Ivanka Trump posted a pair of headshots on Instagram Tuesday to mark the Lunar New Year, wearing a cream-colored suit and diamond stud earrings. For this, she was branded culturally insensitive by the internet's self-appointed etiquette police.
The alleged offense: wearing a light-colored outfit while wishing people a happy holiday. White and near-white colors are said to be discouraged during Chinese New Year celebrations. That was enough for outlets and commenters to declare a full-blown "cultural faux pas."
Her caption was generous, thoughtful, and entirely inoffensive. She noted that 2026 is the Year of the Fire Horse and wrote:
"The Year of the Fire Horse calls us to courage, to energy, to intention, and to fearless creation. It is a year for bold ideas, decisive action, and turning vision into something enduring."
She also expressed personal excitement about projects she's been working on, closing with "Happy Lunar Year" and including the Mandarin characters 新年快乐. None of this mattered to the people looking for a reason to be offended.
The backlash, such as it was, consisted of a handful of unnamed social media commenters, quoted by the Daily Mail. One wrote, "Ever inappropriate, Ivanka." Another asked, "Why's she acting like this is her culture?" A third declared, "They are so tone deaf that it's almost comical."
That's it. Three anonymous comments. No named critics. No cultural organizations issuing statements. No actual Chinese or Chinese-American public figures are weighing in. Just a few stray voices on social media, scooped up and presented as a controversy.
This is the formula, and it works the same way every time. A Trump family member does something perfectly ordinary. Anonymous commenters complain. A media outlet packages those complaints into a story with words like "slammed" and "blasted" in the framing. The outrage isn't organic. It's manufactured from scraps.
The entire premise rests on the claim that wearing white during the Chinese New Year is a serious cultural misstep. Set aside that the suit was cream-colored, not white. Set aside that the sourcing for this cultural rule traces back to a single undated Glamour UK article with no quoted experts. Even if the convention exists in some traditions, the leap from "some families prefer red during the holiday" to "a woman in New York posting on Instagram committed a faux pas" is enormous.
Cultural traditions are not monolithic. Chinese New Year customs vary across regions, generations, and families. The confident assertion that Ivanka Trump violated some universal rule reveals more about the accusers than the accused. They don't actually care about Chinese cultural norms. They care about finding a new angle to criticize someone named Trump.
Notice the contradiction baked into the criticism. One commenter asked why Ivanka is "acting like this is her culture." So the objection is both that she celebrated the holiday wrong and that she shouldn't have celebrated it at all. If she'd ignored Chinese New Year entirely, the same people would call her exclusionary. If she'd worn red, they'd accuse her of performative cultural appropriation.
This is the infinite loop that public figures on the right face with cultural engagement. There is no correct move. The rules exist only to generate violations, and the violations exist only to generate content. It's a closed system that produces nothing but grievance.
Ivanka Trump, a 44-year-old mother of three, wished people a happy Lunar New Year on social media. She wrote about courage, bold ideas, and gratitude. She included Mandarin characters. She also shared an Instagram story of her 14-year-old daughter Arabella riding a horse on the beach, a fitting image for the Year of the Horse.
Days earlier, she attended a charity event honoring St. Jude's Children's Hospital, wearing a white beaded fringe cocktail dress that once belonged to her late mother, Ivana Trump, who passed away in 2022. That detail didn't make it into the outrage cycle because it's harder to build a hit piece around a woman wearing her dead mother's dress to a children's cancer charity.
The story here isn't a cultural faux pas. It's the media's relentless need to find one. Every holiday, every post, every outfit becomes a potential indictment when your last name is Trump. The commenters will keep commenting. The outlets will keep packaging it. And the rest of us will keep recognizing the pattern for exactly what it is.
President Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One on Monday evening that he was unaware of news reports describing a close personal relationship between DHS Secretary Kristi Noem and her top advisor, Corey Lewandowski.
When a reporter asked whether the reports were "a bad look" and whether Noem would remain in her position, Trump kept it brief.
"I mean, I haven't heard that. I'll find out about it, but I have not heard."
The exchange followed a Wall Street Journal report last week that detailed the relationship between Noem and Lewandowski and reported that the White House has grown "uncomfortable" with their closeness. Both Noem and Lewandowski are married. Both have publicly denied reports of an affair.
According to the Journal's reporting via Mediaite, Lewandowski initially wanted to serve formally as Noem's chief of staff at DHS. Trump rejected the idea, citing reports of a romantic relationship between the two. Officials told the Journal that Trump has continued to bring up those reports.
The situation grew more visible last year when tabloid photos showed Lewandowski going back and forth between his apartment and Noem's, which were across the street from each other. After those photos surfaced, Noem moved into a government-owned waterfront house on a military base in Washington. The house is normally provided to the leader of the U.S. Coast Guard, which falls under DHS's purview during peacetime.
A DHS spokeswoman said Noem moved to the house for increased security and pays rent. Lewandowski also spends time at the property, according to the Journal. People familiar with the situation told the paper that the two have done "little to hide their relationship inside the department."
Washington loves a soap opera, and this story has all the ingredients the press corps salivates over: a cabinet secretary, a political advisor with a colorful reputation, tabloid photos, and a waterfront house that belongs to the Coast Guard. The personal details will dominate cable news for days.
But the real question isn't whether Noem and Lewandowski are romantically involved. The real question is whether the arrangement compromises the mission at DHS.
