Peter Mandelson, the former U.K. ambassador to the United States, has been released on bail after his arrest on suspicion of misconduct in public office. The Metropolitan Police confirmed the news in a statement issued just after 2 a.m. Tuesday.
Mandelson, 72, was filmed being led from his London home to a car by plainclothes officers on Monday afternoon. Police searched two of his properties in London and western England as part of a criminal probe launched earlier this month into his ties to the late Jeffrey Epstein.
The Metropolitan Police spokesperson kept it clinical:
"A 72-year-old man arrested on suspicion of misconduct in public office has been released on bail pending further investigation."
The police did not name the suspect. Mandelson had previously been identified as the former diplomat under investigation.
At the center of the investigation are claims that Mandelson passed sensitive government information to Epstein, the disgraced U.S. financier convicted of sex offenses involving a minor in 2008. Messages suggest the information exchange occurred in 2009, when Mandelson was a senior minister in the British government, the AP reported. The information was potentially market-moving.
Mandelson also appears to have told Epstein he would lobby other members of the government to reduce a tax on bankers' bonuses. This was after Epstein's conviction. Not before. After.
And Mandelson once called Epstein "my best pal."
More than 3 million pages of Epstein-related documents were released last month by the U.S. Justice Department. Those files helped trigger the criminal probe now engulfing two of Britain's most prominent public figures.
Mandelson's arrest was not an isolated event. Four days later, Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, the former Prince Andrew, landed in police custody on suspicion of a similar offense related to his friendship with Epstein. Both men are suspected of improperly passing U.K. government information to the financier.
Mountbatten-Windsor was released after 11 hours in custody while the police investigation continues.
Two members of the British establishment, each with deep ties to Epstein, each arrested within days of each other, each on suspicion of betraying their government's trust to a convicted sex offender. The pattern speaks for itself.
The political fallout lands squarely on Prime Minister Keir Starmer, who made the baffling decision to name Mandelson as ambassador to Washington at the start of President Donald Trump's second term. This was a man with known, deep, and publicly acknowledged connections to Jeffrey Epstein. Starmer chose him anyway.
The decision nearly cost Starmer his job earlier this month. He has since acknowledged he made a mistake and apologized to the victims of Epstein. He fired Mandelson in September.
Consider the sequence: Starmer appointed a man who called a convicted sex offender his "best pal" to represent Britain in Washington, then fired him when the obvious became undeniable, then watched him get arrested on suspicion of passing government secrets to that same sex offender. This is not a case of hindsight being 20/20. The warning signs were visible from orbit.
The British government has pledged to begin releasing documents connected to the appointment in early March. Whatever those documents reveal, the judgment failure has already been exposed.
Mandelson was no backbencher. He was an architect of New Labour, the political movement that brought the party back to power in 1997. He served in senior government roles under Prime Minister Tony Blair between 1997 and 2001, then returned under Prime Minister Gordon Brown from 2008 to 2010. He was the European Union's trade commissioner between those stints. He was appointed to the House of Lords for life in 2008. His grandfather, Herbert Morrison, was a former Labour Cabinet minister.
He twice had to resign from government posts. Earlier this month, he resigned from the House of Lords entirely.
The man was Labour royalty. Now he is out on bail.
Gordon Brown, for his part, has been particularly angered by the revelations and has been helping police with their inquiries. When a former prime minister cooperates with investigators probing his own former cabinet minister, the institutional rupture runs deep.
Mandelson remains on bail pending further investigation. The government's promised document release in early March could deepen the political crisis or clarify the scope of Starmer's knowledge before the appointment. Meanwhile, the Mountbatten-Windsor investigation proceeds on a parallel track.
The Epstein saga has already consumed reputations on both sides of the Atlantic. The release of 3 million pages of documents by the U.S. Justice Department made sure of that. But what's unfolding in Britain is something distinct: not just social embarrassment or tabloid scandal, but criminal investigations into whether powerful men traded their country's secrets to a man everyone already knew was a predator.
Mandelson helped secure a trade deal in May. He moved in the highest circles of British and international politics for three decades. None of it insulated him from a pair of plainclothes officers and a Monday afternoon car ride.
President Donald Trump declared Friday that voter ID requirements will be in place for this year's midterm elections, with or without congressional approval. The announcement, posted on Truth Social, left no room for ambiguity about his intentions.
"There will be Voter I.D. for the Midterm Elections, whether approved by Congress or not!"
In a separate, lengthier post, Trump said he had "searched the depths" of legal arguments and would be "presenting an irrefutable one in the very near future," delivered in the form of an executive order. He did not specify what legal rationale he would rely on, but the message was clear: the executive branch is not waiting on a Senate that may not deliver.
Trump's declaration comes days after the House passed the SAVE America Act on Wednesday by a vote of 218-213. The bill would overhaul federal voting rules in ways that most Americans, when polled honestly, already support. Its key provisions:
The bill drew support from prominent figures, including tech mogul Elon Musk, while MAGA-aligned rapper Nicki Minaj rallied fans to pressure their senators to pass it. That coalition alone tells you something about how broad the appetite for election integrity actually is when you strip away the Beltway spin.
The problem is the Senate, Politico noted. Republicans have privately acknowledged the bill faces uncertain prospects in the upper chamber, which is why Trump's executive order threat carries real strategic weight. It forces the issue. Senators who might have quietly let the SAVE America Act die in committee now face a binary choice: pass the legislation yourselves, or watch the president do it without you.
