The newly elected mayor of Coeur d’Alene in Idaho was accused of making hateful comments against Christians in a video spliced together from the many rants he posted to social media.

Councilman Dan Gookin garnered 34.2% of the vote to defeat the incumbent mayor as well two other opponents. Gookin had been a member of the city council since 2011 and ran as a Republican but has a history of tangling with the local GOP.

‘I admit that my language is salty. For that I apologize. I am a passionate man. I get worked up, especially when extremists are trying to destroy my community.’

After Gookin won the mayoral election, a video of his comments about Christians resurfaced on social media. The video contains multiple clips, many of which are unrelated phrases.

“Christians, they tend to be the rudest, most disrespectful jerks I have ever seen,” he said in the video.

“I seriously think if Jesus were here today he would have a message for everyone who’s a Christian, and he would just say, ‘Get the f**k!” he says in another clip.

The Kootenai County Republican Central Committee reposted the video in Oct. 2024 along with a statement of condemnation.

We have received multiple complaints from community members regarding Dan Gookin, Precinct Committeeman, Coeur d’Alene City Councilman, “North Idaho Republican” member. … It has been reported that he has engaged in verbally abusive behavior towards Christians, including the use of insults and defamation. The KCRCC rejects ALL forms of racial, religious, sexual, and political supremacy; and ALL political violence; and ALL political weaponization of mislabels.

However, Gookin responded at that time with a video explaining the context of many of the spliced clips and showed that they were misleading.

For instance, the second comment quoted was actually from a rant against Facebook but was cut off to make it appear that he was simply criticizing Christians.

“I seriously think if Jesus were here today he would have a message for everyone who’s a Christian, and he would say, ‘Get the f**k off Facebook!'” reads the full quote in context.

He said that some of the other clips had to do with comments he saw from people identifying as Christians but mocking the death of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

“It’s obvious to anyone with a brain that this stuff is taken out of context! But the far right lack brains,” Gookin said.

“I admit that my language is salty. For that I apologize. I am a passionate man. I get worked up, especially when extremists are trying to destroy my community,” he adds.

He went on to post other clips with more context.

“I’m sure the Pharisees back in Judea would have loved this technology and used it to take Christ’s teachings out of context and do a video like the local far right has done to me,” he continued. “Evil hasn’t changed much in 2,000 years.”

RELATED: Liberal feminists melt down on Twitter over one tweet from a Christian pastor

Gookin complimented the voters for choosing to elect him mayor.

“The citizens of Coeur d’Alene made a good decision, and I look forward to serving them,” he said.

In Oct. 2023, the KCRCC sued Gookin for defamation related to accusations of “money laundering, election fraud, and campaign finance violations.” That lawsuit was dropped after they reached a mediated settlement to receive $25,000 from Gookin’s insurance company.

Gookin also defended a local ice cream shop from critics who attacked it for showing support for Charlie Kirk after his assassination.

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A Democratic congressman tried to criticize a deportation operation, but the Department of Homeland Security said he was “deliberately misrepresenting” the incident.

Rep. Mike Quigley (D-Ill.) posted a video on Wednesday of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents dragging a woman out of a preschool.

‘ICE law enforcement did NOT target a daycare and were only at this location because the female illegal alien fled inside.’

“ICE isn’t going after the worst of the worst. This morning, they took a preschool teacher without a warrant IN FRONT OF CHILDREN in my district,” he added to the post.

Only hours later, DHS responded from its official social media account and completely undermined Quigley’s version of the incident.

“Congressman, you are deliberately misrepresenting the facts,” the agency wrote. “ICE law enforcement did NOT target a daycare and were only at this location because the female illegal alien fled inside.”

DHS said that officers were trying to perform a “targeted traffic stop” of the female because she was an illegal alien from Colombia. The driver of the car refused to pull over, and the officers gave chase.

The couple abandoned the car at a shopping mall and then went into the day care and preschool.

“They ran into a daycare and attempted to barricade themselves inside the daycare — recklessly endangering the children inside,” the statement continued. “The illegal alien female was arrested inside a vestibule, not in the school. Upon arrest, she lied about her identity.”

