“IRAN HAS JUST ANNOUNCED THAT THE STRAIT OF IRAN IS FULLY OPEN AND READY FOR FULL PASSAGE,” he wrote on TruthSocial. “THANK YOU!”

A few minutes later, Trump posted that the Strait was “COMPLETELY OPEN AND READY FOR BUSINESS AND FULL PASSAGE.”

The Iranian foreign minister, Seyed Abbas Araghchi, confirmed this on X, saying that yesterday’s ceasefire between Israel and Lebanon was connected to the strait’s reopening.

“In line with the ceasefire in Lebanon,” he said, “the passage for all commercial vessels through Strait of Hormuz is declared completely open for the remaining period of ceasefire, on the coordinated route as already announced by Ports and Maritime Organisation of the Islamic Rep. of Iran.”

Since Monday, the United States had maintained a blockade of ships connected to Iranian commerce. Trump added on Friday that “THE NAVAL BLOCKADE WILL REMAIN IN FULL FORCE AND EFFECT AS IT PERTAINS TO IRAN, ONLY, UNTIL SUCH TIME AS OUR TRANSACTION WITH IRAN IS 100% COMPLETE.”

“THIS PROCESS SHOULD GO VERY QUICKLY IN THAT MOST OF THE POINTS ARE ALREADY NEGOTIATED,” he wrote.

Addressing a sticking point in talks, Trump said Tehran had offered not to possess nuclear weapons for more than 20 years.

“We’re going to see what happens. But I think we’re very close to making a deal with Iran,” Trump told reporters outside the White House on Thursday.

The Strait of Hormuz is a key waterway for the global oil trade. About 25% of world seaborn oil trade transits the straight, according to the International Energy Agency, with 80% of it destined for Asia. About 19% of the world’s liquefied natural gas transits the strait as well.

Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan imported almost two-thirds of their liquefied natural gas supplies via the Strait of Hormuz in 2025, making them particularly vulnerable to Iran’s actions.

Oil prices fell sharply in late trading as Trump announced the ceasefire. West Texas Intermediate crude, the domestic benchmark, fell by more than 9% to around $102 per barrel, The New York Times reported.

Trump announced April 7 that Iran agreed to open the Strait of Hormuz, but the crucial waterway remained heavily disrupted by the conflict.

This story is developing and will be updated.

Reuters contributed to this report.

The post BREAKING: Trump Gives Major Update on Strait of Hormuz appeared first on The Daily Signal.

In his 100-day address on Sunday, he announced the city’s first socialist supermarket will be up and running in East Harlem in 2027. The only thing slower than Mr. Mamdani opening the store next year will be the checkout line once it finally opens—and that’s assuming the shelves aren’t empty.

The mayor plans to manage five government-run stores by the end of his first term, one located in each of New York City’s five boroughs, that will be run for no profit with the objective of keeping prices artificially low for a select basket of staples (e.g. bread, milk, eggs). Addressing food affordability in an already expensive city is important, but this “solution” is central planning dressed up as compassion.

Rather than addressing the web of city regulations, labor costs above national averages, and high real estate expenses that inflate prices for small grocers, the mayor suggests government intervention. This could harm small businesses by crowding them out.

Private grocery stores operate on thin profit margins of only 1 to 3% while simultaneously navigating labor costs and theft. Owners are not “greedy capitalists,” despite what communists might say. The incentive to maximize profits actually facilitates competition and naturally drives prices down. When a public option enters the market with artificially low prices and no barriers to entry, mom-and-pop shops get pushed out.

In a free market system, private grocers outperform public options. When asked about the private sector’s natural advantage over his socialist marts, Mamdani stated, “I look forward to the competition. May the most affordable grocery store win.” However, the city will be funneling tens of millions of taxpayer dollars into stores that do not pay rent or property taxes—hardly fair competition.

Taxpayer-funded stores will distort the market and create surges in demand that the government is ill-equipped to handle. The lesson here is that the productive private sector outperforms the unproductive public sector. For example, take the notoriously slow and cost-inefficient government-run postal service or Department of Motor Vehicles; now, imagine the government in charge of food supply.

Not only would shoppers face long lines and stores face food shortages, but the city will have spent tens of millions of dollars that it cannot afford. Estimated costs are projected at $30 million for the first grocery market, nearly half of the mayor’s original $70 million budget for five.

As valuations for these Marxist marts keep rising, so does the burden to taxpayers—this at a time where New York City has a $7 billion budget gap over the next two years and nearly $100 billion in total debt.

The reality is that nothing is truly free in a socialist system. Everything is paid through higher taxes, larger deficits, or hidden costs passed to consumers. Such reckless spending is never prudent, especially on policies that fail in both principle and practice.

Cities like Erie, Kansas or Baldwin, Florida left taxpayers on the hook for inefficient, government-run grocery stores that created scarcity and failed to alleviate food unaffordability. Each municipal government found the public store too difficult and too costly for taxpayers to operate.

The Soviet Union infamously nationalized food production and distribution as a part of its centralized economy—to the detriment of its citizenry. Shortages, empty shelves, rationing, and bread lines were unfortunate outcomes of the failed socialist experiment. Compare that to the American grocery experience of full shelves and food variety, all made possible by free markets.

Despite the obvious dichotomy between pro-growth free enterprise and restrictive nationalization, Mayor Mamdani still believes his government-owned bodegas can do business better. Soviet Russia, Communist China, and Socialist Cuba followed the same script, promising affordability through central planning but delivering scarcity, corruption, and poverty.

New Yorkers are about to learn the hard way what millions already discovered in the last century: socialist “solutions” to everyday problems fail spectacularly.

Private grocers already feed millions of New Yorkers daily without government interference. Mayor Mamdani’s city-run stores would distort the market and impose higher costs on taxpayers, leaving residents worse off.

If a government-owned grocery store does open in the Big Apple in 2027, New Yorkers will experience the real costs of “free” socialist proposals: they charge residents once in taxes and once at the register.

The post Mamdani’s First Marxist Mart Expected to Open Next Year appeared first on The Daily Signal.

The Democrat strategy is not subtle. Quinnipiac found that 65% of voters blame Trump at least somewhat for the recent rise in gas prices due to the Iran war, and Democrats think they have found their midterm jackpot issue. They hope if they can keep the conversation centered on pain at the pump, voters will forget their failures on the border, inflation, crime, and foreign policy. 

Former Vice President Kamala Harris is already blaming Trump for pain at the pump, calling it the “direct result” of his Iran policy.  

They are betting that temporary frustration will outweigh the larger truth Americans see: The world is dangerous, our enemies exploit weakness, and real leadership sometimes requires force even when markets react in the short term. Iran threatens global shipping lanes and destabilizes the world. 

However, voters are not convinced that weakness is strength or that retreat is leadership.  

We have seen this before. After Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, oil prices and gasoline costs rose as the Persian Gulf crisis shook global energy markets. Americans felt the pain, but history did not judge that moment by gas prices alone. It judged whether the United States had the strength to confront aggression at a critical moment. America led a coalition, drove Saddam out of Kuwait, and restored deterrence in the Gulf. President George H. W. Bush’s approval surged during and immediately after the Gulf War, rising from 64% before the war to 89% after victory. 

That history matters now because it exposes the Democrats’ biggest strategic flaw: they confuse costs with failure. National security decisions can carry economic consequences, but the real question is whether those costs are helping restore deterrence, protect global order, and make hostile regimes think twice before testing American resolve. Democrats refuse this debate because it exposes their weakness. Their playbook is to frame strength as escalation, deterrence as recklessness, and American power as a problem rather than a solution. 

Harris’ attack reveals how poorly the Democrats are misreading the electorate. They assume higher gas prices will immediately trigger voter backlash without asking what caused the increase, what alternatives exist, and what weakness costs the country. Gallup polled Americans in the war’s opening phase, from March 2-18, and found only 2% named gas prices as the nation’s top problem. 

Recent Fox polling reveals that voter concern about gas prices is high, but concern about inflation is even higher.

