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.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio departed for Germany on Thursday to lead the U.S. delegation at the 2026 Munich Security Conference, one year after Vice President JD Vance stood on the same stage and told European leaders their biggest threat wasn't Russia or China — it was themselves.
Fox News reported that Rubio's message before boarding was blunt.
"The Old World is gone. Frankly, the world I grew up in, and we live in a new era in geopolitics, and it's going to require all of us to re-examine what that looks like and what our role is going to be."
That's not diplomatic throat-clearing. That's a warning — delivered plainly, without apology, to a continent that has spent the better part of a decade pretending the post-Cold War order would sustain itself indefinitely.
To understand what Rubio is walking into on Saturday, you have to understand what Vance walked into last year. At the 2025 Munich Security Conference, the Vice President delivered a speech that reportedly left European leaders stunned. He accused European governments of drifting toward censorship and argued that the continent's greatest danger was internal democratic decay — not external military threats.
"What I worry about is the threat from within, the retreat of Europe from some of its most fundamental values — values shared with the United States of America."
President Trump called the speech "brilliant" and noted that Europeans are "losing their wonderful right of freedom of speech." The speech drew significant attention from conservatives and backlash from European officials — though notably, none of the critics were willing to go on the record.
The administration hasn't let the rhetoric remain rhetorical. The State Department has targeted the European Union's Digital Services Act as "Orwellian" censorship. New visa restrictions have been implemented aimed at foreign officials accused of censoring Americans online. These aren't talking points. Their policy.
The conference this year features a curious guest list on the American side. Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and California Gov. Gavin Newsom are all attending.
Think about that lineup for a moment. A failed presidential candidate, a socialist congresswoman from the Bronx, and a governor who can't keep the lights on in his own state — all flying to Munich to represent... what, exactly? The opposition? The resistance? A shadow government pitching itself to foreign leaders?
There's one Secretary of State, and he's Marco Rubio. The rest are tourists with diplomatic pretensions.
Rubio arrives in Munich not as a freshman diplomat finding his footing, but as the most versatile official in the administration. He has served as acting national security advisor, acting archivist of the United States, and acting administrator of USAID — all while running the State Department. The man's portfolio makes most Cabinet secretaries look part-time.
White House spokeswoman Olivia Wales framed the Munich trip within the administration's broader record:
"The President and his team have flexed their foreign policy prowess to end decades-long wars, secure peace in the Middle East and restore American dominance in the Western Hemisphere. The entire administration is working together to restore peace through strength and put America First."
The "Western Hemisphere" line isn't throwaway. Earlier this year, the U.S. military captured Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro. Rubio was at Mar-a-Lago with President Trump, monitoring the operation. That's the kind of credibility you carry into a room full of European defense ministers who struggle to meet their NATO spending targets.
There's been speculation about the dynamic between Rubio and Vance on the world stage — the kind of palace intrigue narrative the press loves to construct. The facts tell a different story.
This week alone, Vance signed a peaceful nuclear cooperation agreement with Armenia and a strategic partnership with Azerbaijan. Earlier in February, both Vance and Rubio held a bilateral meeting with Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni. Vance led a delegation — which included Rubio — at the Winter Olympics opening ceremony in Milan.
Wales put it simply:
"President Trump has assembled the most talented team in history, including Vice President Vance and Secretary Rubio, who are working in lockstep to notch wins for the American people."
Working in lockstep doesn't mean doing the same job. Vance laid the intellectual groundwork at Munich last year. Rubio builds on it this year with a different style but the same core message: Europe must reckon with its own failures before demanding American resources.
At the World Economic Forum in Davos last December, President Trump said something that should have set off alarms across every European capital:
"I don't want to insult anybody and say I don't recognize it. And that's not in a positive way. That's in a very negative way. And I love Europe and I want to see Europe do good, but it's not heading in the right direction."
That wasn't a diplomatic slight. It was a diagnosis. And it's one that European leaders have studiously avoided confronting because confronting it would require them to admit that their immigration policies, their speech codes, their defense freeloading, and their regulatory overreach are self-inflicted wounds — not externalities imposed by Washington.
Rubio understands the cultural connection. He told reporters before departing:
"We're very tightly linked together with Europe. Most people in this country can trace both, either their cultural or their personal heritage, back to Europe. So, we just have to talk about that."
That's the posture — not adversarial, but honest. America isn't walking away from Europe. It's demanding that Europe walk toward reality.
The Munich Security Conference draws hundreds of senior decision-makers from around the world every year. Under the first Trump administration, Vice President Mike Pence attended twice. Under Biden, Kamala Harris attended three times. Previous secretaries of state — Kerry, Blinken, Clinton — have all addressed the body.
