that stage of his life, he believed couldn’t withstand scrutiny. God, to him, seemed unnecessary. Worse, He seemed embarrassing. Atheism, on the other hand, felt like intellectual courage.

Beha embraced the godless creed at first, wholeheartedly. But it didn’t take long for cracks to appear.

Rather than joining the professional atheist class — the permanently outraged and faintly condescending set, à la Harris and Dawkins, who mistake self-indulgence for insight — Beha asks a far riskier question: What replaces God once He’s gone? Not as a thought exercise, but in real life. In daily choices. In suffering. In death.

Here, the book begins to shine.

Motion and chaos

Beha identifies two dominant atheist positions. The first is scientific materialism, which holds that only what can be measured is real. Everything else — mind, love, conscience, beauty — is reduced to physical process. Choice becomes brain chemistry. Human life is explained as motion and chance, sorted into probabilities.

The second is a newer, trendier alternative: romantic idealism. Instead of reducing the world to atoms, it centers everything on the self. Meaning is something you create. Truth is something you feel. The highest good is authenticity, and the highest crime is judgment. God disappears, and the individual assumes His place.

Both, Beha argues, fail in opposite but equally revealing ways.

Materialism reduces the human person to a biological incident. Consciousness becomes a chemical glitch. Love becomes an evolutionary strategy. It is an impressively sterile system, one that explains everything except why anyone should bother getting out of bed.

Romantic idealism reacts against this coldness by putting the individual will on the throne. The view seems warmer, and perhaps it is, but it is still incoherent. If everyone creates meaning, meaning ceases to exist. If truth is personal, truth dissolves. The self becomes both king and casualty, crowned with responsibility and locked in solitude.

Between them, Beha shows, modern atheism swings between delusion and despair. That may explain why so many of its most visible champions — from Bill Maher to Ricky Gervais to Penn Jillette — sound less liberated than irritated. Atheism can take things apart, but it can’t hold them together.

RELATED: Did science just accidentally stumble upon what Christians already knew?

CSA-Printstock/Getty Images

Philosophical freeloading

What makes this critique effective is Beha’s refusal to hide behind abstractions. He doesn’t pretend that these systems fail only in theory. They fail in lived experience. They fail when existential angst arrives uninvited.

Atheism, Beha observes, has a curious habit. It borrows Christian language — dignity, justice, compassion — while denying the metaphysical foundation that gives those words meaning. It wants human rights without a human giver. What looks like intellectual bravery is closer to philosophical freeloading.

Beha is especially critical of the arrogance that often accompanies unbelief. Atheism flatters itself as fearless while demanding a strangely narrow universe — one small enough to fit inside a laboratory or a podcast episode. Anything that resists measurement is dismissed as childish. Transcendence is treated as something reserved for uncultured troglodytes.

Christianity, by contrast, has never sold comfort by making reality smaller. It doesn’t reduce the world to what feels manageable. It claims that meaning is real whether we want it or not, that God isn’t a projection of human wishes, and that right and wrong aren’t personal inventions. It doesn’t erase suffering. Instead, it meets it head-on. To be alive is to bear pain, and to bear pain is to be alive.

The way back

It is from within that hard-earned contrast — after years in the wilderness of unbelief — that Beha finds his way back, not to a vague faith, but to Christianity itself and finally to the Catholic Church. This isn’t a story of conquest. It’s an acknowledgment that atheism, however confident it sounds, left him more miserable and taught him to call that misery freedom — something he came to see clearly when his brother Jim nearly died in a car crash and later when he himself faced death with stage-three lymphoma.

Crucially, Beha isn’t arguing that faith banishes doubt. He would laugh at that idea. He remains a skeptic in the classical sense — aware of human limits, suspicious of tidy conclusions, allergic to ideological shortcuts. Faith, as he presents it, is the decision to live as though truth, goodness, and meaning are not clever hallucinations generated by neurons killing time.

For conservative Christians, “Why I Am Not an Atheist” matters because it doesn’t preach. It doesn’t wring its hands over secularism or bulldoze unbelievers. It does something far more damaging: It lets atheism talk, at length. Given enough space, its confidence begins to crack, its claims lose shape, and its bravado gives way to a worldview that can’t deliver what it promises. Atheism isn’t undone here by counterargument, but by relentless exposure.

In an age when disbelief markets itself as adulthood and faith as regression, Beha offers a bracing reversal. Atheism, he suggests, is a creed without the slightest bit of substance, built entirely on what it denies.

Christianity, whatever one’s denomination, remains the only worldview bold enough to say that life matters, suffering is not pointless, and belief answers to what is, not what we want.

​Faith, Atheism, Christianity, Lifestyle, Books, Why i am not an atheist, Christopher beha, Review 

Rapper Nicki Minaj has been setting off a social media firestorm since declaring her support for President Trump.

After making a live appearance with the president last week, Minaj — whose real name is Onika Tanya Maraj-Petty — has been steadily accusing the music industry of awful conduct.

‘If you ever vote DemonCrat again, you’re just as soulless as they are & will perish.’

Particularly Minaj spent some time on Sunday evening accusing the music industry of partaking in satanic rituals and cult-like behavior.

‘The jig is up’

“Your favorite artist has been practicing rituals in a satanic cult where they take babies from other countries & mutilate & kill them as a form of a blood sacrifice to their God,” she wrote on X. “You see, when your master is satan, you must constantly shed blood. However, the JIG IS UP.”

Minaj then took aim at rapper Jay-Z, real name Shawn Carter, posting images purporting to show the artist in his late 20s alongside famous singers while they were teenagers.

RELATED: Trump’s ‘number-one fan,’ Nicki Minaj, praises the president, shreds Gavin ‘Newscum’

“Are y’all understanding that these ppl have been sacrificing children as a way of gaining & maintaining power? If you ever vote DemonCrat again, you’re just as soulless as they are & will perish,” the female rapper wrote.

Photo finish

Attached to the statement were two photos of Carter — one with the late singer Aaliyah and one with Beyoncé Knowles, whom he married in 2008 — each overlaid with labels identifying the alleged year of the photo and the corresponding ages of the people pictured.

The photo with Aaliyah is labeled “1996,” with Carter identified as 26 and Aaliyah as 15. If the photograph were in fact taken in 1996, that age attribution would be accurate: Aaliyah was born on January 16, 1981, and would most likely have been 15 at the time.

However the dating of the image appears to be incorrect.

Multiple photographs archived by Getty Images, as well as reporting from the Hollywood Reporter, show Carter and Aaliyah wearing the same outfits at a Fourth of July party hosted by Sean “Diddy” Combs in East Hampton, New York, on July 2, 2000. If the image dates from that event, Aaliyah would have been 21 and Carter 30.

Destiny’s children

A second image, showing Carter with Beyoncé Knowles, is also overlaid with age labels, identifying Carter as 27 and Beyoncé as 16. The image appears to originate from an event at the Prime Time 21 nightclub in North Dallas, Texas, on January 31, 1998, as reported in a 2024 Daily Mail article. While the label misstates Carter’s age — he was reportedly 28 at the time — Beyoncé was indeed 16, having been born on September 4, 1981.

