Tori Spelling and four of her children were rushed to a hospital after a two-vehicle collision in Temecula, California, just before 6 p.m. on April 2. Three of the children's friends were also transported to the hospital in three separate ambulances.
The Riverside Sheriff's Department confirmed the crash, which occurred in the 28000 block of Rancho California Road.
"On April 2, 2026, at 5:44 p.m., deputies were dispatched to the 28000 block of Rancho California Road regarding a vehicle collision."
Deputies located two vehicles with collision damage upon arrival. All occupants were medically evaluated at the scene. Authorities confirmed no arrests were made, and the cause of the collision remains under investigation.
It remains unclear who exactly was in the car with Spelling or what further medical services were required after the scene evaluation. The "Beverly Hills, 90210" actress is reportedly recovering ahead of Easter weekend, though no specific medical details have been provided.
The crash comes during what has already been a turbulent stretch for the Spelling family. The actress shares five children with her estranged husband, actor Dean McDermott: Liam, Stella, Hattie, Finn, and Beau.
McDermott first announced the couple's separation on Instagram in June 2023, but quickly deleted the post. The message, before it vanished, struck a familiar tone for celebrity breakups:
"It's with great sadness and a very very heavy heart that after 18 years together and 5 amazing children, that @torispelling and I have decided to go our separate ways, and start a new journey of our own."
Spelling cited June 17, 2023, as the couple's date of separation. She first filed for divorce on March 29, 2024. In the filing, she requested spousal support from McDermott while also asking the court to terminate its ability to award spousal support to her estranged husband. She requested full custody of the children along with joint legal custody.
The facts reported by Fox News are thin, and that's worth acknowledging. Seven children and an adult transported to a hospital after a collision involving multiple ambulances is serious on its face. But the absence of arrests and the ongoing investigation mean there's no indication yet of reckless or impaired driving by anyone involved.
What matters right now is simpler than any celebrity headline: children were hurt. Regardless of the tabloid noise that perpetually surrounds Spelling's personal life, a mother was in a car with kids when something went wrong. The investigation will sort out the cause. For now, the only thing worth hoping for is that every one of those children walks away healthy.
Donald Trump will lead a public rededication of the United States as "one nation, under God" on May 17 at the National Mall in Washington, D.C., in an event called "Rededicate 250" marking the country's 250th anniversary. Some of the most recognizable names in American Christianity will join him.
Bishop Robert Barron, founder of Word on Fire Ministries and Bishop of the Diocese of Winona–Rochester, will speak. So will Father Mike Schmitz of the Bible in a Year podcast and Jonathan Roumie, the actor who plays Jesus in The Chosen. Cardinal Timothy Dolan, Archbishop of New York, will appear via video call.
The Protestant lineup is just as deep: Pastor Jack Graham of Prestonwood Baptist Church in Plano, author Eric Metaxas, and film producer Samuel Rodriguez. Franklin Graham, Billy Graham's son, is also expected to give an address via video. Worship music will be led by Chris Tomlin, author of "How Great Is Our God," alongside Blessing Offor, a Nigerian-born American gospel singer.
This is not a vague gesture toward civil religion. It is a deliberate, public act of national gratitude and consecration, staged at the symbolic heart of the republic.
The event's homepage frames it plainly. Attendees are invited to:
"Join with neighbours and friends from every state in the Union in giving thanks and praise to God for 250 years of His Providence for the United States, in praying that God bless and protect America for the next 250 years, and in solemnly rededicating our country as one nation under God."
Justin Caporale, executive producer for major events and public appearances for the White House, described the mission in similarly direct terms:
"Our mission is to gather the nation in prayer and worship, to have a moment reflecting on God's providence in the birth and preservation of the United States, and this is really our opportunity to unite the country and rededicate our nation to God."
No ambiguity. No euphemism about "shared values" or "the spirit of togetherness." God, by name, at the center of the nation's 250th year. That clarity is the point.
Rededicate 250 does not exist in isolation. The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops has launched its own set of events to honor the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. The USCCB has asked parishes to contribute to 250 collective hours spent in adoration and 250 collective hours of works of mercy before the Fourth of July, as The Catholic Herald reports.
Then, on July 12, the bishops will consecrate the United States to the Sacred Heart of Jesus during Holy Mass at the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington, D.C.
That timeline matters. May 17 on the Mall. Parish-level devotion through Independence Day. A formal consecration in July. This is not one rally. It is a sustained, layered commitment from both political and religious leadership to reassert the country's relationship with God at a moment when the culture insists that the relationship is an embarrassment.
For decades, the acceptable posture in elite American life has been to treat faith as a private matter, something tolerated in living rooms and sanctuaries but unwelcome in the public square. The idea that a sitting president would stand on the National Mall and explicitly rededicate the nation under God will strike certain quarters as provocative. It is worth asking why.