You need a photo ID to board a plane, buy a beer, pick up a prescription, or open a bank account. The notion that requiring one to vote in a federal election constitutes some kind of radical overreach is a position that exists almost exclusively among political operatives who benefit from the status quo.
Trump has been personally involved in efforts to tighten voter registration standards nationwide, and the SAVE America Act represents the legislative culmination of that push. Requiring proof of citizenship to register is not voter suppression. It is the bare minimum any functioning democracy should expect. Directing states to remove noncitizens from voter rolls is not xenophobia. It is bookkeeping.
The left's opposition to these measures has always rested on a curious foundation: the simultaneous insistence that noncitizen voting never happens and that any effort to prevent it is an existential threat to democracy. If it never happens, the safeguards cost nothing. If it does happen, the safeguards are essential. Either way, the objection collapses under its own weight.
Trump wrote that "if we can't get it through Congress, there are Legal reasons why this SCAM is not permitted," signaling that his legal team is building a case rooted in existing federal authority rather than new legislative power. The specifics remain to be seen, but the posture matters. This is a president who has learned from his first term that waiting on Congress is often waiting on nothing.
Critics will inevitably frame this as executive overreach. They will discover their concern for constitutional restraint at the precise moment a Republican president acts on an issue that polls well with the American public. The same voices that cheered expansive executive action on climate regulation, student loan transfers, and immigration enforcement pauses will suddenly rediscover the beauty of the legislative process. Set your watch by it.
The deeper question is whether the Senate will make the executive order unnecessary. The SAVE America Act passed the House by the slimmest of margins. Every Republican voted for it. Every Democrat voted against it. That unanimity on the left is worth noting. Not a single Democrat could bring themselves to support the idea that Americans should prove they are, in fact, Americans before casting a ballot.
The legislative path through the Senate remains narrow. The executive order path remains legally untested. But the political ground has shifted. Voter ID is no longer a wish-list item or a campaign applause line. It is an active confrontation between a president willing to act and a political class that has spent years explaining why the simplest election safeguard in the democratic world is somehow impossible here.
Trump is forcing the question. Congress can answer it, or he will.
A Spanish teacher at a public high school in upstate New York was placed on paid administrative leave after she agreed to advise a student-led chapter of Turning Point USA on campus. Jennifer Fasulo, who teaches at Charles W. Baker High School in Baldwinsville, a Syracuse suburb, has been out of the classroom since Jan. 30.
The students asked for the club. The teacher said yes. The district pulled her from her job.
The Baldwinsville Central School District informed parents in a Feb. 10 letter that offered almost nothing in the way of explanation:
"The district can confirm that a staff member has been placed on paid administrative leave while a matter is under review. We are following established administrative and legal procedures, and we are unable to comment further or share additional details at this time."
That's the entire statement. No specifics. No allegations of misconduct. No timeline for resolution. Just bureaucratic boilerplate designed to say something without saying anything at all.
According to her supporters, Fasulo offered to help students establish a Club America chapter on campus, affiliated with Turning Point USA. The request came from the students themselves, not from parents, not from outside political organizers, and not from Fasulo, as New York Post reports.
Former Republican state Senate candidate Caleb Slater, who met Fasulo through church and other Christian circles and has taken up her cause, made this point directly:
"These are students who asked for this organization to be founded, not parents or teachers."
That distinction matters. Public schools routinely host student clubs across every conceivable interest and ideology. Environmental clubs, social justice clubs, LGBTQ alliance groups: these all operate with faculty advisers, and nobody gets suspended for volunteering. But when the club leans conservative, suddenly a "matter is under review."
Club America President Jerry Dygert addressed the Baldwinsville school board directly at its Feb. 9 meeting:
"This teacher is being targeted not because of her performance, but for her political beliefs."
Students have rallied behind Fasulo. A petition demanding her return has collected more than 2,100 signatures as of Thursday. Parents have taken to Facebook to voice support. The community response has been loud and overwhelmingly on the teacher's side.
Slater has gone further, saying Fasulo is being used as a sacrificial lamb to discourage any conservative organizations or opinions at the school. That's a serious charge. It's also one of the district has done nothing to refute,e beyond hiding behind "established administrative and legal procedures."
Others have claimed the school's actions had nothing to do with Turning Point USA and were instead sparked by an interaction Fasulo had with a student about sexual orientation. An unnamed parent alleged that Fasulo questioned her daughter about her sexual orientation while advising an after-school Christian youth group called Youth Alive.
These claims are unsubstantiated.
That's worth pausing on. The district has provided no official reason for the leave. The only competing explanation comes from an anonymous allegation with no corroboration. And yet, the teacher is the one sitting at home while the district "reviews" the matter weeks later with no end in sight.
If the district had a legitimate, non-political reason to place Fasulo on leave, nothing stopped them from saying so. Their silence speaks volumes. When a school district refuses to explain why it removed a teacher, but the only publicly visible trigger is her agreement to sponsor a conservative student club, reasonable people will draw reasonable conclusions.
This is how ideological conformity gets enforced in public education. Not through written policies banning conservative clubs. Those would be struck down immediately. Instead, through soft power: the raised eyebrow in the faculty lounge, the administrative "review" that never quite concludes, the chilling effect on every other teacher who might consider sponsoring something outside the approved ideological menu.
