Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson spent this week on a media tour — not to discuss the weighty constitutional questions sitting on her desk, but to defend her night out at the Grammy Awards and promote her memoir.
Jackson appeared on "CBS Mornings" on Feb. 10 and ABC's "The View" on Feb. 11, where she defended attending the Grammy ceremony this month as a nominee for the audio version of her 2025 book "Lovely One." She did not win. The Dalai Lama took the award for best audio book, narration, and storytelling recording.
Meanwhile, the Supreme Court still has not issued a ruling on President Trump's tariffs — a case argued back in November — and has decided only one of the other eight cases from that same oral arguments session. The court is currently in the middle of a four-week break from hearing arguments and issuing opinions.
The issue isn't that a Supreme Court justice attended an awards show. The issue is which awards show, and what happened there.
Sen. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., laid it out plainly, according to USA Today: many attendees at the ceremony wore "ICE OUT" pins, and two award winners used their acceptance speeches to denounce the Trump administration's immigration enforcement. Blackburn called it:
"Such a brazenly political, anti-law enforcement event."
Jackson, seated in that audience, is part of the court currently deliberating a major case on presidential authority. The optics aren't complicated. A justice who will rule on the legality of the president's enforcement powers attended an event where enforcement of immigration law was treated as something to protest — accessorized with lapel pins, no less.
On "The View," Jackson waved it off. She described the evening in glowing terms:
"It was extraordinary. I'd never been to any kind of event like that before."
When pressed on the criticism, she framed attendance as part of her duties:
"Another part of the job, actually my job, is public outreach and education. I thought this is a great opportunity to highlight my work in this ways and to see what's happening at the Grammy's."
Public outreach. At the Grammys. While your pending caseload includes whether the president can use emergency powers to impose tariffs.
Co-host Whoopi Goldberg rushed to Jackson's defense, arguing that the justice "had no way of knowing what anyone's speech was going to be." Jackson agreed:
"That's right."
Fine. She didn't know what the speeches would say. But she also didn't leave. She didn't issue any statement distancing herself from the politicized spectacle. She went on two talk shows afterward and described the evening as "extraordinary."
On "CBS Mornings," Jackson addressed the still-pending tariffs case with the kind of reassurance that sounds reasonable until you think about it for more than a few seconds:
"The court is going through its process of deliberation. The American people expect for us to be thorough and clear in our determinations and sometimes that takes time."
Thoroughness is a virtue. But the court heard oral arguments on these tariffs in November. It's now mid-February. They've managed to resolve exactly one of the nine cases argued that month. The tariffs — which function as a centerpiece of the president's economic agenda and a major foreign policy tool — remain in legal limbo.
During those November arguments, many justices sounded skeptical that the president can tap emergency powers to sidestep the standard tariffs process. That skepticism, combined with the glacial pace, has fueled speculation that the court is in no rush to invalidate a sitting president's signature economic policy — preferring to let the clock run rather than issue a politically explosive ruling.
That's a choice. And it's a choice that has consequences for American businesses, trading partners, and the broader economy every single day it goes unresolved.
There's a deeper pattern worth noting. Jackson is not the first justice to have a public life outside the court. Justices write books. They give speeches. They attend events. None of that is inherently problematic.
But the left spent years demanding that conservative justices recuse themselves from cases based on the flimsiest associations — a flag on a neighbor's lawn, attendance at a legal conference, a friendship with someone tangentially connected to a litigant. The standard they set was that even the appearance of bias was disqualifying.
Now, a liberal justice attends an event where performers and attendees openly protested federal law enforcement, where anti-ICE sentiment was literally pinned to people's chests — and the defense is that she couldn't have predicted the speeches. The recusal industrial complex that targeted conservative justices has gone remarkably quiet.
Jackson also used her Grammy loss to charm the talk show audience:
"If you're going to lose, I mean, you might as well lose to the Dalai Lama, for sure."
It's a good line. It's the kind of thing that plays well on daytime television. And that's precisely the concern — a sitting Supreme Court justice who seems more comfortable on a talk show couch than behind the bench, building a media persona while cases of national significance collect dust.
Jackson described her Grammy attendance and media appearances as "public outreach and education." She called the criticism itself just:
"Part of the job."
But there's a difference between public engagement and a publicity tour. Promoting a young adult version of your memoir on "The View" while the country waits for a ruling on presidential trade authority isn't outreach. It's branding.
The Supreme Court's authority rests on the perception that its members are above the political fray — that they deliberate with care, speak through opinions, and let their work product do the talking. Every appearance on a daytime talk show, every photo op at an awards ceremony dripping with partisan signaling, chips away at that perception.
Jackson has every right to attend the Grammys. She has every right to go on television. But rights and wisdom aren't the same thing. The American people waiting on a tariffs ruling might prefer their justices spent February working — not explaining why losing to the Dalai Lama was actually kind of fun.
James Van Der Beek died on Wednesday at the age of 48. The actor, who became a household name as the lead of the WB's "Dawson's Creek," had announced a Stage 3 colorectal cancer diagnosis in early November 2024.
His wife, Kimberly Van Der Beek, confirmed the news on Instagram:
"He met his final days with courage, faith, and grace. There is much to share regarding his wishes, love for humanity and the sacredness of time. Those days will come."
She asked for privacy as the family grieves. Van Der Beek is survived by Kimberly and their six children.
Born March 8, 1977, in Cheshire, Connecticut, James David Van Der Beek found the stage early, appearing in school plays as a child before making his professional debut in an off-Broadway production of Edward Albee's "Finding the Sun." His first film credit came in 1995's "Angus," followed by "I Love You, I Love You Not" the following year.
Then came the role that changed everything, as NBC News reported. In 1998, "Dawson's Creek" premiered on the WB, and Van Der Beek's portrayal of Dawson Leery — the earnest, film-obsessed teenager navigating life in a small coastal town — struck a chord with millions of young viewers. The show ran for six seasons and 128 episodes before ending in May 2003. It launched careers alongside Van Der Beek's, with Katie Holmes, Michelle Williams, and Joshua Jackson all starring as series regulars.