The phrase "one nation, under God" is not new. It is in the Pledge of Allegiance. It reflects a founding-era conviction that rights come from a Creator, not from bureaucracies. The Declaration of Independence says so in its second sentence. Acknowledging that the inheritance of the document on the 250th anniversary is not radical. It is literate.
Yet the cultural left has spent years treating any public expression of Christian faith as a form of coercion. Prayer at a football game becomes a constitutional crisis. A cross on public land triggers litigation. A president invoking God on the Mall will generate breathless commentary about "Christian nationalism," a term designed to make the ordinary practice of American civic religion sound like an insurgency.
The roster for Rededicate 250 undermines that narrative before it starts. Catholics and Protestants. Bishops and pastors. An actor, a podcaster, an author, and a gospel singer born in Nigeria. This is not a narrow sectarian display. It is a broad coalition of believers doing something Americans have done since before there was a Constitution: gathering to thank God and ask for His continued blessing.
The discomfort this event generates will reveal more about the critics than about the participants. The question is not whether it is appropriate for a president to pray in public. Presidents have done so for 250 years. The question is whether the governing class still believes what the founders wrote, that the nation's rights and freedoms are endowed by a Creator and sustained by Providence.
Rededicate 250 answers that question on the Mall, in front of the country, with music and prayer and the full weight of the office behind it.
Some will call it a spectacle. Others will call it overdue.
HuffPost published a report claiming the Pentagon "invited more than 3,500 employees to attend a Good Friday service at its in-house chapel," but that "it's only for Protestants, not Catholics." The outlet's senior politics reporter, Jennifer Bendery, cited a memo from Air Force leadership that read: "Just a friendly reminder: There will be a Protestant Service (No Catholic Mass) for Good Friday today at the Pentagon Chapel."
The implication was clear. The Pentagon, under Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, had deliberately excluded Catholics from worship on one of the holiest days of the Christian calendar. Bendery wrote that Hegseth, whom she called "a far-right evangelical Christian, has tried to infuse his religious views into Pentagon activities.
There was just one problem. Catholics don't celebrate Mass on Good Friday. They never have.
The correction came swiftly, and from every direction. Washington Examiner reporter Salena Zito addressed Bendery directly:
"Catholic here ... we do not celebrate Mass on Good Friday. It is the only day of the year without a Mass, as the church commemorates Jesus' death."
National Review senior editor Charles C.W. Cook was less patient:
"Yes. It says that there is no Catholic Mass on Good Friday because Catholics do not do Catholic Mass on Good Friday. Is there literally nobody you could have asked? Not one person? Not even Google?"
"Fox & Friends Weekend" co-host Rachel Campos-Duffy offered a more detailed explanation of what actually happens in Catholic churches on Good Friday. Catholics hold a service, not a Mass, because there is no consecration of the Eucharist on that day. Communion is distributed using hosts consecrated the day before, on Holy Thursday. Worshippers read the Gospel of the Passion of Christ and venerate the cross, as Fox News reports.
Hot Air managing editor Ed Morrissey made the same point, noting that what HuffPost framed as exclusion was simply a matter of terminology:
"FYI: Catholics do not have Mass on Good Friday. It's a service, as there is no transubstantiation. Where communion is offered, it's with previously consecrated hosts. This sounds like a misunderstanding of terms by the sources or the reporters."
"Misunderstanding" may be generous.
A Department of War official told Fox News Digital that Catholic Masses are held on a daily basis at the Pentagon and that religious services are open to all Pentagon employees. In other words, the Pentagon wasn't excluding Catholics from anything. The memo simply noted that the Good Friday service would be Protestant in form, which is exactly what you'd expect when the Catholic Church itself does not hold Mass on that day.
The phrase "No Catholic Mass" wasn't a prohibition. It was a description.
But HuffPost ran with it anyway, constructing an entire narrative around the idea that Hegseth was weaponizing religion inside the Defense Department. The framing required its audience to know nothing about Catholic liturgical practice, and apparently required the same of its reporters and editors.
Conservative radio host Erick Erickson pointed to a pattern:
"This person continues to write about Christianity and keeps proving to be completely ignorant of Christianity. Catholics do not celebrate Mass on Good Friday."
Townhall editor Larry O'Connor widened the lens beyond Bendery herself:
"Anybody here surprised that Jennifer doesn't have a good working understanding of Catholicism? Me neither. But, It IS extraordinary that not one person in the editorial chain has even the slightest knowledge of Catholics."
That's the real indictment. This wasn't a tweet fired off in haste. It was a published report from a senior politics reporter at a national outlet, presumably reviewed by at least one editor. Not a single person in that chain caught the error or bothered to check. A ten-second search would have killed the story before it was written.