Every teacher in the Baldwinsville Central School District is watching what happens to Jennifer Fasulo. If she's reinstated quietly with no consequences for those who removed her, the message is still clear: helping conservative students will cost you weeks of your professional life and a cloud of suspicion. If she isn't reinstated, the message is worse.
The students at Baker High School did exactly what every civics teacher in America tells students to do. They organized. They found a faculty adviser. They followed the process. And the adults in charge responded by removing the only teacher willing to help them.
More than 2,100 people have signed a petition saying that's wrong. The district hasn't even bothered to explain why it thinks otherwise.
Robert De Niro wants you to know that Donald Trump will never leave the White House. He has wanted you to know this since at least May of 2024. He wanted you to know it again in October of 2025. And now, in a forthcoming podcast appearance with Nicolle Wallace, he wants you to know it one more time.
Breitbart reported that the actor is set to appear on a podcast sponsored by MS NOW, the far-left news network, where he delivers a familiar refrain. According to a preview reported by The Wrap, De Niro once again insists that Trump will refuse to vacate the presidency when his second term ends in 2028.
"Let's not kid ourselves. He will not leave. It's up to us to get rid of him."
Wallace, for her part, tried to emphasize that such a movement should be "peaceful." A reassuring qualifier, given the temperature of the rhetoric preceding it.
This is not new material. De Niro has been delivering this warning on a loop since the 2024 election, and the quotes are almost interchangeable at this point. In May of 2024, the actor offered this:
"Elections? Forget about it. That's over. That's done. If he gets in, I can tell you right now. He will never leave. He will never leave. You know that. He will never leave."
Then, in October of 2025, he kept the streak alive:
"We can't let up. Cannot let up on him because he is not going to leave the White House. He does not want to leave the White House. He will not leave the White House. Anybody thinks he, oh, he'll do this, he'll do that, it's just deluding themselves."
And now, from the podcast preview:
"He will never leave. We have to make him leave. He jokes now about nationalizing the elections. He's not joking. We've seen enough already."
Four statements across two years, all saying the same thing, with the same evidence behind them. Which is to say: none.
There is a rather large problem with the theory that Trump will barricade himself in the Oval Office and refuse to yield power. He already lost an election and left.
Trump lost his first re-election bid to Joe Biden in 2020. He left the White House without hesitation when he lost. There is no indication that he won't do so again in 2028. The Twenty-Second Amendment exists. The transfer of power has a date on the calendar. None of this requires Robert De Niro to organize a citizen resistance movement from a podcast studio.
But facts have never been the point of this exercise. The point is the performance.
De Niro also went on to claim that Trump is somehow threatening polling places, suggesting citizens may need to physically show up on "the other side" to ensure people can vote safely. His exact words:
"We have to make sure that like what he's trying now, that all the polling places have people that can come there safely. That might mean citizens on the other side."
What Trump is "trying now" at polling places is never specified. No incident is cited. No evidence is offered. It is the kind of claim that sounds urgent precisely because it is vague, a shadow on the wall that the audience is invited to fill in with their own anxieties.
This is the engine of modern progressive fearmongering. You don't need proof. You need tone. You need a famous face saying "you know that" with enough gravity that the listener nods along without asking what, exactly, they know.
The broader pattern here is worth noting, not because De Niro is uniquely influential, but because he represents a type. The celebrity who mistakes volume for moral authority.
The cultural figure who, having spent decades in rooms where everyone agrees with him, genuinely cannot fathom that the democratic process might produce outcomes he dislikes and then self-correct on schedule.
Some even made the same "he'll never leave" claim in 2020. Trump left. The prediction failed. Nobody recalibrated. They simply moved the goalpost to 2028 and kept going.
This is not political commentary. It is a ritual. The conspiracy refreshes itself every cycle, immune to the fact that its core prediction has already been disproven by observable reality. The left spent years warning that democracy was about to end, watched it continue functioning, and concluded that they simply hadn't warned hard enough.
De Niro telling Nicolle Wallace that Trump "will never leave" is not brave. It is not insightful. It is a man reciting the same line to the same audience and receiving the same applause. The podcast drops Monday. The next one will sound identical.
New York City's new mayor just took office, facing a multibillion-dollar deficit, and decided the problem was too many cops. Zohran Mamdani, the democratic socialist who succeeded the indicted Eric Adams, canceled thousands of planned NYPD hires and proposed roughly $22 million in cuts to the department's budget as part of a sprawling $127 billion spending plan unveiled Tuesday.
Under Adams' hiring roadmap, the NYPD was set to add 300 officers in July 2026, scale up to 2,500 by July 2027, and eventually bring on 5,000 additional officers annually by July 2028. That trajectory would have put approximately 40,000 officers on New York's streets. Mamdani's plan caps the force near its current level of around 35,000.
All of it is gone with a stroke of a pen. The mayor canceled all orders Adams issued after his September 2024 indictment, and the NYPD expansion was among the casualties.
According to Breitbart, Mamdani framed the budget as a moment of reckoning, telling reporters his administration "inherited a historic budget gap." He tried to preempt the obvious criticism that this is just another round of New York City fiscal theater:
"I know that for those who have watched budget after budget, it is tempting to assume that we are engaging in the same dance as our predecessors. Let me assure you, nothing about this is typical. That's why our solutions won't be either."
