EPIC City, the Islamic all-inclusive development being planned in Texas by the East Plano Islamic Center, may have rebranded to “the Meadow” in order to hide the agenda — but recent actions taken by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton may be shutting down the compound for good.

“It’s appearing less and less likely that they’re ever going to break ground, especially since at the end of last week, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton announced that he is suing just about everyone involved,” BlazeTV host Sara Gonzales says on “Come and Take It.”

Paxton is suing the East Plano Islamic Center, Community Capital Partners, and the individual leaders for “securities violations after alleging that they are engaged in an illegal land development scheme.”

“He’s suing all of them. He said, ‘You get a lawsuit, and you get a lawsuit, and you get a lawsuit. You’re all getting lawsuits,’” Gonzales says. “Because you guys need to understand very clearly: We’re not doing this here. Not in Texas.”

“There are a lot of problems within my state that I want to make sure get fixed, okay, but one thing that it feels a whole hell of a lot like we are all aligned on is, ‘You’re not turning my state into an unrecognizable third-world country,’ and ‘You’re not turning my state into a Muslim-majority area,’” she continues.

And one of the many reasons Gonzales feels so strongly about this is because Islam is growing rapidly in other areas — and we have all been able to see the outcome.

“I have eyeballs. I see what’s happening in Europe. I see what’s happening in the U.K. I see what’s happening. I see the crime statistics. I see the violent sexual crimes only going up and up and up. I see the terrorism. Like, we all have eyeballs,” she explains.

“We all see what is happening, and it’s nothing personal,” she continues. “It’s not like every single one of them must be terrible people. It’s just not something we’re going to do here in Texas. We’re not doing that.”

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The top women’s tennis player in the world was recently confronted with the idea that she might have a biological advantage over other women.

Aryna Sabalenka, the world’s No. 1-ranked player in the Women’s Tennis Association, is preparing for a “Battle of the Sexes” against Nick Kyrgios, who reached as high as No. 13 in the men’s rankings in 2016.

To promote the event, the two appeared on “Piers Morgan Uncensored” where they were asked if they think it is fair when men, or transgender athletes, compete in women’s sports.

‘I feel like they still got a huge advantage over the women.’

Morgan prefaced his question by citing Martina Navratilova, a former tennis star who has been adamant about keeping men out of women’s competitions.

“[Navratilova] says it’s wrong for the Women’s Tennis Association to allow trans women to compete in its events; do you agree with her?” Morgan asked.

“That’s a tricky question,” Sabalenka initially replied.

The Belarusian then stated the obvious biological reality.

“I have nothing to do against them. But I feel like they still got huge advantage over the woman, and I think it’s just not fair to a woman to basically face, like, biologically man,” she said.

The 27-year-old continued, “You know, it’s not fair, like, the woman been working the whole life to reach her limit and then she has to face, like, a man, like, which biologically much stronger. So for me, I don’t agree with this kind of stuff in sport.”

Morgan then posed the question to Kyrgios, who quickly explained that he had “nothing to add” because he feels “the exact same way.”

Sabalenka was not out of the woods yet because Morgan then brought up criticisms the athlete has faced from her competitors.

RELATED: ‘XX XY’: Tennis star Aryna Sabalenka’s coach spotted wearing pro-biological women sports apparel during win over world No. 1

The British host referred to Marta Kostyuk, the No. 26-ranked women’s tennis player. In October, the Ukrainian complained that Sabalenka is “bigger,” “taller,” and “stronger” than she is and that Sabalenka and another Polish player have biological advantages due to their testosterone levels.

“We all have our own biological structure. Some have a higher level of testosterone, some have lower. I know players who are good players who have higher levels of it,” Kostyuk claimed, per Firstpost.

While Kostyuk said she’s sure that her opponents aren’t on drugs, the 23-year-old said it’s “just the biology” of their bodies and that “definitely helps.”

“I’m trying to see how I can beat these players with the tennis skills I have, but I have to work more than they have to win the points,” she added.

Sabalenka laughed off these comments, telling Morgan that Kostyuk was just making “excuses.”

“It’s actually quite funny because she’s a strong girl,” she said. “She probably has more muscles than I do, and she looks fit and strong, and I think that’s not the case in all of the matches she lost against our players.”

RELATED: Tennis star stops match to make absurd demand about a baby in the crowd

Photo by Adam Hunger/Getty Images

In Britain, the governing Lawn Tennis Association essentially barred “transgender women” from playing in top women’s tournaments in December 2024.

After conducting a formal review, the organization determined that the “average man” has an advantage when playing against the “average woman.”

The new rules restrict “transgender women and nonbinary individuals assigned male at birth” from playing in top-tier and competitive women’s tournaments.

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Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent mocked blue-state leaders as “the Grinches Who Stole Christmas” for blocking tax relief for Americans.