Van Der Beek marked the show's 20th anniversary in a January 2018 Instagram post:
"The little pilot we shot in that small town for that fledgling network aired, changed our lives and launched our careers."
A year after "Dawson's Creek" debuted, Van Der Beek starred in "Varsity Blues" as a high school quarterback — a film that became its own kind of cultural touchstone. Cameos in "Scary Movie" and "Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back" followed in 2000 and 2001, respectively.
The trajectory of Van Der Beek's career after "Dawson's Creek" was the trajectory of an actor who refused to be defined by a single role — even if the world kept trying. He appeared across a wide range of television, with guest spots on "Criminal Minds," "Ugly Betty," "How I Met Your Mother," "One Tree Hill," "Medium," and "Law & Order: Criminal Intent."
In the early 2010s, he landed what many considered a creative high point: playing a fictionalized, self-mocking version of himself on ABC's "Don't Trust the B---- in Apartment 23." He spoke about the role to The Hollywood Reporter in 2014:
"It was a really fun character to play because he was completely without shame. It's fun to mock the business, and it's fun to keep your own ego in check, too. You feel very safe when you're constantly destroying all those little things you keep precious as an actor. It's a very liberating feeling."
That willingness to laugh at himself — genuinely, not performatively — set him apart in an industry where ego is currency. He went on to star in CBS's "CSI: Cyber" for two seasons and appeared in the first season of FX's drama series "Pose."
In a 2024 interview with People magazine, Van Der Beek reflected on the peculiar intensity of the fame "Dawson's Creek" brought him as a young man:
"When it first started happening, the people who were coming up to me were teenage girls who were screaming."
He was characteristically honest — and funny — about the mark it left:
"I have what I call the lamest form of PTSD ever, which is when I hear teenage girls go, 'Oooh!' When I hear that titter, I go into a still space ... [then] I'm like: Dude, get over yourself."
Self-deprecation as a survival mechanism. It served him well.
On November 3, 2024, Van Der Beek revealed publicly that he had been diagnosed with Stage 3 colorectal cancer. He had been fighting privately before making the announcement, a decision that itself reflected a kind of quiet dignity increasingly rare in an age where every personal crisis becomes a content strategy.
"I've been dealing with this privately until now, getting treatment and dialing in my overall health with greater focus than ever before. Please know that my family and I deeply appreciate all the love and support."
He was 47 at the time of that post. He was 48 when he died.
Colorectal cancer rates among younger adults have been climbing for years, and Van Der Beek's diagnosis — and now his death — puts a recognizable face on a disease that too many people still associate only with older generations. Forty-eight is not old. It is the age of fathers coaching Little League, of men in the prime of their professional lives, of husbands with six children who still need them.
There is something worth pausing over in Kimberly Van Der Beek's words. She did not describe her husband's final days with the language of victimhood or defiance that has become reflexive in public grief. She said he met them with courage, faith, and grace.
Those are not small words. They are the vocabulary of a man who understood that how you face the end matters — that character is not something you perform for an audience but something you carry into the rooms where no cameras follow.
James Van Der Beek made his mark playing a teenager who took everything too seriously. He spent the rest of his career proving he didn't have to. He leaves behind a family, a body of work, and the memory of a man who — by every account available — faced the hardest thing with the best of himself.
He was 48 years old.
A federal judge struck down California's ban on face coverings for federal law enforcement officers this week, handing the Trump administration a clean legal victory and exposing a rift between Governor Gavin Newsom and the state senator who authored the law.
Judge Christina Snyder blocked enforcement of the mask ban on Monday while upholding a separate California law requiring federal agents to visibly display identification. The ruling turned on a straightforward problem: the law banned federal agents from covering their faces during operations but exempted state and local police. The court deemed that the carve-out was unfair.
The result is a law that was designed to obstruct federal immigration enforcement — struck down because its authors couldn't even write it consistently.
Newsom signed the mask ban last fall in response to ICE officers wearing face coverings during immigration operations in Los Angeles. At the time, the governor framed the issue in the most dramatic terms possible:
"Masked men jumping out of unmarked cars, people disappearing, no due process, no oversight, zero accountability, happening in the United States of America today."
"These are authoritarian actions by an authoritarian government."
State Senator Scott Wiener authored the bill and reportedly intended it to apply to all law enforcement — federal, state, and local. But the version Newsom signed exempted state police, a carve-out that reportedly came from negotiations with the governor's own office, according to the Daily Mail.
That exemption became the law's fatal flaw. You cannot argue that masked law enforcement is a threat to civil liberties and then protect the right of your own state troopers to do the same thing. The court noticed.
What followed the ruling was not a unified Democratic response. It was a public finger-pointing exercise.
Newsom's press office wasted no time putting the loss on Wiener:
"Mr. Wiener rejected our proposed fixes to his bill — language that was later included in the identification bill the court upheld today. He chose a different approach, and today the court found his approach unlawful."
Wiener, for his part, immediately pledged to try again:
"Now that the Court has made clear that state officers must be included, I am immediately introducing new legislation to include state officers. We will unmask these thugs and hold them accountable. Full stop."
So the governor's team says the senator refused their fixes. The senator says he'll write a new version that does what the governor apparently wanted all along. The only people who came out of this with a clear message were the ones who sued to stop it.
Attorney General Pam Bondi framed the ruling as part of a broader pattern of courtroom success:
"Following our arguments, a district court in California BLOCKED the enforcement of a law that would have banned federal agents from wearing masks to protect their identities."
"These federal agents are harassed, doxxed, obstructed, and attacked on a regular basis just for doing their jobs. We have no tolerance for it."
"We will continue fighting and winning in court for President Trump's law-and-order agenda."
The Trump administration sued to block the mask ban back in November, arguing California lacked the authority to regulate federal agents. The Department of Homeland Security urged authorities to ignore the law entirely. The court's ruling vindicated that position.
There's a reason ICE agents wear face coverings during operations. They work in hostile environments where activists film them, post their faces online, and target them for harassment. Bondi's statement pointed to a reality that California's leadership would prefer to ignore: the people enforcing immigration law face real threats from the people who oppose it.