Voters are not looking at the pump in isolation. They are looking at energy costs against the questions of affordability, deterrence, and American strength. 

Voters cannot miss the hypocrisy. Democrats spent four years excusing historic inflation when it suited their politics. They backed policies that weakened confidence in American energy, from killing Keystone XL to pausing new federal oil and gas leases, ignored warnings about instability abroad, and dismissed deterrence as exaggerated concerns.  

Now, as the Iran war has temporarily pushed up gas prices, they want to pose as defenders of working families. They offer no real alternatives; they only hope short-term pain will erase the memory of their own failures. Voters are smarter than that. 

The truth is Democrats want a gas price panic because they cannot beat Trump on security. While the real debate is about Iran, deterrence, and American resolve, they would rather turn it into a referendum on a gas receipt than on leadership. But Americans know temporary pain is not the same as strategic failure. A party that confuses the two proves only one thing: It never understood strength in the first place. 

The post Democrats Want a Gas Price Panic Because They Cannot Beat Trump on Strength  appeared first on The Daily Signal.

After The Daily Signal reached out for comment, the group deleted its press release claiming to combat “disinformation,” and announced a pause in the program. The City of Boston, for its part, confirmed that it awarded a grant to the group, but explicitly stated that no taxpayer funds may be used for the program.

“OUTnewcomers, a grassroots LGBTQ+ migrant justice organization based in Greater Boston, announces the temporary pause of its wellness initiative, Project Belonging Matters,” the group posted in a press release after The Daily Signal reached out for comment Thursday.

OUTnewcomers claimed that the organization and its founder, Sal Khan, “received multiple death threats and threats of being reported to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement following the project’s public launch.”

The group does not suggest it checks documentation to ensure that migrants are legal when dispersing services.

The LGBTQ+ Migrants’ ‘Wellness’ Program

The organization launched the program on Tuesday with posts on Facebook and Instagram.

“Get $250-$500 for your well-being,” a poster states, advertising “Wellness Support for LGBTQ+ Migrants in Boston.”

The poster states four different potential uses for the funding: “Yoga & Meditation,” “Creative Healing,” “Peer Support,” and “Gym Memberships.” The poster says the program will give priority to “low-income, trans & isolated LGBTQ+ migrants in Boston,” with the proviso that “all funds must be used within the City of Boston.”

Combating ‘Disinformation’

After Mass Daily News and the Daily Mail reported on the program, OUTnewcomers published a press release countering what it called “disinformation” that “endangers LGBTQ+ migrants” in Boston.

The organization claimed the news outlets “did not follow ethical reporting standards,” but only suggested that the outlets wrongfully reported the $250-$500 payments.

“Our City of Boston-funded program is modest and need based,” the organization wrote. “It provides small vouchers of $50 or less to eligible LGBTQ+ migrants living in Boston to access limited wellness supports such as haircuts, acupuncture, or massage. The program is also intended to support local Boston businesses that welcome LGBTQ+ and migrant clients and workers.” (emphasis original)

The press release stated that the “hate-driven disinformation” “directly endangers” Khan and “puts vulnerable community members at greater risk.”

The Daily Signal reached out to the organization, seeking to clarify the size of the grants available and to verify whether the City of Boston funded them.

OUTnewcomers declined to comment to The Daily Signal and asked that The Daily Signal never contact the organization again.

Pausing the Program

After The Daily Signal reached out, OUTnewcomers removed the press release from its website and replaced it with the release announcing the pause.

“While we remain deeply committed to this work, the safety of our community must come first,” Khan, the organization’s founder, said in a statement on the pause. “We are taking this pause to assess risks and ensure that we can continue our mission in a way that protects those we serve.”

Boston’s Response

A spokesperson for the City of Boston confirmed that Beantown taxes had funded OUTnewcomers, but noted that none of the grant money may be allocated to the program in question.

“No funds have been distributed or directed for those purposes,” the spokesperson told The Daily Signal in a statement Thursday. “This organization received a $7,500 grant through a city program to support mental health services. Those funds were not designated for and may not be used for the voucher program referenced.”

The city’s budget for fiscal year 2026 allocated the funds, but the grant was cut from the fiscal year 2027 budget.

The post Boston LGBTQ Activist Group Flailing After Conservative News Reports on ‘Wellness’ Grants to Migrants, Funding Yoga, Haircuts appeared first on The Daily Signal.

In a 224-204 vote, the House passed a bill that would require the homeland security secretary to designate Haiti for Temporary Protected Status.

Haitians have had the designation in the United States since 2010, but the Trump administration has tried to terminate TPS, only to be blocked by federal courts.

The result of today’s vote was made possible by Republicans who broke with GOP leadership and voted “yes” on the measure.

“Who needs Democrats whenever you have a Republican tool vote for amnesty?” Rep. Brandon Gill, R-Texas, told The Daily Signal just after the vote.

“The House just voted to codify, effectively, President [Joe] Biden’s open-border policies for the Haitians,” he continued.

On Wednesday, six Republicans voted with Democrats to bring the measure to the floor. Even with pushback from the House Freedom Caucus, four more joined in breaking rank.

The six Republicans who voted to bring the bill to the floor included Reps. María Elvira Salazar and Carlos Giménez of Florida, Reps. Mike Lawler and Nicole Malliotakis of New York, Rep. Don Bacon of Nebraska, and Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania.

On Thursday, Republican Reps. Mike Turner and Mike Carey of Ohio, Rich McCormick of Georgia, and Mario Díaz-Balart of Florida joined them, along with independent Rep. Kevin Kiley of California. When votes were finalized, cheers could be heard outside the House chamber.

“Voters elected us to help the president mass-deport illegal aliens who are in our country,” Gill continued, noting that the president specifically called out the Haitian immigrant community as needing reform during the 2024 election.

“You don’t turn around and give those very same people we were voted to deport amnesty,” Gill said. “It’s just a great way to just piss in the face of our voters who elected us to actually keep our community safe and secure.”

Gill noted that 91% of Haitians protected under TPS originally came into the United States illegally, and 69% came during the Biden administration.

“It’s unacceptable to see some Republicans breaking ranks to advance this Democrat-led bill, betraying the mandate voters gave them and delivering de facto amnesty,” a Heritage Action spokesperson told The Daily Signal.

“Heritage Action will not support amnesty—no exceptions,” the spokesperson continued.

“That is what this bill is,” Gill told The Daily Signal. “It is de facto amnesty for people who came into the country illegally.”

The post Gill Blasts Republicans Who Voted to Keep Protected Status for Haitians appeared first on The Daily Signal.

“After four years of Bidenomics, we said enough,” House Republican Conference Chairwoman Lisa McClain, R-Mich., said. “So, we passed the Working Family Tax Cuts.”

McClain accused Democrats of mismanaging taxpayer dollars, saying they “advocate for waste, fraud, and abuse,” while asserting Republicans had provided meaningful relief to working families.

House Majority Whip Tom Emmer, R-Minn., echoed those remarks, saying additional tax relief is forthcoming.

“When [Joe] Biden took office, the economy was in ruins,” Emmer said. “For the last 15 months, we’ve worked hard to bring it back.”

“When Republicans govern, the American people win,” he continued. “And our work isn’t finished. We still have more to do.”

Emmer added that “every single Democrat” voted against the tax cuts and accused the media of spreading false claims about the bill, but said Republicans were still able to secure its passage.

House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, R-La., said the legislation disproved Democrat claims that only wealthy Americans would benefit.

“For the first time in a long time, families are seeing the benefit of the federal government,” Scalise said, rejecting what he called “lies” that the cuts would primarily help billionaires and millionaires. “In reality, it’s hardworking families.”

To underscore their claims, Republicans invited a guest speaker to describe how the tax cuts affected her personally.

Amber Benamati, a Metallus steelworker from New Philadelphia, Ohio, told attendees the Working Families Tax Cuts had delivered “real results for everyday Americans.”