The Department of Homeland Security sits at the center of the most consequential policy fight in the country right now: securing the border and enforcing immigration law. That work requires focus, institutional credibility, and a secretary whose authority inside the building is unquestioned. An advisor who was denied a formal chief of staff role by the president himself but who nonetheless operates as a shadow power center inside the department is a structural problem, regardless of whatever personal dynamics exist.
If Lewandowski's influence at DHS exceeds his formal role, that matters. If career officials and political appointees inside the department are navigating around a relationship rather than through a chain of command, that matters more. None of that requires a tabloid photo to be concerning.
Trump's response on Monday was measured. He didn't defend the relationship. He didn't attack Noem. He said he'd look into it. That's a president keeping his options open, not a president who's made up his mind.
The Journal report landed hard enough that reporters are now asking the president directly, on camera, whether his DHS secretary will keep her job. That kind of pressure doesn't dissipate on its own. Either the White House moves to resolve the Lewandowski question, or the story keeps compounding.
Noem has one of the most important jobs in the federal government. The border mission is too critical and too politically charged to be shadowed by questions about who's really calling the shots inside the department. If Lewandowski's presence is a distraction, the fix is straightforward. If it's more than a distraction, the fix is even simpler.
DHS doesn't need a personnel soap opera. It needs a clear chain of command and a secretary whose authority runs through the org chart, not around it.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio stood before an audience of European leaders at the Munich Security Conference on Friday and drew a line that no American diplomat has drawn from that stage in decades. In a sprawling, roughly 3,000-word address, Rubio declared that the era of polite transatlantic deference is over — and that the Trump administration has no intention of presiding over a slow-motion surrender of Western strength.
The sentence that landed hardest:
"We in America have no interest in being polite and orderly caretakers of the West's managed decline."
That's the red line. Not a threat. Not a withdrawal. A refusal to keep playing a losing game by someone else's rules. Rubio's speech called for tighter borders, revived industry, reasserted national sovereignty, and a European alliance that actually carries its own weight. In a venue that has traditionally served as a showcase for transatlantic unity and multilateral pleasantries, the message was unmistakable: Washington is done subsidizing complacency.
The Munich Security Conference exists in a kind of diplomatic amber. Year after year, U.S. officials have taken the stage to stress multilateral cooperation and institutional continuity — the bureaucratic vocabulary of a foreign policy establishment that treats inertia as stability. Rubio shattered the pattern.
Where previous American diplomats reassured, Rubio diagnosed. According to Fox News, he described the erosion of manufacturing, porous borders, and dependence on global institutions not as isolated policy failures but as symptoms of a deeper Western complacency — a civilization that forgot what made it strong in the first place. Reclaiming supply chain independence, enforcing immigration limits, and rebuilding defense capabilities would be key to reversing course.
This was not a speech designed to make the room comfortable. It was designed to make the room think.
The predictable response from Brussels and its media allies will be to cast this as American isolationism — a retreat from the world stage. Rubio preempted that framing directly:
"We do not seek to separate, but to revitalize an old friendship and renew the greatest civilization in human history."
There's nothing isolationist about telling your allies to get serious. The Trump administration has repeatedly called on European allies to shoulder more of their own defense burden, and Rubio's Munich address embedded that demand inside a larger civilizational argument. The ask isn't just "spend more on tanks." It's "remember what you're defending."
Rubio envisioned an alliance that "boldly races into the future" — not one frozen in the institutional arrangements of 1949, maintained out of habit rather than conviction. The distinction matters. The left hears "change the alliance" and reflexively screams abandonment. What Rubio actually described is a partnership between nations strong enough to stand on their own and choosing to stand together.
Germany — the host nation, the Cold War fault line, the country whose division once symbolized the fracture of a continent — sits at the center of everything Rubio described. Europe's largest economy has spent decades outsourcing its energy security, its defense posture, and increasingly its border enforcement to multilateral frameworks that diffuse responsibility so thoroughly that no one is ever accountable for failure.
Rubio's speech named the consequences of that drift without naming the countries. He didn't have to. Every leader in that room knew exactly which capitals had let their militaries atrophy, which governments had waved through mass migration under humanitarian banners, and which economies had hollowed out their industrial base in pursuit of a borderless global market that enriched elites while gutting working communities.
The speech forced a question that Munich conferences have spent years avoiding: If the West is declining, who chose decline?
Rubio's address was the clearest signal yet that the Trump administration views transatlantic relations not as a legacy arrangement to be maintained but as a living alliance to be rebuilt — on terms that reflect current realities rather than Cold War nostalgia. The administration intends to reverse the policy choices that produced what Rubio framed as Western drift, and it's pressing European allies to do the same.
Europe now faces a straightforward choice. It can treat Rubio's speech as an insult, retreat into institutional defensiveness, and hope the next American administration returns to the old script. Or it can take the dare — invest in its own defense, control its own borders, rebuild its own industrial capacity, and meet the United States as an equal rather than a dependent.
The comfortable middle ground — where Europe lectures Washington about multilateralism while relying on American taxpayers for security — just got a lot smaller.
Rubio didn't go to Munich to break an alliance. He went to tell Europe that an alliance worth having requires partners worth the name.
A federal grand jury has charged 11 individuals in a marriage fraud conspiracy run by a Chinese transnational criminal organization that recruited U.S. Navy service members to enter sham marriages with Chinese nationals — granting them not just immigration benefits but physical access to American military installations.