He's right that it isn't typical. Most predecessors didn't respond to a crime-weary city by gutting police hiring while simultaneously shopping for tax increases.
Mamdani laid out two paths for closing the deficit. The first, and his preferred route, involves raising taxes on wealthy New Yorkers and profitable corporations. That requires Albany's blessing, meaning Governor Kathy Hochul would have to sign off. Hochul, a moderate Democrat seeking re-election, has been steadfastly opposed to any kind of tax hikes. That alliance seems unlikely despite the two reportedly finding common ground on expanding child care.
The second path is the quiet threat. Mamdani warned that without state-level tax authority, the city would be forced to raise property taxes and raid its reserves:
"And if we do not go down the first path, the city will be forced down a second, more harmful path. Faced with no other choice, the city would have to exercise the only revenue lever fully within our own control. We would have to raise property taxes."
Translation: give me the power to tax the rich, or I'll tax homeowners instead. It's a hostage negotiation dressed up as fiscal responsibility.
What Mamdani is proposing isn't a budget. It's a prioritization exercise, and the priorities tell you everything. The city has a spending problem large enough to require the word "multibillion" in front of "deficit," and the first place the new mayor looks for savings is law enforcement. Not the bloated bureaucracy. Not the programs that have turned city government into a jobs program for activists and consultants. The cops.
This is the democratic socialist governing philosophy in practice. The theory holds that policing is overinvested and social services are underinvested. The result, everywhere it's been tried, is the same: neighborhoods that needed more officers get fewer, and the people who bear the cost are the ones least able to leave.
New York City residents who lived through the crime surges of recent years watched Adams promise a return to public safety through manpower. Whatever else Adams got wrong, and the indictment suggests he got plenty wrong, the instinct to put more officers on the street reflected what voters actually wanted. Mamdani scrapped that commitment within weeks of taking office.
The revenue side of this proposal deserves its own scrutiny. Mamdani presented his preferred path as "the most sustainable and the fairest," calling for an end to what he described as "the drain on our city" by taxing the wealthy and corporations.
New York already competes with states like Florida and Texas that charge no state income tax at all. Every year, high earners and the businesses that employ thousands of New Yorkers weigh whether the city is worth the cost. Mamdani's answer to the question "why are people leaving?" is apparently "let's give them another reason."
And if Hochul refuses to play along, property taxes go up. That doesn't hit hedge fund managers. It hits the retired couple in Queens who bought their house in 1987. It hits the small landlord whose margins are already razor-thin. Mamdani frames this as the unfortunate backup plan, but the structure of his proposal ensures that someone pays more no matter which path Albany chooses.
Cut policing. Raise taxes. Frame it as justice. This is not a New York innovation. It's the same formula that hollowed out city after city over the past decade. The rhetoric always sounds compassionate. The results never are.
Mamdani told reporters the city "can and will overcome" its budget crisis. Maybe so. But five thousand officers who were supposed to be walking beats, answering calls, and keeping subway platforms safe won't be there to help. New Yorkers will overcome their budget crisis the way they overcome everything else: on their own, with fewer police between them and whatever comes next.
Three weeks after 84-year-old Nancy Guthrie vanished from her Tucson home, Pima County Sheriff Chris Nanos told BBC News on Tuesday that investigators have not ruled out the possibility that an accomplice aided the suspected kidnapper captured on doorbell camera video.
Guthrie was last seen the night of January 31, when her son-in-law, Tommaso Cioni, dropped her off at her house after she spent the evening with him and her daughter, Annie Guthrie. She was reported missing the following day. Her heart pacemaker showed a disconnect from her phone in the early morning hours that night.
The FBI shared doorbell camera footage last week showing what it described as an armed individual who appeared to have tampered with the camera at Guthrie's front door on the morning of February 1. The bureau describes the suspect as male, between approximately 5 feet 9 inches and 5 feet 10 inches tall, with an average build. No suspect has been named.
According to CBS News, on Monday, the Pima County Sheriff's Department announced that Savannah Guthrie, the "Today" show co-host and Nancy's daughter, along with her two siblings and their spouses, had all been cleared as suspects. Nanos did not mince words about how thoroughly investigators examined the family before reaching that conclusion:
"We really put them through the wringer. We not just interview them, we take their cars, we take their houses, we take their phones, all this stuff — and we're not taking it. They're giving it to us voluntarily. They have been 100% cooperative with us through everything we've asked. They are victims. They are not suspects."
All three of Nancy Guthrie's children have appeared in videos pleading for their mother's return since the disappearance.
Nanos told BBC News he believes Guthrie was targeted in the apparent abduction. That word, "targeted," carries weight. It suggests that investigators believe this was not random, that someone selected an 84-year-old woman living alone and executed a plan to take her. Whether that plan involved one person or more remains an open question.
The forensic picture is developing but has yet to produce a breakthrough. Investigators recovered a set of gloves approximately two miles from Guthrie's home. On Tuesday, the sheriff's department disclosed that a DNA profile from those gloves did not produce a match in the national database maintained by the FBI, nor did it match different DNA evidence collected at the home itself.
Investigators are now looking into genetic genealogy options to check for matches, a technique that gained national attention in the Golden State Killer case and has since become a critical tool for law enforcement working without a hit in traditional databases.
On Thursday, the sheriff's office said "biological evidence" found at Nancy Guthrie's home was being analyzed and that DNA profiles were "under lab analysis." The office did not specify the type of biological evidence recovered.