“No taxes on overtime and no taxes on tips are real relief for working-class families,” she said.

She also praised President Donald Trump and congressional Republicans for getting the bill signed into law last July despite Democrat opposition.

The post Republicans Champion End of ‘Bidenomics’ on Tax Day appeared first on The Daily Signal.

Jack Fowler: So, Victor, you had shared with me a long thread off of X by Miad Maleki, I think. I’m sorry if I mispronounced your name, sir. And it’s 10 points about the success, the economic success, of the blockade, the U.S. blockade. Would you like to take that on, my friend? 

Victor Davis Hanson: I liked that article because it was analytical and empirical. 

What he was saying were certain aspects that people had forgotten. They are receiving in their aggregate income about, was it $430-something million a day, Jack, in oil? 

Fowler: Yeah.

Hanson: Oil, petrochemicals, and … 

Fowler: Let’s just to say the collective economic damage— 

Hanson: Yes. Collective, is that $435 million. 

And you can see how, because everything they have, from washing machines to tires, that has to be imported, and you can stop everything if you control the Strait of Hormuz. And everybody talks about, well, they have the Caspian Sea, or they have a port on the other side of the strait, like the Gulf of Oman. 

No. He points out that those are very minuscule areas of oil export. The big enchilada is Kharg Island. Unfortunately, for the Iranians, it’s way deep in the Persian Gulf. So, they came up with the idea, they want to blockade that, fine. And they say, “We’re only going to let pro-Iranian ships in,” fine. They don’t have the wherewithal to enforce that. If they send out their narcotic-like PT boats, the warthogs, they can destroy them. 

If they try to blanket the Gulf States and Israel with missiles, [Donald] Trump will lay the blow … He will just take out their dual-use generation and stuff, and that will stop that very quickly. So, what Trump basically did, Jack, is he said, OK, blockade—hmm, good idea, but you’re the wrong people blockading it. We’re going to have a blockade, but we’re going to borrow your idea that it’s selective. So, we’re going to flip it upside down. You say nobody but pro-Iranian people can come in. We’re going to say nobody but anti-Iranian are going to come in. So, any ship—and they’re going to have a problem with China because that’s 80% of the ships coming in to get the oil will be Chinese, but they’re going to have to turn back. 

That’ll be explosive if they try to do it. I think eventually Trump will do it, and China will get angry and we’ll see what happens. But we have the wherewithal to stop it.

And a couple things are going to happen, as he points out. They don’t have the storage capacity just to keep pumping oil and add it into Kharg Island big fuel storage depots, or into ships that are idle there. At some point, very quickly, in a matter of days, they’re going to fill all those things up.

And as he points out, with oil wells, if you just shut them down, they have to be maintained and they get water seepage. And it’s very hard and expensive to reboot them. 

It’s a very intricate process. And he said they’re not going to be able to have any petrochemical or oil income because they’re not diversified with their ports like the Saudis are or the Emirates.

And he made another good point, and I had written about that this morning, but I wrote it a couple of days ago, that they don’t understand the Gulf. They think it’s going to be forever 20% of the world’s oil leaves. And therefore, they are critical, because you’ve got to go close to their shore, and they’re going to interfere. And they just keep talking about that. 

And while they’re talking, they don’t see the world is changing, and it’s changing rapidly.

The Saudis now export most of their oil to the Red Sea. If the Houthis get orders to stop it, well, Trump bombed them for 56 days, and the Israelis and the Americans can shut down their power, their water, everything, if they try that. They’re going to build probably another pipeline to the Red Sea. 

They’re talking about building one across the desert through Jordan to Haifa, or near Jerusalem. They’re talking about expanding the one that already exists in the Gulf of Oman, where you could get the oil before you got near the Strait.

And at the same time, they think that nobody will touch their oil because it’s critical to the world price. Maybe, maybe not, one or 2 million barrels a day, but Ukraine and Russia are talking about a ceasefire. 

You put Russian oil at full capacity on the market. You put Venezuela, which is increasing every day, a little bit, their oil output, and Trump says he is going to have another million barrels. You could say to the Iranians, “as long as your regime is in power, you’re not going to export any oil—not today, not six months from now.” 

And the world economy would make the necessary adjustments, is what the writer is saying.

He’s basically telling us that it’s a political challenge to Donald Trump. They have counted on the Left to embolden them. So, their strategy is to indulge in accrued stereotype of the Middle East. They want to do a rug deal. And they want to barter and barter and barter and feign anger, and back and forth. 

And they want that to draw that out for three to four to five months. And they want the economy to stall, the world economy, and then they want the Left to come in and take the House and take the Senate and cut off funds and stop the war. 

I don’t think that’s going to happen. That’s their strategy. But what he’s trying to argue is that strategy requires a quiet population that can be intimidated, as it is now, but permanently so, and it requires some economic viability to survive. And they already can’t afford food, they can’t afford gas, they’re under attack, they’ve lost probably a half a billion dollars, half a trillion dollars in weapons and infrastructure that was accrued over 47 years. 

They can’t rebuild that, and they can’t give money to the Arab terrorists, there are three or four proxies, five proxies in Syria and Iraq and Lebanon and Gaza and Yemen, without angering further the population. 

As I said in this article, it’s one thing to tell the population, “Well, you don’t like us, but we restored the Iranian credibility. Everybody’s afraid of us. We’re the terror master.” And now the people are saying, “No, you’re not the terror masters of the Middle East. You’re a paper tiger. You’re buffoons. 

“They’ve wiped you out. We’re going down the toilet with you. This is what you did. Nobody’s afraid of you anymore. You’re a bunch of clowns.”

That is fatal to a dictatorship, to be humiliated and to be an object of ridicule. 

So, he points all of that out, I think, quite successfully, as did Michael Duran, who always has important things to say. He says seven myths about the Iranian war. 

So, I guess to sum up, the Left is in a bubble, and it’s all frenzied because Trump is under such criticism by Tucker Carlson or Megyn Kelly or Candace Owens, and they say, oh, the MAGA movement’s blowing apart. And everybody’s saying it’s lost. And they don’t look at the situation, you know. They don’t look at the actual military. It’s the most asymmetrical war in memory. 

And Trump can adjudicate when it starts and when it ends. And if he wants to take up the Iranian challenge, it’ll be very interesting when American warships go through there and they’ve completely demined the area, this week, and tankers follow them. And they start to bring in those little mosquito boats and see what happens. 

I think you’ll see a whole fleet of warthogs in the air, and they will blast them out of the water. And I think they’ll hit any missile within two or three minutes. They’ll know where it was launched, they’ll take that out. 

But they’re not going to stop there. They’re going to tell them, OK, you’re broke now. You’ve got $400 million in economic damage plus, per day. Wait till you don’t have any power. And that will really shake up things.

And somebody said, well, that would be inhumane. Well, then talk to Bill Clinton, because he shut down the power grid at Belgrade almost for a day or two every week, he did. And talk to Barack Obama. He shut down television stations in Libya, shut down the ports. He tried to do a lot of stuff. Which he said he didn’t do. So, there’s a long tradition of dual-use targeting. 

Fowler: Yeah. I mean, outside of war, we shut down the United States during COVID. 

Hanson: I will say something more controversial. I really like The Wall Street Journal, but I’m getting very, very disappointed. I look at the headline stories in the news section, and I can’t distinguish them from The New York Times. It’s all doom and gloom. Trump did this and this, this is this. Then I say to myself, at least the editorial page—I really like Dan Henninger, Barton Swaim. Is that it? He’s very— 

Fowler: Don’t forget Bill McGurn. 

Hanson: Don’t forget Bill. Yeah, but I love Bill McGurn. I like Holman Jenkins, Kimberly, of course. But today, Gerald Baker, whom I really like, he’s a very brilliant guy, but he has succumbed to the pessimism of the news stories. And he’s basically saying that war is lost or it’s not going well. And it’s just anti-empirical, to say that, given the great difference in damage. 

