President Trump announced Friday that CNN, MS NOW, and Politico were banned from the White House, effective immediately.

By Saturday morning, the ban was real. Reporters from all three organizations were turned away from the White House grounds. Press passes were disabled or confiscated, Reuters reported. By Monday morning, the media companies were filing lawsuits.

The First Amendment establishes a floor. A president who professes devotion to free speech should aim higher.

The reaction from plenty of people on the right was predictable: Good! About time! A friend of mine reposted Trump’s announcement on Facebook with three words: “Late but welcome.”

I understand the sentiment. I don’t share it.

The institutional press has spent years torching its own credibility. CNN can be grossly unfair. Politico can be tendentious. And MS NOW is simply unwatchable. Reporters make mistakes, protect narratives, follow ideological fashions, and regularly publish garbage. Trump is perfectly entitled to say so.

But none of that answers the question: What should government do about it?

The First Amendment issue here is more complicated than the knee-jerk reactions suggest. Reporters possess no free-floating constitutional right to enter the Oval Office, fly on Air Force One, join the presidential press pool, or demand an interview with the president.

The courts have never said otherwise.

In fact, the White House won an important round last year when the Associated Press sued after being excluded over its refusal to adopt “Gulf of America.” In a June order, two D.C. Circuit judges concluded that restricted presidential spaces such as the Oval Office, Air Force One, and Mar-a-Lago are not First Amendment forums. The White House therefore retains considerable discretion over which journalists get in — even, the judges said, on the basis of viewpoint.

Brian Stelter can hyperventilate all he likes. CNN does not own a chair in the Oval Office.

But the same ruling reaffirmed an older rule.

When the White House opens press facilities generally to “bona fide journalists” — the Brady Briefing Room, for example — access cannot be denied arbitrarily or because officials dislike a journalist’s speech. That principle goes back to the D.C. Circuit’s 1977 decision in Sherrill v. Knight.

Trump has now gone well beyond leaving CNN out of the Oval Office pool.

RELATED: CNN says Trump press ban is illegal — then the Trump team THROWS DOWN fiery response

Graeme Sloan/Getty Images

He has revoked ordinary White House access for entire news organizations because, by his own account, he objects to their journalism. “They purposely write negative news,” he said Friday.

Lawyers can argue about where precisely the First Amendment line falls. Presidents are better off staying well away from it.

Especially presidents who have spent years railing against censorship, government pressure on social media companies, and official efforts to suppress disfavored speech.

Trump began his second term with an executive order declaring government censorship undertaken to advance a “preferred narrative … intolerable in a free society.” Vice President JD Vance went to Munich weeks later and delivered a speech excoriating European governments for restricting disfavored speech.

Those principles are tested by speech you despise, not speech you welcome.

You cannot hate the media enough? Fine. Hate them.

Read somebody else. Watch somebody else. Mock them. Refute them. Support media companies that don’t hate your guts. Put every mistake the other guy makes on blast. When CNN or MS NOW botches a story, make them eat it for a month.

Bad journalism has a remedy in a free country: more speech.

Once government begins imposing penalties because officials despise the journalism, the question changes. It is no longer whether CNN deserves contempt. It is what power you are willing to give the state. Me? Not very much.

Barack Obama’s White House confronted the same temptation in 2009. Administration officials complained that Fox News operated more like an arm of the Republican Party than a news organization. When the White House tried to exclude Fox from a pool interview with a Treasury official, the other networks objected and threatened to pull out. The administration backed down.

Good.

Fox did not suddenly become acceptable in Obama’s sight. The administration stopped trying to settle an argument with a news organization by manipulating access.

Ronald Reagan had a better formulation. He had plenty of righteous complaints about hostile press coverage, but he called the antagonism between presidents and reporters “the friction of freedom.”

RELATED: So much for ‘Reliable Sources’!

Kevin Mazur/Getty Images for WarnerMedia

A year later, Reagan acknowledged that presidents naturally try to use the press to their advantage and avoid situations that hurt them. The press could take care of itself, he said, and so could the president.

His preferred epitaph for a president’s relationship with reporters was simple: “He gave as good as he got.”

That’s about right.

Nobody is asking Trump to admire CNN or pretend bad journalism is good journalism simply because reporters invoke the First Amendment.

Fight them. But fight them with words. They call it the bully pulpit for a reason.

And forget CNN for a moment.