The three-count indictment, unsealed in Jacksonville, Florida, lays out a scheme spanning from March 2024 to February 2025. Five suspects were arrested on Feb. 3 by Homeland Security Investigations and the Naval Criminal Investigative Service. Two more are scheduled to self-surrender. Six remain at large.
Four former Navy service members have already pleaded guilty in related cases. Their sentencing hearings are pending.
The operation worked like a pipeline. The criminal organization recruited U.S. citizens — preferably members of the armed forces, according to the indictment — to marry Chinese nationals in exchange for structured cash payments. The first installment came up front. A second followed when the foreign spouse obtained legal immigration status. A final payment arrived after the divorce. The marriages were transactional, start to finish.
But immigration fraud was only half the equation. Because military spouses receive identification cards granting access to U.S. installations, the scheme doubled as a backdoor onto American bases. That elevates this from garden-variety fraud to a direct national security threat, as Just The News reports.
The sham marriages took place across multiple states — New York, Connecticut, Nevada, and Florida — suggesting the network's reach extended well beyond a single jurisdiction.
The most detailed episode in the indictment reads like a federal case study in how brazen the operation had become.
In January 2025, a confidential source reported to law enforcement that Navy reservist Raymond Zumba had offered to bribe the source and the source's spouse — who worked in the personnel office issuing identification cards at Naval Air Station Jacksonville — in exchange for unauthorized Department of War ID cards.
Federal agents directed the source to continue communications with Zumba. On Feb. 13, 2025, Zumba drove from New York to Jacksonville with three co-defendants: Anny Chen, 54, of New York; Hailing Feng, 27, of New York; and Kin Man Cheok, 32, of China. After business hours, Zumba brought Chen and Cheok onto Naval Air Station Jacksonville and initiated the process for them to receive ID cards.
The next day — Valentine's Day — Zumba met with the confidential source and handed over $3,500 in exchange for two cards.
He was arrested on the spot. Both cards were recovered.
The indictment names five defendants:
Four former Navy members — Raymond Zumba, Brinio Urena, Morgan Chambers, and Jacinth Bailey — have pleaded guilty in related cases. The identities of the remaining defendants have not been publicly disclosed.
Each count of marriage fraud conspiracy and bribery conspiracy carries a maximum federal prison sentence of five years.
Marriage fraud schemes are not new. What distinguishes this case is the deliberate targeting of military personnel — not as incidental marks, but as the preferred vehicle for the operation. The indictment's language is telling: the organization sought U.S. citizens, "preferably members of the armed forces." That preference wasn't about romance. It was about what a military spouse ID card unlocks.
HSI Tampa acting Special Agent in Charge Michael Cochran framed the stakes clearly:
"This investigation underscores the critical role that HSI plays in protecting our nation from transnational criminal organizations that seek to exploit our customs and immigration laws and threaten our national security. Through the dedication and expertise of our agents and partners, we have successfully investigated, disrupted and dismantled a sophisticated criminal network operating across borders."
"Dismantled" may be the operative word — but six targets remain unaccounted for, and the network's full scope across four states suggests this indictment captures a slice of the operation, not necessarily its totality.
Every immigration enforcement story invites the same tired deflection: that these are victimless bureaucratic violations, paperwork crimes dressed up as threats. This case demolishes that narrative. Chinese nationals obtained physical access to a U.S. naval air station through fraudulent marriages brokered by a transnational criminal organization. Active-duty and reserve service members sold their status — and their country's security — for cash.
The men and women who serve honorably on bases like NAS Jacksonville deserve to know that the people walking through the gate beside them actually belong there. Four of their own peers betrayed that trust. The organization that recruited them exploited every seam in the system — immigration law, military spousal benefits, base access protocols — simultaneously.
This is what immigration enforcement actually looks like when agencies are empowered to do their jobs: a multijurisdictional takedown spanning HSI offices in Jacksonville, New York, Baltimore, and Los Angeles, coordinated with NCIS, culminating in arrests, guilty pleas, and an indictment that names the network for what it is.
Six suspects are still out there. The work isn't finished.
January's Consumer Price Index came in below expectations, dropping annual inflation to 2.4% — the lowest reading since May and a sharp decline from December's 2.7%. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported a modest 0.2% seasonally adjusted monthly increase for all urban consumers, beating economists' forecasts of 2.5%. Core inflation, which strips out food and energy, fell to its lowest point in nearly five years.
Florida's Voice reported that the Trump administration wasted no time framing the numbers as vindication. White House Deputy Press Secretary Kush Desai delivered a statement that doubled as a victory lap:
"Today's expectation-beating CPI report proves that President Trump has defeated Joe Biden's inflation crisis: overall inflation fell, and real wages grew by $1,400 in President Trump's first year in office."
That $1,400 figure — the real earnings gain for private-sector workers over the past year — sits at the center of the administration's case. Real average hourly earnings climbed 1.2% across all private-sector workers and 1.5% for middle- and lower-wage employees. Under the Biden administration, workers lost nearly $3,000 in real earnings, according to White House figures. The reversal is not subtle.
The numbers aren't abstract. They map onto the parts of the economy that working Americans actually feel.
Energy prices dropped 1.5%. Gasoline fell 3.2%. Used vehicles — a category that became a symbol of Biden-era sticker shock — declined 1.8%. Beef, eggs, and coffee all saw reductions in January. Prescription drug prices remained steady last month and declined over the course of 2025.