Meanwhile, the FBI has been probing gun purchases in the Tucson area. The owner of a local gun store told CBS News that an FBI agent visited approximately a week ago, showed him several images with faces and names, and inquired about purchases made in the last year. That suggests the bureau is working from a set of possible leads, even if none have materialized publicly.
Law enforcement sources also told CBS News that investigators have been using a "signal sniffer" tracking device to detect possible signals from Guthrie's heart pacemaker. Engineers are still working through additional cameras from the property as well.
The reward for information has climbed sharply. On Thursday, the 88-CRIME tipline reward increased to $102,500, buoyed by a $100,000 anonymous donation. The FBI is separately offering $100,000 for information leading to a resolution. That is a combined incentive of $200,000 for anyone who knows something.
The size of that reward reflects both the severity of the case and the frustration of a community watching an elderly woman's disappearance stretch into its third week without an arrest. Anonymous six-figure donations don't materialize for ordinary cases. Someone with resources wants answers badly enough to pay for them.
The most unsettling detail in this investigation may be what is absent. No ransom demand has surfaced publicly. No suspect has been identified by name. No person of interest has been announced. The doorbell footage shows a figure, not a face. The DNA tells investigators who the suspect isn't, not who he is.
Nanos's refusal to rule out an accomplice adds another layer. A solo kidnapping of an elderly woman from her home is alarming enough. The possibility that this was coordinated, that more than one person planned and executed the abduction of an 84-year-old grandmother, transforms the case into something darker.
For now, the investigation grinds forward on forensics, genetic genealogy, gun purchase records, and whatever those additional property cameras might yield. The FBI and the Pima County Sheriff's Department are working the case aggressively. The question is whether the evidence will catch up to whoever disappeared into the Arizona night with Nancy Guthrie.
An entire family waits. So does a $200,000 reward. Someone knows something.
A Texas jury handed Asher Vann a $3.2 million verdict after finding that false accusations of racially motivated bullying destroyed his adolescence, invaded his privacy, and inflicted severe emotional distress. Vann, now a college freshman, was never charged with a crime. Police investigations at the time produced no arrests. But the damage was already done.
The case traces back to a 2021 sleepover in which a classmate, 13-year-old SeMarion Humphrey, accused Vann and several other boys of shooting him with a BB gun and forcing him to drink urine. The accusations spread across social media like accelerant on dry wood, quickly framed as race-based bullying. National media picked it up. Protesters showed up in the Vann family's neighborhood. Activists demanded that the school expel him.
Five years later, a jury saw through it.
Asher Vann appeared on Fox News's "The Will Cain Show" on Tuesday alongside his father, Aaron Vann, to discuss the verdict and the years of fallout that preceded it. His description of what actually happened at the sleepover bears almost no resemblance to the story that consumed social media and cable news in 2021.
"We went hunting for frogs. We had big jackets on, so dumb kids, we each took shots at each other like a Nerf war, except with airsoft guns. Then after, he fell asleep, and way before that, we all agreed, whoever falls asleep first gets pranked, and he got pranked, and it was nasty, but it was not like this big racial torture that it was played out to be."
Stupid? Sure. Gross? Absolutely. A racially motivated hate crime committed by teenagers? The police didn't think so. The district attorney didn't think so. And now twelve jurors don't think so either.
But that distinction never mattered to the mob. The narrative was too useful. A story about dumb kids being dumb kids at a sleepover doesn't generate clicks, protests, or national outrage. A story about racial torture does. So that's the story that got told.
Aaron Vann described the experience of watching his family become a national target overnight. Demonstrations materialized in their neighborhood. Calls flooded the school demanding his son's expulsion. The family was on the defensive before they even understood what was happening.
"Everything's happening all at once. You don't know what to do. You go into immediate protection mode and protecting your family."
The elder Vann said he wanted to tell their side of the story but understood the danger of fighting a viral narrative on its own turf.
"I wanted to get our story up, but I knew that there was a way to do that in an appropriate manner that wasn't trial by social media."
That restraint cost the family five years. Five years of living under the weight of accusations that law enforcement had already declined to pursue. Five years of being publicly branded as something they were not. But the Vanns chose the courtroom over the comment section, and the courtroom delivered.
Attorney Justin Nichols, who appeared on-air to discuss the case, noted the composition of the jury: five African American members, three Asian members, two Latino members, and the remaining jurors were Caucasian. The diversity of that panel matters because it preemptively dismantles the inevitable counternarrative. This wasn't a story of racial solidarity overriding the facts. It was a multiracial jury unanimously recognizing that a false accusation had been weaponized.
Nichols didn't mince words about the defendant's conduct throughout the proceedings:
"This is emblematic of somebody who continues to refuse to accept responsibility throughout the case, throughout their depositions and even on the stand. They continued to push this false narrative of racism that they know did not exist, that was untrue, and they continue to double down instead of finally taking some responsibility for hurting so many lives."
Summer Smith, Humphrey's mother, issued a statement to Fox News emphasizing that the legal claims involved intentional infliction of emotional distress and invasion of privacy, not defamation or slander. She stated the decision will be appealed and said she remains "steadfast" in seeking justice for her son.
The distinction she draws is technically correct and entirely beside the point. A jury found that what she did caused severe emotional distress and invaded Asher Vann's privacy. Whether the legal label reads "defamation" or "intentional infliction of emotional distress," the underlying finding is the same: the story she pushed was false, and it ruined a kid's life.