RELATED: Nicki Minaj stuns crowd in surprise appearance at TPUSA conference, praises Trump and Vance

Kevin Mazur via Getty Images

The image posted by Minaj appeared to be a crop of a photo from that evening, in which Jay-Z is pictured with the four members of Beyonce’s group, Destiny’s Child.

Nevertheless Minaj had commentary to share on the whole ordeal.

“Imagine if a 30 year old rapper was out here with a 16 year old in this day & age — and how y’all would have his head on a platter. The guy was hugging & humping on teens in broad day light,” she wrote on X.

The newest Republican supporter said she still has more to reveal about the music industry and will shed light on some of the indiscretions of the biggest hip-hop players.

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​Nicki minaj, Align, Rappers, Hip hop, Music industry, Satanism, Jay-z, Beyonce, Cult, Entertainment 

Singer Billie Eilish used her moment at the Grammys to declare how she really feels about ICE and immigrants in America — which BlazeTV host Sara Gonzales of “Sara Gonzales Unfiltered” points out was a blatant display of her “white savior complex.”

“No one is illegal on stolen land,” singer Billie Eilish said as she stepped up to accept her Grammy, before adding, “It’s just really hard to know what to say and what to do right now. And I just, I feel really hopeful in this room, and I feel like we just need to keep fighting and speaking up and protesting, and our voices really do matter, and the people matter.”

“If I had a dime for every liberal white woman who has a white savior complex and thinks that it is her duty to save the brown people, I just, you’d never see me again, I’d be so rich. I would move out into the boonies, and no one would ever hear from me again, because they seem to be totally obsessed with protecting illegal criminals with brown skin,” Gonzales comments.

However, one social media user, Drew Pavlou, took to Instagram to post a reel of himself claiming he plans to test out Eilish’s theory.

“Big news, everybody. I’ve decided today to move into Billy Eilish’s $6 million Malibu beachside mansion. She announced today at the Grammys that no human being is illegal on stolen land,” Pavlou said into the camera.

“So, I’m going to be making the trip to America. I’m packing my bags right away, and I’m looking forward to just taking possession of her $6 million Malibu mansion. No human being is illegal, so I want to thank everybody who’s believed in me on the journey. I really can’t wait to move in,” he continued.

“It’s now my house. I want to thank Billy Eilish as well for her generosity. Thank you so much,” he added.

“It’s worth mocking. It’s really worth mocking,” Gonzales says, stifling a laugh. “These people don’t actually believe the drivel that they say. They’re like, ‘Oh, there should be no borders. No human being is illegal.’”

“Like, OK, why do you have armed security? Why do you have a gate that people have to type in a code?” she asks. “That seems oppressive to all of these people, these indigenous people, if no one is illegal on stolen land.”

Want more from Sara Gonzales?

To enjoy more of Sara’s no-holds-barred takes on news and culture, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.

​Video, Video phone, Camera phone, Upload, Sharing, Free, Youtube.com, Sara gonzales unfiltered, Sara gonzales, The blaze, Blazetv, Blaze news, Blaze podcasts, Blaze podcast network, Blaze media, Blaze online, Blaze originals, Billie eilish, Ice protests, The grammys, No one is illegal on stolen land, Immigration, Illegal immigration 

A confrontation at a Minneapolis gas station involving a U.S. Border Patrol commander has reignited debate over whether private businesses should deny service to federal law enforcement officers based on opposition to immigration enforcement.

Video circulated online by FreedomNTV shows Border Patrol Cmdr. Gregory Bovino being followed out of a Speedway convenience store by a man believed to be a store employee or manager. In the footage, the man tells Bovino, “We do not support ICE. Get off our property.”

‘It’s shameful conduct to try to penalize men and women who are enforcing federal law.’

Bovino does not respond in the video and exits the store without engaging.

The incident, which occurred in late January, is the latest in a series of encounters in which Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents and Department of Homeland Security officials have been turned away from private businesses, particularly in Minnesota, amid heightened anti-ICE activism.

RELATED: LAPD defies Newsom: Chief refuses to enforce mask ban on ICE

Photo by Stephen Maturen/Getty Images

Similar refusals have been reported at hotels and retail locations, including a Hampton Inn-branded property in Lakeville, Minnesota, where ICE agents were denied accommodations and had reservations canceled. That episode drew national attention after Hilton removed the hotel from its brand. The General Services Administration likewise removed it from its federal lodging programs.

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem was also denied entry to a building in a Chicago suburb earlier this year while attempting to use a restroom, according to DHS officials.

The Speedway video has fueled renewed scrutiny over the line between private business discretion and refusals of service aimed at federal agents performing official duties.

RELATED: Klobuchar running for Minnesota governor on anti-ICE platform

Photo by Jamie Kelter Davis/Getty Images

Former Assistant U.S. Attorney Zack Smith said that while private businesses generally control access to their property, singling out law enforcement officers because of their role raises serious ethical concerns.

“It’s shameful conduct to try to penalize men and women who are enforcing federal law,” Smith said. “Even if a business technically has the authority to refuse service, that doesn’t make it right.”

Smith added that similar incidents emerged during periods of unrest following 2020, when law enforcement officers increasingly became symbolic targets of political activism.

Following the Speedway incident, criticism of the convenience store chain spread rapidly online, with calls for consumer boycotts aimed at Speedway and its parent company, 7-Eleven.

7-Eleven and the DHS did not respond to a request for comment from Blaze News.

The Department of Homeland Security and Immigration and Customs Enforcement have not announced whether further action will be taken.

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​Ice, Anti-ice, Anti-ice protests, Anti-christian, Police, Ice agents, Politics 

Democrats have worked overtime to demonize and delegitimize the men and women of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement — those whom Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz branded as “Trump’s modern-day Gestapo,” Sen. Tina Smith (Minn.) called a “clear and present threat,” Rep. Eric Swalwell (Calif.) dubbed “terrorizing bandits,” and Democrat anchor-baby Rep. Delia Ramirez (Ill.) called a “terror force.”

In addition to Rep. Nancy Pelosi (Calif.), Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner, and other Democrats threatening lawfare against ICE officers, some radical officials have turned up the heat by suggesting that it may be reasonable to shoot masked federal immigration agents.

‘He is openly calling for people to shoot federal law enforcement.’

Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.) claimed this week that it would be “justified” to shoot those he characterized as “masked hoodlums.”

“What is really the major problem in this country today is the fascism in our streets, the attacks on American citizens by masked hoodlums,” said Nadler, going off-topic during a House Judiciary Committee hearing on Tuesday. “If you were attacked by a masked person, you might think you were being kidnapped. You’d be justified in shooting the person to protect yourself.”