Every presidential practice sets a precedent. Anyone cheering presidential punishment of a despised news organization today should decide whether he wants the same rule administered someday by a president who thinks Fox News, Blaze News, or some other right-wing outlet traffics in “negative news.”

That isn’t an argument for CNN. It’s an argument for us.

The safest rules governing government power are the ones you can tolerate when your enemies administer them.

Trump may ultimately prevail on some of the constitutional argument here. The D.C. Circuit has already recognized broad presidential authority over access to restricted spaces. Revoking ordinary White House credentials because of hostile coverage presents a different question.

The First Amendment establishes a floor. A president who professes devotion to free speech should aim higher.

CNN doesn’t need defending. The principle does.

Let them in anyway.

That’s the friction of freedom.

​Brian stelter, Censorship, Cnn, Donald trump, Fake news, First amendment, Free speech, Ms now, Opinion & analysis, Politico, Ronald reagan 

Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni is taking action to limit the impact of Muslim immigrants on her country.

Italy has taken on millions of immigrants from majority-Muslim countries because of its accessibility to boats carrying migrants across the Mediterranean Sea.

‘In Italy, no one, in the name of a real or supposed tradition, can decide that a young woman must hide herself.’

On Sunday, Meloni said that the country will ban burqas in schools and also limit the number of foreign students allowed in each class.

“You must go to ⁠school with your face uncovered, and in Italy, no one, in the name of a real or supposed tradition, can decide that a young woman must hide herself,” she said at an annual gathering of the youth in her party.

“A measure will soon be presented to a Cabinet meeting to legally establish a maximum number of foreign students per class,” Meloni added. “It also requires parents of foreign students facing serious difficulties integrating into the school system to learn Italian and bans burqas and niqabs in schools.”

About 12 in every 100 students in Italy are not citizens, according to one research study cited by NBC News. She argued that foreign students would have a tougher time integrating in schools with too many other foreign students.

“If there is only ⁠one child in a class who doesn’t understand Italian, that child will likely be able to learn the language and integrate quickly with the help of classmates and teachers,” Meloni continued. “However, if the number of children who don’t understand the language becomes large — or even ⁠the majority — that is no longer integration; it is neglect.”

Meloni was elected four years ago in part by Italians wanting a harder line against illegal immigration, and she has pressed for those policies despite criticism from the left.

She did not indicate what the numerical limit of foreign students might be.

BlazeTV host Steve Deace responded to the proposed ban in comments to Blaze News.

“It took a few years, but Meloni is finally living up to all her based rhetoric leading up to her election,” he said.

RELATED: MASSIVE PROTEST against illegal migrants OVERRUNNING tiny Spanish province: ‘Enough, Ceuta won’t give up!’

CAIR did not respond to a request for comment from Blaze News.

Meloni previously threatened to shut down an immigration agreement with Spain after illegal migrants from Morocco overran the border of the Ceuta province in northern Africa.

“The images coming from Ceuta are shocking and demonstrate, once again, that uncontrolled illegal immigration poses a real threat to the security of Europe’s borders,” read a translated post from Meloni on July 30.

“We will not yield an inch on the issue of illegal immigration,” she added.

The immigrant population in Italy has skyrocketed from about 423,000 in 1985 to about 5.8 million in 2024.

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​Giorgia meloni, Illegal immigration, Italy, Muslims, Islam, Burqa ban, Politics 

The smart TV on your wall isn’t just for watching shows and movies. It also might be spying on you. A bombshell report claims that some smart TVs are recording living room conversations, storing unencrypted transcripts, and sucking up other private data, all for “advertising” purposes. Here’s what you need to know and how to stop it.

During a two-hour video posted by Gamers Nexus, editor in chief Steve Burke argued that LG’s smart TVs can suck up an enormous amount of information about their users.

If you own a smart TV of any kind whatsoever, you’re still not completely safe.

“We were able to retrieve plain-text transcripts of voice conversations and inputs from the TV,” Burke claimed. His team also maintained that audio and video could be recorded and saved to a remote device, even while the TV was disconnected from the internet.

While the alleged conversation-recording capabilities would be the most alarming discovery, users could also face siphoning of other personal data. Burke said his test LG TV scoured his data network and saved an entire list of smart devices that were also linked to the same Wi-Fi address, including iPhones, Android devices, Apple Watches, routers, printers, PCs, and more. Burke further claimed it also marked down the IP address for the host network, as well as the individual IP addresses of the other located devices, and marked down the TV’s geographical location and the names of other nearby Wi-Fi networks.

