Wesley Dingus, the 48-year-old mayor of Butler, Ohio, resigned from office Tuesday after the village council convened a special meeting to address what it called "personnel reasons." His resignation letter was read aloud at the meeting and unanimously accepted.
The letter was brief and strange in equal measure. Dingus wrote that he was stepping down "not under stress but under duress," a distinction without much of a difference for a man facing two misdemeanor voyeurism charges and a separate arrest for aggravated assault.
Council President Eric Tron will assume the mayor's role.
Dingus was arraigned on February 19 in Mansfield Municipal Court on two misdemeanor charges of voyeurism. According to the report, he was captured on camera twice smelling a girl's underwear. He pleaded not guilty in both cases.
Those charges arrived on top of an already existing legal mess. Dingus was arrested on August 17, 2025, on charges of aggravated assault and vehicular assault tied to a July 11 incident that gained national attention. The man held public office throughout it, as Beacon Journal reports.
Tron, the council president who now inherits the mayor's duties, spoke to News 5 Cleveland after the meeting:
"I have mixed feelings about everything, but I'm just happy that things turned out the way they did, as far as how it went tonight. I think everybody's kind of relieved the mayor resigned."
"Mixed feelings" is generous. The village council had to drag this to a special session just to get a resignation out of a mayor facing voyeurism charges involving a minor. That it required a formal meeting, public pressure, and what Dingus himself characterized as "duress" tells you everything about how voluntarily he left.
There is a broader pattern here that conservatives understand instinctively: public officials cling to power long past the point where decency demands they let go. It doesn't matter the party or the size of the office. A village mayor in rural Ohio and a big-city machine politician share the same reflex. The title becomes the identity, and the identity doesn't surrender easily.
What makes cases like this particularly corrosive is the smallness of the stage. Butler is not a metropolis with layers of bureaucracy to absorb the shock. In a village, the mayor is someone your kids see at the gas station. The betrayal of public trust lands differently when the public is your neighbors.
Dingus pleaded not guilty. He is entitled to the presumption of innocence in court. But a courtroom and a mayor's office operate under different standards. Criminal guilt requires proof beyond a reasonable doubt. Public service requires the public's confidence. Those two thresholds are not the same, and elected officials who hide behind the first to avoid the second do their constituents no favors.
The council did what it had to do. It called the meeting. It accepted the resignation. It moved on. That's how self-governance is supposed to work at every level: when an officeholder becomes a liability to the people he serves, the people's representatives act.
Butler gets a clean start. The residents deserve one.
Attorney General Pam Bondi announced Friday that 30 more people have been indicted for their alleged roles in an anti-ICE protest at a Minnesota church, bringing the total number of defendants to 39.
News Nation Now reported that twenty-five of the newly indicted individuals had already been arrested, with more arrests expected before the day was out.
The sweep dramatically expands a case that first drew national attention when former CNN anchor Don Lemon was named as one of nine people initially charged.
Now, with 30 additional names on the indictment, the Justice Department is making clear that the original arrests were an opening salvo, not a final word.
All 39 defendants face the same pair of federal charges: conspiracy against the right of religious worship and violating a law that forbids obstructing access to houses of worship.
Read that again. The protesters who claimed to be standing up for the vulnerable are being prosecuted for targeting a church. For interfering with the right of Americans to worship freely.
There is a deep irony here that the left will never acknowledge. The same political movement that wraps itself in the language of rights and tolerance descended on a house of worship to obstruct a lawful federal operation.
They didn't picket a government building. They didn't march on a courthouse. They chose a church. And the charges reflect exactly what that choice was: an assault on religious liberty.
Bondi did not mince words in a social media post announcing the indictments:
"YOU CANNOT ATTACK A HOUSE OF WORSHIP. If you do so, you cannot hide from us — we will find you, arrest you, and prosecute you."
She followed that with a pointed declaration about the Justice Department's priorities:
"This Department of Justice STANDS for Christians and all Americans of faith."
FBI Director Kash Patel echoed the attorney general's resolve in his own statement:
"Let it be known: This FBI will never tolerate anyone who targets, intimidates, or attacks Americans peacefully exercising their right to worship freely. Thank you @AGPamBondi and @TheJusticeDept for your relentless pursuit of this case."
The tone from both officials is unmistakable. This is a DOJ that views obstruction of worship as a serious federal crime, not a misdemeanor footnote to be plea-bargained into community service.
When the original charges dropped, and Don Lemon's name surfaced, the predictable machinery of progressive sympathy kicked into gear.
Protesters were cast as brave dissidents. The church was reframed as a staging ground for ICE operations, as though that justified mobbing it. The actual congregants, the people who use the building to pray, were erased from the narrative entirely.
This is a pattern. The left champions "sanctuary" when it means shielding illegal immigrants from federal law. But the actual sanctuary of a house of worship? That gets trampled the moment it becomes politically inconvenient. The word only matters when it serves their purposes.
Consider what the charges tell us about what happened at that church:
This was not a candlelight vigil. This was not a peaceful assembly. It was a coordinated effort to prevent Americans from accessing their own church.
The expansion from nine to 39 defendants signals that investigators took their time building this case.