“We see people being shot, for what? For driving a car?” he added, possibly referring to Renee Good, an anti-ICE radical who was fatally shot while driving her SUV into an ICE agent. “We see the ICE goons break into people’s homes without a warrant.”

Vice President JD Vance was among the many critics who blasted Nadler over his incendiary remarks, noting, “Jerry Nadler is one of the highest ranking Democrats in the House of Representatives and he is openly calling for people to shoot federal law enforcement.”

“This is despicable behavior from an elected official and I’m sure the leftwing media will cover it extensively,” added Vance.

RELATED: ‘He is no victim’: Sister of man shot by Border Patrol in Arizona tells anti-ICE protesters to stop defending him

Photo by Mostafa Bassim/Anadolu via Getty Images

Stephen Coughlin, an American lawyer and former Joint Chiefs of Staff intelligence analyst, wrote that from a “Counter-State POV, could this be considered ‘open communications’, sanctioning targeted violence against federal officers when conducting their statutory mission? It should be taken as a given that when the far left (Marxist) designates a group as ‘fascist,’ it is the same as putting them on a target list.”

Judicial Watch president Tom Fitton noted, “The Left is murderous.”

According to the Department of Homeland Security, ICE agents faced 68 vehicular attacks, representing a 3,300% increase in such attacks against ICE law enforcement. During the same stretch, Customs and Border Patrol officers faced 114 vehicular attacks.

“Sanctuary politicians with their rhetoric comparing ICE to the Nazi Gestapo, slave patrols, and the secret police and encouraging illegal aliens to evade arrest have incited violence against law enforcement,” DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement on Tuesday.

“We have seen more than 180 vehicle attacks against law enforcement since President Trump took office,” continued McLaughlin. “In addition to these vehicle attacks, our officers are also facing a more than 1,300% increase in assaults against them and an 8,000% increase in death threats as they risk their lives to arrest murderers, pedophiles, rapists, gang members, and terrorists.”

In an attempt at damage control Tuesday evening, Nadler claimed that he was “not calling on citizens to shoot ICE” but rather “calling on ICE to stop shooting citizens.”

‘It’s kind of a recipe for disaster.’

“ICE is a rogue agency hellbent on terrorizing our neighbors and instilling fear in immigrant communities,” Nadler continued in his non-apology. “They should stop wearing masks, put on a uniform, and start wearing body cameras. Get a judicial warrant, too.”

Nadler’s rationalization of shooting ICE agents greatly resembles that provided by Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes (D) in her interview last month with KPNX-TV’s Brahm Resnik.

After alleging that ICE officers are engaged in “thuggish, brutish behavior” and claiming that “real cops don’t wear masks,” Mayes told Resnik with a smile both that Arizona is a “stand-your-ground state” and that “we also have a lot of guns in Arizona.”

“You know, it’s kind of a recipe for disaster, because you have these masked federal officers with very little identification, sometimes no identification, wearing plain clothes and masks, and we have a stand-your-ground law that says that if you reasonably believe that your life is in danger and you are in your house or your car or on your property that you can defend yourself with lethal force.”

Despite the interviewer providing Mayes with ample opportunity to clarify her meaning, the Democrat proceeded to give what appeared to be a retroactive excuse for would-be killers, stating, “How do you know they’re a peace officer?”

“If there’s a situation where somebody pulls out their gun because they know Arizona is a stand-your-ground state, then it becomes ‘did they reasonably know that they were a peace officer?'” said Arizona’s top law enforcement officer.

When Resnik once more pressed her for clarification that she was not “telling folks you have license if you are threatened,” Mayes said, “Well,” and smirked.

“No,” she continued, “but again, if you’re being attacked by someone who is not identified as a peace officer, how do you know?”

Like Nadler, Mayes faced widespread criticism for her comments. Republican Arizona Rep. David Schweikert, for instance, characterized them as “freelancing a scenario where bullets start flying and then shrugging it off as ‘just the law.'”

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A white Texas student’s life was turned upside down by a hate hoax perpetrated by a black acquaintance’s mother, Summer Smith, and her lawyer, Kim Cole.

Smith and Cole were at last visited by consequence on Jan. 22, when a Texas judge awarded the student, Asher Vann, $3.2 million in attorneys fees and damages from the duo.

A mother’s hate hoax

Smith, of Plano, Texas, came forward in March 2021 with allegations about her black son’s supposed bullying by a white acquaintance and other classmates.

‘They knowingly and intentionally launched a crusade of false facts, allegations, and narratives to create a social media and public outrage.’

After lobbing various accusations and sharing images of minors from the Plano Independent School District online, Smith held a press conference where she alleged that her then-13-year-old son, SeMarion Humphrey, was subjected to racially charged abuse, forced to drink urine from a plastic cup, shot with BB guns at a sleepover, and threatened so that he would not speak out.

“This is not a prank. This is beyond bullying. You are evil. They are evil,” Smith said at the press conference.

Cole — a lawyer who briefly represented Karmelo Anthony, the man accused of murdering 17-year-old Austin Metcalf at a track meet last year — claimed that the supposed abuse at the sleepover was “pre-calculated” and “racially motivated” and alleged further that Humphrey’s peers used racial and “homophobic” slurs against him.

RELATED: ANOTHER Black Lives Matter scam exposed: Oklahoma leader accused of blowing funds on trips, real estate, shopping sprees

Photographer: Angel Garcia/Bloomberg via Getty Images

The duo’s claims were not only gobbled up by Dominique Alexander, the founder of Next Generation Action Network, and other leftist activists who demanded “justice” and marched with the supposed victim but amplified by the liberal media and in a viral petition that secured over 182,000 signatures.

The school district, faced with intense scrutiny after Smith’s press conference, launched an investigation into the matter. The Plano Police Department similarly indicated that it was looking into the matter.

Facing similar pressure, then-Plano Mayor Harry LaRosiliere joined other officials in condemning the alleged “abhorrent behavior” and spoke of the need to “end bullying and racial abuse in our school and certainly in our community.”

The false victim narrative that prompted all this hand-wringing initially proved lucrative for Smith.

With Cole’s help, Smith was able to raise nearly $120,000 on GoFundMe in the name of therapy, private schooling, and “justice for SeMarion.”

The Washington Free Beacon, citing court records, reported that less than $1,000 of the money raised went toward Humphrey’s schooling. The rest was blown on luxuries including dining, travel, beauty products, liquor, cell phones, car payments, rent, and a designer dog.

While Smith raked in the cash, Asher Vann, the white student accused of organizing the alleged attack on Humphrey, was vilified and attacked.

“I was getting death threats from thousands of people on social media,” Vann told the Free Beacon. “People leaked my address and my name. During one of the protests, they walked all the way to my house and threw bricks through my house.”

“It was scary,” continued Vann, whose family apparently often looked after Humphrey. “These were adults, and I was in middle school at the time. Full-grown adults were rushing my house and causing harm to it. What if I was home and they saw me? They could have ripped me from my home and beaten me. It was very scary.”