But none of them went to Munich with the leverage this administration carries. A captured dictator. Peace agreements in the Middle East. Nuclear cooperation deals were signed days before arrival. A State Department actively confronting European censorship regimes rather than enabling them.
Rubio's speech Saturday will land in a room where the old assumptions about American patience have already been dismantled. The question isn't whether Europe will listen. It's whether Europe can afford not to.
Mike Schaefer, an 87-year-old disbarred attorney with a misdemeanor spousal abuse conviction, a $1.83 million slumlord judgment against him, and a permanent restraining order obtained by actor Brad Garrett, filed Tuesday to run for Congress in California's 48th District. He filed from a Las Vegas address.
This is what Democrats mean when they talk about expanding the map.
Schaefer joins a handful of other Democrats hoping to flip CA-48, a seat currently held by Republican Darrell Issa and one of five GOP-held districts now in play after Proposition 50 redrew California's congressional boundaries. The U.S. Supreme Court upheld the new maps on Feb. 4, and Democrats have wasted no time trying to capitalize. The district shifted from formerly Republican-leaning to what's being characterized as toss-up or even left-leaning territory—not because voters changed, but because the lines did.
Schaefer has run for office approximately 33 times over more than 50 years, according to the Daily Caller. He usually loses badly.
He was elected the youngest San Diego City Council member ever at age 27 in 1965 and served two terms. After that, the wins dried up. He pulled 0.98% in the 1971 San Diego mayoral race. He managed 2.5% in a 2016 Nevada congressional primary. He started as a Republican before switching to the Democratic Party around 2004—a conversion that coincided not with any discernible ideological awakening but with the discovery that one party's ballot lines were easier to get on in the districts where he wanted to run.
The one bright spot: in 2018, at age 80, Schaefer won a seat on the California State Board of Equalization, beating a Republican state senator. He was re-elected in 2022 with his party's endorsement, dubbing himself "The Equalizer." He is now termed out of that position, which apparently means it's time for Congress.
Schaefer was disbarred in both California and Nevada in 2001 for serious ethics violations. The Nevada Supreme Court cited a litany of offenses:
He has not been reinstated despite multiple appeals, the most recent in 2014.
Then there's the housing record. In 1981, Schaefer owned a 64-unit building in the mid-Wilshire area of Los Angeles for eight months. A 1986 jury in Los Angeles Superior Court awarded his former tenants $1.83 million—a record at the time. The building was found overrun with rats, cockroaches, and sewage backups that caved in ceilings and floors. Street gangs operated inside the property. Schaefer blamed the gangs for blocking improvements.
That wasn't an isolated episode. In 1979, he faced fire-code violations and threats of jail time in San Diego over unsafe conditions in properties he controlled. In 1982, he was involved in a rent dispute case in Arizona. He owned rundown apartments in Baltimore that drew complaints over alleged neglect and poor maintenance. The man earned the "millionaire slumlord" label across multiple states and multiple decades.
In 1993, Schaefer was convicted of misdemeanor spousal abuse. He later served jail time for violating the terms of his probation.
By 2013, actor Brad Garrett—best known for "Everybody Loves Raymond"—secured a permanent restraining order against Schaefer in Las Vegas Justice Court. The dispute reportedly began over a complimentary show ticket at the MGM Grand and escalated from there, with Garrett accusing Schaefer of stalking and harassment.
The court ordered Schaefer to stay 100 feet away from Garrett at all times, banned him from the MGM Grand entirely, and required him to obtain court permission before filing any future lawsuits against Garrett or his staff. Schaefer had allegedly kept pushing unwanted promotion offers on Garrett and refused to stop. Garrett cited Schaefer's history of violence and erratic behavior in seeking the order.
A man who needs a judge's permission to file a lawsuit wants voters to send him to Washington to write laws.
Schaefer is a sideshow, but the circus he wandered into matters. Proposition 50 handed Democrats a redrawn map that puts five Republican congressional seats in jeopardy. Republicans challenged the maps in court, arguing they were drawn in at least one area to favor Hispanic voters in violation of federal voting rights law. The Supreme Court disagreed on Feb. 4, and the maps stand.
The term for this is gerrymandering, though polite company only uses that word when Republicans draw the lines. When Democrats do it in California through a voter-approved ballot measure, it's called "independent redistricting" or "democracy in action." The result is the same: lines redrawn to predetermine outcomes.
Issa is running for re-election in November in a district that no longer resembles the one his voters chose him to represent. Democrats smell blood—and their recruiting standards reflect the urgency. When your redistricting scheme is so aggressive that an 87-year-old disbarred, convicted, restraining-order-carrying perennial candidate sees a viable path, the maps aren't expanding democracy. They're diluting it.