RELATED: ICE officer shoots at driver who tried to run over agent during vehicle stop in California, DHS says

“Facts including criminality and information on the male assailant are forthcoming and we will update the public with more information as soon as it becomes available,” DHS added.

Quigley responded with just two words.

“They’re lying,” he wrote.

A WGN-TV report claimed to confirm that a day care teacher had been detained from the Rayito de Sol Spanish Immersion Early Learning Center in Chicago. The school indicated in a statement that the officers did not present a warrant and were following the woman, who was arriving for work.

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Americans across the country are overwhelming food bank and hunger relief organization lines after SNAP benefits were halted on November 1 — with nearly 42 million Americans losing their benefits all at once.

In Phoenix, one woman waiting in a devastatingly long line at St. Mary’s Food Bank told a reporter that she wants the men and women in Washington, D.C., to “hurry up and get the job done” and “worry about the people, not about themselves.”

Reportedly, 900,000 Arizonans were gearing up to lose their benefits.

And in Los Angeles County it’s even worse, as over 1 million families are on EBT — which is out of 3.2 million families total, amounting to about one-third of the population.

However, two U.S. judges have ordered the Department of Agriculture to release contingency funding to restart the SNAP benefits, but those funds may not reach families who are hungry for up to a week.

“Our elected officials are letting us down because, you know, we vote and put these people in office, and they tend to get a personal vendetta going with each other and forget about the main thing, which is the people,” one woman in L.A. County told a reporter for the Los Angeles Times.

Because of the amount of people on EBT, the food banks helping out are expecting to run out of food.

“That is not sustainable,” executive producer of “Pat Gray Unleashed” Keith Malinak comments, shocked. “Even in good times.”

“That’s staggering,” BlazeTV host Pat Gray agrees.

Want more from Pat Gray?

To enjoy more of Pat’s biting analysis and signature wit as he restores common sense to a senseless world, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.

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While national attention has largely been focused on cities like Portland, Oregon, and Chicago, Illinois, illegal alien arrests in Texas have seen an uptick following recent raids.

According to an NBC News report, Immigration and Customs Enforcement recently completed an operation in Houston, Texas, which led to 1,500 arrests over a 10-day stretch.

‘President Trump and Secretary Noem have unleashed ICE to make America safe again.’

NBC noted that the rate of per-day arrests on this raid was above average compared with raids in other cities.

The Department of Homeland Security confirmed the report on social media.

On X, DHS said, “President Trump and Secretary Noem have unleashed ICE to make America safe again.”

RELATED: Texas DMV has allegedly been registering vehicles to illegal aliens

Photo by Jamie Kelter Davis/Getty Images

“If you come to our country and break our laws. We will hunt you down.”

The 10-day Houston raid in October was preceded by similar 10-day raids in February and August, which respectively led to 543 and 822 arrests, NBC reported, citing Bret Bradford, the Houston field office director.

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The apparent harassment of the Mexican president by a seemingly drunken man has led to a national conversation about the harassment women face on a daily basis.

President Claudia Sheinbaum was taking a five-minute walk on her way to the Education Ministry when a man approached her from behind, grabbed her, apparently attempted to cup her breasts over her clothes, and tried to kiss her, video showed.

‘If the most powerful woman in Mexico experienced harassment, what can women who travel on public transportation or walk alone every day expect?’

The man was brushed away by someone near the president, and the bizarre incident was captured on video by bystanders. Sheinbaum said in her daily media briefing that she was pressing charges against the man in order to show other Mexican women that the harassment was not acceptable.

“I decided to file a complaint because this is something … all women in our country experience,” Sheinbaum said. “I experienced it before, when I wasn’t president. It shouldn’t happen. No one should violate our personal space. No man has the right to violate that space.”

Others jumped on the incident to call for more action against public harassment.

“If the most powerful woman in Mexico experienced harassment, what can women who travel on public transportation or walk alone every day expect?” asked Ivonne Ortega, a member of Congress. “This is the reality that millions of women and girls face daily.”