That would amount to just about all the information available to the device.

Ultimately, Burke and others suggest, LG compiles this information and sells it to advertisers so that they can serve customers targeted ads through their LG Ad Solutions network. Gamers Nexus further claims, however, that LG and its partners aren’t the only ones that can access this data. Hackers may also get ahold of it through “remote code execution” vulnerabilities where they take control of a TV and manipulate its behavior.

To be clear, LG denied all of Burke’s claims. The company pushed back forcefully.

The claims made in the recently published video are not true. LG TVs process voice data only when the voice button on the remote control is pressed and held or when a wake word such as “Hi LG” is recognized after the user has activated the Far-Field voice recognition feature. Other than these instances, the TVs do not collect or record ambient conversations. (If the wake word is not recognized, no voice data is transmitted to the server; the audio processing for wake word detection is performed locally on the device and is immediately deleted.)

So where does this leave users?

RELATED: Your smart TV may be watching you back: NEW report reveals troubling details

Pat Gray Unleashed

At this point, whether or not you might worry about LG smart TVs in your home that might be recording your conversations, you might think you’re in the clear because you have an other-branded TV on the wall. Unfortunately, if you own a smart TV of any kind whatsoever, you’re still not completely safe.

Shortly after Burke published the initial video alleging LG’s surveillance machine, the Verge, a longtime mainstream tech media outlet, claimed that all smart TVs track their users through automatic content recognition. Built into most modern TVs, ACR monitors your screen to see what you watch. It can also capture audio and video from viewing sessions and send them to a server to help the TV provider deliver content recommendations or sell targeted ads.

Granted, ACR isn’t nearly as invasive as LG’s audio surveillance discovery is claimed to be, but it still proves that, at the very least, your viewing habits are being watched and monetized out from under you.

That brings us to the solution. If you own an LG TV and you’re wondering what to do next, here are some tips that can help.

Wipe and restore your smart TV as new. This process is a little different, depending on the year of your LG TV, but the goal is ultimately the same. We want to wipe any local data your TV already captured and stored, including surveillance data.Disconnect your TV from the internet. Cut off Wi-Fi access and unplug any ethernet cables attached to the back panel. If your TV can’t connect to the internet, it can’t transmit surveillance data. That said, Gamers Nexus discovered that LG TVs still capture conversations while disconnected, and they can relay transcripts if that connection is ever restored, so ensure you keep your LG TV away from your Wi-Fi for good.Give your TV a new brain. Since you now effectively turned your smart TV back into a dumb TV, you can get back some smart functionality by connecting a separate streaming device, preferably without ACR. Non-ACR options include the Apple TV and the Google TV Streamer, while Fire TV and Roku both come with ACR technology built in.

The best way to stop smart TV companies from spying on you is not to own a smart TV at all. However, new dumb TVs are hard to find these days, especially in larger form factors. At the very least, if you do plan to buy a new TV soon, shop carefully, and watch as events unfold.

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​Advertisers, Privacy, Spying, Tech, Surveillance 

Questions have swirled about Minnesota Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar’s past for years, but one reporter from LindellTV finally had the guts to ask her these questions on camera.

Alison Steinberg stopped Omar in a congressional hallway and pressed her on a claim that BlazeTV host Pat Gray’s been waiting for.

“I have been waiting for this particular confrontation with Ilhan Omar for a long time. A long time. Somebody actually finally did it,” he says, before playing a clip of the tense encounter.

“Hi congresswoman, Tom Homan said that you’re under criminal investigation for immigration and marriage fraud,” Steinberg said, asking, “Any comment on that?”

“No, I don’t have a comment for that,” Omar responded through laughs.

“If there’s some marriage fraud,” Steinberg continued, “Can you just tell us straight up, did you marry your brother?”

“Absolutely not. What a ridiculous thing to ask,” Omar said, before adding, “Did you marry your brother?”

“Absolutely not,” Steinberg responded, but she wasn’t done.

“Why are you being criminally investigated?” she asked, to which Omar said, “I am not.”

Steinberg then pressed Omar as to whether or not Tom Homan, who has said otherwise, is a “liar.”

“He is, he’s been saying some dumb s**t like you,” Omar said angrily.

Gray couldn’t be more impressed with the young reporter.

“That’s great,” he says. “That’s not easy to do. That might look easy to do, but it isn’t.”

“Straight up,” he adds, “‘Did you marry your brother?’”