They identified participants methodically, secured evidence, and brought charges in waves. That's how serious federal prosecutions work. Bondi's note that more arrests were expected later Friday suggests the net may not be fully drawn yet.
For those who participated in the Minnesota church protest and assumed the original nine indictments were the end of it, Friday delivered a different message.
The DOJ kept working. The FBI kept identifying faces. And 30 more people woke up to the reality that obstructing a house of worship carries federal consequences.
The celebrity defendant in this case may be Don Lemon, but the story is bigger than one disgraced cable news anchor looking for a second act. It's about whether a movement that claims moral authority can bulldoze the religious liberty of ordinary Americans and walk away clean.
Thirty-nine indictments say it cannot.
Republican senators are pressing Attorney General Pam Bondi and the Justice Department to release every file related to Jeffrey Epstein that mentions President Trump's name, after media reports this week revealed that documents released under the Epstein Files Transparency Act did not include FBI memos summarizing interviews with a woman who made claims in 2019 against both Epstein and Trump involving an incident from the 1980s.
The DOJ publicly released an index indicating the FBI conducted four interviews related to the woman's claims and wrote separate summaries. But the summaries themselves were not among the published files.
The message from GOP lawmakers has been simple: the law says release everything, so release everything.
Sen. John Kennedy of Louisiana, a member of the Judiciary Committee, was characteristically blunt:
"Release the documents. Redact the names of the victims. Don't release photographs, naked or otherwise, of minors. Release the documents. This is not going to go away until there is full disclosure."
Kennedy followed up with a line that left no room for interpretation:
"I don't know how else to say it: Release the documents."
Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley echoed the sentiment without hesitation:
"I think when we pass a law that says that all documents need to be put out, it seems to me all documents need to be put out."
Sen. Susan Collins of Maine noted that withholding files mentioning a sitting president "would seem to be contrary to the intent of the law," while acknowledging she didn't know whether legitimate reasons existed for redactions. Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina called it "concerning" if true, though he added he hadn't yet confirmed the reporting himself. Sen. Joni Ernst said she had believed all files were already released and called it "definitely something I'd want to look into." The Hill reported.
None of these senators hedged on the principle. Congress passed a transparency law. The expectation is compliance.
The DOJ initially told The New York Times that "the only materials that have been withheld were either privileged or duplicates," later adding that some documents may have been held back because of "an ongoing federal investigation."
On Wednesday night, the Department issued a more detailed statement acknowledging that individuals and news outlets had flagged files related to documents produced to Ghislaine Maxwell in discovery during her criminal case:
"As with all documents that have been flagged by the public, the Department is currently reviewing files within that category of the production. Should any document be found to have been improperly tagged in the review process and is responsive to the Act, the Department will of course publish it, consistent with the law."
That statement strikes the right note. If files were improperly tagged, fix them. If a legitimate privilege or investigative need applies, explain it. Transparency laws don't come with a footnote that reads "unless politically inconvenient."
The White House has repeatedly said Trump did nothing wrong about Epstein, and the DOJ has previously described the allegations in question as having no credibility. If that's the case, releasing the files only reinforces that position. Withholding them does the opposite.
Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer held a press conference Thursday in the Capitol, and his rhetoric made clear that Democrats see this as a political weapon, not a transparency cause:
"Let me be blunt, there is a massive coverup going on in the Justice Department to protect Donald Trump and people associated with Jeffrey Epstein."
He vowed an "all-out oversight effort," promised to "pull on every thread" and "chase every lead," and said Democrats plan to travel to the DOJ in the coming days to review unredacted files. Democrats also asked the DOJ and FBI to preserve all records related to decisions on redacting and withholding Epstein documents.
This is Schumer doing what Schumer does: wrapping partisan ambition in the language of justice. The man who spent four years enabling the weaponization of the DOJ against Trump's political allies now demands the same institution answer to him. His concern for transparency is recent and selective.
Rep. Robert Garcia of California, ranking member of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, claimed Tuesday that the DOJ "appears to have illegally withheld FBI interviews" with the woman who made the allegations.
The Democrats' framing here deserves scrutiny. They aren't simply asking for documents. They're pre-loading the conclusion: that any gap in the record is proof of a conspiracy. That framing is designed to ensure that no matter what the files contain, the narrative of a "cover-up" persists.
Here's the political reality. If files are released and contain nothing damaging, Democrats will claim the real documents were destroyed. If files are withheld for legitimate legal reasons, Democrats will call it a cover-up. And if anything ambiguous emerges, it will be treated as a conviction in the court of cable news.
This is why Republicans are smart to get ahead of it. By demanding full release themselves, GOP senators eliminate the Democratic monopoly on the transparency argument. Kennedy, Grassley, Collins, Tillis, and Ernst aren't breaking with the administration. They're protecting it by making the obvious point: sunlight is the best disinfectant, and the law already requires it.
Congress passed the Epstein Files Transparency Act with broad bipartisan support. The premise was straightforward: the American public deserves to know who was involved in Epstein's operation and why certain people were never prosecuted. Kennedy framed it precisely:
"This is not going away until there's full disclosure and the American people want to know, and they're entitled to know, who if anyone, did Epstein traffic these women to … and why they weren't prosecuted."