This was never really about masks. It was about obstruction — finding any procedural lever to make federal immigration enforcement harder, slower, and more dangerous for the agents carrying it out. If you can force agents to show their faces, you give the doxxing machine fresh ammunition. If you can tie up enforcement operations in state-level compliance requirements, you create friction where the federal government is supposed to operate freely.
Newsom tipped his hand on Tuesday when he suggested the ruling should inspire a federal mask ban:
"Based on the court's decision, I think we should move in the opposite direction. We should have a federal mask ban."
"I don't believe federal agents should be running roughshod over the Constitution, putting communities that are already on edge in more terror and more distress by having masks on. No other law enforcement agency operates like this."
The governor's office added:
"No badge and no name mean no accountability."
But the court upheld the identification requirement. Federal agents will be required to visibly display identification. That's the accountability mechanism — and it survived. The mask ban was something else entirely, and the court saw through it.
Wiener says he'll reintroduce the legislation with state officers included. Whether Newsom signs a version that applies to his own state police remains an open question — and a revealing one. It's easy to demand transparency from federal agents enforcing laws you don't like. It's harder when the same standard applies to officers under your command.
California's Democratic leadership wanted to build a legal wall around illegal immigrants. Instead, they built a law so poorly constructed that it collapsed under the weight of its own hypocrisy. The court didn't need to reach the federal supremacy question. The equal protection problem was enough.
When your law fails because you carved out an exception for your own side, the court isn't handing your opponents a win. You handed it to them yourself.
Attorney General Pam Bondi turned a House Judiciary Committee hearing into a masterclass in political accountability on Wednesday, ripping into Democrats who spent years ignoring Jeffrey Epstein's crimes only to suddenly discover their outrage now that a Republican administration is doing the work their side never bothered to attempt.
The hearing — ostensibly about the release of files related to the Epstein prosecution — devolved into a series of clashes between Bondi and Democratic members, with Ranking Member Jamie Raskin absorbing the sharpest blow. Bondi called him a "washed-up, loser lawyer — not even a lawyer" after he accused her of filibustering during questioning.
It was that kind of afternoon.
As reported by the New York Post, the core tension of the hearing was impossible for Democrats to escape. More than 3 million pages of investigative materials on Epstein and his convicted accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell have been released under a bill co-authored by Rep. Thomas Massie and Rep. Ro Khanna, signed by President Trump last November. The release happened on this administration's watch. The silence happened on the last one.
Bondi drove that point like a nail:
"None of them asked [former Attorney General] Merrick Garland, over the last four years, one word about Jeffrey Epstein. How ironic is that? You know why? Because Donald Trump."
That framing is difficult to argue with. Democrats controlled the Judiciary Committee. They had Garland in the same chair. They chose to spend that time on other pursuits. Now they want credit for caring about Epstein's victims — the same victims the DOJ under their preferred attorney general apparently never warranted a single question about.
Rep. Pramila Jayapal tried a theatrical move, asking Epstein victims or their family members in attendance to stand and raise their hand if they had not been able to meet with the current Department of Justice. Bondi didn't take the bait:
"Why didn't she ask Merrick Garland this twice when he sat in my chair? I'm not going to get in the gutter for her theatrics."
Raskin came in swinging. He accused Bondi of siding with perpetrators and ignoring victims — not just on Epstein, but on what he called "homicidal government violence against citizens in Minneapolis," a reference the article provided no context for and Raskin apparently felt no obligation to substantiate.
"You're not showing a lot of interest in the victims. Whether it's Epstein's human trafficking ring or the homicidal government violence against citizens in Minneapolis, as attorney general you're siding with the perpetrators and you're ignoring the victims."
This is the rhetorical equivalent of throwing everything at the wall. Epstein's trafficking ring and an unrelated Minneapolis grievance crammed into a single breath, designed to create an emotional impression rather than an argument. Raskin then complained that Bondi was filibustering — a rich accusation from a man who used his own time to deliver a two-topic indictment with no connective tissue.
When Raskin demanded that Chairman Jim Jordan restore time to Rep. Jerry Nadler and warned Bondi about speaking on "our time," her response was clean:
"You don't tell me anything."
The retiring New York Democrat didn't fare much better. Bondi confronted him directly over past claims that President Trump conspired with foreign actors in the 2016 election:
"You said the president conspired, sought foreign interference in the 2016 election. Robert Mueller found no evidence, none, of foreign interference in 2016. Have you apologized to President Trump?"
The hearing record does not reflect an apology. What it reflects is an attorney general unwilling to let Democrats use their time without being reminded of how they spent the last decade.
"You all should be apologizing. You sit here and you attack the president, and I am not going to have it. I'm not going to put up with it."
Perhaps the most damning detail of the hearing wasn't a quote from the dais — it was a fact about one of the members' colleagues. According to reporting, US Virgin Islands Delegate Stacey Plaskett texted with Jeffrey Epstein during a 2019 House Oversight Committee hearing to get tips about questioning ex-Trump legal fixer Michael Cohen.
A sitting member of Congress was taking advice from a man who had already pleaded guilty to soliciting a minor for prostitution and was registered as a sex offender. A representative for Plaskett previously acknowledged Epstein had contacted her among other "staff, constituents, and the public at large, offering advice, support, and in some cases partisan vitriol."
Former Bondi chief of staff Chad Mizelle connected the dots:
"Jerry Nadler attacking Attorney General Bondi over Epstein, while his colleague Rep. Plaskett was using Jeffrey Epstein as a confidant and adviser, is the height of hypocrisy."
Democrats want to be the party of accountability on Epstein. Their own members were in his text messages. That contradiction doesn't need editorial commentary — it speaks fluently on its own.
The hearing wasn't exclusively a left-right affair. Rep. Thomas Massie, one of the co-authors of the very legislation that produced the document release, turned his fire on Bondi over how the DOJ handled redactions. He showed three documents he described as "emblematic of the massive failure of the DOJ to comply with the Epstein Files Transparency Act" and argued that potential co-conspirators' names had been blacked out while some victims' identities were exposed.