Want more from Pat Gray?

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​Alison steinberg, Criminal investigation, Ilhan omar, Immigration fraud, Lindell tv, Pat gray, Tom homan, Blazetv show 

Joe Biden has been out of office for almost two years now — so why does everything still feel so expensive?

As midterm elections draw nearer, that’s the question on the top of American minds, and BlazeTV host Ron Simmons has some answers.

While prices are up, Simmons points out that this all began under Biden, where “prices rose about 21%.”

“That’s over 5% a year. And since that time, since the second administration of President Trump, they’ve grown a little over 2% a year, about 2.5% a year,” he explains.

“When prices grew to 21%, so if something cost a dollar and then when Biden left it cost a $1.20, it didn’t go back down to a dollar when President Trump got elected,” he says.

“What he has done, and his administration have done, is they’ve just reduced how fast it’s increasing,” he adds.

Simmons explains that prices will go down when demand goes down.

“If you remember back to 2008, 2009, when they had the huge housing crisis, well, in 2007, do you know what interest rates were for mortgages at that time? Guess what they were. They’re right what they are right now, a little over 6%,” he explains.

“People lost their jobs and things, and there was more supply than there was demand,” he continues. “So they dropped interest rates and they brought interest rates down, probably too low, honestly — artificially low — and so you could buy a house at a 3% mortgage.”

“Then when the economy got better, and the fact that we pumped a lot of unnecessary money into the economy, interest rates went up because there ended up being more demand than there was supply,” he adds.

When the demand is high, the interest rates remain high.

“Now, what we don’t want to happen is another huge recession, obviously, but just remember how this happened,” he says, pointing out that Democrat policies have led us here.

“Housing has become dramatically more expensive during the Biden years,” he continues, noting that the Heritage Foundation has reported that the cost of financing a medium-priced home has risen 114% since 2021.

“At the same time, consumer prices have risen about 20%, which we talked about, and it costs about $13,300 more per year to purchase the same house, interest-rate-wise, than it did in 2021,” he says.

“Immigration was a part of this,” he explains. “When they opened the floodgates, more people coming into the country means there’s more demand for goods and services, and that increased the cost of living and housing.”

However, Simmons points out that the most expensive cities — San Francisco, Los Angeles, San Jose, New York, and Boston — are all run by Democrats.

“So just remember when you’re voting this time,” he adds.

Want more from Allie Beth Stuckey?

To enjoy more of Allie’s upbeat and in-depth coverage of culture, news, and theology from a Christian, conservative perspective, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.

​Biden administration, Donald trump, Economy, Housing crisis, Inflation, Prices, Recession, Ron simmons, Midterms, Blazetv show 

An interview to mark the start of the NHL season went off the rails when an activist reporter hammered one of the league’s greatest players of all time with political questions.

Almost two weeks before the games start to count, Washington Capitals forward Alexander Ovechkin was talking to the media when an ESPN reporter started pelting him with question regarding a recent political ad he had been a part of.

She’s ‘got an arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court for abducting Ukrainian children.’

Ovechkin, the NHL’s all-time goal-scoring leader — yes, he has scored even more goals than Wayne Gretzky — was featured in a pro-Russia ad for President Vladimir Putin’s United Russia party in the lead-up to the elections last weekend.

Although Ovechkin simply stood in the background during the ad, ESPN reporter Robert Klemko — who is half-Ukrainian — went after the hockey player about the details of the filming, asking if he informed his team before the video shoot.

“No,” Ovechkin replied, per Klemko’s recollection of the interview.

The reporter then told Ovechkin his appearance in the commercial “feels to people like a pro war stance.”

“I don’t think it’s a pro war,” Ovechkin reportedly replied. “I think it’s just support what’s happening in Russia. I want the peace and love for everybody. It doesn’t matter who you are, American, Russian, or Ukrainian.”

After Klemko claimed the war would “be done soon” if Putin stops the invasion, he later asked if Ovechkin would support Russia “no matter what.”

The 41-year-old replied, “Well, I’m gonna live there, yeah.”

This prompted the ESPN journalist to ask an inflammatory question: “So if they’re responsible for a genocide, you would support the genocide?”

Ovechkin asked for a translation of “genocide” from a member of his media team, a note corroborated by different outlets. He then replied, “Oh. I would say, like, I’m, I hope it’s not gonna, it’s not gonna be like that.”