The sector-level wage data tells its own story:
These are not Silicon Valley knowledge workers or government-sector employees padding their resumes with DEI certifications. These are the people who build things, extract things, and make things — the backbone of the physical economy. When their real wages rise, it means the policy environment is rewarding production, not just consumption.
For months, critics warned that Trump's trade posture would ignite a new inflation spiral. The January data offers a clean rebuttal: no broad spikes have materialized. Energy is cheaper. Goods are cheaper. The categories most exposed to supply-chain disruption moved in the right direction.
This is worth sitting with for a moment. The entire economic case against the administration's trade agenda rested on the assumption that tariffs would function as a consumer tax, driving prices higher across the board. January's CPI doesn't just fail to confirm that theory — it contradicts it. The economy absorbed the policy shift and kept cooling.
That doesn't mean tariffs carry zero cost in any category. But the doomsday framing — the breathless cable-news segments, the op-eds treating every tariff announcement as a prelude to Smoot-Hawley — looks increasingly disconnected from the data.
Desai pointed to two areas where the administration sees continued momentum. Housing inflation, which has been the stickiest component of CPI for years, continues to cool. And prescription drug prices actually fell over the year — a trend the White House credits to its Most Favored Nation drug pricing deals and the Great Healthcare Plan.
"Housing inflation notably continues to cool, while prescription drug prices actually fell in 2025, with even more price relief ahead for American patients thanks to President Trump's Most Favored Nation drug pricing deals and the Great Healthcare Plan."
Housing and healthcare are the two categories that erode middle-class purchasing power faster than anything else. If both trend lines hold, the downstream effects on household budgets could be substantial — and politically potent heading into the midterms.
The White House didn't stop at celebrating the present. Desai turned the data into a direct message aimed at the Federal Reserve:
"With inflation now low and stable, America's economy is set to turbocharge even further through long-overdue interest rate cuts from the Fed."
The phrase "long-overdue" is doing deliberate work. The administration's position is clear: the Fed held rates higher than the data justified, and every month of delay costs borrowers — homebuyers, small businesses, anyone carrying variable-rate debt — real money. With inflation now sitting comfortably below economists' expectations, the case for continued restraint thins considerably.
Whether the Fed acts on that signal is another matter. But the political ground has shifted. A central bank that holds rates steady while inflation undershoots forecasts isn't being prudent. It's being stubborn.
Strip the rhetoric away, and the administration's argument reduces to a simple contrast: $3,000 lost under Biden, $1,400 gained under Trump. One presidency bled purchasing power from working families. The other restored it in twelve months.
Critics will note these are White House figures, not independently audited calculations. Fair enough. But the BLS data is the BLS data. Inflation fell. Real wages rose. Energy got cheaper. Food got cheaper. The trend lines all point in the same direction, and they all point away from the previous administration's record.
Americans don't need a press secretary to tell them whether their paycheck stretches further at the grocery store. They already know. The CPI report just confirmed what the checkout line has been saying for months.
Cardi B kicked off her Little Miss Drama Tour at Acrisure Arena in Palm Desert, California, on Wednesday night with a message for Immigration and Customs Enforcement: try something.
"B—h, if ICE come in here, we gon' jump they a–es."
The 33-year-old rapper, born Belcalis Marlenis Almanzar, told her audience she had bear mace backstage and declared that federal agents wouldn't be taking her fans. She asked how many Mexicans or Guatemalans were in attendance, sang a brief snippet of "La Cucaracha," then launched into her hit "I Like It" as if threatening federal law enforcement were just another part of the setlist.
The Department of Homeland Security didn't let it slide.
"As long as she doesn't drug and rob our agents, we'll consider that an improvement over her past behavior."
DHS posted the response on its official X page, quote-retweeting coverage of the rapper's comments. No ambiguity. No diplomacy. Just a clean shot referencing a chapter of Cardi B's past she's spent years trying to reframe.
In 2016, Cardi B went on Instagram Live and described — in explicit detail — how she lured men to hotels during her time as a stripper, drugged them, and robbed them. Her own words:
"And I drugged n****s up and I robbed them. That's what I used to do. Nothing was muthaf—in' handed to me, my n—a. Nothing!"
When those comments resurfaced in 2019, she addressed them on social media but never quite disavowed the conduct. Instead, she framed it as survival:
"I made the choices that I did at the time because I had very limited options. I was blessed to have been able to rise from that, but so many women have not. Whether or not they were poor choice at the time, I did what I had to do to survive."
She added that she never claimed to be perfect and described her admissions as speaking her truth — "things that I felt I needed to do to make a living."
This is the person now positioning herself as a moral authority on immigration enforcement. A woman who openly admitted to committing felonies against individuals is now threatening violence against federal agents whose job is to enforce laws Congress passed. The irony doesn't need decoration.
What Cardi B did on that stage wasn't brave. It was cheap. Telling a crowd of fans in a deep-blue California venue that you'll fight ICE costs nothing. There's no risk. There's no courage in performing defiance for an audience that already agrees with you in a state whose political leadership has spent years obstructing federal immigration enforcement.
But the performance matters — not because it changes policy, but because it reveals how normalized hostility toward law enforcement has become in certain cultural corridors. Threatening federal agents is now an applause line. Bear mace as a prop gets cheers, not concern. A rapper with an admitted criminal past gets to cosplay as a civil rights champion, and nobody on the left blinks.
Imagine the reaction if a country music star told a crowd in Nashville they'd assault ATF agents. The think pieces would write themselves. The double standard is the point.