RedState writer Bonchie cut to the political motive:
"Catholics do not do Mass on Good Friday. It would be offensive to them to try to hold one. Just incredible how hard the left is trying to cause divisions that don't actually exist."
What followed was arguably worse than the original mistake. Daily Wire reporter Megan Basham noted that despite being corrected by thousands of Catholics online, Bendery refused to acknowledge the error:
"What's wild about the hubris of journalists like this lady at @HuffPost is she has literally THOUSANDS of Catholics correcting her that there is no Catholic mass on Good Friday."
Basham added that Bendery continued to suggest Catholics would be barred from attending the Pentagon's Good Friday service entirely, a claim Basham said she was "quite certain is not true."
HuffPost's parent company BuzzFeed did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
This episode is small in scale but revealing in kind. It shows what happens when a newsroom's animating purpose is opposition rather than information. If your goal is to catch the Defense Secretary doing something sinister, you'll find sinister things everywhere, including in a routine chapel memo describing a liturgical reality that predates the Pentagon by roughly two thousand years.
The irony is thick. A story meant to expose religious intolerance inside the military was built entirely on religious illiteracy inside a newsroom. The reporters who positioned themselves as defenders of Catholic inclusion didn't understand the first thing about Catholic worship.
Every Catholic in America who has ever attended a Good Friday service knew immediately that this story was nonsense. Every editor at HuffPost apparently did not. The gap between those two groups tells you everything about who these outlets are actually writing for, and it isn't the faithful.
Usha Vance is expecting the couple's fourth child this coming July, a baby boy who will make the Vances the first vice-presidential family to welcome a baby while in office in well over 100 years. The last time it happened was 1870.
In a recent interview with NBC News' Kate Snow, the Second Lady talked about what pregnancy looks like when your home address is the Naval Observatory, how she and J.D. Vance keep life normal for their three young kids, and a new project she's quietly launched that deserves more attention than it will probably get.
Vance was candid about the obvious contrasts between this pregnancy and her previous ones. Her answer was refreshingly human:
"There's some differences obviously. I have to dress up a lot more. My last pregnancy, there were a lot of sweatpants."
It's a small detail, but it says something. The Vances didn't grow up in political dynasties. They arrived in Washington because J.D. Vance wrote a book that told the truth about forgotten America, and voters responded. The sweatpants-to-Second-Lady arc isn't political theater. It's real life, as Parade reports.
When Snow pressed on whether Vance can still do normal things like walk into a grocery store, her response was telling:
"We do that. We have our neighborhood shops and our Costco membership."
A Costco membership. The Second Lady of the United States shops at Costco. That one line communicates more about who this family is than any campaign ad ever could.
Snow noted that Vance stopped working in 2024 when her husband was chosen for the role of Vice President. That's no small thing. Usha Vance is a trained lawyer. She walked away from a professional career to support her husband's service and raise their family during one of the most consequential political chapters in modern history.
Vance acknowledged the adjustment honestly:
"Oh, certainly. It was disorienting at first to lose that…But it was an opportunity. There are things that I really care about and want to do, and when the time comes, I mean, I do intend to work."
There's no grievance in that answer. No performative martyrdom. She made a choice, she's clear-eyed about the tradeoffs, and she plans to return to professional life when the season is right. That kind of grounded pragmatism is vanishingly rare in Washington, where every personal decision gets filtered through ideological scorekeeping.
The cultural left has spent years insisting that a woman's value is measured exclusively by career achievement. Vance's decision to step back, raise her children, and invest in something meaningful on her own terms is the kind of choice feminists claim to support but rarely celebrate when it doesn't fit the approved script.
The most substantive part of the interview was about Vance's new project: a children's podcast called "Storytime with the Second Lady." It already has three episodes, one of which features racecar driver Danica Patrick doing a dramatic reading of a Disney fan favorite.
Vance described it simply as "sort of just an advertisement for reading." But her reasons for launching it go deeper than that:
"I have a long-standing interest in education. It seemed like a really natural fit because we have young children…As I was teaching them to read, I was starting to see some statistics about the decline in literacy rates, and this is a long-term trend and worrisome."
She's right, and this is a cause that should transcend politics but somehow doesn't. Declining literacy rates among American children represent a genuine crisis, one that gets buried under debates about school funding formulas and equity frameworks while kids still can't read at grade level.
Vance isn't proposing a federal program. She isn't demanding new bureaucratic infrastructure. She's reading books to children and encouraging parents to do the same. It is the kind of initiative that starts at the kitchen table, not in a committee hearing room. Conservatives have always understood that culture is upstream of policy. A Second Lady using her platform to promote literacy through something as simple as storytime is exactly the right instinct.