I can see that he’s upset with Trump’s exclamations, but that doesn’t disguise the fact that we’ve done so much damage to this Iranian military. And the economic damage hasn’t even taken its full toll yet. But it’s now at a crisis point, and they know it, and that’s why they wanted to negotiate. 

And their idea— 

Fowler: Inflation is nearly 50% there. 

Hanson: Yeah, they’re broke, and everybody said it was brilliant—nobody imagined they would close it. Now, they knew they were going to try that, but they don’t have the naval facilities to close it. Not against the U.S. Navy. And all they’re going to do is say, well, we’re going to close it. And the Americans said, well, we weren’t going to do that, but because you gave us the idea, or you think it’s OK, we’ll do it. 

But none of your friends are coming in, and all of your enemies are. And they’re all going to get oil from the Arab exporters. But they’re not going to get any from you. 

And so, it’s going to flip back on them.

We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal.

The post ‘Paper Tiger’ Exposed: Victor Davis Hanson on Trump’s Strategy Crushing Iran appeared first on The Daily Signal.

This is Victor Davis Hanson for The Daily Signal.  

The Left is making quite a deal of attention to what they call the anti-MAGA Right, that is former staunch supporters of [President] Donald Trump that have now parted ways with him. And the names that they fixate on, the Left, Marjorie Taylor Greene, who resigned from Congress after a big fight with Donald Trump over the Epstein files and the [Iran] war. 

Tucker Carlson, the former Fox host, news host, and now has become a fierce Trump critic. Megyn Kelly, who had a very successful Fox show herself and then went to NBC and now has a very successful podcast, and she seems to have parted ways with Donald Trump over the same issues as Marjorie Taylor Greene and Tucker Carlson. 

Then, of course, Joe Rogan has expressed disappointment. Perhaps he is now not in the MAGA fold. Candace Owens has been a virulent critic. Steve Bannon, I don’t know what his status is, but there’s a group of people. And then further to the right, of course, there’s the Groypers and Nick Fuentes and all those people.

But what was their beef? The first thing that seems to really bother them is the current war. I shouldn’t say the first thing. The first thing that bothered some of them was the summer 2025 attack by the United States for about 25 hours on the nuclear facilities in Iran. It was a one-off. Tucker Carlson said this was unnecessary. 

It could lead to World War III. It didn’t. It did retard the progression of nuclear acquisition. Then new information came in that they had much more ballistic missiles than had been anticipated. And there may have been other areas where they had stored nuclear material. So, then, that reopened negotiations this year to remove those peacefully. 

They didn’t work. And so, then the United States began, at the end of February, bombing, and now we’re in the sixth week and they feel that is a forever war and an endless war.

But it’s a very funny forever war, isn’t it? I mean, if you look at it, there’s been tragically 13 Americans killed, but it’s not 4,000 or 5,000, as we’ve seen in Iraq and Afghanistan, 7,000 total, perhaps another 20,000 casualties.

It’s an air war, almost exclusively an air war except for the rescue of the pilot, and it’s completely asymmetrical. We have destroyed, as people have said, their navy, except for their patrol boats, which I think will be destroyed shortly if they try to interrupt traffic any further in the Strait [of Hormuz]. 

We’ve destroyed their air force. We’ve destroyed their missile defense. We’ve taken out the first and second tier of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the regular army, the theocrats, and even some of the politicians. So, their command and control is in disarray, and we have suffered really no major downfall other than politics. 

The future of that war is entirely political. I mean, the United States is at liberty to do what it wants, whatever the military feels is necessary to disarm Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons and to stop its ballistic missile potential.

But it’s a political question. Just a question of what’s the effect on the world economy? 

What’s the effect on the American economy, and more importantly, how does that affect the midterms and the future of the Trump presidency? But people are conflating those and suggest that militarily it’s a defeat. That’s absurd.

What else did this new group of critics, this new old group of critics, get angry about? Trump tweeted that if, Iran had not met these conditions, and were not going to negotiate then he would, destroy their civilization. 

It was pretty poorly worded. And they felt that this was beneath him, beneath the United States. They joined the Left in saying that this was outrageous. The Left took him literally, not figuratively, but I don’t think anybody believed he meant all of the Iranian people.

And we know that because, of course, as I had said earlier, no president has avoided dual-use civilian targets as much as Trump. We didn’t do it in World War II. We hit every civilian target we could, from power plants to highways to water facilities to oil production in Germany and Japan. 

We did it again in Korea. We did it certainly in Vietnam. We took out all the bridges in the Danube in the 1999 bombing under [Bill] Clinton. And of course, we knocked out the power grid of Belgrade, a million and a half people several times. We did the same thing in Libya. We denied we did it, but we hit civilian ships, we hit port facilities, we hit TV stations. 

Trump hasn’t done that except for one bridge, so he didn’t really, I mean, his record shows that he doesn’t believe he wants to destroy the civilization. In fact, it’s just the opposite, and I think his critics know that, or he wouldn’t have said, help is on the way. Help is on the way. 

The whole subtext of this entire campaign is while regime change is not the primary agenda, he hopes that by weakening and humiliating this theocracy, then the people will rise up. And that is why he’s selected targets that would allow them to rise up and not hurt the people. 

So, was it an overstatement? Yes, but they should know better what he meant. Of course he did, because his deeds prove what he meant. 

So, what’s going on here? I think part of the problem is in the intimacy that some people on the Right have cultivated and developed with Trump. In other words. If you’re going to campaign with Trump, if you’re gonna be a regular visitor at Mar-a-Lago with Trump, if you’re gonna be an intimate of the family and if you’re gonna work with him and you’re a news person, then you feel… It’s apparently Steve Bannon felt that way. 

Maybe Tucker feels that way. Maybe Megyn feels that way. Maybe Marjorie Taylor Greene felt that way. But if you feel that you have a special relationship, then you feel downcast or betrayed because not only your president, but your friend and associate that you’d helped, didn’t quite agree with you, but that it’s always better to have some distance so you can be empirical. 

And if you’re empirical, then the question is: What’s the alternative to Donald Trump’s MAGA agenda? Because if you look at the border, it’s closed. If you look at illegal immigration, he has deported 500,000 criminals. Another million have self-deported, and he is in the process of probably finishing another 500,000 deportees. 

We should have two million. We’ve never done that before.

If you look at energy right now, the United States has never produced so much oil and gas, and we’re right on the verge of a nuclear energy renaissance, and we’re going in Alaska. We’re going offshore. We’re trying to get more oil and gas in California. For all practical purposes, at least for now, DEI is dead. 

No other president would’ve done that, this reverse racism or this tribal chauvinism that has so plagued the nation. Donald Trump ended that. He has put the universities on notice that they cannot continually defy civil rights laws and Supreme Court decisions. No one did that before. 

As far as transgenderism, they’re on the defensive now. The idea that biological men will dominate female sports and men with biological male characteristics will dress among women is over. 

So, what I’m getting at is this: All of these critics agree with what Donald Trump has done on 80% of the issues. At least their record says they do. So, why on one particular issue, in which you disagree, and it’s very doubtful that you can categorize this a forever or endless war. 

It’s much more in the flavor of the Venezuela, the [Qasem] Soleimani, the [Abu Bakr] al-Baghdadi, the ISIS bombing. It is not anything near fighting house to house in Fallujah or going into hostile villages in Helmand province. 

We’re not on the ground. We’re not fighting on the jihadist turf. We’re using our strength, air power and a distance from to mitigate casualties and inflict greater damage on the theocracy. 

It’s not a forever, endless war, and they know that.

So, if you are apostates from the whole Trump agenda because of your disagreement about this one particular issue, and you feel that he betrayed you because you categorize it a forever or endless war, which he promised to avoid, then you’re nullifying the entire agenda. 

And what is the alternative? A Kamala Harris agenda? I don’t know, an Eric Swalwell agenda? A Gavin Newsom agenda that’s antithetical to everything these people have stood for and lobbied for and advanced for?