The framing Cardi B leaned into — that ICE is some occupying force coming to snatch innocent people from concerts — only works if you refuse to acknowledge what ICE actually does. These are the agents who dismantle human trafficking networks, arrest violent criminals who've re-entered the country illegally, and enforce the immigration laws that exist precisely because a nation without borders isn't a nation at all.
When a celebrity with a massive platform tells fans to physically attack those agents, she isn't protecting anyone. She's putting her own audience at risk of federal obstruction charges. She's encouraging confrontation that could get someone hurt. And she's doing it from behind a security detail that would absolutely call law enforcement if someone rushed her stage.
That's the contradiction the left never addresses. The people who scream loudest about abolishing enforcement are always the ones most insulated from the consequences of lawlessness.
The department's response was notable for its brevity and its bite. No lengthy press release. No hand-wringing about artistic expression. Just a single sentence that reminded the public exactly who was lecturing them about morality — and what she's admitted to doing.
It's the kind of directness that government agencies have historically avoided, and it landed precisely because it refused to treat celebrity posturing as serious policy discourse. Cardi B made a threat. DHS made a point.
The rapper will sell tickets off this. The clip will circulate. Her fans will call it iconic. But somewhere in Palm Desert on Wednesday night, a woman who drugged and robbed men told a crowd she'd assault federal officers — and half the country was supposed to cheer.
DHS didn't cheer. They remembered.
Eight people are dead in the small community of Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia, after an 18-year-old former student opened fire at a local residence and then at Tumbler Ridge Secondary School on Tuesday afternoon. The shooter, identified by RCMP Deputy Commissioner Dwayne McDonald on Wednesday as Jesse Van Rootselaar, killed his mother, his 11-year-old stepbrother, and six people inside the school before turning the gun on himself.
Van Rootselaar was born male and began transitioning to female approximately six years ago. An initial emergency alert described the active shooter as a "female in a dress." A police superintendent later referred to Van Rootselaar as a "gunperson" during a press briefing.
Approximately 25 others were wounded. Most of the school victims were found in the library. One was found in a stairwell. Among the dead: a 39-year-old female teacher, three 12-year-old female students, one 12-year-old male student, and one 13-year-old male student. Their identities have not been released.
This was not a case where nobody saw anything coming. The New York Post reported that according to McDonald, police had visited the Van Rootselaar family home on multiple occasions over the last several years due to concerns about the shooter's mental health. Van Rootselaar was taken into custody for assessment under British Columbia's Mental Health Act on more than one occasion.
Two years ago, firearms were seized from the home. The lawful owner — whom McDonald did not name — petitioned to have them returned. And got them back.
Two firearms were recovered at the school: one long gun and one modified handgun. Whether these were the same weapons previously seized and returned is, according to authorities, "not immediately clear." How Van Rootselaar gained access to the school building during school hours is also unknown. He had dropped out approximately four years ago. Tumbler Ridge Secondary serves grades 7 through 12 and has a student body of roughly 160. Around 100 students were evacuated to safety after being barricaded in classrooms for more than two hours.
Reports of the shooting reached the RCMP at approximately 1:20 p.m. local time. The emergency public alert wasn't canceled until 5:45 p.m.
When asked whether he believed there was any correlation between Van Rootselaar identifying as transgender and the shooting, McDonald said it was:
"Too early to say."
It's always too early to say. And then the conversation moves on, and the question is never revisited — not because the evidence doesn't warrant it, but because the cultural gatekeepers have decided the question itself is impermissible.
The Tumbler Ridge massacre is the latest in a series of mass shootings carried out by individuals who identify as transgender:
Pointing this out is not an accusation that transgender identity causes violence. The overwhelming majority of transgender-identifying people will never harm anyone. But the refusal to even examine the intersection of gender dysphoria, severe mental illness, and mass violence is not compassion — it's cowardice dressed up as sensitivity. When a pattern recurs, adults investigate it. They don't close their eyes and call it kindness.
Van Rootselaar's mother, 39-year-old Jennifer Strang, was among his first victims. She was killed at the family residence alongside her 11-year-old son, Van Rootselaar's stepbrother.
Strang had been a vocal advocate for her child's transition. In July 2024, she posted a trans-inclusive Pride flag on Instagram with the message:
"I really hope the hate I see online is just bored old people and not true hatred. Do better and educate yourself before spewing bulls–t online."
She added:
"Do you have any idea how many kids are killing themselves over this kind of hate?"
She described herself as a "conservative-leaning libertarian" and used the hashtag #ProtectTransKids. In August 2021, Van Rootselaar's grandmother posted a birthday message on Facebook — roughly two years into the transition — celebrating his 14th birthday:
"Happy 14th birthday to our grandson Jesse !! Love you always !! XOXO"
There is something unbearable about a mother who did everything the modern therapeutic consensus told her to do — affirm, support, protect — and was killed by the child she championed. This isn't a point to score. It's a tragedy to sit with. But it is also, inescapably, a data point that challenges the claim that affirmation alone is sufficient treatment for deeply troubled young people.
Van Rootselaar was repeatedly flagged for mental health crises. He was assessed under the Mental Health Act multiple times. He dropped out of school at roughly 14 years old. Firearms were in the home. Every institutional tripwire that was supposed to prevent exactly this outcome failed — not because the signs weren't there, but because the systems meant to act on them didn't.