The Vances are raising three kids already: eight-year-old Ewan, six-year-old Vivek, and four-year-old Mirabel. A fourth arrives in July. That's a full house by any standard, and a particularly full one when your daily life includes Secret Service details and state dinners.
What comes through in the interview is a family that treats public life as something they navigate together rather than something that defines them. The Costco runs, the library trips, the hands-on parenting. None of it is revolutionary. All of it is countercultural in a Washington that rewards ambition over presence.
The Vance family is about to make history this summer. Not the loud, contentious kind. The quiet kind, where a baby is born, and a family grows, and the country gets a reminder of what its leaders look like when they live the values they talk about.
Bryon Noem, husband of former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, told The New York Times he plans to speak publicly about the leaked photos showing him wearing fake breasts and engaging with "bimbofication" fetish models online. Just not yet.
"I will at some point. Today is not the day. I appreciate your heart."
That was his response after the Daily Mail published a bombshell report on Tuesday revealing the photos and Bryon Noem's participation in the fetish scene, which included posing as a woman with large breasts and carrying on explicit conversations with other women. The couple has been married since 1992 and has three adult children together.
A spokesperson for the family offered a brief statement: the family was "blindsided" by the revelation and asked for "privacy and prayers at this time."
The Noem marriage was not exactly a picture of stability before this week. Kristi Noem has long been rumored to be having an affair with her top aide, Corey Lewandowski, the political commentator who appeared alongside her at events, including the 2024 Republican National Convention in Milwaukee. Both Lewandowski and Noem have denied that their relationship is anything beyond professional.
Those denials did not stop Congress from asking about it, the Daily Beast reported. On March 4, Kristi Noem was grilled at a House Judiciary Committee hearing over the alleged affair. Bryon Noem had dutifully appeared with her at that hearing. President Trump publicly announced her firing from DHS shortly after.
Political commentator Ryan James Girdusky shed additional light on what he called D.C.'s open secret. He told the "It's a Numbers Game" podcast back in August 2025 about a telling exchange:
"A reporter walked up to her and said, 'Why are you having this affair? Why haven't you met up with your husband? Why aren't you divorcing your husband?'"
According to Girdusky, Noem's response to the reporter was blunt: she blurted out that her husband was gay. Girdusky confirmed on Tuesday that he was talking about Noem and posted further commentary on X.
"But to say she had no idea really flies in the face of what she was saying."
Girdusky was careful to note he had "no idea if he is or isn't," but added that in D.C. circles, the state of the Noem marriage was common knowledge, calling it "all appearances." He suggested she may have used the claim about her husband as justification for stepping out on her own wedding vows.
There is a reasonable conversation to be had about private behavior and public consequences, and this is one of those cases where the line between the two dissolves entirely. Kristi Noem was the Secretary of Homeland Security. Her husband's secret online life, whatever its precise nature, represents exactly the kind of vulnerability that foreign intelligence services exploit.
Jack Barsky, a former Soviet spy turned U.S. counterintelligence asset, told the Daily Mail what anyone with a passing familiarity with espionage tradecraft already knows:
"It's astounding that somebody whose spouse is at that level has that kind of bad judgment."
This is not a morality lecture. It is a security assessment. A Cabinet secretary's spouse engaged in easily blackmailable behavior while she led the agency responsible for protecting the homeland. The question is not whether anyone's feelings are hurt. The question is whether adversaries knew about this before the American public did, and what leverage that might have provided.
Back in South Dakota, where the Noems built their political brand on ranching, faith, and family values, the reaction was exactly what you'd expect from people who knew Bryon Noem as a neighbor.
Kevin Ruesin, a cattle rancher, offered the instinctive response of a man confronted with something that doesn't fit the person he knows:
"I grew up playing ball with Bryon. I've never known him to be part of stuff like that. I don't believe that at all."
His first guess was AI fabrication. That impulse is understandable in an age where synthetic images are increasingly convincing. But Bryon Noem himself admitted to participating in the bimbofication scene, which makes the AI defense difficult to sustain.
The conservative movement has a recurring problem, and it is not ideology. It is vetting. The pipeline from state politics to national power moves fast, and the assumption that someone who talks right and governs right will also live right has burned the movement more than once.
Kristi Noem rose on a brand built around:
The substance of that brand is now in open conflict with the reality of her personal life. An alleged affair with a top political aide. A husband secretly living an online double life. A family spokesperson asking for prayers while the former secretary claimed to be blindsided by something that was, by multiple accounts, the worst-kept secret in Washington.
None of this means the policies she advocated were wrong. Border security doesn't become less important because its messenger turns out to be personally compromised. But credibility matters in politics, and the gap between what the Noems projected and what they were apparently living is the kind of gap that erodes public trust in everyone who shares a stage with them.