"Literally the worst thing you could do to the survivors, you did."
Bondi addressed the redaction issue directly, committing to correct errors in both directions:
"If any man's name was redacted that should not have been, we will of course unredact it. If a victim's name was unredacted, please bring it to us, and we will redact it."
She also told Chairman Jordan that Massie "has Trump Derangement Syndrome" and called him a "failed politician" — a notable choice of words aimed at a Republican ally of the legislation. The redaction question is legitimate. The process of releasing 3 million pages of investigative materials is massive, and errors in a release of that scale are correctable. What matters is whether the administration fixes them — and Bondi committed on the record to doing so.
Strip away the theatrics, and what Wednesday's hearing revealed is simple. The Trump administration released more than 3 million pages of Epstein-related materials. The previous administration released none. Democrats who had four years and a willing attorney general to demand transparency on one of the most significant sex trafficking cases in American history chose instead to focus on partisan investigations. Now they want to interrogate the people who actually opened the files.
Mizelle summarized it without excess:
"The Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee did nothing to bring justice and transparency to the Epstein saga. Attorney General Pam Bondi has."
Epstein's victims were in that hearing room. They didn't come to watch Democrats perform outrage they never felt when their own party held the gavel. They came because someone finally released the files — and it wasn't Merrick Garland.
At least nine Democrats who served in the Biden administration are running for Congress or governor this cycle — and almost none of them want voters to know it.
Across campaign websites, launch videos, and promotional materials, Biden alumni are performing a coordinated vanishing act on the man who gave them their most prominent jobs. No photos. No name drops. No trace of the 46th president, except where absolutely unavoidable — and even then, wrapped in enough euphemism to make a press secretary blush.
The pattern is unmistakable. These aren't obscure staffers hoping nobody Googles them. These are ambassadors, cabinet secretaries, and senior White House officials who now treat their own résumés like classified documents, as Axios reported.
Start with Bridget Brink, Biden's ambassador to Ukraine, now running for a Republican-held House seat in Michigan. In her announcement video, she told voters she proudly served "under five presidents, both Democrat and Republican" — while photos of Obama and George W. Bush flashed on screen. The president who actually appointed her as ambassador? Nowhere to be found.
Michael Roth, Biden's interim leader of the Small Business Administration, is challenging Rep. Tom Kean Jr. in New Jersey. His website describes him as a leader "trusted by senators, governors, mayors, and a president." Which president? He'd rather not say.
Then there's Deb Haaland, Biden's Interior secretary, now running for governor of New Mexico. Her website refers to her cabinet tenure only as holding the position "for the past four years" — no mention of who put her there. In a revealing twist, her site does mention Trump, boasting about her work with him in getting seven House bills she introduced signed into law. Biden gets erased; Trump gets a highlight reel.
Xavier Becerra, Biden's Health and Human Services secretary, is running for governor of California. Biden appeared in neither his campaign launch video nor his website. Doug Jones, the former senator who served as Biden's "sherpa" guiding Ketanji Brown Jackson's Supreme Court nomination, left Biden off his website and kickoff video for his Alabama governor's race.
A national Democratic strategist, who requested anonymity, explained the calculus plainly:
"Joe Biden's lingering unpopularity is proving to be a serious drag on Biden alums running in swing districts across the country."
The strategist went further:
"They're unable to talk about their most recent and often most high-profile job experience without alienating general election voters."
Read that again. These candidates cannot mention the most significant line on their résumé without hurting their chances. That is the Biden legacy, distilled to a single strategic verdict.
The reversal from recent history makes the silence louder. In the 2018 midterms, Democratic candidates tripped over each other to associate themselves with Barack Obama. Biden himself was a sought-after surrogate on the campaign trail. Haaland said at the time that she wouldn't have had the courage to run if she hadn't worked for Obama's campaigns.
Obama was an asset. Biden is an anchor.
Ryan Vetticad, a former presidential management fellow at the Department of Justice, now running for a House seat in Illinois, was asked about leaving Biden out of his campaign materials. His response was diplomatic but unmistakable:
"It's not the priority for me."
He elaborated:
"There's a lot of things that Democrats did wrong in the 2024 cycle, so I want to chart a new way forward."
"Chart a new way forward" is the kind of language you use when the old way led somewhere catastrophic. Vetticad isn't wrong about 2024. He's just not willing to say the quiet part any louder than he has to.
Only one candidate among the group leaned into his Biden service. Christian Urrutia, running for a House seat in New Hampshire, highlighted his work at the Pentagon under Biden on his website, arguing that "people are hungry for folks that are authentic." The key detail: his seat is viewed as solidly or likely Democratic. He can afford the association because he doesn't need swing voters.
In competitive districts, Biden's name is poison. In safe blue seats, it's merely irrelevant. Neither scenario reflects well on the former president's political standing.
The implications stretch beyond the midterms. Kamala Harris and Pete Buttigieg — both Biden administration alumni — are cited as potential 2028 presidential candidates. If midlevel appointees running for House seats can't afford the Biden association, the problem compounds exponentially for anyone seeking the presidency on the strength of that same administration's record.
A former Biden White House official dismissed the whole pattern as "a manufactured, press-driven narrative." A Biden spokesperson declined to comment at all. These are not the responses of people who believe the narrative is wrong. They're the responses of people who have no good answer for it.
Meanwhile, Republicans are doing exactly what you'd expect. Rep. Mike Lawler of New York wasted no time tying his Democratic challenger, Cait Conley, to Biden on social media, calling her "the director of counterterrorism on the Biden National Security Council during the fall of Kabul and the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan." Conley did not respond to a request for comment.
The candidates can scrub their websites. They can film slick launch videos that mention every president except the one who hired them. But opponents have Google, and voters have memories. The Biden record doesn't disappear because a web designer omitted it.
Doug Jones, at least, tried to split the difference. He told Axios he was "proud of the work I did for my friend President Biden," then added that "as the campaign evolves, so too will our website and future materials." Translation: the website will eventually mention Biden — once the campaign calculates the least damaging way to do it.