Only two mass shootings in Canadian history have claimed more victims — the 1989 Montreal massacre at École Polytechnique, which killed 14 women, and the 2020 Nova Scotia attacks, which killed 22 people across 16 locations. Tumbler Ridge now joins that list. A school of 160 students in a rural community just absorbed a body count that would dominate American headlines for weeks.
The Canadian flag flew at half-staff at Parliament on Wednesday. Prime Minister Mark Carney spoke to the media in Ottawa. No specific policy responses or statements were quoted.
Canada's gun control regime is already among the most restrictive in the Western world. Firearms were seized from this home. The system worked exactly as designed — and then reversed itself when the legal owner asked. The weapons came back. Eight people are dead.
The uncomfortable truth is that no regulatory framework can substitute for institutional courage. The Mental Health Act assessments didn't hold Van Rootselaar. The firearms seizure didn't stick. The school, which he hadn't attended in four years, apparently had no mechanism to stop a former student from entering during school hours. Every checkpoint existed on paper. None of them held in practice.
The debate that follows this massacre will be predictable. Calls for stricter gun laws in a country that already has strict gun laws. Demands to avoid "politicizing" the shooter's transgender identity — demands that would never be made if the shooter's ideology pointed rightward. And a quiet burial of the mental health failures that let a known, repeatedly flagged individual walk into a school with two firearms.
A 39-year-old teacher is dead. Four children aged 12 and 13 are dead. A mother and her 11-year-old son are dead. The system knew Jesse Van Rootselaar was in crisis. It was known for years.
Knowing wasn't enough. It never is, when no one is willing to act on what they know.
A Washington Free Beacon investigation is raising pointed questions about one of Maryland Governor Wes Moore's most frequently told personal stories — that his great-grandfather, a minister in South Carolina, was forced to flee to Jamaica under threat from the Ku Klux Klan.
The report claims that historical records from the Protestant Episcopal Church and contemporary newspaper accounts tell a different story: that James Thomas's departure was an orderly and public professional transfer after he was appointed to replace a deceased pastor in Jamaica, not a secret, middle-of-the-night escape.
For Moore, the timing couldn't be worse. The Democrat is widely believed to have White House ambitions, and the scrutiny strikes at the heart of a narrative he has built into his political identity.
Moore has placed the KKK narrative at the center of his personal brand, according to Fox News. In a 2020 appearance on the Yang Speaks podcast — an episode literally titled "Wes Moore on how the KKK ran his family into exile" — he detailed how his great-grandfather was a minister in Winnsboro, South Carolina, who fled to Jamaica after being threatened by the Klan.
By 2023, the story had become a rhetorical cornerstone. Moore told Time magazine:
"I am literally the grandson of someone who was run out of this country by the Ku Klux Klan, right? So the fact that I can be both this grandson of someone who was run outta this country by the Ku Klux Klan, and also be the first Black governor in the history of the state of Maryland."
That framing does a lot of work. It transforms a policy politician into a symbol — the descendant of racial terror who ascended to the governor's mansion. It's the kind of story that launches presidential campaigns.
And it may not hold up.
The Free Beacon report points to church records and newspaper accounts suggesting Thomas's move to Jamaica was a routine pastoral transfer, not a desperate flight from white supremacist violence. The distinction matters. The difference between "appointed to replace a deceased pastor" and "run out of this country" is not a matter of emphasis or oral tradition softening the edges. Those are two fundamentally different stories.
There's also a location discrepancy that the article doesn't resolve. Moore has described his great-grandfather as a minister in Winnsboro, South Carolina. The Free Beacon report references Pineville, S.C. These are not the same place.
This isn't the first time the Free Beacon has turned its attention to Moore's biography. The outlet has previously raised questions about his military record and an Oxford University thesis. A pattern of biographical scrutiny is forming around a man who has built his political career substantially on the power of his personal story.
Moore's office did not directly rebut the historical records. Spokesperson Ammar Moussa offered this to Fox News Digital:
"We're not going to litigate a family's century-old oral history with a partisan outlet. The broader reality is not in dispute: intimidation and racial terror were pervasive in the Jim Crow South, and it rarely came with neat documentation. Even Bishop William Alexander Guerry — whom they cite to suggest there was no hostility — was later murdered amid intense backlash tied to his racial equality work. The Governor is focused on doing the job Marylanders elected him to do."
Read that carefully. The statement doesn't say the Free Beacon got it wrong. It says Moore's team won't "litigate" the question. It pivots to the general truth that the Jim Crow South was a place of racial terror — which no one disputes — and uses that broader reality as a shield against specific factual questions about a specific family story.
That's not a rebuttal. That's a rhetorical exit ramp.
The reference to Bishop Guerry is doing similar work — introducing a tangential historical figure to create an atmosphere of racial violence, thereby making it seem unreasonable to question whether this particular minister was actually threatened. The logic amounts to: bad things happened in the South, therefore, this specific claim shouldn't be scrutinized. That's not how biography works, and it's certainly not how journalism works.
The comparisons arrived almost immediately. Greg Price, who served as Trump's White House rapid response manager for the first half of 2025, posted on X:
"Wes Moore is being talked about as one of the top contenders in the 2028 Democratic primary and the guy has already told more lies about his life than Elizabeth Warren."
National Review editor Ramesh Ponnuru kept it shorter and sharper:
"Moore is reaching Biden levels of fabulism."
Fox News chief political analyst Brit Hume simply pointed readers to the reporting:
"Hoo boy. Read this, and the post it is in response to."