Bryon Noem says he will talk. The phrasing suggests he has a story to tell that goes beyond what has already surfaced. Whether that story implicates only himself or pulls others into the wreckage remains to be seen.
Washington already moved on from Kristi Noem, the officeholder. It may not move on so quickly from what her family's unraveling reveals about the cost of building a political life on a foundation that was never solid to begin with.
The world's oldest known tortoise is not dead. Jonathan, the roughly 193-year-old giant tortoise who lives on the grounds of Plantation House on the remote island of St Helena, is alive and well, despite a viral social media post that convinced multiple major news outlets otherwise.
An X account purporting to belong to Joe Hollins, a vet who has previously cared for Jonathan, posted that it was "heartbroken to share" that the tortoise had died. The BBC, USA Today, and the Daily Mail all ran with the story. There was just one problem: none of it was true.
The real Joe Hollins set the record straight with USA Today:
"Jonathan the tortoise is very much alive."
Nigel Phillips, the governor of St Helena, confirmed as much in an email to the BBC. The correction, dated April 2, arrived after the damage was already done.
The timing, right around April 1, gave the hoax a convenient cover story. But Hollins made clear this wasn't someone's idea of a seasonal gag. The fake account was soliciting cryptocurrency donations under his name, the BBC reported.
"I believe on X the person purporting to be me is asking for crypto donations, so it's not even an April Fool joke. It's a con."
So a scammer impersonated a veterinarian, fabricated the death of a beloved animal, and monetized the grief of strangers on the internet. And newsrooms helped spread it for free.
This is a story about a tortoise, and no one was physically harmed. But the mechanism should alarm anyone who pays attention to how information moves. A single unverified social media post, from an account no one apparently bothered to authenticate, triggered published reports across three major international outlets.
No one called the governor's office first. No one reached Hollins before running the story. The post said something sad; it came from an account that looked official enough, and that was sufficient. Publish now, verify later.
This is the same institutional media that lectures the public about misinformation. The same outlets that demand platform censorship to protect people from "dangerous" content. They couldn't pick up the phone before declaring a 193-year-old tortoise dead.
If this is the standard of verification applied to a feel-bad animal story, imagine what gets through when the stakes are actually high.
Jonathan's story, the real one, is remarkable enough without fabrication. A photograph from 1882 shows him fully grown when he was first brought to St Helena, and experts suggest he was about 50 years old by that time. He has lived through the reigns of at least eight British monarchs.
In 1947, he met both George VI and the future Elizabeth II during their visit to the island. In 2024, he met Sir Lindsay and was presented with a Guinness World Record certificate recognizing him as the oldest known land animal in the world.
Hollins, who clearly has genuine affection for the animal, described him in a 2016 BBC interview as "a 450lb crusty old reptile that I'm very fond of."
Jonathan has outlasted empires. He will probably outlast the scammer's X account, too.
The crypto angle is the part that deserves lingering attention. Social media scams are not new, but they are evolving. The impersonation of a real person, tied to a real and emotionally resonant story, designed to extract cryptocurrency donations before anyone could verify the claim: that is a sophisticated grift. And it worked, at least long enough for major outlets to amplify the lie without spending a dime of their own credibility budget to check it.
Every institution involved here failed at the one job it was supposed to do. The platform failed to catch the impersonation. The newsrooms failed to verify. And by the time the correction landed, the scammer had already gotten what they wanted: attention, emotion, and presumably wallets.
Jonathan, for his part, remains unbothered. He's survived since before the American Civil War. A fraudulent tweet was never going to be what got him.
The second lady of the United States still takes her three kids to Costco. She buys their lunchbox snacks there. She picks up the same items her family has always grabbed from the warehouse store. And when she moved into the vice president's official residence at the Naval Observatory in Washington, D.C., she had no intention of giving that up.
Usha Vance told NBC News in a recent interview that keeping the family's Costco membership was non-negotiable, a small, deliberate act of normalcy inside a life that has become anything but normal.
"We have our neighborhood shops. We have our Costco membership. We have all our favorite things that we get. They pick their lunchbox items from there. It's just sort of a family tradition. It's the kind of stuff that you don't want to let go when you have a family life and you move into something like the Naval Observatory."
It is a small detail. But in a political culture where Washington's elite routinely lose touch with how ordinary Americans live, a second lady who still pushes a cart through a warehouse store stands out.
Usha Vance left her career as a trial lawyer after President Trump won the 2024 election. She moved her family, three children, all under the age of ten, into the Naval Observatory, the sprawling official residence of the vice president in Washington. She is also expecting a fourth child.