And so, if you sit out the midterms, or you oppose Trump de facto, whether you know it or not, you are favoring the alternate agenda. 

And that agenda is something that, at least in your recent positions, you have adamantly opposed. 

We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal.

The post One Disagreement, Total Revolt? Victor Davis Hanson Calls Out MAGA’s New ‘Defectors’ appeared first on The Daily Signal.

“For as long as it takes, we will maintain this blockade. … But if Iran chooses poorly, then they will have a blockade and bombs dropping on infrastructure, power, and energy,” Hegseth said.

Since April 13, the United States has shifted from a strategy of military destruction to one of economic pressure in order to encourage an outcome in negotiations with Iran, intermediated by Pakistan.

“The War Department will ensure that Iran never has a nuclear weapon,” said Hegseth. “We prefer to do it the nice way through a deal led by our great vice president and negotiating team, or we can do it the hard way.”

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Dan Caine joined Hegseth and stressed that the United States was not blocking the Strait of Hormuz with a literal cordon of ships across, but rather targeting ships connected to Iranian commerce.

“This blockade applies to all ships regardless of nationality heading into or from Iranian ports. The U.S. action is a blockade of Iran’s ports and coastline, not a blockade of the Strait of Hormuz.”

He added that the U.S. “will actively pursue any Iranian-flagged vessel” in regions such as the Pacific.

Caine told reporters that the military is “ready to resume major combat operations at literally a moment’s notice.”

Hegseth also mentioned Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent’s sanctions campaign against Iran, known as “Operation Economic Fury,” saying it is “maximizing economic pressure.”

The post Hegseth: Blockade Will Force Iran to Negotiate or Perish appeared first on The Daily Signal.

That’s what the self-avowed socialist New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani thought was a clever answer to Margaret Thatcher’s famous line about the problem with socialism being that you run out of other people’s money.

He said it at his “first 100 days” bash on Sunday.

Maybe the quip makes sense to the young, woke voters in Mamdani’s base who think that they transcend history (or more likely don’t know anything about it). Perhaps they believe just as many previous generations of leftists did that True Socialism hasn’t been tried.

But it’s become clear after Mamdani’s first 100 days in office that the “New Era” he’s promised doesn’t look much different than the old era, and his ambitious agenda is quickly running into the hard reality that even in New York, wealth is finite.

The city didn’t instantly implode the moment Mamdani walked into office, though that’s a low bar for success. New York is much bigger than one man, even a very powerful one.

Yet, there are warning signs that not only will Mamdani’s leadership produce poor results, but that Gotham is looking at long-term deterioration if he governs as promised.

If there is one thing socialists have truly perfected over the years, it’s exploiting voter dissatisfaction—whatever the cause—and creating a mess of historic proportions.

No Free Bus

One of the signature promises of Mamdani’s campaign was that he would bring free buses to all residents in the city. That clearly isn’t happening this year and may never happen at all.

“Mamdani’s highly-touted demands for free buses has fallen to the wayside in both state and city budget proposals,” the New York Post reported in early April.

New York City Comptroller Mark Levine has warned that New York faces an over $7 billion deficit between this year and next, and it looks like the bus was a casualty of that budget gap. It didn’t help that the state relies on the revenue.

The best Mamdani could come up with was a limited, pilot program. Hardly a revolution.

And that’s almost certainly a good thing.

Kansas City, Missouri, tried a free bus program with federal COVID-19 relief money. What a scam that whole “pandemic relief” thing turned out to be, right? Once the federal money ran out, the local funding also quickly dried up. According to local residents, the New York Post reported, the buses became “unreliable, filthy, rolling homeless shelters.”

$30 Million Grocery Store … by 2029

Another one of Mamdani’s big promises was that he would open a government-run grocery store in each of New York City’s five boroughs, because you can’t truly experience the warmth of collectivism without a good old-fashioned bread line, right?

Mamdani announced during his first 100 days speech that the city would move forward with this awful idea by building a single store in East Harlem for $30 million and would finish all the stores by 2029, despite planning to burn through nearly half of the $70 million budget on this single location.

It’s a staggering amount of money to pay for a single store that will surely cost more to operate than it could ever make in profit.

But it makes total sense if you understand that Mamdani’s revolution is just to put the Democrat governing model on steroids.

I’ll make a few predictions here.

That dollar amount is just the beginning of the money that will be dumped into this project that is unlikely to even finish by 2029.

The money isn’t just being used to build the store, it’s to pay for all the union jobs and officials working on it. This will be New York City’s Grocery Store to Nowhere. Like the California “ghost” bullet train, the whole project is a cover to make sure the right people get paid rather than a serious project to create a functioning supermarket.

Disorder Increasing, Crime on Subway

While crime has generally been falling in New York and around the nation, there are worrying signs that urban disorder will drastically increase under Mamdani.

Mamdani blew his first serious test of governing when a big snowstorm pummeled New York shortly after he took office. Initially, Mamdani insisted that the homeless encampments wouldn’t be torn down and that the city’s homeless population wouldn’t be forced to go into shelters.

The mayor eventually backtracked on the city’s homeless sweeps but at least a dozen people died of exposure in the brutally cold temperatures.

Perhaps more worrying is the potential for crime to spike back up again. There was a major surge in violent crime on public transit in the first few months of the year. Robberies are up by 21% compared to last year, according to New York Police Department data.

There have also been a few high-profile violent crimes that highlight all that’s wrong with the Left’s governing philosophy. In March, an illegal alien shoved 83-year-old Air Force vet Richard Williams and another man onto the subway tracks. Williams later died of his injuries.

In April, a machete-wielding manic calling himself “Lucifer” stabbed three people before being shot and killed by police.

It seemed that at least a few of Mamdani’s diehard supporters were more upset with the NYPD than the man taking a hatchet to fellow New Yorkers.

If you wonder why it is that American cities have a crime problem, look no further than the mentality of that X post.

Springtime for Radicals

One final note about Mamdani’s early returns must be made.

On top of the poor policy decisions thus far, the new mayor has additionally surrounded himself with a collection of extremists and other sordid people.

Some of these radicals are serving in an official capacity, like his Marxist housing czar Cea Weaver, who publicly dreamed about impoverishing white, middle-class homeowners. The city’s new racial equity plan hardly dispels the notion that this is Mamdani’s goal too.

Mamdani invited anti-Israel activist Mahmoud Khalil to the governor’s mansion for Ramadan. The Syrian-born Khalil faces deportation by the Trump administration, which has accused him of being a Hamas supporter.

That’s hardly surprising given that Mamdani’s wife has a growing record of supporting antisemites and pro-Palestinian terrorists on social media. Mamdani insists she is a “private person.”

One way or another it suggests that Mamdani has no desire to moderate or “normalize” in his time as mayor.

There are other nodes of power in New York City that will contain Mamdani, some will encourage him, but it’s increasingly clear that, however things shape out in the coming years, the city will be worsened by his leadership. 

The post Mamdani’s Revolution Runs Into Hard Reality appeared first on The Daily Signal.

U.S. birth rates have been steadily declining for more than a decade now, and the total fertility rate (the number of births a woman is projected to have over her lifetime) has continued to hit new lows for several years.

The preliminary data released this month from the CDC suggest the downward trend in fertility continued in 2025. The birth rate dropped from 53.8 births per 1,000 women in 2024 to 53.1 in 2025, and the total number of births declined by 22,534.

Some media outlets and scholars say the drop in birth rates is good news, and that it is driven by declining teen births as well as by women in their 20s delaying relationships and motherhood until they are more financially and emotionally prepared. They argue births will be made up for down the road.

The reality is not so rosy, though. Teen births did decline, but the overall drop in the birth rate is driven mostly by a declining share of Americans marrying and forming families at all. Declining births among women in their 20s are not being made up for later on either, as marriage is delayed ever further into the life course.   

Examining the change in birth rates by age: 

• Birth rates among teenage young women dropped, particularly among older teens (ages 18-19).
• The largest decreases in birth rates were among women in their 20s.
• Birth rates among women age 30 and over increased, or in some cases remained steady (among women ages 45-54).