The Elizabeth Warren comparison is apt because it identifies a specific species of political dishonesty: the biographical embellishment designed to claim membership in an oppressed group — or proximity to oppression — for political advantage. It's not garden-variety political spin. It's identity construction.
Moore said in September that he is "not running for president" in 2028 and is "excited" about serving a full term if he wins re-election in November. Nobody in professional politics takes that at face value. The DNC convention stage in August 2024, the national media profile, the carefully curated biography — these are not the moves of a man content to govern Annapolis.
Which is precisely why this story has teeth. Presidential campaigns are built on biography, and biography can be audited. The further Moore moves toward a national stage, the more every claim gets tested against the documentary record. The Free Beacon found church records and newspaper clippings. Opposition researchers in a presidential primary will find more.
The Democratic Party has a recurring problem with candidates whose personal mythologies outrun their documented histories. The instinct to build political identity around victimhood and overcoming — rather than around policy accomplishment and vision — creates an incentive structure where embellishment isn't just tempting, it's almost structurally required. If your political value depends on how compelling your suffering narrative is, the pressure to sharpen that narrative is immense.
Moore's response to the scrutiny will tell us more than the initial report did. A politician confident in his story produces the evidence. A politician who pivots to "we won't litigate oral history" is buying time.
The records are either there or they aren't. Oral history is powerful and real — but when you use it on a national stage to build a political brand, it stops being a family story and starts being a public claim. Public claims get checked.
Moore wanted the KKK narrative to carry him to a higher office. Now it's carrying questions he hasn't answered.
Convicted sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell appeared virtually before the House Oversight Committee on Monday from a federal prison camp in Texas, invoked her Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination, and refused to answer a single question. Her lawyer then made the play everyone saw coming: Maxwell will talk — but only if President Trump grants her clemency.
The 64-year-old is serving a 20-year sentence. She has every incentive to deal and almost no leverage to do it with. Yet her attorney, David Oscar Markus, framed the offer as something close to a public service.
"If this Committee and the American public truly want to hear the unfiltered truth about what happened, there is a straightforward path. Ms. Maxwell is prepared to speak fully and honestly if granted clemency by President Trump."
The White House has denied that clemency is under consideration.
Markus didn't stop at the clemency gambit. According to the New York Post, he volunteered an unsolicited declaration on behalf of his client — one that conveniently names the two most powerful men whose orbits intersected with Jeffrey Epstein's.
"Both President Trump and President Clinton are innocent of any wrongdoing."
He then added:
"Ms. Maxwell alone can explain why, and the public is entitled to that explanation."
Think about what's happening here. Maxwell won't answer questions under oath before Congress, but her lawyer will assert — without cross-examination, without evidence, without sworn testimony — that two presidents are clean. That's not transparency. That's a press release dressed in legal clothing.
If Maxwell truly possesses exculpatory information about powerful figures, the place to deliver it is under oath, subject to questioning, with the full weight of perjury consequences behind every word. Not through a lawyer's statement on X. The Fifth Amendment exists for good reason, but you don't get to invoke it and simultaneously shop your version of events through your attorney's social media account.
This isn't Maxwell's first attempt at controlled disclosure. Trump's Justice Department already interviewed her in prison last year. She testified to Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche on July 24 and 25 under limited immunity protection.
The result was underwhelming. Maxwell provided almost no new information about Epstein's infamous associates — a list that includes Prince Andrew, former Harvard President Larry Summers, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, and former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak. On the subject of Trump specifically, Maxwell said she:
"never witnessed the president in any inappropriate setting in any way."
Days after that interview, Maxwell was transferred from a federal prison in Tallahassee, Florida, to a medium-security camp in Texas — a facility reportedly nicknamed "Club Fed." No official reason for the transfer has been provided.
Meanwhile, a DOJ memo released on July 6 concluded that Epstein held no "client list" and that no additional co-conspirators would be charged. A joint DOJ-FBI document concluded Epstein committed suicide in his Manhattan jail cell on August 10, 2019, while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges.
House Oversight Chairman James Comer announced at least five more depositions following Maxwell's non-event Monday:
Comer told reporters after the deposition that the committee still has serious work to do.
"We had many questions to ask about the crimes she and Epstein committed — as well as questions about potential co-conspirators."
"We sincerely want to get to the truth for the American people and justice for survivors. That's what this is about."
Comer said he was open to hearing from more Epstein associates but hasn't committed to further interviews, including with Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick. According to emails released by the Justice Department, Lutnick planned to visit Epstein's private Caribbean island, Little St. James, in 2012 — though Lutnick told the New York Post he broke off contact with the financier around 2005.
Rep. Ro Khanna, a California Democrat who co-authored legislation allowing ongoing DOJ disclosures, submitted seven questions he wanted Maxwell to answer before Monday's deposition. Among them: whether Maxwell could verify a claim made in a December filing by her own legal team — that 29 Epstein associates had secret non-prosecution agreements, and whether she or Epstein would "arrange, facilitate, or provide access to underage girls to President Trump."
That last question tells you everything about where Democrats want this investigation to land. Not on the bipartisan constellation of powerful men who populated Epstein's world. Not on the systemic failures that let a convicted sex offender serve 13 months — most of it on work release — after pleading guilty in 2008 to soliciting a minor for prostitution. Not on the institutional rot that allowed Epstein to build his operation across decades.