One of her first moves was practical, not political. She asked whether the residence was childproofed. Anyone who has chased a toddler around a house built for diplomats, not diaper changes, understands the impulse.
Since settling in, Vance has been spotted around Washington running errands, grabbing coffee, and wearing casual clothes, a deliberate contrast with the carefully stage-managed appearances that define most political spouses. The Costco runs are part of that pattern: a mother of young children doing what mothers of young children do, regardless of the address on the mailbox.
On Monday, Usha Vance launched "Story Time with the Second Lady," a podcast aimed at children. Three episodes dropped at once. In the first, she read from Peter Rabbit. The second featured racing legend Danica Patrick. The third brought on Paralympian and author Brent Poppen. New episodes will arrive every few weeks.
Vance said she has used her platform as second lady to encourage Americans to read more, noting the initiative comes "at a time when the literacy rate is declining."
She framed the project in personal terms, not policy ones.
"I've always loved reading a story, from when I was a kid until today, and now as a mom, story time with my kid is a highlight of my day."
She told viewers the podcast would take them on "so many adventures" and help children "learn new things." She also teased a future appearance from Atlas, the family's dog.
The initiative is modest in scope. It does not come with a federal budget line or a new bureaucracy. It is a woman with a microphone, a children's book, and a few friends reading aloud. That simplicity is the point. At a moment when Washington seems incapable of doing anything without a task force, a press strategy, and a seven-figure communications budget, Vance picked up a copy of Peter Rabbit and hit record.
The NBC News interview also revealed something about the Vance marriage that goes beyond Costco runs and bedtime stories. Usha Vance described herself as a trusted adviser to her husband, not merely a supportive spouse standing behind a podium.
JD Vance is widely expected to run for president in 2028. Asked about those conversations, Usha Vance was direct but careful.
"There are conversations all the time. JD is very focused on the midterm elections right now, on all the things that are happening right this moment, which are obviously exceedingly important. And so if you come back in 2027 and ask me, I'll have a better sense of, you know, what he's thinking in that way. But that's not the priority in our conversations."
The answer was disciplined. She acknowledged the 2028 question without feeding it. She redirected to the midterms without sounding evasive. And she set a clear boundary, come back in 2027, that any experienced political spouse would recognize as a polite way of saying "not now."
That kind of message discipline matters. Usha Vance has shown a knack for public appearances that reveal just enough personality to be engaging without handing opponents a sound bite. In a media environment that rewards gaffes and punishes candor, that is a genuine skill.
Washington is full of people who forget where they came from the moment they get a government car and a security detail. The city's political class eats at restaurants where a salad costs $28, sends children to schools that charge more than most state universities, and treats a trip to a normal grocery store as a photo op rather than a weekly chore.
Usha Vance's insistence on keeping the Costco membership is a small thing. But small things reveal character. It signals a family that does not intend to let the trappings of office rewrite their daily habits.
The Vances have drawn attention at high-profile public events and faced hostile crowds. Through it all, Usha Vance has maintained a composure that reflects someone grounded in something more durable than poll numbers.
She left a successful legal career. She moved her young family into a historic residence that was not childproofed. She is pregnant with her fourth child. And she still finds time to read Peter Rabbit into a microphone because she thinks American kids should read more.
None of that requires a press release. It just requires showing up, at the kitchen table, at the warehouse store, and at the microphone.
In a town that runs on pretense, a Costco card is a quiet act of defiance.
Valerie Bertinelli wants you to know her breasts are "deformed," and she's decided she'd rather laugh about it than hide from it. Fox News reported that the 65-year-old actress laid bare the physical toll of decades-old breast implants during a conversation with Drew Barrymore, tying it to her new memoir, "Getting Naked."
Four surgeries in 2024. A fever of 104 degrees. An infection so severe that her breast "started to cave in on itself." And still, at least one more procedure to go.
It's a jarring story, told with the kind of self-deprecating honesty that's become rare in a celebrity culture obsessed with curating perfection.
Bertinelli first got breast implants in the late 1980s. She wrote in her memoir that she always hated her naturally small breasts and wanted a modest change, but she ended up with results more dramatic than she intended. For decades, she kept them hidden rather than displayed.
"After I got the implants, I never put them on display. I tried to hide them even, embarrassed that I had done it."
The trouble escalated after Bertinelli suffered a bad fall at some unspecified point before 2024, leading to surgery to remove the old implants and replace them with smaller ones. About one week after that replacement surgery, things went wrong: discoloration, swelling, dizziness, and a dangerous fever.
In an interview with People magazine earlier this month, Bertinelli described the moment her doctor saw the damage:
"The look on my doctor's face when he finally saw me made me think 'Oh s---' I guess I should have come in earlier.' And he took everything out [the implant and the surrounding tissues] and then my breast became infected and started to cave in on itself. It became a crater."