Yes, it is true that teen birth rates fell, which is good news, particularly when we are talking about minor-aged teens. But teen births are too small a share of total births these days to move the needle of the overall birth rate much at all. This is especially the case if you look only at births to minor-aged teen women, the group we should be most concerned about.

Teen births peaked in the early 1990s, after rising for several years. Since then, they have declined drastically, a positive and remarkable reversal. Today, teen births are a small fraction of U.S. births.

In fact, if we had only seen the declines in teen births while the birth rates among other women had remained stable (no decreases among women in their 20s and not even increases among women ages 30 and above), the overall birth rate would have remained nearly stable. 

What is happening is that an ever-increasing share of people are failing to marry and have children when they are in their prime childbearing years. With every passing year, the age of marriage increases, fewer people are marrying, and that leads to fewer children being born. Delayed marriage reduces the likelihood of ever marrying. Researchers project that roughly one-third of Gen Z will not have married by age 45 and may never marry at all. 

Married couples are much more likely to have children. The average number of children born to married couples has been steady for about three decades, although with some dip in the last few years. The drop in the birth rate is primarily driven by a decline in marriage rates.

While there has been a bump in births among women ages 30 and older—indicating that some of the decline in births to young women are delayed births rather than births foregone—the increase in births among women 30 and older are not enough to make up for the declines in births among younger women.

There are more consequences to declining marriage than fewer births, too.

Marriage is a good in itself. Marriage is one of the strongest factors associated with adult happiness and is also connected with increased household income, better health, and greater psychological well-being for adults.

Children raised in married-parent families also do better on these outcomes, as well as several others: greater educational attainment, lower delinquency rates, reduced likelihood of abuse.  

While there are some silver linings in the new birth rate data then, including declining teen births, the underlying story is much bleaker. It’s a story of declining marriage and family formation. This comes at great cost—including a shrinking future generation.

The post The Real Reason America’s Birth Rate Keeps Falling appeared first on The Daily Signal.

Several House Republicans, along with now-independent Rep. Kevin Kiley of California, joined Democrats in voting to bring a bill to the floor extending TPS for Haitians. Rep. Ayanna Pressley, D-Mass., secured 218 signatures to force consideration of the bill.

The Department of Homeland Security in November 2025 announced that it would terminate Haiti’s TPS designation. The move revoked legal protections for more than 350,000 Haitians to live and work in the U.S., Reuters reported.

“It is outrageous that six Republicans joined all Democrats to advance a vote extending Temporary Protected Status for illegal alien Haitians by another three years,” Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas, told The Daily Signal.

Republican Reps. Maria Elvira Salazar and Carlos Gimenez of Florida, Reps. Mike Lawler and Nicole Malliotakis of New York, Rep. Don Bacon of Nebraska, and Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania all joined Democrats on the vote.

Heritage Action, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization that champions conservative members like Roy, told The Daily Signal, “It’s unacceptable to see some Republicans breaking ranks to advance this Democrat-led bill, betraying the mandate voters gave them and delivering de facto amnesty.”

Roy pointed to the case of Rolbert Joachin, a Haitian national who entered the United States under the Biden administration. He applied for and was granted TPS after receiving a final order of removal in 2022, but was recently charged with the killing of a Florida gas station worker. Joachin pleaded not guilty to charges of homicide and property damage, the Fort Myers News-Press and Naples Daily News reported Wednesday.

The alleged attack, which Roy said was a byproduct of a “reckless decision” from the Biden administration, was captured on surveillance video.

”Americans are still grappling with the devastating consequences of the Biden border crisis, including the brutal murder of a Florida mother allegedly by a Haitian illegal alien reportedly allowed to remain here under TPS on President Biden’s watch,” Roy added.

Rep. Josh Brecheen, R-Okla., said the push to extend TPS reflects a broader pattern of prioritizing illegal immigrants over American citizens.

Roy and Brecheen also argued that repeatedly renewing Temporary Protected Status undermines the program’s original intent as a temporary humanitarian measure.

“TPS was first granted to Haitians following an earthquake in 2010, and today, 16 years later, it is still in place,” Brecheen told The Daily Signal. “Sixteen years is not temporary.”

“Temporary should mean temporary, and it is long past time these illegal aliens return to their home country for good,” Roy added.

Rep. Randy Fine, R-Fla., told The Daily Signal he opposes any congressional effort he views as granting amnesty, including the Haitian TPS bill.

“I will never vote for amnesty,” Fine said. “I don’t care if you got here last week, last month, last year, or 30 years ago.”

In a prior interview with The Daily Signal, Fine argued that enforcing immigration laws would lower costs for Americans.

“It’s not just about political values or reducing crime,” Fine said. “It’s about making housing more affordable, reducing health care costs, shrinking the size of our education system, and making insurance affordable.”

The post ‘16 Years Is Not Temporary’: Freedom Caucus Members Want TPS Ended for Haitians appeared first on The Daily Signal.

Trump said in a social media post that the ceasefire would start at 5 p.m. EST, aiming to halt a conflict between Israel and the Iran-aligned Lebanese group Hezbollah that was reignited by the U.S.-Israeli war against Iran.

He said he had held “excellent conversations” with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Lebanese President Joseph Aoun.

“These two Leaders have agreed that in order to achieve PEACE between their Countries, they will formally begin a 10 Day CEASEFIRE at 5 P.M. EST,” he said. “Both sides want to see PEACE, and I believe that will happen, quickly!”

Trump said he had directed Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Dan Caine to work with the two countries to achieve lasting peace.

The war with Iran spilled into Lebanon on March 2, when Hezbollah opened fire in support of Tehran, prompting an Israeli offensive in Lebanon just 15 months after the last major conflict.

Breakthrough on ‘Sticky Issues’ Between US and Iran

Hopes of a deal between Iran and the United States have also been growing after nearly seven weeks of war.

A security source said a Pakistani mediator had made a breakthrough on “sticky issues,” although Tehran said the fate of its nuclear program had not been resolved.

The United States and Pakistan have been talking up prospects for a deal after nearly seven weeks of war, with Trump saying the accord would open the Strait of Hormuz, through which a fifth of the world’s oil and gas supply flows. 

Closure of the strait has caused the worst oil price shock in history and forced the International Monetary Fund to downgrade its outlook for the global economy, warning prolonged conflict could push the world to the brink of recession. 

Pakistan’s army chief and Field Marshal Asim Munir, an important figure in mediation efforts, arrived in Tehran on Wednesday to try to prevent a renewal of the conflict after talks in Islamabad that ended without a deal.

A senior Iranian official told Reuters on Thursday the trip had led to greater hopes for a second round of talks and an extension of a two-week ceasefire, but said fundamental differences remain over its nuclear program.

The war began with U.S.-Israeli attacks on Iran on Feb. 28, triggering Iranian attacks on Iran’s Gulf neighbors and reigniting the Israel-Hezbollah conflict.

Thousands of people have been killed, mostly in Iran and Lebanon. Soaring energy costs have rattled investors and policymakers globally.

Originally published by Reuters

The post Trump Says Israel and Lebanon Agree on Ceasefire, Optimism Grows on Ending Iran War appeared first on The Daily Signal.

Rollins’ tenure as district attorney was marked not by justice, but by a radical prosecutorial philosophy that prioritized ideology over public safety, culminating in a disgraceful resignation after a damning federal report.

As Boston faces the prospect of Rollins’ return, it is critical to examine her record, her policies, and the grave implications for the city and the nation if we ignore the lessons of her past.

Rollins’ Tenure as DA

When Rollins first assumed office as Suffolk County district attorney in 2018, she immediately made waves by publishing “The Rachael Rollins Policy Memo,” an unprecedented document that listed 15 crimes for which prosecution would generally be declined.

The memo was a blueprint for radical non-prosecution, fundamentally altering the role of the district attorney from enforcing the law to selectively ignoring it.