In addition to bricks and vitriol, Vann was slapped along with some of his friends with criminal charges — charges that a grand jury declined to accept and a Plano Police Department officer admitted last year likely lacked probable cause, the Free Beacon reported.

A father’s justice

Aaron Vann ultimately sued Cole and Smith on behalf of his son, Asher.

The lawsuit accused the duo of:

creating an “outrageously false narrative for the purposes of raising money and garnering attention, at the expense of children’s privacy”; invasion of privacy, noting that Smith and Cole apparently publicized the teen’s name and address “with the express purpose of causing humiliation, public ridicule, and inspiring public hatred and harassment” of the teen; andacting “intentionally and/or recklessly, when they knowingly and intentionally launched a crusade of false facts, allegations, and narratives to create a social media and public outrage designed to torment [Asher] and subject him to intense ridicule, hatred, embarrassment, and fear – all based on facts Defendants knew to be false.”

According to Plano Police Department Officer Patricia McClure’s 2025 testimony cited by the Beacon, the boys attending the sleepover apparently went outside with airsoft rifles and BB guns in search of frogs during a winter storm. Absent any sign of amphibian targets, the boys reportedly took turns shooting one another. Later, they pranked one another.

Vann suggested to the Beacon that there was no ill will between him and Humphrey after the sleepover but that Smith later caught wind of the events and pushed an alternate version in the press.

The case was called to trial in late October, and a jury — which included four black members — found that Smith and Cole effectively blew up Asher Vann’s life with a false narrative.

Judge Benjamin Smith of Texas’ 380th Judicial District Court ruled late last month that for their “intentional infliction of emotional distress and invasion of privacy” against the young man, Smith and her lawyer must each pay $1,599,000, accruing interest at a rate of 7.5% per annum. The judge also ordered both women to each pay several thousand dollars more for Vann’s attorney fees.

Smith told the Beacon she plans on filing an appeal and maintains that her preferred narrative is the truth. Cole did not return Blaze News’ request for comment.

This is not the Vann family’s first court victory in recent years.

The Vanns took the Plano Independent School District to court after it suspended Asher Vann for three days and placed him in an off-campus disciplinary program for 75 days amid Smith’s hate hoax campaign. In 2022, a U.S. district court found that the district had indeed violated the boy’s substantive due process rights.

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Helen Andrews recently revived discussion of what she calls the great feminization — the idea that as women come to numerically dominate institutions, those institutions begin to function differently, often badly. Her observations are important and largely correct. What follows is a friendly amendment to her thesis. I agree with much of what she sees, but I think an essential part of the story still needs to be named.

Let’s begin by laying out her argument clearly.

The psychological feminization of institutions preceded the numerical one. Men in power enabled it.

The great feminization thesis

Men and women, on average, tend to behave differently. For our purposes, the key distinction is this: Women tend to prioritize relationships and consensus-building, while men tend to prioritize rules, justice, and abstract principles.

Helen Andrews puts it this way: Women ask, “How do we make everyone feel okay?” Men ask, “What are the rules, and what is just?”

If we borrow a familiar parental analogy: Mothers want children to be happy; fathers want children to behave.

The great feminization thesis makes two claims:

When women numerically dominate an institution — whether a profession, a university, or a bureaucracy — that institution will naturally drift toward more “feminine” priorities.What we now call “wokeness” is simply the institutionalization of those priorities.

From this, Andrews draws a sobering conclusion: If wokeness is driven by demographics rather than ideology, it will not simply burn itself out or be defeated by better arguments.

That observation is serious, largely correct, and incomplete.

Key takeaway #1: Wokeness is not the point — totalitarianism is the point

Anyone who thinks wokeness began in 2020 is already naïve. What we now call wokeness is simply a recycled version of an ideology that has been circulating since at least the 1930s. We have called it communism, socialism, political correctness, multiculturalism — and now wokeness. Same garbage, different label.

The label is not the point. The content is.

These ideologies all promise the impossible: the end of poverty, the end of discrimination, the end of pollution, even the end of viral disease. When people talk this way, look out. They are asking for a blank check — unlimited moral permission to acquire power in pursuit of an unattainable goal.

Doing the impossible requires enormous power. Convincing people that it is not only possible, but a moral duty, requires propaganda. These ideologies don’t work for you or for society as a whole. They work for the people who are trying to accumulate power, while endlessly moving the goalposts.

So worrying about where “wokeness” begins or ends is a distraction. Totalitarian aspiration is the point.

Key takeaway #2: The great feminization is more than numbers

The problems Helen Andrews identifies did not begin when women crossed the 50% mark in any institution. They began much earlier. Which means we cannot diagnose civilizational decline by counting heads alone.

The great feminization is not merely statistical. It is psychological and political.

Consider the case of Larry Summers, forced out as president of Harvard in 2006 after remarks about sex differences in aptitude at the extreme upper end of scientific fields. Importantly, Harvard was not majority-female at the time.

Several prominent women defended Summers. They noted that he was speaking off the record, citing substantial research, and had a long history of supporting women in academia. But those voices did not matter. What mattered were the women who expressed the greatest emotional distress — the ones who said they felt sick or faint.

Someone made a decision to elevate those reactions above truth-seeking and institutional integrity. Someone allowed the public to believe that “insensitivity” was the decisive issue. That decision mattered.

Key takeaway #3: Specific people made specific decisions

Treating wokeness or feminization as an automatic demographic process lets decision-makers off the hook. Institutions did not drift accidentally. People chose to reward grievance, punish dissent, and redefine excellence around emotional display.

Statistical generalizations obscure two crucial facts.

First, bell curves overlap. While men and women differ on average, individuals vary widely. Some women are more analytical than many men; some men more emotional than many women.

Second — and more importantly — no one’s behavior is predestined. The ability to regulate our emotions is a basic requirement of adulthood. Every functioning society expects adults to govern their reactions rather than demand that institutions reorganize themselves around tantrums.

The Yale moment

The 2015 Yale Halloween costume episode provides a clear example. A professor’s wife suggested students “be chill” about costumes. Students were outraged, with some of them having public meltdowns, demanding that Yale prioritize their emotional comfort over free inquiry.

Yale was not majority-female. Feminization alone cannot explain this behavior.

What we witnessed instead was a demand for paternal authority stripped of paternal discipline. “Make us feel safe,” the student insisted — while rejecting the professor’s insistence that other people have rights too.

When you smash the patriarchy, you don’t get freedom and justice. You get a spoiled 2-year-old running the place.

RELATED: Milo Yiannopolous dares to tell the truth about homosexuality

Phillip Faraone/Getty Images

The sexual revolution and power

The psychological feminization of institutions preceded the numerical one. Men in power enabled it.

Businesses gained access to a new labor pool. Elite men rewrote workplace rules in ways that advantaged themselves while disadvantaging male competitors lower down the ladder. Universities institutionalized grievance disciplines. Contraceptive ideology separated sex from responsibility, granting men sexual access without paternal obligation.