RELATED: Mexico hands over 26 high-ranking alleged drug cartel figures to US for prosecution

One survey of female transit riders from several nations found that Mexico had the worst reported rate of public harassment.

Some critics of the president speculated that the incident was orchestrated in order to draw attention away from the horrific assassination of the mayor of Uruapan, Michoácan, seemingly at the hands of the drug cartels.

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Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) published damning documents last month detailing how the Biden FBI not only secretly obtained the private phone records of numerous Republican lawmakers but subpoenaed records for over 400 Republican individuals and entities as part of what the Iowa senator called a “fishing expedition.”

Grassley noted last week that Operation Arctic Frost, the “fishing expedition” in question, “was the vehicle by which partisan FBI agents and DOJ prosecutors could improperly investigate the entire Republican political apparatus.”

‘The road to reform is long.’

Amid the backlash over the latest insights into the Biden administration’s yearslong apparent campaign to criminalize its political opponents, the FBI began canning some of the agents involved in Arctic Frost whose names appeared in the newly released documents. While the bureau handed out numerous pink slips in recent days, it evidently had issues making them stick.

Last week, the FBI reportedly fired at least two agents who had worked on the Arctic Frost investigation.

CNN originally reported that Aaron Tapp, the special agent in charge of the FBI’s San Antonio office who previously had an oversight role on Arctic Frost, was among those fired, though it has since indicated that he was forced into retiring.

RELATED: Bondi exposes ‘UNPRECEDENTED’ Arctic Frost action against Trump by Biden admin

Jack Smith. Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images

On Monday, the bureau allegedly canned another four agents who worked on Smith’s team: Jeremy Desor; Blaire Toleman, a Chicago-based agent who once led a now-defunct public corruption squad; David Geist, a former assistant special agent in charge of the bureau’s Washington field office; and Jamie Garman, an agent who was placed on administrative leave early last month, reported Reuters.

“The public has a right to know how the government’s spending their hard-earned tax dollars, and if agents were engaged in wrongdoing they ought to be held accountable,” Sen. Grassley said in a statement. “Transparency brings accountability.”

Multiple sources told Reuters that at least two of the terminations — Toleman’s and Geist’s — were rescinded later in the day, along with a number of other terminations that allegedly took place on Monday.

Sources familiar with the matter told CNN that Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, had intervened on Monday to reverse the firings of least four fired FBI agents. One source said she weighed in on account of the agents’ involvement in the Trump administration’s crackdown on criminality in the national capital.

This last-minute rescue was, however, apparently as short-lived as the initial terminations. The FBI reportedly fired the agents again on Tuesday.

It’s presently unclear how many agents were officially canned.

The FBI and Pirro’s office did not immediately respond to Blaze News’ request for comment.

The FBI Agents Association complained in a statement on Tuesday that “the actions yesterday — in which FBI Special Agents were terminated and then reinstated shortly after — highlight the chaos that occurs when long-standing policies and processes are ignored. An Agent simply being assigned to an investigation and conducting it appropriately within the law should never be grounds for termination.”

“Director Patel has disregarded the law and launched a campaign of erratic and arbitrary retribution,” added the group.

Mike Howell, president of the Oversight Project, told Blaze News, “Individual accountability for participation in or oversight of weaponized operations such as Arctic Frost should absolutely be imposed. I’m glad some have been fired for this, and I am sure they will sue and be well represented.”

“The personnel laws are very restrictive to accountability, which certainly makes accountability harder, especially when considering termination versus reassignment,” continued Howell. “That being said, you can’t have weaponized individuals still at the FBI, that just should not ever be an acceptable option. The road to reform is long.”

Howell added, “I’d like to see more thought given to systemic reform at the FBI so it can’t operate institutionally as it did during the Biden years especially. Whack-a-mole on weaponized individuals is tough work, but the FBI and government should also mitigate the potential for them to abuse power again.”

Editor’s note: Mike Howell is a contributor at Blaze News.

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