On Wednesday, Bessent posted an AI-generated image of Democrat Governors Kathy Hochul of New York, Jared Polis of Colorado, and J.B. Pritzker of Illinois as grinches.

‘This partisan stonewalling is a direct assault on the very families and workers liberal politicians claim to champion.’

“Thanks to @POTUS, ’tis the season to be jolly — unless you’re a taxpayer in New York, Colorado, Illinois, or the District of Columbia,” Bessent wrote. “For millions of hardworking Americans, @GovKathyHochul, @GovofCO @jaredpolis, and @GovPritzker are The Grinches Who Stole Christmas.”

“Courtesy of their Scrooge-like tendencies, America’s seniors, along with all workers who would benefit from No Tax on Tips and No Tax on Overtime, will be robbed of the tax relief they deserve,” Bessent continued. “The Christmas season should be a time of great cheer. But due to the Trump Derangement Syndrome of these Governors and other radical leftists, too many low- and middle-income households will receive nothing but coal in their state tax stockings.”

President Donald Trump’s July 4 bill eliminates taxes on tips for service-industry workers and on overtime for linemen and factory workers. It also provides a tax deduction for seniors receiving Social Security.

A Wednesday press release from the Treasury Department accused the Democrat leaders of “political obstructionism” for “deliberately blocking their own residents from receiving these historic benefits at the state level.”

RELATED: Trump gives American farmers $12 billion boost to overcome inflation, trade wars

J.B. Pritzker, Kathy Hochul. Photo: Allison Robbert/Bloomberg via Getty Images

“This partisan stonewalling is a direct assault on the very families and workers liberal politicians claim to champion. By denying their residents access to these important tax cuts, these governors and legislators are forcing hardworking Americans to shoulder higher state tax burdens, robbing them of the relief they deserve and exacerbating the financial squeeze on low- and middle-income households,” the department’s press release read.

States are not required to adhere to all federal tax provisions. New York is introducing new codes to its tax form, requiring residents to pay taxes on tips and overtime. Colorado plans to require residents to report the amount of overtime pay that was deducted federally and then add it back for state tax purposes. Illinois is expected to adopt similar updates to its tax form to add pay deducted federally.

New York has been ranked the worst state in the country for taxes. The state’s overall tax burden is estimated at 12.02%, while Illinois’ is 9.67% and Colorado’s is 8.42%.

RELATED: Trump Accounts: Newborns get a $1,000 tax-free nest egg that grows until age 18 — American dream revival or debt nightmare?

Jared Polis. Photo by Hyoung Chang/Denver Post/Getty Images

Polis responded to Bessent’s comments in a post on X, claiming that Colorado has reduced taxes.

“Colorado has cut our income tax three times, and unlike these measures in Trump’s law, those cuts are permanent,” Polis wrote. “While the Secretary is supporting Trump’s tariff taxes, we are delivering real relief through the most generous child tax credit in the nation and cutting poverty. Spend less time talking about tips, which Colorado conforms to and won’t be subject to state or federal income tax up to the level designated in HR1 and instead focus on lowering interest rates, costs and bringing down the price of goods ahead of Christmas by eliminating these draconian tariffs. Happy holidays, Secretary — may your stockings be full of facts, not coal.”

In response to Bessent’s post, Hochul wrote, “Remarkable that an office once held by Alexander Hamilton is now tweeting Grinch fanfic at governors.”

Pritzker’s office did not respond to a request for comment.

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Jonathan Franklin, a former race and identity correspondent for National Public Radio who now apparently serves as an adjunct professor at Georgetown University, recently went into panic-mode after realizing he had made a series of damning remarks to investigative journalist James O’Keefe on hidden camera.

In the footage published on Wednesday by the O’Keefe Media Group, Franklin — whose personal website is now password-protected, Instagram profile has been set to private, and page on the Georgetown University was largely scrubbed — appears to call various black conservatives a “coon,” including Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, Candace Owens, and U.S. Ambassador to the Bahamas Herschel Walker.

‘Well, the thing is that I actually am James O’Keefe.’

When pressed by O’Keefe on why he hasn’t shared such views publicly, Franklin, who is set to teach a journalism course on sourcing and interviews, appears to say, “I’d have to stop being a journalist for me to say what I really want to say.”

At one point in his conversation with O’Keefe — whom he evidently did not recognize on account of a pair of glasses — Franklin appears to say, “I work with a bunch of stupid white people.”

Franklin declined to comment on the situation involving the video published by O’Keefe, a representative told Blaze News.

RELATED: University of Minnesota faces backlash over project that seeks to cure the ‘Whiteness Pandemic’

Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images

Georgetown University did not respond to Blaze News’ request for comment.

After hearing enough racially charged rhetoric, O’Keefe asks Franklin in the video what he thinks about James O’Keefe.