RELATED: Sophie Cunningham defends Sydney Sweeney — but admits she ‘morally’ has a problem

In a clip from CTV News, Ovechkin told reporters he is going to move back to Russia when he retires from hockey.

“I’m going to stay there. I’m going to live there. My kids are going to live there.”

Regarding the political ad, Ovechkin stated that he’s “for peace and love” and that he hopes “everything’s going to be okay.”

He revealed when he was asked to do the commercial, he simply replied, “Yes.”

“So, simple as that,” Ovechkin said.

Outlet HockeyFeed said Klemko then “pressed” Ovechkin after the group press conference and attempted to tell the player what his involvement in the ad “really signals.”

Ovechkin continuously gave statements like “I’m not in politics,” and “I don’t know who that is” in regard to certain people featured in the ad, but Klemko pressed forward and asked the Russian if he felt he was perpetuating propaganda.

“It mimics messaging Russians get that says Ukraine is responsible for being invaded by Russia,” Klemko wrote.

“I can’t say who’s right and who’s wrong,” Ovechkin responded soon thereafter.

Klemko said he told Ovechkin that one of the people in the ad is “Maria Lvova Belova,” who, he said, “got an arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court for abducting Ukrainian children.”

Ovechkin said he didn’t know who that person is.

RELATED: Charles Barkley defends WNBA, but says ‘race’ and ‘sexuality’ are behind Sophie Cunningham clashes

Sasha Mordovets/Getty Images

Klemko’s subsequent article for ESPN, published Thursday, cited University of Maryland “senior scholar” Sarah Oates, who directly stated that Russia is “perpetuating a genocide on Ukrainian people.”

“Putin has said Ukraine and Ukrainians have no right to exist. And this is a key reason for the invasion. Ovechkin supports Putin, he supports the Russian regime, and that means he supports genocide,” Oates claimed.

After his questions about genocide, Klemko said the media relations team ended his interview with Ovechkin.

Capitals general manager Chris Patrick later told ESPN that if Ovechkin had told the franchise about the ad, the organization would have “worked to avoid the situation very hard. And I doubt we’d be standing where we’re standing right now if he had run it by us.”

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​Nhl, Alexander ovechkin, Espn, Russia, Ukraine, Hockey, Sports 

Despite intense protests and warnings about a “slippery slope,” Canada’s liberal government legalized medically assisted suicide nationwide in 2016.

As critics predicted, the so-called Medical Assistance in Dying program — recognized by Canada’s Office of the Parliamentary Budget Officer as a cost-saver for the country’s immigration-strained and eugenicist-founded health care system — has been grossly liberalized over the past decade, become a leading cause of death and claiming the lives of ineligible victims.

‘This is murder.’

The family of an 83-year-old Christian woman who was allegedly killed by lethal injection without proper consent in a MAID procedure has filed a complaint with the Office of the Chief Coroner of Ontario, sounding the alarm about the euthanasia regime.

Brigitte Kranendonk noted in a July 21 post on Facebook that her German-born grandmother, Brigitte Stegemann, a resident of the Pearl — a long-term care facility in Cannifton, Ontario — was diagnosed earlier this year with untreatable stage 4 stomach cancer.

While Stegemann could have potentially survived for years, a meeting was held several months ago to discuss the possibility of MAID, Kranendonk said.

“At that time, GG clearly stated that she did not wish to pursue it. As a devout Christian, she explicitly expressed that MAID conflicted with her personal beliefs and faith,” Kranendonk, who held legal power of attorney for Stegemann, claimed on Facebook.

The grandmother was approached on two occasions about pursuing MAID while her granddaughter was on a 10-day vacation, the Facebook post claimed, then visited on July 7 for a MAID assessment by a physician identified in Kranendonk’s complaint as Catherine Koester.

The Christian Canadian think tank Cardus noted in an August 31 report that unlike most first-world nations, Canada requires only one written request for euthanasia and one witness to that request and does not legally require communication with a patient’s family members about the patient’s medical history and state of mind.

RELATED: Priest breaks hip — now Canada apparently wants him dead

Universal Images Group/Getty Images

During the July 7 assessment, Stegemann allegedly failed to evidence soundness of mind — “GG repeatedly provided objectively incorrect answers to basic, factual questions about her own life and immediate family” — and signaled distress while family members protested the evaluation, Kranendonk claimed.

‘They saw an opportunity.’

Among the questions the elderly Canadian apparently got wrong was a query about how many siblings she had. While the actual answer was 13, Stegemann said that she had none, according to her granddaughter.