Among the offenses Rollins chose to overlook were trespassing, shoplifting, larceny, disorderly conduct, disturbing the peace, receiving stolen property, driving offenses, breaking and entering, malicious destruction of property, threats, minor in possession of alcohol, drug possession, resisting arrest, and even resisting arrest if the underlying charge was one of the other 14 listed crimes.

This sweeping policy sent a message: accountability for criminal behavior was optional, not mandatory, in Suffolk County.

Rollins’ approach wasn’t merely a departure from tradition—it was a rejection of the very purpose of prosecution.

The memo’s rationale, couched in the language of social justice, ignored the tangible consequences for victims and communities. Instead of deterring crime, it emboldened offenders, fostered lawlessness, and undermined the public’s confidence in the justice system.

Her memo was not a nuanced exercise in prosecutorial discretion—it was a wholesale abdication of responsibility.

By refusing to prosecute crimes like shoplifting and larceny, Rollins effectively gave a green light to petty theft and property crime. The decision to decline prosecution for breaking and entering and malicious destruction of property signaled to would-be criminals that they could violate the sanctity of homes and businesses with impunity. Even offenses like drug possession, resisting arrest, and threats were swept under the rug, eroding the deterrent effect of the law and leaving victims without recourse.

The consequences were predictable. Businesses faced soaring losses from theft, neighborhoods wrestled with rising disorder, and police officers found themselves demoralized and constrained by policies that made enforcement futile.

Rollins’ memo wasn’t just misguided, it was dangerous. It demonstrated a fundamental misunderstanding of the district attorney’s role: to protect the public, not to experiment with unproven theories that put communities at risk.

Biden Makes Her US Attorney

The radical prosecutorial philosophy embodied by Rollins didn’t end with her tenure as district attorney.

In a move that should have alarmed anyone paying attention, then-President Joe Biden nominated Rollins to serve as U.S. attorney for the district of Massachusetts.

This was a clear signal that the administration favored the George Soros-backed model of rogue prosecution—a model that prioritizes nonenforcement, ideological activism, and disregard for the rule of law.

The Senate confirmation process was contentious, with many senators raising concerns about Rollins’ record and suitability for federal office.

Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., gave a seven-minute speech at her Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, essentially echoing what we had been saying for years about Rollins. 

Ultimately, Rollins was confirmed only after then-Vice President Kamala Harris broke a 50-50 Senate tie, underscoring the divisive nature of her nomination.

This episode was not just a political drama but a warning. When the highest levels of government are willing to embrace radical prosecutors, whose records are marred by controversy and failure, the consequences for American justice are profound.

Egregious Ethical Lapses and Resignation

Rollins’ tenure as U.S. attorney was short-lived, but not before she became the subject of one of the most damning ethics investigations in recent memory.

On May 17, 2023, the U.S. Department of Justice Office of the Inspector General and the Office of Special Counsel released a report detailing Rollins’ serious ethical lapses and violations of the Hatch Act. The report described Rollins’ conduct as “among the most egregious ever investigated,” highlighting her misuse of official resources, improper political activity, and flagrant disregard for federal ethics rules.

The findings were unequivocal.

Rollins had abused her position, undermined the integrity of the office, and violated the trust placed in her by the public.

The report was not just a critique—it was an indictment of her judgment, temperament, and fitness for public service. The severity of the violations left no room for ambiguity: Rollins was unfit to serve as a prosecutor, let alone at the highest levels of federal law enforcement.

In the wake of the Justice Department and the Office of Special Counsel report, Rollins resigned in disgrace, leaving a legacy of controversy and ethical failure. Her departure was met with relief by those who had witnessed the erosion of prosecutorial standards under her leadership. For the citizens of Massachusetts and Boston, the episode was a painful reminder of the risks posed by radical prosecutors who place ideology above law, and ambition above integrity.

Public reaction was swift and critical. Community leaders, law enforcement officials, and policy advocates called for a return to prosecutorial standards that prioritize safety, accountability, and ethics. The damage done by Rollins’ tenure was not easily repaired, but her resignation offered an opportunity to restore trust and reaffirm the principles that should guide the office of the district attorney.

Suffolk County—and Boston—deserves a real district attorney, not more of the same failed soft-on-crime polices. The citizens of Suffolk County deserve a prosecutor who puts their safety first, who respects the rule of law, and who embodies the integrity the office demands.

The post Rachael Rollins’ Return: A Warning for Boston and American Justice appeared first on The Daily Signal.

Over the weekend, NBC News reported that Ohio’s former health director shattered a mirror pulled off the wall during a “verbal argument” with her husband.

Acton, who ran the Ohio Department of Health at the time, admitted to Bexley, Ohio, police that she had been drinking. The police report stated the verbal argument was over “her extended work hours” and that there was no evidence of physical violence.

That incident is sparking chatter in Ohio and elsewhere as she runs for governor.

Ohio Republican Party Chairman Alex Triantafilou told The Daily Signal it’s a story that will “be in the minds of the voters.”

The story not only attracted the attention of many Ohioans, but also Donald Trump Jr., who referred to Acton on X as a “Leftwing psychopath.”

Vivek Ramaswamy, who is running for governor as a Republican, reposted Trump’s comment to his account, as did his pick for lieutenant governor, state Sen. Rob McColley.

NBC News reported that Acton’s campaign “disputed and sought to clarify several elements of the police report,” pointing out that she had one drink at dinner. During the incident, Acton “bumped into a wall hanging which fell,” the campaign told NBC News.

ABC News 5 spoke with Acton’s pick for lieutenant governor, David Pepper, who called the public reaction “sort of a desperate attempt to try and tear Amy Acton down.” Pepper characterized the situation as “a simple argument.”

Matt Dole, a crisis public relations consultant, told The Daily Signal that the Acton campaign so far has delivered “a brutally bad crisis communications response.”

He specifically took issue with the lack of transparency from the Acton campaign, noting that Pepper is the one responding.

“The first rule of crisis communications is to be transparent, because the cover-up becomes worse than the original crime,” Dole said.

He added that he would have advised Acton to share the story on the day she was announcing her run for governor, so “when it came out, it wouldn’t have been a big deal.”

Gov. Mike DeWine, R-Ohio, whom Acton worked under as health director, apparently did not know about the incident prior to the news report.

“Governor DeWine was unaware of both the 2019 incident and associated police report involving Dr. Acton,” Dan Tierney, the governor’s spokesperson, said in a statement. “The governor holds his staff to the highest standards of conduct. Given that the allegations in the report are deeply troubling, Governor DeWine would have expected Dr. Acton to have at that time promptly disclosed this to him, and he is very disappointed that it did not occur.”

DeWine told ABC News 5, “I don’t know what happened. I was not there. The only thing that I have said is that I wish she had reported that to us, just the police coming to a house, whatever the facts are.”

Pepper said he did not see a need for Acton to have made the dispute public. “I think most people, when they have a private personal argument with their spouse, aren’t necessarily telling their boss about that,” he said.

Dole said in not disclosing it, “she has now made it an issue in this campaign.”

“If she had disclosed it to DeWine or disclosed it on the day she announced, it would not be an issue in the campaign,” Dole predicted.

The Acton campaign has not responded to The Daily Signal’s request for comment.

Triantafilou told The Daily Signal that Acton “should have” told DeWine, and that “Ohioans should be very alarmed” she didn’t.

“The question is, what else is she hiding from Ohioans at this point?” he added.

Triantafilou also took the opportunity to praise the likely Republican nominee.

“We think we’ve got a far better candidate in Vivek Ramaswamy,” Triantafilou said. “Our candidate is working extraordinarily hard, is going to be very well-funded, and I think there ought to be a robust conversation here about who ought to lead Ohio.”

Dole said Acton’s response speaks to her experience: “All of this points to what we know of Amy Acton. She is not a politician, and she is not ready for prime time.”

The post Amy Acton ‘Domestic Dispute’ Report Stirring Up Ohio Governor’s Race appeared first on The Daily Signal.