Franklin answers, “I’ve heard from people he’s an a**h**e.”

“Well, he does, like, the undercover stuff and, like, exposes people, you know?” says O’Keefe. “He exposes people, you know, telling people, like, what they really think.”

“There’s a way to do that sort of watchdog, gotcha, ambush journalism but doing in a way that doesn’t disrespect the person that you’re trying to catch or yourself as a reporter,” says Franklin.

O’Keefe then takes off his glasses, points to the hidden camera, and announces to Franklin, “Well, the thing is that I actually am James O’Keefe.”

“No, you’re not,” responds Franklin.

Upon realizing the man he’d been talking to is in fact James O’Keefe, Franklin gets up and begins to run away. Outside the building, Franklin can be seen falling to the ground. After asking whether the adjunct was all right, O’Keefe tries asking him clarifying questions about his apparent “coon” comments, to which Franklin responds, “I will sue.”

O’Keefe and his team subsequently took Franklin to a pharmacy to get him Band-Aids for the cuts he sustained in his tumble. After cooling off, Franklin appeared to confirm to O’Keefe on camera that while he did work for NPR, he had lied during their earlier conversation about working for CBS News.

When later discussing the encounter, O’Keefe questioned whether an individual who allegedly harbors racist views and would share them with a stranger should be teaching journalism classes at an institution like Georgetown University.

“That type of racism is not just his personal opinion,” said O’Keefe. “It is a bias about a group of people that directly affects fairness, credibility and judgment. Why? Because he’s a professor who is using these slurs. He is revealing a framework that shapes how he interprets information.”

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I must admit to having a complicated relationship with Dinesh D’Souza’s documentaries.

As much as I have enjoyed several of them, I find that they falter in a few ways: They often lack staying power, offering little incentive to return to them after the moment has passed; they are too self-referential — filtering every issue through D’Souza’s own perspective; and they are preoccupied with energizing sympathetic audiences rather than persuading skeptical ones.

Where the film is likely to receive its fiercest pushback is on the subject of eschatology — the theology of the end times.

This last flaw is especially frustrating. Catering to the conservative base is easy, but with D’Souza’s resources and backing, his films could be far sharper — and far more enduring — if they focused on timeless themes rather than re-litigating the 2020 election or attacking whoever happens to be running for president that year.

Chasing the ‘Dragon’

It was with this in mind that I went into D’Souza’s newest effort, “The Dragon’s Prophecy.” A loose adaptation of the Jonathan Cahn book of the same name, the Angel Studios production examines the fallout of the October 7 terrorist attacks and the subsequent two-year war between Israel and Hamas (which effectively ended with a ceasefire on October 10).

Sharpness, at least, is not a problem this time. The film arrives at a harrowing moment. Tucker Carlson is condemning “Christian Zionism” as heresy; New York City has just elected a mayor who wants to arrest the prime minister of Israel; and bipartisan resentment toward American Jews hasn’t been this pronounced since Pat Buchanan implicitly blamed them for supporting the Gulf War.

Anti-Zionism — and its adjacent anti-Semitism — is enjoying a fashionable resurgence, while support for the Israeli government sits at an all-time low.

D’Souza confronts these trends head-on. He calls out Carlson — as well as the far-left bloc of House Democrats known as “the Squad” — by name, even integrating footage from Carlson’s combative June interview with Ted Cruz. The result is a forthright defense of Israel, one that bluntly characterizes Hamas as rapists, murderers, and terrorists — and depicts the group’s atrocities in unflinching detail, including phone calls in which militants boast to their parents about their killings.

Intentional shock

It’s a grisly watch. The film includes insurgents shooting dogs and civilians, and it lingers on the aftermath of violence. But the shock is intentional. As Ambassador Mike Huckabee tells D’Souza, the war is “an eternal battle between good and evil,” with Israel on the side of the angels and Hamas aligned with “the Dragon.”

Amid this devastation, D’Souza wanders the Holy Land and laments that Israel is a place where “nothing is ever solved or resolved,” a region with “no solutions and no idea what the problems even are.” Yet his moral clarity never wavers. He even calls the construction of the Islamic Dome of the Rock on the Temple Mount “the true colonialism.”

His mission is to locate meaning in the conflict. To that end, he speaks with Jewish victims, archeologists uncovering evidence of ancient Israelite history, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who uses the occasion to swat at his American critics and to praise Donald Trump.

Disputed dispensation

Where the film is likely to receive its fiercest pushback is on the subject of eschatology — the theology of the end times.

Because D’Souza’s target audience is predominantly Christian, the most vocal critics may be anti-dispensationalists, whose views have become increasingly common among Catholics and mainline Protestants. They correctly note that dispensationalism is a 19th-century American theological development and that the popular notion of a “rapture” is relatively recent.