Despite Stegemann’s apparent disorientation, the physician allegedly found her fit to make the MAID decision, then informed the family that the procedure would take place just days later.

Kranendonk suggested to the Daily Mail that her grandmother’s final moments were a horror show, alleging that a gloveless nurse who supposedly treated the family members contemptuously had repeatedly failed to tap the right vein in one arm for the deadly IV before switching to the other arm and beginning the prodding anew.

“There was a phenomenal amount of blood,” said Kranendonk, who indicated that Stegemann had wept bitterly in the lead-up to her final day. “It is all over my Oma’s arm, it is all over her nightie, soaking through her pillow, all over the sheets, there is so much blood.”

According to Kranendonk, the doctor entered the room on July 10, explained to Stegemann that she was going to administer some “medicine,” and after 10 minutes, the woman was pronounced dead.

“She was a vulnerable human being, and they saw an opportunity,” added Kranendonk.

Kranendonk’s complaint to the province’s chief coroner, which was obtained by Canadian combat veteran and MAID critic Kelsi Sheren, states that in the case of her grandmother’s demise, there was a “severe failure of statutory safeguards, procedural requirements, and patient consent protocols.”

In addition to Stegemann allegedly lacking the capacity to make the decision to pursue MAID, the complaint alleges that “care home staff actively initiated private MAID discussions and facilitated the completion and witnessing of official application paperwork in secret, deliberately bypassing” the patient’s legal power of attorney. It also alleges that the euthanasia took place without verbal confirmation from Stegemann.

“One of our greatest ethical concerns is that GG [Stegemann] had explicitly declined MAID, stating it violated her Christian faith,” Kranendonk said in her Facebook post. “Once a vulnerable patient explicitly declines this path, the facility should never have targeted her for re-evaluation behind closed doors while her primary advocate was away — especially when the facility had no trouble contacting [Kranendonk] daily for minor, routine care decisions.”

Blaze News did not immediately receive comment from Ontario Premier Doug Ford’s office, Ontario Health at Home, the Pearl, or Dr. Koester.

While the Office of the Chief Coroner told Blaze News that it “does not share details related to any death investigation,” it noted that “the MAiD Review Team (MRT) reviews every MAiD death reported in the province to ensure compliance with all federal legislative and regulatory requirements. This includes reviewing the MAiD Death Report submitted by the practitioner, confirming completeness and accuracy of the information, and directly contacting a representative of the deceased to identify any issues or concerns.”

Kranendonk — who greatly regrets not applying for a legal injunction to halt the procedure — told the Daily Mail that she is also appealing to the Patient Ombudsman and Belleville Police in an effort to determine whether what happened to her grandmother was legal.

A spokesman for Belleville Police told the Daily Mail, “This incident is currently open and under investigation with our Criminal Investigations Division. We are unable to provide any additional information at this time.”

The death of Brigitte Stegemann has attracted international attention, especially in the United States.

Utah Sen. Mike Lee (R) wrote, “The intersection of assisted suicide and socialized medicine results in state-led horrors, treating the young, old, infirm, and distressed as disposable people. We must never allow this barbarity to spread in America.”

“This … is … evil,” tweeted Sen. Ted Cruz, a Republican born in a Canadian province that has recently taken some steps to rein in Canada’s sick experiment.

Normalcy advocate Robby Starbuck emphasized that “this is murder. Canada murdered this woman.”

Jason Kenney, Canada’s former conservative defense minister and Alberta’s 18th premier, said that the tale of Stegemann’s demise is an indictment of the Canadian Supreme Court’s “decision to trample on its own precedent, and the democratic decisions of Parliament, by opening the floodgates to killing the elderly and the infirm. If the claims made here are credible, the Crown must charge those responsible for the murder of Brigitte Stegemann.”

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​Canada, Euthanasia, Health care, Medical assistance in dying, Mike lee, Ontario, Socialized medicine, Ted cruz, Politics 

Various news outlets, including Fox News, have agreed to suspend pool reporting at the White House as a way to protest the president’s news ban.

On Friday, President Donald Trump accused CNN, MS NOW, and Politico of peddling fake news and banned them all from the White House.

‘If they had credibility, I wouldn’t be sitting here right now.’

In response, ABC, CBS, CNN, NBC, and Fox News announced on Monday that they had suspended White House TV pool reporting.