This is what a historically unpopular presidency looks like in its aftermath. Not a single one of these candidates is running on Biden's record. Not one is making the case that his administration improved the lives of the voters they're courting. The silence is the review.
Democrats salivate at the prospect of major gains in November. They may even get them. But they'll do it by pretending the last Democratic president doesn't exist — which tells you everything about what that presidency actually delivered.
Eight people are dead in the small community of Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia, after an 18-year-old former student opened fire at a local residence and then at Tumbler Ridge Secondary School on Tuesday afternoon. The shooter, identified by RCMP Deputy Commissioner Dwayne McDonald on Wednesday as Jesse Van Rootselaar, killed his mother, his 11-year-old stepbrother, and six people inside the school before turning the gun on himself.
Van Rootselaar was born male and began transitioning to female approximately six years ago. An initial emergency alert described the active shooter as a "female in a dress." A police superintendent later referred to Van Rootselaar as a "gunperson" during a press briefing.
Approximately 25 others were wounded. Most of the school victims were found in the library. One was found in a stairwell. Among the dead: a 39-year-old female teacher, three 12-year-old female students, one 12-year-old male student, and one 13-year-old male student. Their identities have not been released.
This was not a case where nobody saw anything coming. The New York Post reported that according to McDonald, police had visited the Van Rootselaar family home on multiple occasions over the last several years due to concerns about the shooter's mental health. Van Rootselaar was taken into custody for assessment under British Columbia's Mental Health Act on more than one occasion.
Two years ago, firearms were seized from the home. The lawful owner — whom McDonald did not name — petitioned to have them returned. And got them back.
Two firearms were recovered at the school: one long gun and one modified handgun. Whether these were the same weapons previously seized and returned is, according to authorities, "not immediately clear." How Van Rootselaar gained access to the school building during school hours is also unknown. He had dropped out approximately four years ago. Tumbler Ridge Secondary serves grades 7 through 12 and has a student body of roughly 160. Around 100 students were evacuated to safety after being barricaded in classrooms for more than two hours.
Reports of the shooting reached the RCMP at approximately 1:20 p.m. local time. The emergency public alert wasn't canceled until 5:45 p.m.
When asked whether he believed there was any correlation between Van Rootselaar identifying as transgender and the shooting, McDonald said it was:
"Too early to say."
It's always too early to say. And then the conversation moves on, and the question is never revisited — not because the evidence doesn't warrant it, but because the cultural gatekeepers have decided the question itself is impermissible.
The Tumbler Ridge massacre is the latest in a series of mass shootings carried out by individuals who identify as transgender:
Pointing this out is not an accusation that transgender identity causes violence. The overwhelming majority of transgender-identifying people will never harm anyone. But the refusal to even examine the intersection of gender dysphoria, severe mental illness, and mass violence is not compassion — it's cowardice dressed up as sensitivity. When a pattern recurs, adults investigate it. They don't close their eyes and call it kindness.
Van Rootselaar's mother, 39-year-old Jennifer Strang, was among his first victims. She was killed at the family residence alongside her 11-year-old son, Van Rootselaar's stepbrother.
Strang had been a vocal advocate for her child's transition. In July 2024, she posted a trans-inclusive Pride flag on Instagram with the message:
"I really hope the hate I see online is just bored old people and not true hatred. Do better and educate yourself before spewing bulls–t online."
She added:
"Do you have any idea how many kids are killing themselves over this kind of hate?"
She described herself as a "conservative-leaning libertarian" and used the hashtag #ProtectTransKids. In August 2021, Van Rootselaar's grandmother posted a birthday message on Facebook — roughly two years into the transition — celebrating his 14th birthday:
"Happy 14th birthday to our grandson Jesse !! Love you always !! XOXO"
There is something unbearable about a mother who did everything the modern therapeutic consensus told her to do — affirm, support, protect — and was killed by the child she championed. This isn't a point to score. It's a tragedy to sit with. But it is also, inescapably, a data point that challenges the claim that affirmation alone is sufficient treatment for deeply troubled young people.
Van Rootselaar was repeatedly flagged for mental health crises. He was assessed under the Mental Health Act multiple times. He dropped out of school at roughly 14 years old. Firearms were in the home. Every institutional tripwire that was supposed to prevent exactly this outcome failed — not because the signs weren't there, but because the systems meant to act on them didn't.
Only two mass shootings in Canadian history have claimed more victims — the 1989 Montreal massacre at École Polytechnique, which killed 14 women, and the 2020 Nova Scotia attacks, which killed 22 people across 16 locations. Tumbler Ridge now joins that list. A school of 160 students in a rural community just absorbed a body count that would dominate American headlines for weeks.
The Canadian flag flew at half-staff at Parliament on Wednesday. Prime Minister Mark Carney spoke to the media in Ottawa. No specific policy responses or statements were quoted.
Canada's gun control regime is already among the most restrictive in the Western world. Firearms were seized from this home. The system worked exactly as designed — and then reversed itself when the legal owner asked. The weapons came back. Eight people are dead.
The uncomfortable truth is that no regulatory framework can substitute for institutional courage. The Mental Health Act assessments didn't hold Van Rootselaar. The firearms seizure didn't stick. The school, which he hadn't attended in four years, apparently had no mechanism to stop a former student from entering during school hours. Every checkpoint existed on paper. None of them held in practice.
The debate that follows this massacre will be predictable. Calls for stricter gun laws in a country that already has strict gun laws. Demands to avoid "politicizing" the shooter's transgender identity — demands that would never be made if the shooter's ideology pointed rightward. And a quiet burial of the mental health failures that let a known, repeatedly flagged individual walk into a school with two firearms.
A 39-year-old teacher is dead. Four children aged 12 and 13 are dead. A mother and her 11-year-old son are dead. The system knew Jesse Van Rootselaar was in crisis. It was known for years.
Knowing wasn't enough. It never is, when no one is willing to act on what they know.
A federal grand jury in Washington declined to indict six Democratic members of Congress who published a video last November urging service members to refuse unlawful orders. The US Attorney's Office for the District of Columbia, led by Trump appointee Jeanine Pirro, had sought the charges — and came up empty.