They want a headline with one name in it.
Every few months, the Epstein story resurfaces with the promise that this time the truth will come out. It never does. Maxwell won't talk without a deal. The DOJ says no client list and no further charges are coming. The powerful men adjacent to Epstein's crimes have spent years lawyering up, and the victims are still waiting for something resembling accountability.
The clemency offer is a sideshow — a convicted sex trafficker trying to negotiate her way out of a 20-year sentence by dangling information she could provide under oath right now, today, if she chose to. She doesn't need a pardon to tell the truth. She needs a pardon to avoid the consequences of everything else.
When Trump was asked about a potential pardon in November, he was characteristically noncommittal:
"I haven't even thought about. I haven't thought about it for months. Maybe I haven't thought about it all. But I don't talk about that. I don't rule it in or out."
The depositions will continue through March. The Clintons are both scheduled. Epstein's inner circle — his accountant, his lawyer — will face questions. Whether any of it produces genuine revelations or just more Fifth Amendment invocations remains to be seen.
But one thing is already clear: the people who know the most about Jeffrey Epstein's crimes have the least interest in sharing what they know — unless the price is right.
A federal judge has ordered the government to unseal documents tied to the FBI's warrant-authorized seizure of 2020 election ballots from a Fulton County, Georgia, election facility. Judge J.P. Boulee, of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia, gave the government until Tuesday to file the warrant affidavit — with redactions limited to the names of nongovernmental witnesses.
The order comes as Fulton County officials fight to get the ballots back. Board of Commissioners Chair Robb Pitts and the Fulton County Board of Registration and Elections have sued the federal government over the seizure, demanding the return of troves of 2020 ballots taken into federal custody.
They originally filed the case under seal. That veil is now lifting — and both sides say they're fine with it.
Judge Boulee — nominated by President Trump in 2019 — made clear that neither party objected to transparency, Breitbart News reported:
"Although Petitioners originally filed this case under seal, both parties have now indicated to the Court that they do not oppose unsealing the docket or the motions filed by Petitioners."
He also noted that the federal government had no objection to releasing the search warrant affidavit itself, the document that would lay out exactly why the FBI sought a warrant in the first place:
"Respondent has stated that it does not oppose the unsealing of the search warrant affidavit and any other papers associated with the warrant subject to the redaction of the names of nongovernmental witnesses."
That's worth sitting with. The federal government executed a judicially authorized warrant to seize election materials from one of the most controversial counties in American election history — and it has no problem with the public seeing why. Whatever is in that affidavit, the Justice Department isn't running from it.
The FBI operation at the Fulton County election facility took place late last month. It was executed under a judicial warrant — not a rogue operation, not an extralegal power grab, but a law enforcement action authorized by a court. Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard appeared at the scene. In a letter to Sen. Mark Warner, Gabbard stated her presence was "requested" by President Trump and that she only observed the operation "for a brief period of time."
At the National Prayer Breakfast last Thursday, Trump indicated it was Attorney General Pam Bondi who insisted Gabbard oversee the raid. The details of who requested what and why will presumably become clearer as the sealed documents come to light. That's the point of unsealing them.
Fulton County's response has been litigation. Rather than cooperating with a federal investigation backed by a judicial warrant, county officials lawyered up and filed suit — under seal, no less — to get the ballots back. The instinct to hide first and fight second tells you something about the posture of local officials who spent years insisting they had nothing to hide.
Sen. Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, offered a characteristically breathless response:
"When you put all of this together, it is clear that what happened in Fulton County is not about revisiting the past, it is about shaping the outcome of future elections."
Warner and other Democrats have warned that Trump may attempt to meddle in the 2026 midterm elections — a claim offered without any specific evidence cited in the source material. The logic appears to be: the federal government investigated election materials in a county dogged by controversy; therefore, the federal government is trying to steal future elections.
This is the infinite loop Democrats have perfected. Any scrutiny of election integrity is itself an attack on election integrity. Any attempt to verify results is an attempt to overturn them. The only acceptable posture, in this framework, is to never look. Ask no questions. Examine no ballots. Trust the people who ran the process — even when the process is what's being questioned.
If the warrant affidavit reveals a serious evidentiary basis for the seizure, Warner's framing collapses. If it doesn't, he'll have his moment. But the fact that the federal government is welcoming the unsealing suggests they're not worried about what the public will find.
Fulton County is not some random jurisdiction caught up in a political dragnet. It is the single most scrutinized county in the most scrutinized state in the 2020 election. For years, questions about its election processes have been met with dismissal, deflection, and accusations of conspiracy theorizing directed at anyone who raised them.
Now the FBI has executed a warrant, seized ballots, and the county's first move was to file a sealed lawsuit demanding them back. Not a public statement of confidence. Not a welcome-mat posture from officials with nothing to fear. A sealed legal action.
The unsealing order changes the dynamic. By Tuesday, the public will have access to the warrant affidavit — the government's own stated reasons for seizing those ballots. Whatever those reasons are, they were persuasive enough for a judge to sign off on the warrant in the first place.
Tuesday's deadline is the inflection point. Once the affidavit is public, the conversation shifts from speculation to substance. The legal battle between Fulton County and the federal government will proceed on the merits. Democrats will either have to engage with the specific facts laid out in the warrant — or keep insisting that looking at ballots is itself a form of election interference.
The federal government wants these documents to be public. Fulton County filed under seal. One side is asking for sunlight. The other reached for the curtain.