“This is to advise that, effective today, the TV pool will not be covering events designated as pool coverage of the President,” Fox News Washington bureau chief Bryan Boughton wrote in an email obtained by Politico.

“This follows the White House’s position preventing CNN from fulfilling its assigned pool duties. There will be no replacement pool put in place,” he added.

Fox News Media, ABC News, CBS News, CNN, and NBC News also released a joint statement about the suspension.

“The public has a vital interest in receiving accurate, independent information about its government. No administration should restrict a news organization because it objects to its reporting,” the group wrote.

Many noted that CNN had defended Fox News in 2009 when former President Barack Obama had limited its access. Fox News returned the favor in 2018 when Trump shut out a CNN reporter.

The president justified his ban in comments to reporters Friday.

“I don’t want them in my office. I don’t want them here,” he said.

“The ban is because they are fake news, they cannot write the truth,” he added. “If they had credibility, I wouldn’t be sitting here right now.”

RELATED: CNN says Trump press ban is illegal — then the Trump team THROWS DOWN fiery response

The president had also threatened to expand the ban to include other outlets such as the New York Times and the Washington Post.

In a post Monday on Truth Social, the president compared fake news to a “cancer” afflicting the country.

“It is corrupt, purposeful, pervasive, fully coordinated, and totally out of control,” he wrote. “It is a threat to our National Security, and must be stopped, NOW!”

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​Fake news, Fox news, White house, Politics, Donald trump 

Feminism has sold women the lie that “patriarchy” is a crisis that’s followed their female ancestors throughout the centuries — but BlazeTV host Nick Freitas believes the real crisis isn’t too many men ruling.

Rather, it’s those who refuse to.

And author Jeremy Pryor couldn’t agree more.

“The word patriarchy is actually very recent,” Pryor tells Freitas. “It’s sort of like less than 100 years old. It was actually invented by people on the left to really attack the idea of there’s too many men. And so they came up with this word.”

“The word patriarch is extremely old. The word patriarchal is very old. The word patriarchy, that’s a fairly new word,” he explains, noting that he’s “wrestled” with whether or not to “embrace” it.

“Because part of what they mean by that is the oppression of a class of people, primarily powerful men over women and over everyone else in society, and we got to smash the patriarchy,” Pryor says.

The word means “ruling father,” and he says he “cannot imagine something more important” than “helping fathers understand that they need to begin to rule families.”

“There’s nothing better for women and for children,” he tells Freitas. “The worst thing that happens to women and children is when men decide to abandon that responsibility.”

“And so what a patriarch is, is somebody who takes that responsibility very personally and very seriously, somebody who doesn’t just protect and provide but also sets a vision for the family,” he adds.

And this is a natural way for men to behave, as Freitas notes that “men crave legacy.”

However, modern culture has seen family legacies take a hit.

“When you turn the family into something that basically is a temporary occupation,” Freitas says, “that eventually breaks down, and then your kids put you in a home. … If I want to build something that’s going to last, well then I build where I think it’s going to last, not where I know it’s by design supposed to break apart and do its own thing.”

“Making the Argument with Nick Freitas” is available on BlazeTV+, YouTube, and major podcast platforms.

Start watching Nick Freitas NOW at blazetv.com and use the promo code NICK40 for $40 off your BlazeTV+ subscription.

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Patrick Clancy held out hope for his 8-month-old son Callan after Lindsay Clancy strangled him and his siblings — 5-year-old Cora and 3-year-old Dawson — in January 2023, according to a “60 Minutes” interview that aired Sunday.

He said he returned to his Duxbury, Massachusetts, home from an errand to find Lindsay lying in the back yard; her throat and wrists were cut — and she was paralyzed after jumping from an upstairs window, CBS News reported.

‘There was a time where I didn’t think I would live to see my 35th birthday. And I was completely fine with it.’

Patrick, 36, said he found his children strangled in the basement; Cora and Dawson were dead — but Callan was hanging on and was airlifted to Boston Children’s Hospital, the news network noted.

“I really thought there was a chance that Callan would live,” Patrick said in the interview. “I remember just thinking, ‘Just give me one. Just give me one kid, and I would raise him as best I could, and I would give him the best life I possibly could. I’d tell him about his brother and sister.’ And I was holding out hope for that.”

Callan’s heart continued to beat for four days, according to “60 Minutes.”

“I got to hold him. I got to lay down next to him,” Patrick revealed. “And he died in my arms.”