The six lawmakers — Senators Mark Kelly of Arizona and Elissa Slotkin of Michigan, along with Representatives Jason Crow of Colorado, Maggie Goodlander of New Hampshire, Chris Deluzio of Pennsylvania, and Chrissy Houlahan of Pennsylvania — all have backgrounds in the military or intelligence community. Their November 2025 video was brief and direct:
"Our laws are clear. You can refuse illegal orders."
That single sentence detonated a political firestorm. And now, months later, the legal machinery marshaled against them has stalled at the grand jury stage, as the Daily Mail reported.
The Uniform Code of Military Justice already establishes that service members must obey lawful orders — and may refuse illegal ones. The six Democrats weren't announcing a novel legal theory. They were restating existing law on camera.
But context matters. The video landed in November 2025, and its timing carried an unmistakable political charge. It wasn't a civics lesson — it was a message aimed at the commander-in-chief. The Democrats knew exactly what they were doing, and the reaction was immediate.
President Trump responded on social media, calling the video:
"SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH!"
Followed by:
"HANG THEM GEORGE WASHINGTON WOULD !!"
Capitol Police moved to provide 24/7 security for the lawmakers. Senator Slotkin described the shift in mid-November:
"Capitol Police came to us and said, 'We're gonna put you on 24/7 security.' We've got law enforcement out in front of my house. I mean, it changes things immediately."
Secretary of War Pete Hegseth pursued his own track against Senator Kelly — a 25-year Navy combat pilot and former astronaut — seeking to strip his military rank and pay. That process remains ongoing.
The DOJ probe moved forward despite the lawmakers announcing they would not cooperate with it. The federal attorneys assigned to the case were reportedly political appointees rather than career DOJ prosecutors, according to an anonymous source cited by NBC News.
That detail matters. Grand juries are famously sympathetic to prosecutors. The old line about indicting a ham sandwich exists for a reason. When a grand jury declines to indict, it signals something beyond reasonable disagreement — it suggests the case presented to them was not persuasive on its most basic terms.
The Speech or Debate Clause in Article I of the Constitution provides lawmakers with broad protections for remarks relating to the "legislative sphere." Whether this specific video falls within that sphere is a legitimate legal question. But a grand jury didn't need to reach the constitutional argument — they apparently weren't convinced the case cleared even the preliminary threshold.
This is the core problem. If the administration believed these lawmakers committed a prosecutable offense, the case needed to be airtight. Instead, they handed Democrats exactly the narrative they wanted.
The six lawmakers wasted no time framing the outcome. Senator Kelly released a statement Tuesday evening:
"It wasn't enough for Pete Hegseth to censure me and threaten to demote me, now it appears they tried to have me charged with a crime — all because of something I said that they didn't like. That's not the way things work in America. Donald Trump wants every American to be too scared to speak out against him. The most patriotic thing any of us can do is not back down."
Senator Slotkin posted on X:
"But today wasn't just an embarrassing day for the Administration. It was another sad day for our country. Because whether or not Pirro succeeded is not the point. It's that President Trump continues to weaponize our justice system against his perceived enemies. It's the kind of thing you see in a foreign country, not in the United States we know and love."
Representative Crow was characteristically blunt:
"If these f***ers think that they're going to intimidate us and threaten and bully me in the silence, and they're going to go after political opponents and get us to back down, they have another thing coming. The tide is turning."
Representative Houlahan called it:
"It's a vindication for the Constitution."
None of these statements is surprising. What's notable is how cleanly they land. When you pursue a case and lose, your opponents get to write the story.
Here's where conservatives should be honest with themselves. The "seditious six" — as some on the right dubbed them — published a video that was politically provocative and deliberately timed to undermine confidence in the chain of command. There are legitimate reasons to find it objectionable. Encouraging service members to second-guess orders, even under the banner of existing law, carries implications that extend well beyond a civics refresher.
But objectionable speech and criminal conduct are not the same thing. The gap between the two is where American liberty lives. Conservatives spent the better part of a decade arguing — correctly — that the Obama and Biden DOJ had been weaponized against political opponents. The IRS targeting of Tea Party groups. The FISA abuse during the Russia investigation. The unequal application of the law during the summer of 2020. Those arguments carried weight because they were grounded in evidence of institutional overreach.
A failed indictment of sitting members of Congress — pursued by political appointees, rejected by a grand jury — hands the left the mirror image of every argument conservatives have made about prosecutorial abuse. It doesn't matter whether the two situations are truly equivalent. Politics runs on narrative, and this narrative writes itself.
The six Democrats are now more prominent than they were before the video. They have a persecution story. They have quotable defiance. They have a grand jury that functionally sided with them. Every strategic objective the prosecution might have served has been inverted.
Conservatives have stronger tools than failed indictments. The Speech or Debate Clause exists precisely to keep political speech disputes out of criminal courts and inside the political arena — where voters, not prosecutors, render judgment. The proper venue for accountability was always the next election, the committee hearing, or the public argument.
When the left overreached with its prosecutions, the result was a backlash that helped fuel a political realignment. Overreach doesn't become acceptable because the other side does it first. It becomes a gift to your opponents.
The administration has real power and a real mandate. Spending that capital on a case that a grand jury won't even return diminishes both.
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters Tuesday that a recently released Department of Justice document supports what President Trump has long maintained — that he took early, proactive steps to alert authorities about Jeffrey Epstein's behavior, years before the financier's crimes became a matter of national reckoning.
The document, released by the DOJ, contains details from a 2019 FBI interview with Michael Reiter, then the police chief of Palm Beach, Florida. According to that interview, Trump called Reiter in July 2006 to offer assistance with the investigation into Epstein, making him, per the document's language, "one of the very first people to call" the police chief about the case.
The timing matters. In 2006, Epstein had not yet become a household name. His crimes were still emerging through a local Palm Beach investigation, not splashed across cable news. And yet, according to Reiter's account to the FBI, Trump reached out on his own initiative.
According to Breitbart News, the DOJ document relays Reiter's recollection of his conversation with Trump. Reiter's 2019 FBI interview documents what Trump told the Palm Beach police chief:
"You should know that guy is a bad guy, and you should be looking at him."