That question doesn't become less important when it touches powerful people. It becomes more important. The entire justification for the law was that the Epstein case represented a grotesque failure of the justice system, one in which wealth and connections shielded predators for decades. If the DOJ now carves out exceptions to the transparency mandate, it validates every suspicion the law was meant to address.
Grassley hasn't decided whether to hold a hearing on DOJ compliance. He should. Not to grandstand, but to establish a clear record of what was withheld, why, and on whose authority. Independent journalist Roger Sollenberger first reported on the missing pages. The press did its job. Now Congress needs to do its job.
The DOJ says it's reviewing the flagged files. Good. The review should be swift, the results public, and the explanations specific. Vague invocations of privilege and ongoing investigations won't satisfy a law written to override exactly those kinds of institutional reflexes.
The American people passed this test once before: they demanded the files. They'll demand them again. The only question is whether the Justice Department treats a transparency law as binding or optional.
Former first lady Michelle Obama used her podcast this week to argue that American society sends women contradictory messages about motherhood, telling them not to have abortions while failing to create the support systems mothers need. The remarks came during an episode of "IMO with Michelle Obama & Craig Robinson," where Obama fielded a question from a first-time mother struggling with the transition back to work.
The listener, identified as Abigail, is a high school music teacher who took a year off to care for her child and was seeking advice about reentering the workforce. Obama, speaking alongside actress Halle Bailey, used the question as a springboard into broader commentary on maternity leave, hormonal recovery, and what she characterized as a culture that doesn't "fully respect and value childbirth."
Obama's central claim is that the country's posture toward motherhood is incoherent. She framed the tension this way:
"We don't live in a society that fully respects and values childbirth. Like, we want people to have them – 'don't have an abortion!'"
She went on to argue that maternity leave policies are inadequate, calling them "ridiculous" and noting that most offer only three to four months. In her telling, that timeline doesn't give a woman's body time to heal, let alone allow hormones to stabilize while breastfeeding. Fox News reported.
"Your hormones are telling you to do one thing. And the societal structure is telling you to do something else."
Obama then pivoted to advice for the listener, encouraging her to accept less than full commitment in certain areas of life. She said she personally likes giving 100% to everything, but that mothers should forgive themselves for falling short of that standard.
"Sometimes 40% is OK. Sometimes 30% is OK, sometimes 70% is OK, right? Because we talked about this earlier, the children are way more resilient than we give them credit for."
Something is telling about the way Obama structured her complaint. She didn't say, "We should do more for mothers." She said, essentially, "You don't get to oppose abortion unless you also build the system I want." That's not an argument for supporting mothers. It's an argument for keeping abortion as the default solution when support systems are lacking.
This is a familiar move from the left. Package a policy demand inside a moral accusation, and suddenly, anyone who opposes abortion but doesn't support a specific government program is a hypocrite. The framing is designed to make the pro-life position contingent on endorsing a progressive welfare agenda. Accept the premise, and you've conceded that the right to life is negotiable based on what the state provides.
But conservatives have never argued that life's value depends on federal maternity leave mandates. The pro-life position is that a child in the womb is a human being. That's a moral claim, not a policy proposal with prerequisites. You don't need to build a perfect society before you can say killing the unborn is wrong.
The deeper irony is that the institutions most invested in supporting mothers, practically and directly, tend to be the ones the left either ignores or actively disdains. Churches, crisis pregnancy centers, faith-based charities, and local community organizations have been doing the unglamorous work of helping new mothers for decades. They provide diapers, formula, housing assistance, counseling, and childcare. They do it without a podcast.
When Obama says society doesn't create "an environment for all women to be able to heal, be focused, and then make the decisions at the right time about when they're ready to move on," she's talking about government. That's the only institution the left recognizes as legitimate when it comes to collective support. The family, the church, the neighborhood: these don't register.
And that blindspot is the actual mixed message. The progressive vision tells women that independence means freedom from all obligation, that children are resilient enough to handle a distracted parent, and that the solution to the difficulty of motherhood is more government intervention. It never tells women that motherhood is inherently valuable on its own terms, not as an obstacle to be managed, but as a vocation worth honoring.
Obama's advice to the listener was, on its surface, compassionate. Permitting yourself to operate at 40% or 30% in certain areas sounds forgiving. But listen to what it actually communicates: motherhood is one of several competing priorities, and the goal is to optimize your allocation across all of them.
This is the managerial language of modern feminism applied to the most intimate relationship a person can have. Your child isn't a deliverable. Motherhood isn't a vertical you're underperforming in. The reason new mothers feel torn isn't that society failed to give them enough leave. It's that something deep and true is telling them their baby needs them, and a culture that treats that instinct as a problem to be solved rather than a signal to be honored is the one sending mixed messages.
Obama acknowledged this instinct without realizing it. She noted that hormones tell a mother to feed and care for her child while "the societal structure is telling you to do something else." She's right. But the answer isn't to redesign the societal structure so mothers can more comfortably ignore the instinct. The answer is to ask why the structure demands that in the first place.
This wasn't a policy speech. It was a podcast segment. And Michelle Obama is free to say whatever she wants on her own show. But the framing matters because it captures a broader progressive argument that has become the default in media and elite culture: that pro-life conviction without progressive policy support is hypocrisy.