The California Democratic Party endorsed Schaefer for his Board of Equalization re-election in 2022. That endorsement came decades after his disbarment, his spousal abuse conviction, his jail time, and the largest slumlord judgment in Los Angeles history. None of it disqualified him in the eyes of the party apparatus. None of it gave anyone pause.
This is the party that lectures the country about character, about protecting women, about housing as a human right. They endorsed a man convicted of beating his wife, who let tenants live with rats and sewage. They didn't just tolerate him—they put their brand behind him.
Now he's running for Congress, and the silence from California Democrats tells you everything about what "standards" mean when a seat is in play. The district is new. The candidate is the same man he's been for 50 years.
Thirty-three campaigns and counting. The voters have answered him 32 times. He keeps asking.
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 Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals — not exactly known as friendly territory for conservative policy — handed the Trump administration a significant legal victory this week, granting a stay of a lower court order that had blocked the end of Temporary Protected Status for migrants from Honduras, Nicaragua, and Nepal.
The ruling clears the path for the administration to proceed with terminating TPS for approximately 60,000 migrants who hold no other immigration status in the United States. The case, National TPS Alliance v. Noem, had been one of several legal battles waged to keep the decades-old designations alive indefinitely.
DHS Secretary Kristi Noem didn't mince words:
"A win for the rule of law and vindication for the US Constitution. Under the previous administration, Temporary Protected Status was abused to allow violent terrorists, criminals, and national security threats into our nation."
The word "temporary" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in Temporary Protected Status. Honduras and Nicaragua were first designated for TPS in 1999, following a hurricane. Nepal received its designation in 2015 after an earthquake. That means Honduran and Nicaraguan TPS holders have been living under "temporary" protection for over a quarter century.
A hurricane hit. Clinton granted temporary relief. Then Bush extended it. Then Obama extended it. Then Trump tried to end it. Then Biden not only extended it but expanded the entire program to the highest levels in its history, ensuring over a million migrants became eligible. Nearly every president since Clinton has routinely extended TPS and designated new countries — turning an emergency measure into a conveyor belt for indefinite residency.
As Breitbart News reported, Noem framed it plainly:
"TPS was never designed to be permanent, yet previous administrations have used it as a de facto amnesty program for decades. Given the improved situation in each of these countries, we are wisely concluding what was intended to be a temporary designation."
She's right on the structural point, whatever one thinks of the individual cases. Congress designed TPS as a short-term shield — a way to pause deportations when a country was in acute crisis. It was never meant to create a parallel immigration system where "temporary" meant "until someone has the political will to say no."
The scale of what the Biden administration did with TPS deserves its own reckoning. Over a million migrants became eligible under Biden's watch — a staggering expansion of a program that was already being stretched well past its statutory intent. That wasn't emergency management. That was immigration policy conducted through the back door, bypassing the legislative process entirely.
This is the pattern that conservatives have identified for years: a program is created with narrow, sympathetic parameters. It gets extended once, twice, a dozen times. Each extension creates a larger constituency that makes termination politically harder. Eventually, the "temporary" designation calcifies into something indistinguishable from permanent residency — and anyone who suggests winding it down gets accused of cruelty.
It's a ratchet that only turns one direction. Until now.
The fact that this stay came from the Ninth Circuit matters. This is the appellate court that immigration activists have long treated as a reliable backstop against enforcement. For years, the circuit served as the preferred venue for challenges to border security measures, deportation orders, and asylum restrictions.
The Ninth Circuit concluded the administration's position was strong enough to warrant staying the lower court's injunction, which signals something important about the legal merits. Courts grant stays when they believe the party seeking one is likely to succeed and that irreparable harm would result from leaving the lower court's order in place. The Trump administration cleared that bar in the Ninth Circuit.
That alone tells you where the legal winds are blowing on TPS termination.
The approximately 60,000 migrants affected by this ruling now face the reality that "temporary" may finally mean temporary. The legal battle in National TPS Alliance v. Noem isn't over — stays are procedural steps, not final rulings — but the trajectory is clear. The administration has momentum, the appellate court's action suggests the legal foundation is sound, and DHS is moving forward.
The broader question is whether this becomes a template. TPS designations remain in effect for numerous other countries, many with their own long histories of routine extension. If the administration succeeds in unwinding the Honduras, Nicaragua, and Nepal designations, the precedent will be difficult to contain.
For twenty-six years, Washington treated "temporary" as a word with no expiration date. The Ninth Circuit just put one back on the calendar.