Reiter further told the FBI that Trump offered to help the investigation in whatever way he could. According to the document, Trump said:
"If you need anything from me, you call."
These aren't quotes captured on tape or pulled from a deposition. They are statements attributed to Trump by Reiter during an FBI interview conducted over a decade after the phone call allegedly took place. That's an important distinction — but so is the fact that a law enforcement official was willing to relay them to the FBI under those circumstances.
At the White House briefing, Leavitt seized on the document's contents to push back against years of insinuation linking Trump to Epstein's crimes. She told reporters that the release "cracks" the establishment narrative surrounding the president and Epstein.
Leavitt pointed to Trump's long-standing claim that he banned Epstein from Mar-a-Lago, arguing the newly surfaced document adds weight to a pattern of behavior Trump has described for years.
"President Trump has always said he kicked Jeffrey Epstein out of Mar-a-Lago."
She added that the evidence suggests Trump was ahead of the curve:
"He was one of the first people — if not the first person — to call the Palm Beach Police Department to report what he knew about Jeffrey Epstein."
It's worth noting that Leavitt herself used conditional language when discussing the phone call, suggesting the White House is presenting the document's account as strongly supportive rather than independently verified in every detail. But her broader point is clear: when the question was whether Trump was complicit or cooperative, this document lands firmly on the side of cooperation.
For years, a certain class of commentator has treated a handful of photographs and passing social references as evidence that Trump and Epstein were close associates — or worse. The implication was always heavy, always directional, and seldom accompanied by anything resembling proof of wrongdoing.
Meanwhile, the actual investigative record — now including this DOJ release — tells a different story. A man who called the police. A man who offered to help. A man who, by Reiter's account, flagged Epstein as someone worth investigating before most of the country had any idea who Epstein was.
The media spent years building guilt by association. What they never seemed interested in was the association that actually mattered: Trump's association with the investigation itself.
The released document does not appear to be the full scope of the DOJ's Epstein-related materials. There's no indication of why the department chose to release this particular document now, or what else may remain in the pipeline. Ghislaine Maxwell is referenced in the document, though her specific role in the context of these details is not elaborated.
Nor does the document resolve every open question about the Epstein case — a case that involves dozens of powerful figures across politics, finance, and media. The full Epstein story remains one of the most significant unfinished chapters in modern American public life.
But what this document does accomplish is straightforward: it provides a contemporaneous law enforcement account — relayed to the FBI — that Trump acted as a willing cooperator, not a person with something to hide.
Consider the asymmetry. Every time an Epstein-related document drops, a segment of the media reflexively scans it for Trump's name. When they find it in the context of cooperation with the police, the story vanishes from the front page. When a photo from a 1990s party surfaces, it leads the cycle.
This is not journalism. It is narrative maintenance.
The same outlets that spent years demanding transparency on Epstein have shown remarkably little interest in the transparency that has actually arrived — because it doesn't confirm what they assumed. The document doesn't show a man entangled with a predator. It shows a man who picked up the phone and called the cops.
That's not ambiguous. That's not spin. That's the FBI's own file.
The Washington Post didn't just trim its newsroom. It carved out nearly half of it.
Updated figures now place the Post's layoffs between 350 and 375 journalists — not the roughly 300 that early reports suggested. That initial number was already staggering. The revised one is something else entirely.
Guild steward and Post Metro reporter Sarah Kaplan, as reported by the Washingtonian, provided the fuller accounting after days of piecing together the actual scope of the cuts:
"the paper is dropping between 350 and 375 journalists"
The reason earlier numbers fell short? Post employees were informed individually that their jobs had been eliminated, and the initial tally only captured union-covered staff. As the Washingtonian reported:
"Previous reports said that nearly 300 union members were among those laid off last week. That figure did not account for dozens more layoffs among Post journalists who aren't covered by the Guild's contract, including staffers in its foreign bureaus and editors and managers in Washington."
So the foreign bureau reporters and the editors and managers outside the Guild's umbrella were quietly disappearing from the ledger while the press ran with a number that already sounded catastrophic.
The Post's pre-layoff newsroom stood at 790 people. Losing 350 to 375 of them means somewhere between 44 percent and 47.5 percent of the entire newsroom is gone, according to Breitbart News.
Not a quarter. Not a third — which is where early reports pegged it. Nearly half.
People were already calling the initial round one of the biggest bloodbaths in media history when they thought it was around 300. The reality is measurably worse. And because employees were notified one by one rather than in a single announcement, it took Kaplan and the Guild several days just to assemble a coherent picture of the damage.
That piecemeal approach — whether intentional or not — had the convenient effect of keeping the full scale of the collapse out of the initial news cycle.
There's a temptation to treat this as a simple business story. Advertising revenue down, digital subscriptions plateauing, billionaire owner finally pulling the ripcord. And those factors are real.
But they don't explain why nearly half a newsroom vanished. Plenty of publications face financial headwinds without amputating half their editorial staff in a single stroke. What makes the Post's situation distinctive is that it spent years burning through the one asset that was supposed to justify its existence: credibility.
The Post branded itself as the indispensable check on power — "Democracy Dies in Darkness" stamped right there on the masthead. But the paper increasingly operated less as a news organization and more as an advocacy shop with a printing press. Readers noticed. Subscribers made choices. And now 350-plus journalists are paying the price for an editorial culture that confused activism with journalism.
That's the part the industry postmortems will skip. They'll talk about the "challenging media landscape" and "digital transformation." They won't talk about what happens when a legacy institution decides its job is to tell readers what to think rather than what happened.
The Post isn't dying in isolation. Legacy media outlets across the board are hemorrhaging staff, influence, and audience. The common thread isn't technology or generational shifts in media consumption — those are accelerants, not causes. The common thread is that institutional media decided to cater to a narrow ideological audience and then discovered that audience wasn't large enough to sustain the operation.
Conservative audiences left first. Then moderates. Then, even some liberals who simply wanted straight reporting grew tired of being lectured. What remains is a shrinking base that already agrees with every editorial premise baked into every "news" story — and that base doesn't generate enough revenue to keep 790 journalists employed.