It isn't. It's a difference in philosophy about where support comes from and what human life is worth. Conservatives believe children deserve to be born. They also believe families, communities, and yes, sometimes government, should support mothers. But one belief doesn't require the other as a precondition. You don't earn the right to defend life by first passing a maternity leave bill.
Obama told her listeners that children won't stop loving their mothers for leaving the house to pursue a passion. That's probably true. But children also can't advocate for themselves in the womb. Someone has to speak for them without conditions attached.
Robert Scrivner stood before cameras this week and did something no child should ever have to do: publicly accuse his own father of abuse, then explain how the state of California helped that father walk free.
Speaking for the first time at a press conference held by State Senator Shannon Grove, Robert branded California's mental health diversion law a "flawed system." His father, former Kern County Supervisor Zack Scrivner, was charged last February with child abuse and possession of assault weapons. He avoided harsher charges of child sexual assault because he was under the influence of drugs at the time and instead entered a mental health diversion program.
Robert Scrivner did not mince words:
"My own father, who is an elected official in Kern County, assaulted my siblings and myself and was granted mental health diversion."
That single sentence carries more indictment of California's criminal justice priorities than a thousand policy papers ever could.
Under California law, mental health diversion allows eligible defendants with diagnosed mental health disorders to receive treatment instead of jail time, the New York Post reported. The program dates back to 2018, and critics have warned for years that it functions as a get-out-of-jail-free card for serious offenders.
The Scrivner case illustrates exactly how. Zack Scrivner was accused of climbing into bed with a pre-teen child in April 2024 and touching her inappropriately. Because he was allegedly under the influence of drugs during the incident, the charges were reduced. Instead of facing the full weight of what he allegedly did to children, he entered a diversion program.
Think about the logic at work here. A man is accused of sexually assaulting a child. Because he was high at the time, the system treats the crime as less serious. Being intoxicated during an alleged assault on a minor becomes a mitigating factor rather than an aggravating one. The drugs don't compound the horror; they dilute the accountability.
This is what California built.
Christina Scrivner, Zack's estranged wife, also spoke at the press conference in favor of the proposed legislation. Her words captured the particular cruelty of a system that asks victims to come forward, then fails them when they do:
"We tell our children to speak up, speak up for yourselves, tell the truth, be honest. My children were and they did."
And then she described what followed:
"Their answer to their plea, their cry for help, was a stark reality of a broken system under mental health diversion."
Christina called her children "courageous" and "honorable" for sharing the truth of their abuse. She described the trauma as "inexplicable." What she did not call it was surprising. For anyone who has watched California's progressive criminal justice experiments play out over the past decade, none of this is surprising. The pattern is familiar. Lenient frameworks designed with sympathetic hypotheticals in mind collide with grotesque real-world cases, and the system shrugs.
Grove used the press conference to announce Senate Bill 1373, which would set limits on which crimes qualify for mental health diversion. She was direct about its purpose:
"My bill will ensure that those who commit violent crimes, such as attempted murder of a child, assault resulting in death and domestic violence, are no longer eligible for a mental health diversion program."
The bill represents a straightforward correction. Violent crimes against children, attempted murder, and domestic violence should never have been eligible for diversion in the first place. That they were tells you everything about the philosophy that produced the 2018 law: the offender's therapeutic journey matters more than the victim's safety.
Assemblymember Dr. Jasmeet Bains, who specializes in family and addiction medicine, added her voice to the effort. Her framing was notably blunt for a California Democrat:
"It was designed to help people get treatment and rehabilitation in appropriate cases, not to provide an escape hatch to sexually assault children."
Bains called it the "Epstein loophole," a term that has attached itself to this provision because of how neatly it captures the dynamic: powerful people exploiting therapeutic language to escape consequences for predatory behavior.
California has spent the better part of a decade reimagining criminal justice around the idea that incarceration is the problem rather than the response to a problem. Proposition 47 downgraded theft. Proposition 57 eased early release for "nonviolent" offenders through classifications that strained the meaning of the word. Zero-bail policies turned arrest into a revolving door. Mental health diversion was supposed to be the humane, evidence-based alternative to a system the left insisted was irredeemably punitive.
But humane for whom? Not for Robert Scrivner. Not for his siblings. Not for the pre-teen child Zack Scrivner allegedly climbed into bed with.
Every one of these reforms shares the same structural defect. They center the accused. They treat the system's response to crime as the injustice worth fixing, rather than the crime itself. And when the inevitable horror story emerges, the architects of these policies express shock that anyone would use a loophole as a loophole.
The fact that it took a former county supervisor's own son going public to generate enough pressure for a legislative fix tells you how entrenched these frameworks are. How many cases without a press conference never get corrected at all?
Senate Bill 1373 faces the gauntlet of California's legislature, where criminal justice reform has historically meant making enforcement softer, not harder. Whether Grove can build enough coalition support to carve out these exclusions remains an open question. Bains's involvement as a physician and assemblymember lends bipartisan credibility, but Sacramento has killed commonsense public safety measures before.