Four surgeries in a single year. And the saga isn't over.
What stands out about Bertinelli's approach is her refusal to treat this as a tragedy requiring a solemn press tour. She cracked jokes. She pointed to her cats, Henry, Batman, and Luna, and told People they're the only ones looking at her body anyway.
"I have to have one more surgery to even them out. Me and these guys are the only ones looking at my boobs anyways, but I don't care because I can't see without my glasses on ... I'll have to date somebody who can't see."
During her conversation with Barrymore, Bertinelli recounted showing the damage and watching Barrymore's reaction shift from casual curiosity to genuine shock. Barrymore had initially asked how bad it could really be. Bertinelli mimicked her eventual response: "Oh yeah, that's bad."
Barrymore, to her credit, pivoted to problem-solving. "And then I proceeded to be like, here's what we can do," Barrymore said.
Bertinelli summed up the exchange with warmth: "I love her honesty. It's like, I can trust this woman."
There's a reason this story resonates beyond celebrity gossip. Bertinelli got implants in an era when cosmetic surgery was already being marketed as a path to confidence, and the decades since have only intensified that pressure. Social media has supercharged it. Filters, influencer endorsements, and an entire industry built on the premise that your body is a problem waiting for a product.
What rarely makes the highlight reel is this part: the complications, the revisions, the infections, the decades of discomfort that follow a decision made at a moment of insecurity. Bertinelli got implants because she hated her body. She spent years embarrassed that she'd done it. And now she's dealing with the physical wreckage of a choice the culture told her was empowering.
None of this is an argument for government regulation or moral panic. It's simpler than that. The cultural machinery that tells young women their bodies need fixing rarely sticks around for the consequences. Bertinelli, at 65, is doing something useful by being blunt about what the brochure left out.
She closed her public remarks the way she's handled the whole ordeal, with a joke that barely conceals the weight underneath:
"Anyway, those were my boobs. Anybody want to date me? It was so serious I just had to find the humor in it."
When Barrymore reminded her, she said she wasn't dating, adding a hopeful "yet," Bertinelli didn't argue the point. She'd already said the quiet part out loud: "My boobs suck, but I'm not dating, so it doesn't matter."
Sometimes the bravest thing a public figure can do is stop performing and just tell the truth. Bertinelli did that. The culture that sold her the implants in the first place could stand to listen.
Tiger Woods was arrested Friday after his Range Rover SUV flipped onto its side in Jupiter, Florida, clipping the rear end of a pressure-washing vehicle in a two-vehicle rollover crash shortly after 2 p.m. The Martin County Sheriff's Office said Woods showed signs of impairment at the scene and was arrested after refusing a urine test.
The Daily Mail reported that neither Woods nor the driver of the other vehicle was injured. Woods was alone in his car and crawled out of the passenger side door. He will remain behind bars for at least eight hours, according to the police department.
President Donald Trump, traveling to Mar-a-Lago just 22 miles from the crash site, broke his silence on the incident after stepping off his limousine. He told reporters plainly:
"There was an accident and that's all I know. Very close friend of mine. He's an amazing person, amazing man. But, some difficulty."
Trump added, "I feel so bad," and then said, "I don't want to talk about it."
The connection between Trump and Woods is not new and not superficial. Trump awarded Woods the Presidential Medal of Freedom during his first term in office. Woods is currently dating Vanessa Trump, the President's former daughter-in-law. The personal ties run deep enough that Trump's visible discomfort in addressing the situation carried its own weight.
Earlier in the week, Trump addressed Woods' status regarding the Masters in an interview on Fox News. He was direct about it:
"I love Tiger, but he won't be there. He'll be there, but he won't be playing in it."
Woods himself had recently said he was "trying" to play in the tournament and planned to attend the Champions Dinner. That prospect now looks far more complicated.
The crash came just days after Woods returned to competitive golf for the first time since 2024. On Tuesday night, he competed at The Golf League in Palm Beach, playing alongside Tom Kim and Max Homa. Their side lost 9-2 to a team featuring Justin Rose, Sahith Theegala, and Tommy Fleetwood.
It was supposed to be a story about a comeback. The golf legend, battling years of physical deterioration, is stepping back onto the competitive stage. That narrative lasted roughly 72 hours.
The facts here are straightforward, and they are serious. A man showed signs of impairment, refused a chemical test, and was arrested at the scene of a rollover crash in broad daylight. The Martin County Sheriff's Office laid that out publicly. There is no ambiguity to spin.
Woods has faced this kind of moment before, and the pattern is familiar to anyone paying attention. The public sympathy, the carefully worded statements from representatives, and the rehabilitation tour. American celebrity culture has a well-worn playbook for these situations, and it almost always prioritizes brand management over accountability.