As the Protestant theologian Brian Mattson writes, “In the grand historical sweep of Christian theology, Dispensationalism is a new arrival.” He explains that its architects argued that salvation unfolds across distinct dispensations, meaning that God’s promises to Israel remain intact for ethnic Jews even as the New Testament opens salvation to Gentiles. “God has two separate ‘tracks’ for the salvation of humanity,” he writes. Thus the national promises to Israel persist in perpetuity.

This is the framework behind the “Left Behind” franchise — 16 books and five films — and it places the modern state of Israel at the center of Revelation in a way that traditional Christian readings do not.

There are legitimate biblical critiques of dispensationalism, just as there are bad-faith motives for attacking it. Mattson notes that many Gen Z “America First” Catholic converts now regard Israel as an unnecessary “foreign entanglement,” while others deploy “heresy” language as a thin veil for anti-Semitism.

RELATED: Haunting play ‘October 7’ lets Hamas terror survivors speak

Phelim McAleer

End-times evidence

Still, D’Souza’s film is thoroughly dispensationalist. Israel’s present turmoil is portrayed as evidence that the end times are near, that evil is intensifying, and that God is making Himself more visible through signs and miracles. The fate of Israel, in this reading, is inseparable from the fate of the world.

The film’s second half is a series of interviews with Israeli archeologists who discuss evidence for figures like King David and Pontius Pilate, treating their discoveries as confirmations of Scripture. When combined with commentary from a Messianic Jew such as Jonathan Cahn, the Israeli-Gaza conflict becomes a mystical drama between cosmic good and cosmic evil.

That argument rests on a contested theological system. However one responds to the film’s defense of Israel, it must be filtered through the angular lenses of American dispensationalism — a hurdle many viewers may be unwilling to clear.

Centrist appeal

There are smaller criticisms as well: The film appears to lean heavily on AI-generated imagery, which raises its own questions about execution. But in the main, the film is preaching to the broad American center — those who support Israel without belonging to either extreme.

Despite these theological quirks, the film ultimately does something I have long wished D’Souza’s documentaries would do: It speaks clearly and with conviction about an issue that possesses lasting moral weight.

Israel will remain a defining struggle for decades. October 7 is only one chapter of that broader conflict. In taking it on, D’Souza presents a moral argument to a conservative audience that is increasingly drifting from him. Whether one agrees with his conclusions or not, he is operating on the level of enduring questions of faith rather than the transitory skirmishes of electoral politics. For once, he isn’t simply preaching to the choir.

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Having just passed the three-month mark since Charlie Kirk was publicly assassinated while speaking to a crowd of students at Utah Valley University, Kirk’s accused killer is set to appear in court in person for the first time.

Tyler Robinson, charged with aggravated murder and several related charges, and his lawyers are set to appear in court on Thursday.

‘This is something that could impact generations to come.’

Robinson’s legal team and the Utah County Sheriff’s Office have asked Judge Tony Graf to limit the media’s presence in the case, according to the Associated Press. In fact, they have requested a ban on cameras in the courtroom.

Legal analyst and California-based trial attorney Roger Bonakdar pointed out to Fox News that information access has shifted dramatically as the case has progressed.

RELATED: New attorney for Charlie Kirk’s suspected assassin requests more time to go through ‘voluminous’ evidence

Judge Tony GrafPhoto by Scott G Winterton-Pool/Getty Images

“When they first arrested Tyler Robinson, the information tap was at full blast,” he said. “They told us that they had audio recordings from Tyler Robinson and a purported confession. They told us that there was video footage from a local fast-food restaurant. They were very, very almost oversharing in the beginning.”

But that “oversharing” has ended, Bonakdar continued: “Now they’ve shut that tap off, and they’re saying you can’t even come to court and hear about what we’re doing when most of it’s probably procedural.”

Many media outlets and high-profile figures have pushed back against the closed-door proceedings and advocated for greater transparency in the case.

Erika Kirk, Charlie Kirk’s widow and now-CEO of Turning Point USA, has advocated to keep news cameras in the courtroom, noting that she, her family, and TPUSA have all been under intense scrutiny since her husband’s brutal public execution.

“There were cameras all over my husband when he was murdered,” she told Fox News’ Jesse Watters in an interview last month. “There have been cameras all over my friends and family mourning. There have been cameras all over me, analyzing my every move, analyzing my every smile, my every tear. We deserve to have cameras in there.”

“Let everyone see what true evil is,” Erika Kirk added. “This is something that could impact generations to come.”

The tension lies between a heavily invested public’s desire for new information in a very high-profile case and preserving a fair trial for the accused.

The judge has ordered that Thursday’s hearing be held in person and open to the public to the greatest extent possible. Judge Graf has also ordered that no information may be disclosed from Robinson’s October 24 virtual proceeding, which reportedly determined that Robinson could wear plain clothes during court appearances but must also wear restraints because of security concerns.

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