The Scrivner family did what the system told them to do. The children spoke up. The mother believed them. They told the truth. And California's answer was to send the man accused of abusing them to a treatment program instead of a cell.
Robert Scrivner had to stand at a podium and say his father's name out loud to change that. No child should carry that weight. But in California, the state made sure someone had to.
President Donald Trump announced Saturday that he is withdrawing his endorsement of Republican Colorado Rep. Jeff Hurd after the first-term congressman voted for H.J.Res.72, a resolution aimed at Trump’s emergency tariff authority.
Trump said he is backing Hope Scheppelman, a critical care nurse practitioner and U.S. Navy veteran, to challenge Hurd in Colorado’s 3rd Congressional District.
Hurd was among six House Republicans who crossed the aisle earlier this month to pass H.J.Res.72, which would repeal Trump’s tariffs on Canada by terminating the national emergency used to justify them.
The vote landed at a volatile moment for U.S. trade policy. The day before Trump’s announcement, the Supreme Court struck down the bulk of Trump’s tariffs in a 6-3 ruling, finding his expanded use of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act exceeded his authority. Trump, however, announced a new 15 percent global tariff and vowed to pursue trade policy through alternative legal channels, Newsweek noted.
This is not a subtle message from the president. In a party that campaigns on fighting for American workers, American producers, and American leverage, the question is no longer whether trade will be contested. It is those who are willing to take the political heat to contest it.
Trump framed the move as a direct response to Hurd’s posture on tariffs and what Trump sees as a failure to support an America First trade agenda. In a Truth Social post, Trump wrote:
"Based on a lack of support, in particular for the unbelievably successful TARIFFS imposed on Foreign Countries and Companies which has made America Richer, Stronger, Bigger, and Better than ever before, I am hereby WITHDRAWING my Endorsement of RINO Congressman Jeff Hurd, of Colorado’s 3rd District, and fully Endorsing Highly Respected Patriot, Hope Scheppelman, to take his place in Congress."
Trump also accused Hurd of misplaced priorities, arguing that the Colorado Republican was “more interested in protecting Foreign Countries that have been ripping us off for decades than he is the United States of America.”
And he made clear this is not how he prefers to operate. Trump described taking back an endorsement as “a difficult decision,” saying he has only done it once before, citing his 2022 withdrawal of support from Alabama Senate candidate Mo Brooks.
Hurd defended his vote in a statement released February 19, grounding his position in Congress’s constitutional authority over trade.
As Hurd put it:
"Today's vote is grounded first and foremost in the Constitution. Article I gives Congress the authority to regulate commerce with foreign nations and to levy tariffs. Those delegations were never intended to serve as a permanent vehicle for sweeping, long-term trade policy."
Hurd also warned about setting a precedent that future presidents could use, even in ways Republicans would oppose.
"If we normalize broad emergency trade powers today, we should expect that a future president — of either party — will rely on the same authority in ways many of us would strongly oppose."
That is the core clash: Trump is signaling that the economic fight with foreign competitors cannot be run with one hand tied behind the nation’s back, while Hurd is signaling that the method matters because precedent lasts longer than any one presidency.
Both arguments are serious. But only one of them is paired with a blunt political reality: the party’s voters are watching who actually stands with the president when the fight gets real.
Trump first endorsed Hurd for reelection in October of 2025, calling him “an Incredible Representative for the Great People” of Colorado’s 3rd Congressional District. The endorsement was part of a batch of 28 House Republican incumbents Trump backed in quick succession, and it marked the first time Trump had thrown his support behind the Grand Junction attorney, who was elected in 2024 by a comfortable margin in the Republican-leaning seat.
Hurd won that 2024 race after his primary opponent, Republican Rep. Lauren Boebert, moved across the state to run in the heavily Republican 4th Congressional District, where she won election to a third term.
Now, Trump is placing his bet on Scheppelman, described as a former Colorado GOP vice chair, critical care nurse practitioner, and U.S. Navy veteran. Trump said she “knows the America First Policies required.” In the same Truth Social post, Trump listed the agenda he expects her to carry, including “Promote MADE IN THE U.S.A.,” “Champion American Energy DOMINANCE,” “Keep our Border SECURE,” and “Stop Migrant Crime.”
Hurd and Scheppelman are set to face off in the June 30 GOP primary for Colorado’s 3rd Congressional District.
Trump’s decision to pull his endorsement marks only the second time he has withdrawn support from a sitting Republican lawmaker, according to the source material. The first, in March 2022, came after Mo Brooks urged voters to move past the 2020 election, which Trump called “going woke.” Brooks later lost his primary to Katie Britt.
Here, Trump is turning a policy dispute into a governing test: if the administration is moving to rebuild leverage on trade, it expects its own party to stop undercutting it, especially when the legal terrain is already contested, and the Supreme Court has narrowed the president’s authority under IEEPA.
Hurd, for his part, pointed to district-level economic concerns, including agricultural producers operating on tight margins and the presence of “the largest steel rail mill in the United States” located within Colorado’s 3rd, arguing that unpredictable trade policy affects “payrolls, investment decisions, and long-term planning.”
That is the tension Republican voters will have to referee: the desire for stable conditions at home versus a national strategy that uses tariffs as leverage abroad.