Women did not enact these changes alone. Men cooperated — and benefited.

Key takeaway #4: Identity politics is a power-grab

Every wave of identity politics follows the same script: Emotional display replaces argument; disruption replaces persuasion; grievance replaces evidence.

“We are oppressed. You owe us.”

This is not really a moral argument at all. It is a power-grab.

Helen Andrews has done a real service by calling attention to the deep problems that majority-female professions and institutions may present. But we have to go deeper than demographics. We have to be willing to say — calmly, firmly, and without apology — “I don’t care how offended you say you are. You still have to behave.”

Men and women alike benefit from that expectation. And the future of civilization and free institutions really does depend on it.

This essay is adapted from the following video, which originally appeared on the Ruth Institute’s YouTube channel.

​Wokeness, Feminism, Ruth institute, Lifestyle, Politics, Culture 

Republican Rep. Brandon Gill of Texas is pushing for President Donald Trump’s tax relief to be felt across America, not just in states that voted for him.

In response to local attempts to block Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act from being implemented in Washington, D.C., Gill introduced legislation to ensure that residents in the nation’s capital can still receive the tax benefits.

‘Government’s top priority should be serving families, not benefiting off them.’

“Thanks to President Trump, the Working Families Tax Cut stopped the largest tax hike since World War II, providing Americans with historic tax relief,” Gill told Blaze News.

“The D.C. Council’s actions would block D.C. residents, namely service workers, from receiving these federal tax credits, from non-taxable tips and overtime, and from keeping their hard-earned money in their wallets. I am joining my colleague Sen. Rick Scott of Florida in putting a stop to the D.C. Council’s interference with America First tax relief.”

RELATED: Exclusive: Brandon Gill unveils key legislation to accelerate deportations for criminal aliens

Photo by Andrew Harnik/Getty Images

As Gill mentioned, his House bill is accompanied by Florida Republican Sen. Rick Scott’s companion legislation in the Senate. Scott noted the immensely popular “no tax on tips” and “no tax on overtime” policies, criticizing D.C. for “deliberately” denying residents these tax benefits.

“President Trump and Republicans passed historic tax cuts into law last year, including No Tax on Tips and No Tax on Overtime to support hardworking American families and businesses and to let them keep more of their own money,” Scott told Blaze News.

RELATED: Exclusive: SAVE Act hangs in the balance as Republican Study Committee pushes for Senate passage

Tierney L. Cross/Bloomberg via Getty Images

“I cut taxes over 100 times when I was governor of Florida to help turn our economy around and businesses grow — which is exactly what President Trump is working to do on the federal level. It is absolutely absurd that self-interested D.C. bureaucrats would deliberately deny families and businesses from saving their own, hard-earned dollars. Government’s top priority should be serving families, not benefiting off them.”

Gill’s legislation is up for a vote in the House on Wednesday and is expected to pass across party lines.

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In an era where every grievance gets inflated into a moral crusade, the ideology people call “wokeness” stands out for one trait more than any other: ungratefulness.

Wokeness doesn’t simply point to injustice. It fixates on it. It treats progress as an illusion, opportunity as a trap, and gratitude as complicity. Everything becomes evidence of oppression. Nothing counts as improvement. To normal people, that posture feels like a bad odor in a room: It sours everything.

Michelle Obama’s story should read like an American testimonial. Yet she often talks about the country as if it injured her.

Everyone knows the type. The chronic complainer. A friend who rants about his job every time you see him. The boss is unfair. The pay is lousy. The co-workers are idiots.

At first, you listen. You sympathize. You offer advice. Then the excuses begin.

“I can’t quit because of the benefits.”

“The job market is terrible.”

“No one would hire me.”

Not with that attitude, pal!

Eventually you realize the problem isn’t his job. It’s him. He doesn’t want solutions. He wants a permanent grievance. After a while, you stop inviting him places. Or you nod and tune out.

Wokeness runs on the same fuel. It sells victimhood as identity and complaint as virtue. It refuses to admit how far the country has moved on race, sex, and equality because that would require humility — and would shrink the movement’s moral leverage.

The result is predictable: Sympathy dries up. People get exhausted. Potential allies become spectators.

You see this pattern in activist politics across the board. Some racial activists talk about systemic racism endlessly while refusing to deal honestly with internal problems that damage communities, like family breakdown and educational collapse. Some LGBTQ activists demand constant affirmation while downplaying enormous legal and cultural victories.

The message stays the same: You owe us more. It rarely becomes: Look how far we’ve come, or here’s what we can fix ourselves.

Michelle Obama embodies this attitude better than almost anyone.

Her story should read like an American testimonial. The country elected her husband president twice. The Obamas became global figures. They turned that platform into immense wealth and influence through books, speeches, and media deals. Few families have been lifted higher by modern America.

Yet Michelle Obama often talks about the country as if it injured her.

Start with her 2008 campaign remark: “For the first time in my adult lifetime, I’m really proud of my country.” Whatever she meant, it landed as contempt. She had lived an elite, upwardly mobile American life — Princeton, Harvard Law, a prestigious career — and still claimed pride only arrived when her husband’s political rise validated it.

Then came the line from her 2016 convention speech: “I wake up every morning in a house that was built by slaves.” She could have framed it as proof of moral progress: a black family in the White House, a nation that overcame its own sins. Instead, she chose the grievance frame, even in the middle of historic achievement.

More recently, Obama described her White House years as a kind of trauma: “What happened that eight years …? What did that do to me internally? … We made it through. We got out alive.” She doesn’t have to pretend the job was easy. But she keeps using the same vocabulary: burden, survival, damage — as if the privilege itself was the wound.

RELATED: Why Trump must block Netflix’s Warner Bros. takeover

Wokeness runs on ungratefulness — and normal people are done with it

In that same conversation, she complained about being labeled “bitter” and “angry” as a black woman. Yet she enjoyed years of glowing coverage from the same cultural institutions that demonize her critics: legacy media, Hollywood, corporate America, the prestige press. Whatever hostility Obama faced, she lived under the warmest spotlight in American public life.

That’s the dynamic people recognize instinctively. Wokeness demands that everyone feel guilty, even when the facts argue for gratitude. It can’t celebrate progress because celebration would admit the country improved. It can’t relax because the crusade requires permanent outrage. It can’t share credit because that would weaken the hierarchy of grievance.

Normal Americans don’t reject wokeness because they hate justice. They reject it because it never stops scolding, never seems satisfied, and never acknowledges anything good. It turns every achievement into an accusation and every success into a complaint.

Ungratefulness repels people. Always has. The movement that builds itself on resentment will keep shrinking — not because its enemies “silenced” it, but because everyday people walked away.

That’s the fate of every ideology that cannot say two simple words: Thank you.

​Gratitude, Woke, Wokeness, Michelle obama, Obama, Opinion & analysis 

On January 30, the U.S. Department of Justice published over 3 million additional pages of documents under the Epstein Files Transparency Act. This new drop contains information from various investigations, including Epstein’s cases in Florida and New York, Ghislaine Maxwell’s case, probes into Epstein’s death, and FBI investigations, among others.