What matters now is whether this gets treated like what it is: a man who allegedly drove impaired in the middle of the afternoon on a public road where other people were present. The driver of the pressure-washing vehicle walked away uninjured. That outcome is luck, not mitigation.
Trump's restraint in his remarks was notable. He acknowledged the friendship, expressed sympathy, and declined to elaborate. That is what loyalty looks like when the facts are still settling. It is also, frankly, what more public figures should do in the first hours after an incident like this: say less, not more.
But sympathy from a friend and accountability from the justice system are not mutually exclusive. Woods crawled out of a flipped SUV on a Friday afternoon in Jupiter, Florida. Someone else was on that road. The system should treat him exactly as it would treat anyone else behind the wheel under those circumstances.
Nothing less. Nothing more.
Nick Fuentes, the 27-year-old far-right livestreamer who once dined with Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago, told his audience during a recent broadcast that he has had a change of heart about the 44th president.
"I'm liking Obama now," Fuentes said. He didn't stop there.
"I miss Obama. I miss the adults in the room. Get this orange clown outta here."
If you're experiencing whiplash, you're not alone. This is the same Nick Fuentes who, during a 2024 podcast episode, said he "really" didn't like the Obamas and singled out Michelle Obama in particular, claiming that "part of what's wrong with Black people in America is that chip on their shoulder, no humility… and they hate you, you can tell they hate this country."
So either Fuentes underwent a genuine ideological conversion in the span of a few months, or he's doing what he's always done: performing for a camera.
Fuentes has built his brand on provocation. His show reportedly averages between 500,000 and 1 million views per episode, numbers built not on policy analysis or grassroots organizing but on the kind of rhetorical arson that keeps audiences tuned in to see what burns next.
Last month, he turned his fire directly on the Trump administration, according to The Daily Beast:
"What does this administration do, other than cover up the Epstein files, embezzle money through government contracts, and bring us to war for Israel."
He followed that with a call for his followers to boycott the midterm elections entirely, or if they do vote, to vote Democrat. That same week, he posted on X: "Still better than Kamala?"
The trajectory is revealing. Fuentes publicly broke with Trump ahead of the 2024 election, claiming the campaign had been "hijacked by the same consultants, lobbyists, and donors that he defeated in 2016." Now he's praising Barack Obama. The through line isn't ideology. It's attention.
The mainstream media treats figures like Fuentes as somehow representative of the broader conservative movement. They aren't. Trump himself distanced himself from Fuentes after the November 2022 Mar-a-Lago dinner that also included Kanye West, a meeting that generated weeks of breathless coverage. According to The New York Times, current and former Trump administration members and outside advisers have avoided engaging with Fuentes entirely.
That's the right call, and it always was.
The conservative movement is a big tent, but it has walls. Fuentes, a college dropout and self-described virgin who has publicly said that "a lot of women want to be raped" and that "women suck," is not a serious political thinker. He's a shock jockey who discovered that the algorithm rewards escalation. The fact that he now claims to prefer Obama over Trump tells you nothing about the state of conservatism. It tells you everything about the shelf life of rage as a business model.
Consider the audience that showed up for this latest pivot. One viewer sent a $20 donation during the livestream with a caption that read, in part, "kill all minorities." The article reporting on Fuentes's statements did not note whether he addressed or rejected that message.
This is the ecosystem Fuentes has cultivated. Not a political movement. Not a coalition capable of winning elections or shaping policy. A pay-per-view rage loop where the host says whatever keeps the donations flowing and the audience says whatever they think the host wants to hear.
When someone tells you to vote Democrat one month and praises Barack Obama the next, you're not watching a political evolution. You're watching a man who ran out of allies on the right and is now flailing for relevance on the only stage he has left: a livestream chat room.
The danger Fuentes poses is not to the conservative movement's policy agenda. He does not influence legislation, has no relationship with anyone in power, and has no constituency beyond his stream viewers. The danger is that outlets will continue to treat him as a synecdoche for the American right, a convenient prop to tar mainstream conservatism with extremism by association.
Every time Fuentes says something grotesque, the headline writes itself in a way designed to splash back on the broader movement. That's not an accident. It's a media strategy, and the left has been running it for years. Find the most toxic person who once stood in the same room as a Republican, then present them as the logical endpoint of conservative thought.
Conservatives don't need to waste energy denouncing Fuentes every time he opens his mouth. The movement has already moved on. He's the one who can't let go.
A man who swings from calling Obama's family enemies of America to saying he misses Obama as "the adults in the room" has no fixed convictions worth engaging. He's not a defector. He's not a whistleblower. He's a streamer chasing his next clip.
The camera will move on eventually. It always does.