With Trump’s endorsement now behind Scheppelman, the primary race in Colorado’s 3rd District is set to intensify.
In the Trump era, endorsements are not ceremonial. They are enforcement.
A Spanish teacher at Charles W. Baker High School in Baldwinsville, New York, was placed on paid administrative leave in late January after she agreed to help students establish a Club America chapter, the conservative civics organization affiliated with Turning Point USA.
Jennifer Fasulo's offense, as far as anyone can tell, was saying yes to her students.
The Baldwinsville Central School District, a suburb outside of Syracuse, confirmed the leave in a February 10 letter to parents and staff but offered almost nothing in the way of explanation. The district's statement was a masterclass in bureaucratic non-answers:
"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."
No specifics. No allegations. No transparency. Just a teacher removed from her classroom and a district hiding behind boilerplate.
According to Breitbart, the most important detail in this story is one the district clearly hopes people will overlook: the students initiated this. They wanted to start a Club America chapter. They went looking for a faculty adviser, which is standard procedure for any school club. Fasulo agreed to help.
Republican State Senate candidate Caleb Slater, who met Fasulo through his church community, made the point plainly:
"These are students who asked for this organization to be founded, not parents or teachers."
Slater said the teacher is being used as a sacrificial lamb to dissuade conservatives from starting clubs at their schools. That framing is hard to argue with when the district won't provide any other explanation for why a teacher who helped students exercise their right to organize is now sitting at home on paid leave, pending what a petition supporting her describes as termination.
Club America President Jerry Dygert spoke at a February 9 board meeting and didn't mince words about what was happening:
"Our club exists to promote political understanding through civil discourse, removing the one teacher who best embodies those values puts that mission in serious jeopardy."
Dygert also said Fasulo "is being targeted not because of her performance, but for her political beliefs." The district has done nothing to contradict that conclusion.
Here is where the district's own language becomes its most damning evidence. From that same February 10 letter:
"The District is firmly committed to providing a safe, welcoming, and inclusive environment for every individual."
"Our policies, practices, and values reflect our belief that all members of our school community deserve to be treated with dignity and respect."
Every individual. All members. Dignity and respect.
Unless, apparently, you're a teacher who helps students start a conservative club. Then you get placed on leave, your name dragged into public view, and your career put in jeopardy while administrators mumble about "established procedures" and refuse to say what you actually did wrong.
This is the pattern in American public education. The word "inclusive" has been hollowed out and repurposed. It now means a specific political orientation is welcome. Deviate from it, and the machinery of administrative review activates. No one will tell you the charge. No one will say your politics are the problem. They don't have to. The process is the punishment.
To their credit, parents and community members aren't letting this slide. A petition supporting Fasulo had collected more than 2,300 signatures as of Sunday. That's a significant number for a suburban school district, and it signals that the silent majority in places like Baldwinsville is getting less silent.
Community members spoke at the board meeting alongside Dygert. The message was consistent: this looks like ideological targeting, and the district's refusal to explain itself only reinforces that impression.
Think about what this teaches every other teacher in the Baldwinsville Central School District. Think about what it teaches every other teacher in New York State. A colleague agreed to sponsor a student club with a conservative orientation, and it cost her the classroom. The specifics of the "review" don't matter for the purposes of the message being sent. The message is: don't.
Don't help those students. Don't associate with that organization. Don't make yourself a target. Keep your head down, run the approved clubs, and nobody gets hurt.
Schools across the country host chapters of every imaginable political and social identity organization. Progressive activism clubs operate freely. But a Club America chapter, focused on civic discourse? That triggers an administrative investigation and a paid leave that sure looks like a prelude to firing.
Conservatives have argued for years that public schools operate as ideological gatekeepers. Districts like Baldwinsville keep proving them right, then issuing statements about "dignity and respect" without a trace of self-awareness.
Jennifer Fasulo said yes to her students. That's all it took.
Two U.S. officials told Reuters that potential military strikes on Iran could target specific individuals and even pursue regime change, options that have emerged in the planning stage if ordered by President Donald Trump. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity and did not say which individuals could be targeted.
The report landed the same day Trump said Friday that he is "considering" a limited military strike on Iran to pressure its leaders into a deal over its nuclear program. The president made the remarks at the White House, where the calculus on Tehran appears to be shifting from diplomacy-first to something with considerably sharper teeth.
This is not abstract saber-rattling. The USS Gerald R. Ford is heading to the Middle East. The U.S. is building up its military presence in the region. And the president has put a clock on the negotiations.
On Thursday, Trump suggested the window for a breakthrough is closing fast, putting the timeline at "10, 15 days, pretty much maximum." He followed that with a statement that left little room for misinterpretation:
"We're either going to get a deal, or it's going to be unfortunate for them."
Last week, when asked directly whether he wanted regime change in Iran, Trump did not equivocate:
"Well it seems like that would be the best thing that could happen."
That is about as explicit as a sitting president gets without issuing a formal directive. The foreign policy establishment will spend the next two weeks debating whether he "really means it." Tehran would be wise to assume he does, as Fox News reports.