In the following days, CBS News said Patrick wrote tributes to each of his three children — and decided to publicly forgive Lindsay, who’s now his ex-wife.

“I saw headlines that said, you know, ‘Killer Mom,’ and ‘Baby Murderer,’ ‘Monster.’ And none of them were accurate,” Patrick noted in the interview. “I believe that it was her mental illness that caused that. So I shared those words.”

The news network said Lindsay never asked Patrick for forgiveness, but Patrick gave it to her anyway.

CBS News said Patrick and Lindsay both brought medical malpractice lawsuits against health care providers who treated Lindsay — and while some have denied wrongdoing, others haven’t yet responded to the claims.

Patrick noted to “60 Minutes” that he believes he “did the best I could with what I had at the time. And I live with the outcome. I live with it every day.”

He also shared that shortly after his children’s deaths “there was a day where I, really without thinking, I drove by their school, and it was at the exact time that all of their friends were getting dropped off, and I … just couldn’t be there anymore.”

RELATED: Lindsay Clancy murder trial hits huge speed bump (UPDATE)

JOSEPH PREZIOSO/AFP/Getty Images

Patrick was asked in the interview if he had suicidal thoughts. His reply? “There was a time where I didn’t think I would live to see my 35th birthday. And I was completely fine with it.”

He added that he no longer could stay in Duxbury, and in April 2023, he moved to New York City where he sought anonymity, CBS News reported.

“Five weeks after I moved to New York, on May 26, I had to figure out how I’m going to celebrate Callan’s first birthday,” Patrick shared in the interview, his eyes welling up. “And how do you celebrate your son’s first birthday months after he’s passed away? And so I go to St. Patrick’s Cathedral, I light a candle, and I said, ‘I love you buddy.’ And I walk out on 5th Avenue, and I stared crying my eyes out. And nobody cared … and I thought, ‘This is where I need to be. I can grieve.'”

Patrick added that before moving from the family house in Duxbury, he kept a number of items that reminded him of his children: Interviewer Ross Douthat mentioned a stuffed “baby sloth that Cora carried everywhere; a photo of Callan wearing a bow tie almost bigger than him; [and] Dawson’s battered and beloved helicopter.”

You can view the entire “60 Minutes” interview here; the below clip is a summary of its content:

RELATED: Lindsay Clancy murder trial fireworks: Defense attorney wants 1 juror kicked out, tells judge his jury instruction is ‘soft’

By this April, Patrick was remarried to Rachel Danis, a New York City fertility doctor, CBS News said.

Danis told the news network that she met Patrick in January 2024 in a New York City run club and got to know each other over coffee.

“Pat pulled out his phone to pay, and I noticed this adorable photo of children as the wallpaper,” Danis shared with CBS News. “And I just asked, ‘Who are those cuties?’ And Pat said, ‘Those are my kids.’ And then I think I asked if they live in Massachusetts, and Pat said, ‘They died.’ And this is just at the cashier.”

Danis noted in the “60 Minutes” interview that she tried to “take some of the weight from Pat.”

“I can’t bring his kids back,” she noted. “But if I can honor them and allow Pat to grieve but also just continue to honor them in the present, I guess that’s all I can do.”

What’s more, the couple shared with “60 Minutes” that they’re starting a family — and Patrick is preparing to one day tell his future child about their older siblings, Cora, Dawson, and Callan.

“I think every parent can agree, you have different relationships with your kids, but they’re all your kids,” Patrick said, according to CBS News. “And I can’t wait to tell them about their brothers and sister.”

During Lindsay Clancy’s murder trial over the summer, Patrick testified and found himself at the center of an online swarm of sleuths and influencers dissecting every detail of the case, developing theories that portray him as uncaring, unfaithful — and even the murderer of his children, CBS News reported.

“It’s painful to see. And it makes it difficult to be in public, and it’s possible that some of those people, after seeing lie after lie after lie, they start to believe it, and that’s what we’re left with,” Patrick said in the “60 Minutes” interview.

CBS News reported that one of the catalysts for theories about Patrick was his apparent stoicism on the witness stand, but Patrick said testifying was difficult — and that he experienced a “massive, traumatic panic attack” on the second day of his testimony.

“They put me in an ambulance,” Patrick noted in the interview. “They offered me some medication, but I said, ‘I don’t want it, because I want to go back, and I want to finish this so I can be done with this.’ And I went back, and I finished the testimony.”

Lindsay Clancy’s trial ended with a hung jury earlier this month.

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