This case fits a pattern that Americans have watched repeat itself for years. An accusation surfaces. It carries a racial charge. Social media amplifies it before anyone verifies it. National media treats the amplification as confirmation. Activists arrive. Institutions buckle. And by the time the facts emerge, the accused has already been convicted in every forum that matters except the one with rules of evidence.
The playbook works because it exploits a genuine moral impulse. Nobody wants to be on the wrong side of a racial injustice story. So institutions, media outlets, and public figures rush to condemn first and investigate later, because the cost of being seen as insufficiently outraged feels higher than the cost of being wrong. The people who pay the price for that calculus are the ones who get falsely accused.
Asher Vann was a teenager when this happened to him. He spent five years carrying the public weight of an accusation that police declined to prosecute, and a jury has now financially punished him. He told Will Cain what the verdict means to him:
"I don't feel so scared and so little as I did back then. I feel like I'm getting heard."
He shouldn't have had to wait five years to feel heard. But a jury of twelve Americans, from every background, finally listened.
Smith says she will appeal. That is her right. But the facts on the ground are stubborn things. No criminal charges were ever filed. No arrests were ever made. And a jury that reflected the full diversity of the community heard the evidence and awarded $3.2 million to the boy whose life was upended by a story that wasn't true.
The media outlets that ran with the original narrative in 2021 will likely not cover the verdict with the same enthusiasm. They never do. The accusation gets the front page. The vindication gets a paragraph on page twelve. That asymmetry is its own kind of injustice, and it's one that no jury can fix.
Asher Vann is a college freshman now. He lost his teenage years to a lie. The $3.2 million won't give those back. But at least, after five years, the record is straight.
A 56-year-old father opened fire at a Pawtucket, Rhode Island, ice rink during a high school hockey game Monday afternoon, killing two family members, critically injuring three others, and then turning the gun on himself. The shooter, Robert Dorgan, also identified as Roberta Esposito, had posted a threatening message on X just hours before the massacre.
The dead include the mother of Dorgan's hockey-playing son, a senior at North Providence High School, and the student athlete's sibling. Three others, described as two relatives and a family friend, remained in critical condition. Police had not publicly identified the victims at the time of reporting.
Pawtucket Police Chief Tina Goncalves addressed reporters after the shooting:
"It appears that this was a targeted event, that it may be a family dispute."
It was not immediately clear whether the mother killed was Dorgan's ex-wife, Rhonda Dorgan.
On Sunday evening, someone on X called trans Democratic Rep. Sarah McBride a man. The post involved actor Kevin Sorbo. Dorgan responded publicly with a message that now reads like a warning shot:
"Keep bashing us. But do not wonder why we Go BERSERK"
Less than 24 hours later, the New York Post reported, Dorgan walked into an ice rink full of families and children and started shooting.
Police said they are still probing the exact motive. Detectives were reviewing surveillance footage from inside the arena. But the timeline is what it is. A person posted a threat invoking violence in the context of trans-rights grievance, then carried out a mass shooting targeting family members the very next day.
Dorgan underwent gender reassignment surgery in 2020. That same year, Rhonda Dorgan filed for divorce. A court filing obtained by local outlet WPRI listed the grounds as "gender reassignment surgery, narcissistic + personality disorder traits." The divorce was finalized in 2021.
What followed were years of heated court disputes over Dorgan's identity. No specific details about those proceedings have been made public, but they paint a picture of a family in prolonged crisis, the kind that courts can document but rarely resolve.
A woman identified as Dorgan's daughter was spotted leaving the Pawtucket police station after the shooting. She told reporters plainly:
"He shot my family, and he's dead now."
She added that Dorgan "has mental health issues" and was "very sick."
Witnesses described a Good Samaritan, the father of another hockey player, who rushed toward the gunfire rather than away from it. He attempted to subdue Dorgan and, according to witnesses, managed to disarm him. But Dorgan had a backup firearm. The heroism was real. So was its limit.
Chief Goncalves hailed the man's courage. In a scene that should have held nothing more dangerous than a body check, an ordinary dad tried to do what instinct and decency demanded.
This shooting arrived just days after another: 18-year-old Jesse Van Rootselaar, a transgender high school dropout in Canada, killed his own mother and stepbrother, then shot six others at his former school in one of Canada's deadliest mass shootings.
Two mass shootings. Two transgender shooters. Back to back.
The cultural establishment will spend the next week doing what it always does: warning against "misuse" of these facts, cautioning that correlation is not causation, and urging restraint in connecting dots that are, frankly, sitting on top of each other. They will frame any discussion of a pattern as bigotry. They will insist the real danger is the conversation itself.
But the question is not whether every transgender person is violent. Obviously not. The question is whether a cultural and medical framework that often accompanies severe mental health distress is getting the scrutiny it deserves, or whether ideological commitments have made that scrutiny impossible. When Dorgan's own daughter says her father was "very sick," and court documents reference narcissistic personality disorder traits alongside gender reassignment surgery, you don't have to be a diagnostician to recognize that something was profoundly wrong long before Monday afternoon.
The left has spent years insisting that gender transition is purely therapeutic, that questioning it is violence, and that anyone who resists the narrative is responsible for harm against trans individuals. Dorgan's X post operated on exactly that logic: you bash us, so don't wonder when we snap. It reframed the shooter as the victim before the first shot was fired.