Anyone questioning whether this president would actually authorize a strike targeting a specific individual need only consult recent history. In 2020, the Pentagon said Trump ordered the U.S. military strike that killed Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani, the head of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps' elite Quds Force, in Iraq.
That operation sent a message that no one in Iran's military hierarchy was beyond reach. The regime understood it then. The fact that targeted strikes on individuals are once again part of the planning conversation suggests the administration wants Tehran to remember it now.
The Soleimani strike was met with the usual chorus of hand-wringing from the foreign policy credentialed class, predictions of World War III, and dire warnings about "escalation." What actually followed was a period of relative Iranian restraint. Strength, it turns out, has a clarifying effect on regimes that mistake American patience for weakness.
A Middle Eastern source with knowledge of the negotiations told Fox News Digital this week that limitations on Iran's short-range missile program are "a firm red line set by Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei." The same source provided context on Iran's positions regarding uranium enrichment flexibility and internal views on the talks.
Iran's "firm red lines" are worth examining in context. This is a regime that:
Red lines drawn by a regime with diminishing leverage are not red lines. They are opening bids dressed up as ultimatums. Khamenei can declare whatever he wants sacred and untouchable. The question is what he is willing to concede when the alternative is not a sternly worded letter from the UN, but American military power positioned within striking distance.
What makes this moment distinct is the architecture around it. The administration is not choosing between diplomacy and force. It is using the credible threat of force to make diplomacy possible. These are not competing strategies. One enables the other.
For years, the prevailing wisdom in Washington held that threatening military action against Iran was "counterproductive" because it would "harden" the regime's position. This theory was tested exhaustively during the Obama era and the early Biden years, producing the original Iran nuclear deal, which Iran promptly exploited, and then its effective collapse. Endless diplomatic patience bought nothing but centrifuges spinning faster.
The current approach inverts that logic. You do not enter a negotiation by telegraphing that you will accept any outcome. You enter it by making the cost of no deal unmistakable. The carrier group, the planning for targeted strikes, the public statements about regime change: these are not threats for the sake of threats. They are the architecture of leverage.
Fox News Digital has reached out to the White House and the Department of War for comment. As of the report, no response was included.
The next 10 to 15 days will reveal whether Tehran's negotiators are empowered to make real concessions or whether they are simply running out the clock, hoping American resolve fades the way it has before. The difference this time is that the man setting the deadline has already demonstrated, in 2020, that he does not bluff.
Iran's leaders have a choice. They can negotiate seriously, or they can test whether the options that "emerged in the planning stage" stay on paper. History suggests they should choose carefully.
An 11-year-old Pennsylvania boy waived his preliminary hearing Thursday after being charged as an adult with criminal homicide in the shooting death of his adoptive father. Fox News reported that Clayton Dietz, who allegedly killed 42-year-old Douglas Dietz in their Duncannon home on Jan. 13, appeared at the Perry County Courthouse in New Bloomfield. His case will now proceed to the Court of Common Pleas.
The facts of this case are as disturbing as any you will encounter. They demand seriousness, not sensation.
According to court records cited by WHP, the sequence of events began shortly after midnight on Jan. 13, when Jillian Dietz, Douglas's wife, said the couple went to bed after singing "Happy Birthday" to Clayton. What followed was methodical.
The boy allegedly searched for his Nintendo Switch, then found keys to a gun safe. He opened the safe, retrieved a revolver, loaded it, pulled back the hammer, and shot his adoptive father while he slept. Court records cited by WHP indicate Douglas Dietz suffered a gunshot wound to the head.
Jillian Dietz told investigators she woke to a loud noise, tried to wake her husband, found him unresponsive, and discovered blood on the bed. When Clayton entered the room, she yelled words to the effect of "Daddy's dead." The boy allegedly ran downstairs shouting, "My dad's dead."
A state trooper reported that Clayton told him plainly:
"I killed Daddy."
Court records cited by WHP also noted that Clayton indicated "he had someone in mind who he was going to shoot." This was not described as an accident. It was not described as a spontaneous act. By every account in the court documents, an 11-year-old located keys, unlocked a safe, loaded a weapon, and fired it into his sleeping father's head.
Pennsylvania State Police responded at approximately 3 a.m. to a report of a male with a gunshot wound, according to a news release from the Perry County District Attorney's Office.
Troopers found Douglas Dietz deceased. Clayton was charged with criminal homicide as an adult. Bail was denied that same day, and he remains confined at the Perry County Prison.
On Feb. 19, the criminal docket was marked "waived for court" after Clayton waived his preliminary hearing. His defense attorney, Dave Wilson, has signaled the fight to come:
"My goal is going to be to try to get him into juvenile court."
That effort will become the center of this case. And it raises questions that the legal system will struggle to answer cleanly.
There is no comfortable place to stand when an 11-year-old is accused of premeditated murder. The instinct to protect a child collides with the reality of what that child allegedly did. Both impulses are human. Only one can govern the legal outcome.
Conservatives have long argued that the juvenile justice system, when misapplied, prioritizes the offender's age over the gravity of the offense and the safety of the community.
Lenient treatment for violent juvenile offenders has produced headlines across the country: repeat offenders cycling through systems designed for truancy and shoplifting, not homicide. The pressure to treat every young defendant as a candidate for rehabilitation, regardless of the crime, is a progressive impulse that often ignores the victim entirely.