So now it's 415. Maybe fewer, once the next round hits.
The Post will likely attempt to rebrand whatever emerges from this gutting as a leaner, more focused operation. Expect language about "prioritizing digital" and "investing in core strengths." That's what every media company says when it's contracting.
But a newsroom cut by nearly half isn't pivoting. It's surviving. And the journalists who remain will work under the shadow of knowing that their institution's choices — editorial and financial — led directly to the elimination of their colleagues' livelihoods.
Seven hundred and ninety people walked into that newsroom. Fewer than half still have a desk.
Democracy doesn't die in darkness. Newspapers die in self-delusion.
A Washington Free Beacon investigation is raising pointed questions about one of Maryland Governor Wes Moore's most frequently told personal stories — that his great-grandfather, a minister in South Carolina, was forced to flee to Jamaica under threat from the Ku Klux Klan.
The report claims that historical records from the Protestant Episcopal Church and contemporary newspaper accounts tell a different story: that James Thomas's departure was an orderly and public professional transfer after he was appointed to replace a deceased pastor in Jamaica, not a secret, middle-of-the-night escape.
For Moore, the timing couldn't be worse. The Democrat is widely believed to have White House ambitions, and the scrutiny strikes at the heart of a narrative he has built into his political identity.
Moore has placed the KKK narrative at the center of his personal brand, according to Fox News. In a 2020 appearance on the Yang Speaks podcast — an episode literally titled "Wes Moore on how the KKK ran his family into exile" — he detailed how his great-grandfather was a minister in Winnsboro, South Carolina, who fled to Jamaica after being threatened by the Klan.
By 2023, the story had become a rhetorical cornerstone. Moore told Time magazine:
"I am literally the grandson of someone who was run out of this country by the Ku Klux Klan, right? So the fact that I can be both this grandson of someone who was run outta this country by the Ku Klux Klan, and also be the first Black governor in the history of the state of Maryland."
That framing does a lot of work. It transforms a policy politician into a symbol — the descendant of racial terror who ascended to the governor's mansion. It's the kind of story that launches presidential campaigns.
And it may not hold up.
The Free Beacon report points to church records and newspaper accounts suggesting Thomas's move to Jamaica was a routine pastoral transfer, not a desperate flight from white supremacist violence. The distinction matters. The difference between "appointed to replace a deceased pastor" and "run out of this country" is not a matter of emphasis or oral tradition softening the edges. Those are two fundamentally different stories.
There's also a location discrepancy that the article doesn't resolve. Moore has described his great-grandfather as a minister in Winnsboro, South Carolina. The Free Beacon report references Pineville, S.C. These are not the same place.
This isn't the first time the Free Beacon has turned its attention to Moore's biography. The outlet has previously raised questions about his military record and an Oxford University thesis. A pattern of biographical scrutiny is forming around a man who has built his political career substantially on the power of his personal story.
Moore's office did not directly rebut the historical records. Spokesperson Ammar Moussa offered this to Fox News Digital:
"We're not going to litigate a family's century-old oral history with a partisan outlet. The broader reality is not in dispute: intimidation and racial terror were pervasive in the Jim Crow South, and it rarely came with neat documentation. Even Bishop William Alexander Guerry — whom they cite to suggest there was no hostility — was later murdered amid intense backlash tied to his racial equality work. The Governor is focused on doing the job Marylanders elected him to do."
Read that carefully. The statement doesn't say the Free Beacon got it wrong. It says Moore's team won't "litigate" the question. It pivots to the general truth that the Jim Crow South was a place of racial terror — which no one disputes — and uses that broader reality as a shield against specific factual questions about a specific family story.
That's not a rebuttal. That's a rhetorical exit ramp.
The reference to Bishop Guerry is doing similar work — introducing a tangential historical figure to create an atmosphere of racial violence, thereby making it seem unreasonable to question whether this particular minister was actually threatened. The logic amounts to: bad things happened in the South, therefore, this specific claim shouldn't be scrutinized. That's not how biography works, and it's certainly not how journalism works.
The comparisons arrived almost immediately. Greg Price, who served as Trump's White House rapid response manager for the first half of 2025, posted on X:
"Wes Moore is being talked about as one of the top contenders in the 2028 Democratic primary and the guy has already told more lies about his life than Elizabeth Warren."
National Review editor Ramesh Ponnuru kept it shorter and sharper:
"Moore is reaching Biden levels of fabulism."
Fox News chief political analyst Brit Hume simply pointed readers to the reporting:
"Hoo boy. Read this, and the post it is in response to."
The Elizabeth Warren comparison is apt because it identifies a specific species of political dishonesty: the biographical embellishment designed to claim membership in an oppressed group — or proximity to oppression — for political advantage. It's not garden-variety political spin. It's identity construction.
Moore said in September that he is "not running for president" in 2028 and is "excited" about serving a full term if he wins re-election in November. Nobody in professional politics takes that at face value. The DNC convention stage in August 2024, the national media profile, the carefully curated biography — these are not the moves of a man content to govern Annapolis.
Which is precisely why this story has teeth. Presidential campaigns are built on biography, and biography can be audited. The further Moore moves toward a national stage, the more every claim gets tested against the documentary record. The Free Beacon found church records and newspaper clippings. Opposition researchers in a presidential primary will find more.
The Democratic Party has a recurring problem with candidates whose personal mythologies outrun their documented histories. The instinct to build political identity around victimhood and overcoming — rather than around policy accomplishment and vision — creates an incentive structure where embellishment isn't just tempting, it's almost structurally required. If your political value depends on how compelling your suffering narrative is, the pressure to sharpen that narrative is immense.
Moore's response to the scrutiny will tell us more than the initial report did. A politician confident in his story produces the evidence. A politician who pivots to "we won't litigate oral history" is buying time.
The records are either there or they aren't. Oral history is powerful and real — but when you use it on a national stage to build a political brand, it stops being a family story and starts being a public claim. Public claims get checked.
Moore wanted the KKK narrative to carry him to a higher office. Now it's carrying questions he hasn't answered.