Despite the massive volume of documents and numerous shocking allegations, there were no game-changing revelations that would perhaps lead to fresh accountability for big names.

Glenn Beck, however, says there was one stunning disclosure: His name is in the Epstein files.

“I want to read exactly what it says,” Glenn begins, displaying the official document containing the email where his name is mentioned.

On Wednesday, December 30, 2009, a woman named Alice Jacobs sent Jeffery Epstein the following email:

I just googled where I’m headed right now to meet some old friends and it just occurred to me that a new friend and fellow eccentric is right around the corner from where I’m visiting. I might be able to stop and say hello if you’re around later this afternoon. Would be quick visit but would be a welcome respite from the fox news/glenn beck disciples I am visiting today. They are lovely aside from their politics.

“I don’t know what that means, but this is the best way to be in the Jeffery Epstein [files], where Jeffrey and his friends are like, ‘I hate Glenn Beck, and I don’t like people who like Glenn Beck.’ Yes, so I am proudly in the Epstein files,” Glenn laughs.

In regard to the file dump, he expresses disappointment — albeit expected disappointment — that yet again, there’s nothing that directly implicates anyone.

“It’s exactly what I thought it would be. I think this thing has been picked through so many times that you’re not going to see anything new in the Epstein files,” he says.

The only thing the files really do is confirm that elites are more often than not “dirtbags.”

“There is an evil in our system, and it revolves around really dark sex stuff,” Glenn says.

Tragically, as of now, it appears there’s no way to legally challenge this insidious elitist network.

The best thing we can do, Glenn says, is “keep our eye on [the Epstein case]” without forgetting that there are other national issues that demand our attention — the violent anti-ICE movement in Minnesota, the socialist collapse of New York City under Mayor Zohran Mamdani, and the ongoing power outages in Nashville, Tennessee.

But even these issues aren’t the most critical. The biggest impact we can make is at the micro level — first with our “family” and second with local politics.

“[Donald Trump] is dismantling this global system, and he’s putting it back local, as local as we care to take it,” Glenn says. “It’ll just come back to the United States government, which I don’t think is a good idea — unless we start taking our communities and our states back the right way.”

To hear more, watch the video above.

Want more from Glenn Beck?

To enjoy more of Glenn’s masterful storytelling, thought-provoking analysis, and uncanny ability to make sense of the chaos, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.

​The glenn beck program, Glenn beck, Epstein files, Jeffery epstein, Epstein case, Epstein list, Blazetv, Blaze media, Blaze podcasts 

A “monstrous act of cruelty” by a couple to their four children in Lancaster, California, led to a life sentence for both.

Maurice Jewel Taylor Sr., 39, and Natalie Sumiko Brothwell, 49, decapitated their 12-year-old boy, Maurice, and 13-year-old girl, Maliaka, in Nov. 2020.

‘Two innocent children were brutally murdered, and their young brothers were left to live through unimaginable horror.’

The couple then forced their younger sons, ages 8 and 9, to view the bodies of their dead siblings and confined them to their bedroom for days without food, according to prosecutors.

“This was a monstrous act of cruelty that shattered an entire family,” said Los Angeles County District Attorney Nathan J. Hochman in a statement about the conviction.

“Two innocent children were brutally murdered, and their young brothers were left to live through unimaginable horror,” he added. “The jury’s verdict delivers justice for these victims and sends a powerful message: Those who commit such evil acts will be held fully accountable.”

The two were convicted of first-degree murder as well as child abuse.

The children’s maternal grandmother maintained that her daughter was innocent and accused Taylor of “ruining so many lives” in a statement read to the court.

Taylor and Brothwell were given life sentences without the possibility of parole.

“How do you put into words that two children were beheaded?” said a close family friend outside the courthouse. “This stays with all of us. This is never going to wash off.”

RELATED: 23-year-old stripper decapitated 55-year-old boyfriend and immediately fled to Mexico, police say

The woman, who was only identified as Ellen, said she had urged Brothwell to leave the relationship for years because of domestic violence.

“She was doing what we were raised to believe. You stand by your man,” Ellen added. “You have a family, and you raise your children.”

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​Parents decapitate children, Maurice jewel taylor murder, Natalie sumiko brothwell murder, Crime, Murder and child abuse 

Imagine the Confederates attacking Fort Sumter in April 1861 and Abraham Lincoln negotiating terms of separation instead of mustering troops. We would be two separate countries. In a limited but real sense, we now live in two countries anyway — because Donald Trump has ceded ground to blue-state mobs.

States like Minnesota, working in tandem with local politicians to obstruct a basic federal function — protecting national sovereignty — are latter-day Confederates. Blue states claim the power to nullify federal immigration enforcement inside their borders. That raises a question no one in Washington wants to answer: If blue states can thwart national sovereignty to protect illegal aliens, why can’t red states remove them?

Blue jurisdictions unify behind the proposition of protecting illegal aliens. Red jurisdictions rarely unify behind protecting Americans from political persecution.

This fight doesn’t hinge on Minneapolis or the specific riots that ended with two anti-ICE agitators dead. It reflects a sustained, coordinated campaign across blue cities: street militants, local Democrats, and friendly judges working in concert to shut down immigration enforcement. The activists don’t negotiate over “rules of engagement.” They aim to ban enforcement itself, at least anywhere Democrats hold power. Blue states now run a neo-Confederacy against one of the few legitimate functions of national government.

Now look at what happens on the other side of the divide. Some weak-kneed Republicans — James Comer of Kentucky among them — float the idea that Trump should leave blue cities to stew in their own sanctuary mess, as if the locals will eventually revolt. That fantasy collapses on contact with reality. Worse, ceding sovereignty to blue states hasn’t even produced more deportations in red states.

Courts have enjoined nearly every state statute that tries to treat illegal presence as a state crime. If red states attempted full-spectrum crackdowns under a Democrat president, the same judicial buzz saw would cut them down.

The result: Democrats can block federal law regardless of who sits in the White House, while red states can’t protect themselves when Democrats run the executive branch.

That asymmetry flows from something simple and ugly: Republicans don’t believe their own promises the way Democrats believe theirs. Republicans talk problems to death. Democrats build institutions.

Democrats staff agencies, cultivate prosecutors, and train judges to pursue a shared mission. Republicans often appoint people who treat their “mission” as career management and donor service.

Democrats built parallel systems designed to frustrate immigration enforcement under an opposing president. Conservatives in red states built little beyond press releases and campaign slogans.

RELATED: Memo to Trump: Stop negotiating and ramp up deportations

Photo by Sean Bascom/Anadolu via Getty Images

Democrats in Minnesota and elsewhere have effectively executed the state interposition James Madison described in Federalist 46.