But this case resists easy categories. This is not a 16-year-old gang member with a rap sheet. This is an 11-year-old in a rural Pennsylvania home. The details suggest premeditation, deliberation, and a chilling calm. They also describe a child who, under any framework, was not old enough to drive, vote, sign a contract, or buy a soda at some school vending machines.
The conservative position is not cruel. It is accountability proportional to the act. And the act here, as described in court records, was the deliberate killing of a sleeping man by someone who planned it, armed himself, and carried it out.
Douglas Dietz was 42 years old. He adopted Clayton. He was celebrating the boy's birthday hours before he was killed in his own bed. Whatever failures, pressures, or darkness led to that moment, a man who chose to be a father to a child who needed one is dead.
That fact should anchor every conversation about what happens next.
The legal system will argue over jurisdiction, competency, and sentencing frameworks. Defense attorneys will push for juvenile court. Prosecutors will point to the evidence of planning and intent. Both sides will make arguments grounded in law.
But the man who sang "Happy Birthday" that night never woke up. The system owes him an answer that takes that seriously.
Rep. Lou Correa (D-CA) went on CNN International Thursday and said the quiet part out loud: Democrats have almost no cards to play in the DHS shutdown standoff, and the White House knows it.
Appearing on "The Brief," Correa laid out a remarkably candid assessment of his party's negotiating position. The $170 billion Congress gave DHS through the reconciliation bill last year means ICE and CBP can keep operating regardless of the partial shutdown. The agency Democrats want to constrain is already funded to do exactly what it's doing.
Correa's solution? Hold firm anyway.
The California Democrat's appearance was a masterclass in self-defeating political messaging, Breitbart noted. In the span of a few minutes, he managed to acknowledge that the administration holds the leverage, that the shutdown is "very small," and that the funding Democrats themselves voted on gives the White House the resources to continue enforcement operations without interruption.
Then he argued Democrats should dig in harder.
"Big, beautiful bill, $170 billion, they can continue moving forward on this very small shutdown and continue to do what they're doing. They have the cards. We have very few cards, and that's why we have to hold firm on this one."
Read that again. The reason to hold firm is precisely that they have no leverage. This is not a negotiating strategy. It's a coping mechanism dressed up as resolve.
Correa framed the Democratic position as a simple request for "guardrails" on immigration enforcement. He attributed the effort to "Hakeem," a reference to House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries, who he said was asking that ICE obtain warrants, respect churches, and protect citizens' rights during operations.
On the surface, these sound reasonable. Nobody objects to constitutional protections. But the framing does a lot of heavy lifting. What Correa and his colleagues are actually demanding is a set of procedural restrictions designed to slow enforcement to a crawl. Requiring warrants for every immigration arrest, carving out broad sanctuary zones around churches, and layering new bureaucratic requirements onto agents already doing their jobs. These aren't guardrails. They're speed bumps engineered to make enforcement impractical.
The tell is in the rhetoric surrounding the request. Correa didn't just ask for procedural reforms. He accused ICE of going "after anybody that gets in their way, including Americans" and described Homeland Security as having become "a police force" rather than a national security agency. He referenced individuals in his district who he said were "beaten, arrested, jailed by ICE," though he offered no names, no case numbers, and no documentation.
Correa referenced two individuals, "Mother Good" and a nurse he called "Pretti," as having been killed. He provided no details about when, where, how, or by whom. He didn't connect these deaths to any specific enforcement action. He simply dropped the names and moved on to broader accusations that the administration would "kill more individuals" if left unchecked.
This is a serious pattern in the immigration debate. Elected officials make grave accusations on camera, offer no specifics, and trust that the emotional weight of the claim will do the work that evidence should. If ICE agents are genuinely brutalizing citizens in Correa's district, that demands specifics: names, dates, incident reports, lawsuits. Not vague gestures on an international news broadcast.
The contrast with the administration's actual stated goal is striking. Correa himself acknowledged that President Trump "promised to deport the most serious of criminals." That's the mandate. That's what the $170 billion is funding. If Democrats believe enforcement is exceeding that mandate, the answer is oversight with evidence, not a shutdown standoff they've already admitted they can't win.
What Correa's interview actually revealed isn't a path forward for Democrats. It's the depth of their strategic bind. They voted for the funding. The enforcement apparatus is operational. The shutdown affects a narrow slice of DHS operations, and the public isn't clamoring for ICE to stop arresting illegal immigrants.
So Democrats are left arguing that:
This isn't a policy disagreement. It's a party watching its own prior decisions play out and objecting to the results.
The White House has little reason to make concessions. Correa said it himself: they have the cards. ICE is funded. CBP is funded. The "very small shutdown" is a nuisance, not a crisis, and every day it continues, Democrats are the ones who have to explain why they're holding out for restrictions on an agency that most voters want to see doing its job.
Correa's honesty, however unintentional, did his party no favors. When your own members go on international television and explain that you have no leverage, the other side tends to believe them.
Democrats wanted a fight over immigration enforcement. They got one. They just forgot to check whether they had any ammunition first.