That framing is not just wrong. It is dangerous. It provides a moral architecture for violence by casting the perpetrator as the oppressed party striking back. And when the bodies are real, the framework collapses under its own weight.
Police are still investigating. The surveillance footage may clarify the sequence of events inside the rink. The relationships between Dorgan and each victim may shed light on whether this was purely domestic or whether the trans-rights grievance expressed online played a motivating role.
But families in Pawtucket already know everything they need to know. They brought their kids to a hockey game. Two people came home in body bags. Three more may not recover.
A high school rink in Rhode Island is now a crime scene. The stick tape and Zamboni marks share the floor with evidence markers. Somewhere, a teenage hockey player just lost his mother and sibling because his father chose carnage over whatever shred of humanity remained.
No manifesto makes that legible. No grievance makes it forgivable.
Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly vetoed a Republican-backed bill that would have required government buildings — including public schools and universities — to segregate restrooms and locker rooms by biological sex. The bill passed with more than two-thirds support in both chambers of the Republican-dominated legislature, and GOP lawmakers are expected to attempt an override.
Kansas has been here before. Last year, the legislature overrode a Kelly veto to pass a ban on puberty blockers and hormone replacement therapy for minors. The governor appears determined to keep playing goalie for the gender ideology lobby, even as her own state's elected representatives — by overwhelming margins — keep sending these bills to her desk.
The legislation would have required government buildings, including public schools and universities, to "take every reasonable step" to segregate restrooms and locker rooms by sex. Individuals who repeatedly use facilities not matching their biological sex could face fines or civil suits of $1,000 and criminal charges.
A separate provision would have banned Kansans from changing the gender marker on state-issued driver's licenses and birth certificates — a longstanding goal of Republican Attorney General Kris Kobach. Children up to the age of eight would have been permitted in opposite-sex restrooms when accompanied by a caregiver.
Republican Rep. Bob Lewis, who amended the bill to include the bathroom provisions, framed it plainly to NPR's Kansas City affiliate:
"It just codifies social norms. When people go into bathrooms or locker rooms, there's just an expectation that it'll be single-sex."
That's the core of it. The bill doesn't invent a new norm. It writes down the one that existed without controversy for the entirety of American history until roughly five minutes ago.
Kelly issued a statement positioning herself as the defender of common-sense priorities:
"I believe the Legislature should stay out of the business of telling Kansans how to go to the bathroom and instead stay focused on how to make life more affordable for Kansans."
She also called the legislation "poorly drafted," claiming it left room for unintended consequences beyond bathroom use.
The "stay focused on affordability" dodge is a favorite of Democratic governors who don't want to explain their actual position on a culture-war bill they know is popular. Kelly doesn't argue the bill is wrong on the merits. She argues the legislature should be doing something else. It's a deflection dressed as fiscal responsibility — and it falls apart the moment you remember that legislatures handle multiple bills in a session. Walking and chewing gum is, in fact, the job description.
Twenty states have already passed similar laws restricting bathroom access based on biological sex in certain public spaces. Kansas isn't blazing a radical trail here. Kelly is the one standing against a growing national consensus.
The bill cleared both the state House and Senate with more than two-thirds support — the exact threshold needed to override a gubernatorial veto. Republican House Speaker Dan Hawkins didn't mince words about Kelly's decision:
"Instead of standing with the overwhelming majority of Kansans on this issue, the Governor chose to appease her most radical supporters at the cost of women and girls in our state."
Hawkins has the numbers to back the rhetoric. When a bill passes with veto-proof margins, and the governor vetoes it anyway, the gesture is almost purely symbolic — a signal to progressive donors and activist groups that she tried, even if the override succeeds. It's constituency politics, not governance.
Republican leaders used a procedure known as "gut and go" — cutting the contents of one bill and pasting them into another — to add the bathroom provisions. Critics flagged that this bypassed the opportunity for public comment. Republican state Rep. Susan Humphries, who chairs the committee where the bill was introduced, pushed back:
"School administrators want clarity on how they're supposed to handle these things. And we're going to give them clarity on that."
Humphries noted that lawmakers had a six-hour floor debate before the bill passed. Whatever procedural shortcut was used to get the language into the bill, six hours of floor debate is not a vote taken in the dark.
The pattern in Kansas mirrors what's happening across red and purple states: legislatures pass popular, common-sense protections for women's single-sex spaces, Democratic governors veto them, and then those vetoes get overridden or become campaign liabilities. Kelly's veto of last year's gender-affirming care ban for minors was overridden. A legal challenge to that law is now pending in state court.
Democratic Rep. Abi Boatman, a transgender woman who filled a House vacancy earlier this month, spoke during the January floor debate:
"Am I afforded all of the rights and responsibilities of an elected official, or do I need to just go waste my time at facilities asking where I'm allowed to take a dump?"
Boatman argued the bill targets transgender Kansans' freedoms rather than protecting women. But this frames the debate exactly backward. The question isn't whether transgender individuals have dignity — of course they do. The question is whether biological women and girls have the right to single-sex spaces in government buildings, schools, and locker rooms. The bill answers yes. That shouldn't be controversial. For most Americans, it isn't.