“The disquietude of the people; their repugnance and, perhaps, refusal to co-operate with the officers of the Union; the frowns of the executive magistracy of the State; the embarrassments created by legislative devices … would oppose, in any State, difficulties not to be despised; would form, in a large State, very serious impediments,” Madison wrote. “And where the sentiments of several adjoining States happened to be in unison, would present obstructions which the federal government would hardly be willing to encounter.”

So the first step is to stir public “disquietude.” Then teach “repugnance” toward federal action. Encourage refusal to cooperate with “officers of the Union.” Then use the governor, legislature, and adjacent states “in unison” to create obstacles so severe that the federal government hesitates to enforce the law.

Blue states have followed that script with discipline. They align the branches. They coordinate the message. They deploy local officials to deny cooperation. They rely on judges in blue jurisdictions to shred the Immigration and Nationality Act, even when Congress tried to limit judicial interference, and they order illegal aliens released from custody.

The political class says the quiet part out loud. Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D) invoked Fort Sumter to describe his interposition against the federal government. Mayor Jacob Frey (D) declared that Minneapolis “does not, and will not, enforce federal immigration law.” Philadelphia DA Larry Krasner threatened to “hunt down” ICE agents he believes violated civil liberties, calling them “wannabe Nazis,” and promised to identify them and pursue them.

RELATED: Civil war chatter rises when Democrats fear losing power for good

Photo by Tayfun Coskun/Anadolu via Getty Images

Blue jurisdictions unify behind the proposition of protecting illegal aliens. Red jurisdictions rarely unify behind the proposition of protecting Americans from political persecution. Where did red-state leaders stand when the Biden Justice Department went after pro-lifers for praying outside abortion clinics? Where did they stand when federal authorities treated ordinary citizens like criminals for walking through the Capitol after barriers and rope lines moved?

Democrats now operate by a new rulebook: anarchy for their people, coercion for ours.

Republicans still operate as if the old system can save them. Even when a red-state leader shows spine, he often stands alone — without a legislature willing to act, without an attorney general willing to litigate, without courts willing to defend state interests.

Watching blue states succeed at sabotaging immigration enforcement under Trump should alarm everyone. A darker problem looms: the next Democrat Justice Department won’t limit itself to immigration. When it turns its machinery against Americans again, red states won’t have Madison’s “in unison” design ready to defend their citizens. They will prove as impotent against federal coercion as they have been against the importation of millions of illegal aliens.

Americans now live like second-class citizens while illegal aliens enjoy first-class protection — because the party that claims to represent Americans has failed at the most basic task of representation: fighting to win.

​Blue states, Red states, Ice, Dhs, Democrats, Gop, Antifa, Minneapolis, Opinion & analysis, Civil war, National divorce, Donald trump, Department of homeland security, Secession, James madison, Federalist papers 

President Donald Trump lambasted CNN reporter Kaitlan Collins when she challenged him on his allies referenced in the newly released Jeffrey Epstein files.

Collins also questioned the president on whether the release had been fumbled by officials, after Epstein victims complained about redactions in the releases.

‘I don’t think I’ve ever seen you smile. I’ve known you for 10 years. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a smile on your face.’

“On the Epstein files, you talk about Democrats who were there,” she said. “Elon Musk was also in there, and so was your commerce secretary, Howard Lutnick, and correspondence that he had with him.”

She asked him if he read the new files.

“I didn’t. I have a lot of things that I’m doing,” Trump responded. “And I don’t know. You mentioned two names. I’m sure they’re fine.”

“A lot of the women who are survivors of Epstein were unhappy with those redactions that came out,” Collins continued. “Some of them, entire witness interviews are totally blacked out.”

“I think it’s really time for the country to get on to something else, now that nothing came out about me,” he responded.

“But what would you say to people who feel like they haven’t gotten justice, Mr. President?” she asked.

“You are so bad. You are the worst reporter. No wonder CNN has no ratings, because of people like you,” the president said.

“You know, she’s a young woman. I don’t think I’ve ever seen you smile. I’ve known you for 10 years. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a smile on your face,” he added. “You know why you’re not smiling? Because you know you’re not telling the truth, and you’re a very dishonest organization, and they should be ashamed of you.”

“These are survivors of sexual abuse,” Collins persisted.

RELATED: Karoline Leavitt berates CNN’s Kaitlan Collins over inflation and the economy

Collins posted video of the interaction on her social media account.

“President Trump argues the country should move on from the Epstein files and lashes out when asked about the survivors’ response to the latest release from the Justice Department,” she wrote.

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A billboard message in support of Immigration and Customs Enforcement in San Francisco has outraged many on the left just ahead of the Super Bowl weekend.

The ad in the famed Fisherman’s Wharf shows an ICE agent with the caption, “Defensive player of the year.”

‘It puts fear in me — that it’s desensitizing people to think that it’s OK to be people hurting people.’

One woman reacted negatively to the billboard in comments to KABC-TV.

“It made me sick to my stomach,” said Karen Guerrero, a woman from Chicago. “It puts fear in me — that it’s desensitizing people to think that it’s OK to be people hurting people.”

A group called American Sovereignty took responsibility for the sign.

“We are saluting the brave Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents who work every day in defense of America with billboards and ads in San Francisco,” the group said on social media.

The sign was excoriated online as well.

“Who allowed this to happen? This is Sickening,” one user said.

“F**K ICE aka NEOGESTAPOS NO ONE IS ILLEGAL ON OCCUPIED LAND,” another message reads.

“Patriots or Brownshirt thugs?” another critic said.

Others said they supported the message.

RELATED: More UNHINGED anti-ICE extremist footage: ‘I am a liberal, leftist, pagan, lesbian, transgender woman, and witch!’

“They have a job to do too. That’s it,” said Scott Yurt, also from Chicago. “I don’t have a problem with them.”

More than 1.3 million visitors are expected in the area for the highly anticipated championship match between the New England Patriots and the Seattle Seahawks at Levi’s Stadium.

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Unless it’s President Donald Trump or a conservative on the chopping block, the media is likely to be silent about it, which is being demonstrated now with one of the latest Epstein files revelations — and it involves Bill Gates.

“I regret to inform you, I’m going to give you a headline that is rather disgusting, but I’m going to have to give it to you anyway,” BlazeTV host Sara Gonzales says, before reading the Daily Mail headline, “Jeffrey Epstein says Bill Gates caught sexually transmitted disease from ‘Russian girls’ … then suggested secretly slipping Melinda antibiotics, new emails in DOJ release claim.”

“It is so crazy to me that the man who wanted to force everyone, wanted to make sure you got your injection, wanted to make sure that, you know, everyone was masked. I can’t remember how many times Bill Gates went out on CNN and MSNBC, and he was like, ‘You better mask up,’” Gonzales says.

“Bill, you could have covered yourself up just the same way you’re asking people to cover their mouths. You could have gave your ding-a-ling a mask, maybe prevented yourself from giving your wife an STD,” she laughs.

In draft emails that Epstein sent to himself, he accused Gates of contracting the sexually transmitted disease and then asking for Epstein’s help.

“I cannot believe that you have chosen to both disregard and discard our friendship developed of over the last 6 years,” one email begins.

“TO add insult to the injury you then subsequently with tears in your eyes, implore me to plase delete the emails regarding your std, your request that I provide you antibiotics that you can surreptitiously give to Melinda, and the description of your penis. You also made it clear to me that I am not to refer to [REDACTED] as that is another topic that must remain between the two of us,” the email goes on.

Epstein went on to explain in another email that he was resigning from his position with BG3 and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

“During the past few weeks I have been caught up in a severe marital dispute between Melinda and Bill,” Epstein wrote.

“From helping Bill to get drugs, in order to deal with consequences of sex with Russian girls, to facilitating his illicit trysts, with married women, to being asked to provide adderall for bridge tournaments … I feel I owe it to my friends and future colleagues to admit a moral failure, to ask forgiveness and to move on with my life,” he continued.

While the document dump made it clear that Gates is at the very least an adulterer, it also gave Gonzales a better idea of who Epstein was — especially considering how much “pizza” was mentioned in the emails.

“I might do a deep dive at some point, but for now I will just say, there are a lot of mentions of pizza and going to go get pizza and leaving the island to get pizza and come back. And there are a lot of weird code words in there that I’m still putting together,” Gonzales says.

“I don’t think it was that Jeffrey Epstein really loved pizza as much as those emails claim. I think we all know what the code is. And obviously with the document dump, it’s going to take a while to put all of these pieces together,” she continues.

“One thing is clear: He was a really bad guy,” she adds.

Want more from Sara Gonzales?

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Last Friday, the Department of Justice released another round of Epstein-related documents, videos, and images, some of which accuse President Trump, whose name appears thousands of times, of egregious crimes, including sexual assault of underage girls, sexual misconduct involving minors at events/parties, threatening to kill children, and involvement in Epstein’s sex-trafficking activities.

One particular FBI-compiled spreadsheet summarizing unverified public tips and allegations regarding President Trump has amassed tens of millions of views on X alone.

“People were claiming, like, ‘Finally, we have a smoking gun on Trump,’ … but the problem with that claim is that it’s just, like, not true at all,” BlazeTV host John Doyle scoffs.

He explains that anyone can file a report with the FBI, which keeps meticulous records of every piece of information — true or not — it receives. The viral document with all the salacious allegations against President Trump is exactly that — records of unverified claims.

“Like, if I file a report today saying that I saw Hillary Clinton shape-shift into a lizard person and board a UFO, that doesn’t mean it’s true,” he laughs. “It just means that I told the FBI that. Maybe I believed it was true; maybe I wanted to sow seeds against people I don’t like. Whatever. The point is, it goes on the record.”

“A low-info, maybe low-IQ schizophrenic, just bored — I can see how that kind of person could read these reports and not know that they contain unsubstantiated information, unsubstantiated allegations,” he adds.

One of the allegations that’s garnering a ton of attention, for example, accuses President Trump of funding or hosting underage sex parties at a Trump-owned golf course in Rancho Palos Verdes, California, around 1995-1996, with extreme claims of some victims being murdered and buried behind the facility.

However, President Trump didn’t purchase the golf course in question until 2002. Further, in the FBI tip summary document, there is a note next to this golf course report stating: “Complainant was spoken to and deemed not credible. Additional research showed 3 separate incidents involving police which requested in mandatory psychiatric evaluations.”

Even still, “that did not stop tons of liberals [and] retarded right-wingers from claiming that Trump was somehow involved in this, like, sex trafficking, rape murder ring out of one of his golf courses,” Doyle sighs.

But the golf course report isn’t even the most ridiculous accusation some people are interpreting as undisputed fact.

For example, one alleged male victim referenced in the documents made a number of wild claims, one of them being that while on a boat with Epstein, his feet were cut with a scimitar that miraculously left no scars. He also claimed that he witnessed babies being dismembered and eaten and that he was raped by Jeffery Epstein, George H.W. Bush, and Bill Clinton.

However, a note in the report shows that the FBI agents who assessed this complainant described him as emotionally unbalanced, unemployed, living with his mother, and having ingested hallucinogenic mushrooms. They ultimately recommended dismissing the case because he could offer no evidence, corroboration, witnesses, or supporting details.

“The retard right and the liberals see these emails, and they’re like, ‘See! We freaking told you Jeffrey Epstein was eating babies, and Trump was friends with him,’” but they fail to read “the next part, [where] it says it’s literally not true,” Doyle says.

Trump, whom Doyle calls “a media genius,” knew all along that this was bound to happen. He was well aware that releasing the files would ignite hysteria in “low-info people,” who would see his name in wild, unverified claims and assume they’re reading facts.

This is why Democrats pushed so hard for the Epstein files to be dropped, Doyle argues.

They may package their petitioning as genuine concern for the abuse of children, but that falls flat when you consider that their party platform is built on “the abuse of children — whether directly because of stuff like the transgender grooming or indirectly by the facilitation of mass third-world migration, which famously participates in things like trafficking children [and] sexually abusing children,” he declares.

“Is it just the same thing that it’s always been, which is anything to attack Trump because Trump is literally the only thing standing in between the global leviathan that is the left and American patriots?”

To hear more, watch the episode above.

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While Democrats are trying to beat down President Donald Trump over lethal shootings by federal agents in Minnesota, a new poll shows that a slim majority approves of his response to the protests.

The online poll was conducted by the Center for American Political Studies at Harvard and the Harris Poll and found that of all categories listed, Trump’s favorability was highest over the Minneapolis anti-ICE response.

A large majority, 60%, said they believed Democratic politicians had encouraged resistance to ICE officers performing their job.

Fifty-one percent of respondents approved of Trump on that issue, 47% approved of his fighting crime in the cities, and 46% said they approved of the president on immigration.

He scored least favorably on the issues of tariffs and handling inflation, at only 39% approval.

The president’s overall approval rating slipped to 45% in the poll after reaching a high of 52% in Feb. 2025.

A large majority, 60%, said they believed Democratic politicians had encouraged resistance to ICE officers performing their job, and only 43% said they supported politicians encouraging that resistance. Fifty-seven percent said they opposed politicians encouraging resistance.

The respondents were polled after the lethal shooting of Alex Pretti, an ICU nurse and anti-ICE agitator who interrupted federal agents while armed with a gun. Respondents could have also known about the lethal shooting of Renee Good, who blocked ICE agents with her vehicle and swerved into one agent after being confronted.

Border Patrol Chief Gregory Bovino left Minneapolis after the shootings, and the president sent Tom Homan, his border czar, to oversee the operation and report directly to the president.

RELATED: ‘Little f**king c***s!’ Democrat official fired over video of him spewing obscenities at women

The polls also found that the Republican Party’s approval rating slid to 44% after reaching 52% in the last year. While Democrats enjoyed their highest approval rating in about the same time, they only reached 44% approval.

Both had a higher approval rating than Congress, at 35%.

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