The left's position requires you to believe that acknowledging biological sex in the most intimate public spaces is an act of cruelty — while ignoring that the women and girls who use those spaces have interests worth protecting too. Every time a Democratic governor vetoes one of these bills, they're making that trade explicit. They're choosing gender ideology over the physical privacy of women.
Kelly can veto. The legislature can override. And Kansas voters will remember which side each chose.
Steve Bannon told Jeffrey Epstein he would "take down" Pope Francis. That's according to newly released Department of Justice files containing messages between the former White House advisor and the late financier, exchanged in June 2019.
The messages, part of a broader trove of Epstein-related communications shared by the DOJ, show Bannon and Epstein discussing the Pope, the Clintons, Chinese President Xi, and the European Union in the same breath — a kind of globe-spanning enemies list dressed up as casual banter between two men who apparently had more contact than previously known.
"The Clintons, Xi, Francis, EU – come on brother."
That was Bannon to Epstein. Whatever one thinks of the targets on that list, the company in which those thoughts were shared should stop anyone cold.
The conversations centered in part on *In the Closet of the Vatican*, a 2019 book by French journalist Frédéric Martel that made the bombshell claim that 80 percent of clergy working in the Vatican are gay. Bannon apparently wanted to turn it into a film — and told Epstein he was the executive producer.
"You are now exec producer of 'ITCOTV.'"
Epstein's reply referenced Noam Chomsky — the leftist intellectual with whom Epstein was known to be close — asking about the status of the film. Whether any of this was a real production effort or just two men inflating their own sense of influence over cocktail-napkin schemes remains genuinely unclear.
What is clear: Bannon, who reportedly identifies as a Roman Catholic, was actively discussing how to weaponize a book about Vatican corruption against the sitting Pope — and his chosen collaborator was Jeffrey Epstein, as The Independent reports.
None of this hostility toward Pope Francis was new for Bannon. In a 2018 interview with The Spectator, he described the Pope as "beneath contempt" and accused him of "siding with globalist elites." The DOJ files simply reveal that his contempt had an operational dimension — and a deeply troubling partner.
At one point, Epstein sent Bannon an article titled "Pope Francis or Steve Bannon? Catholics must choose." Bannon's response was two words:
"Easy choice."
It's worth pausing here — not to relitigate Bannon's views on Catholic Church governance, some of which resonate with faithful Catholics who have legitimate grievances about institutional corruption and doctrinal drift. There are serious critiques to be made of Pope Francis's pontificate from a conservative Catholic perspective. The problem isn't the critique. It's the chat room.
The Epstein files have been a slow-drip indictment of elite culture across the political spectrum. Every new release names people who had no business being in that man's orbit — and yet were. Bannon's inclusion in that orbit is significant not because it discredits conservatism, but because it illustrates how Epstein operated: attaching himself to the power of every ideological flavor, making himself useful, making himself trusted.
Conservatives who rightly demanded full transparency on the Epstein files — who pushed for every name to be released and every connection scrutinized — cannot flinch now that the files touch someone on their side of the aisle. The principle was never "expose only the Democrats." The principle was sunlight.
The same release that shows Bannon's messages also shows Epstein in communication with Chomsky, a figure the left has lionized for decades. Epstein's network was ideologically promiscuous. That's what made it dangerous.
Pope Francis and the conservative movement had a genuinely complicated relationship — one that extended well beyond Bannon's personal vendetta. In 2016, Francis suggested that Donald Trump's border wall plans made him "not Christian":
"A person who thinks only about building walls, wherever they may be, and not building bridges, is not Christian."
Just one day before Trump's second inauguration in January 2025, Francis weighed in again on mass deportation plans:
"If it is true, it will be a disgrace, because it makes the poor wretches who have nothing pay the bill for the imbalance. It won't do. This is not the way to solve things."
These interventions frustrated many American conservatives who saw a Pope more interested in scolding sovereign nations for enforcing their borders than in addressing the institutional rot within his own Church. That frustration was — and remains — legitimate.
Vice President JD Vance, himself a Roman Catholic, offered perhaps the most thoughtful conservative response to this tension. In an interview, he articulated the concept of *ordo amoris* — the ordered nature of Christian love:
"There's this old school – and I think it's a very Christian concept, by the way – that you love your family and then you love your neighbour and then you love your community and then you love your fellow citizens and your own country, and then after that you can focus and prioritise the rest of the world."
Francis directly contradicted this, insisting that Christian love "is not a concentric expansion of interests that little by little extend to other persons and groups." It was one of the more revealing theological exchanges in recent political memory — two Catholics, both sincere, arriving at fundamentally different conclusions about what love demands of a nation.
Vance met with Pope Francis on Easter Sunday 2025 and shared a homily with him. Francis died on April 21, 2025. President Trump called him "a good man, who worked hard and loved the world."
The DOJ files raise questions that deserve answers — not from partisan actors looking to score points, but from anyone who took the Epstein accountability project seriously. The specifics of why these files were released, through what legal mechanism, and what other communications they contain remain unclear.
Bannon's representatives have not responded to requests for comment.
The conservative critique of Pope Francis — on immigration, on globalism, on the Church's internal scandals — stands or falls on its own merits. Millions of faithful Catholics hold those views without ever exchanging a single message with Jeffrey Epstein. That's the line. The critique doesn't need Epstein, and anyone who brought him into it contaminated something that was otherwise defensible.
You can want accountability in the Vatican without wanting it delivered by a man who trafficked children. That distinction matters more than any of the politics around it.