These groups acted like deputized secret police, compiling dossiers on pro-life activists—including personal details like addresses and the names of their children—reporting on their activity to the DOJ, and laying out the road map for legal charges against them.

These eye-opening revelations come from the Justice Department under President Donald Trump, which released an exhaustive report Tuesday outlining the way the previous administration weaponized the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act to target pro-life protesters. The revelations build on the research from my book “The Woketopus: The Dark Money Cabal Manipulating the Federal Government,” fleshing out the exact way in which far-left activist groups dictated policy in the Biden administration.

The report doesn’t just reveal the previous administration’s extreme bias against pro-lifers, but also how abortion activist groups effectively carried out law enforcement functions on the government’s behalf, without any democratic accountability.

The National Abortion Federation

As I noted in “The Woketopus,” the Biden Justice Department appears to have adopted the mindset of the National Abortion Federation, which tracks threats, violence, and incidents of “stalking” at abortion facilities across the country. Little did I know, the federation hadn’t just inspired the Biden administration’s mindset but fed information on potential targets to a federal task force.

Attorney General Merrick Garland resurrected the National Task Force on Violence Against Reproductive Health Care Providers, which he charged with investigating potential FACE Act violations. The task force, mostly staffed by career attorneys from the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, developed a close working relationship with the National Abortion Federation.

Sanjay Patel, the task force director, worked with NAF’s security team, and he described the team’s director, Michelle Davidson, as an “MVP” in bringing incidents to his “attention, often in real time, which usually result in an investigation/ prosecution.” Patel regularly communicated with NAF, Planned Parenthood Federation of America, and the Feminist Majority Foundation.

By contrast, Patel and his task force mostly kept pro-life groups at arm’s length. According to the report, the Biden DOJ even refused to hand over evidence to pro-life defendants, evidence the office shared with pro-abortion activists.

Dossiers on Pro-Lifers

According to the report, Patel “monitored” pro-life activists for years before charging them. The National Abortion Federation sent him “security reports” or “dossiers” on pro-life activists.

For instance, NAF sent the Justice Department a 135-page report on an Operation Save America convention in June 2021, complete with a conference schedule, lodging, and multipage dossiers on “anti-choice individuals,” many of whom Trump would pardon after the Biden DOJ brought FACE Act charges against them. The dossiers contained personal information, such as addresses, photographs of the pro-lifers with their spouses and minor children, names of associates and affiliated ministries, and even driver’s license numbers.

The guide’s information about prior arrests ultimately formed the basis for later FACE Act charges.

The National Abortion Federation informed Patel “in real time” about ongoing protests, “often before local law enforcement could fully respond,” the report states. “At his request, NGOs compiled evidence that ultimately gave rise to search warrants and charges.”

In other words, NAF provided surveillance of pro-life activists, tipped the DOJ off to their activities, and even provided roadmaps for charging documents.

The report even notes that, in the Biden administration, federal prosecutors tried to screen out jurors based on religion. In one email, a prosecutor complained of “a very Catholic magistrate on duty this week” who “was very particular about the bond conditions and not infringing on [defendants’] First Amendment rights.”

Helping Activists Raise Money

Even before Patel worked with abortion groups to target pro-lifers, he had agreed to serve as a reference to help the National Abortion Federation raise money.

In December 2020, NAF’s Security Director Tara Gannon asked Patel if one of his colleagues would agree to be a reference, as the federation was seeking a grant from the Lisa and Douglas Goldman Fund. While Patel first asked his colleague if she would be a reference, he later agreed to do so himself.

NAF sought the grant to “help cover the costs of security activities within our department,” including “travel costs to provide member training—active shooter, bomb threats, domestic violence in a reproductive health setting, etc.”

The fund awarded NAF a $100,000 grant in 2022 for the “Security and Safe Access Program, to help reproductive health clinics and providers counter anti-abortion harassment and violence.”

What Does This Mean?

While law enforcement can and should receive and investigate tips from the public, this report shows that Biden’s Justice Department went much further than following up on reports about wrongdoing.

Throughout its four years, the Biden administration outsourced much of its thought work to the infrastructure of the Left, deputizing radical activist groups that occasionally acted like agents of the state. These activist groups, bankrolled by the Left’s dark money network, called many of the shots in the federal government. This vast influence campaign acted like an octopus, weaving its woke tentacles to control the levers of the federal bureaucracy.

While Trump has done yeoman’s work to dismantle this influence network, the Left’s infrastructure remains. In fact, many of the woke bureaucrats I exposed in “The Woketopus” have moved from government back to the leftist NGOs from whence they came. In other words, the Woketopus remains a threat, and a potential future Democrat administration may seek to resurrect the same cozy relationship with the Left.

The post WOKE INFILTRATION: The Deep Scandal Behind the Biden DOJ Targeting Pro-Lifers appeared first on The Daily Signal.

“America last” Republicans like Rep. Maria Elvira Salazar, R-Fla., the original co-sponsor of the bill and daughter of Cuban immigrants, refuse to recognize what the American people mandated the Trump administration to do—carry out mass deportations.

For starters, the acronym of the bill name is in Spanish, which is not the official language of the U.S. Naming an amnesty bill in a foreign language is a slap in the face to Americans, and a member of Congress legislating on behalf of the illegal immigrant population is disloyal to America.

The DIGNIDAD Act has been drafted to give legal status to at least 13 million illegal immigrants who have been in the U.S. for many years because removing them or encouraging them to self-deport is supposedly unkind and a threat to their dignity as human persons. However, the dignity of the American citizen was never accounted for as this bill was drafted (or, frankly, any time amnesty is considered).

Failing to mass deport is already tacit amnesty, but codifying amnesty in legislation is a direct contradiction of immigration law and only encourages the next wave of illegal immigration.

There are multiple types of amnesty in the DIGNIDAD Act. First, “DREAMer” amnesty would be granted to the estimated 2.5 million illegal aliens who entered the U.S. as minors. Under this amnesty, the person would be given 10 years of conditional status, then full permanent residence would be available to them, the precursor to U.S. citizenship.

Second, the act establishes the Dignity Program, which would give around 11 million illegal aliens who have been in the U.S. since before Dec. 31, 2020—prior to former President Joe Biden’s border crisis—amnesty. Illegal aliens benefiting from this receive renewable legal status, work authorization, and the ability to travel in and out of the U.S. as they please. The only condition is that they check in every two years.

Third, amnesty is given to illegal alien spouses and children of U.S. citizens.

In addition to amnesty, the bill inhibits use of information provided in DIGNIDAD benefit applications from being used for immigration enforcement. This would repeat a terrible policy from the 1986 amnesty law that only fostered fraud.

The bill would prevent immigration enforcement actions from occurring in or near an overbroad list of “protected areas,” including places where children gather, where ceremonies like weddings occur, medical health facilities, and courthouses, among others.

The DIGNIDAD Act wouldn’t just gut immigration enforcement; it would also increase and expand legal immigration benefits. The bill would double employment-based visas and codify the foreign student-to-employee pipeline by allowing all “temporary” foreign students to remain permanently in the U.S. It would codify the Optional Practical Training program, which incentivizes employers to hire foreign graduates instead of American graduates, and allow STEM Ph.D. and medical students to self-petition for both temporary and permanent visas.

America’s immigration system is for Americans, but the DIGNIDAD Act is for the rest of the world.

The current push for this bill is to put conservatives on defense, opposing amnesty, instead of being on offense, advocating for mass deportations and other, better legislation that would actually enforce our immigration laws and prevent noncitizens from voting in our federal elections.

The DIGNIDAD Act defies the will of the American people. That is undignified.

The post Americans Want Mass Deportations, Not Amnesty appeared first on The Daily Signal.

“I’m here to confirm the identity of our shooter in this murder-suicide that happened several hours ago as former Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax,” Fairfax County Police Chief Kevin Davis said in a press conference Thursday morning. “Fairfax shot and killed his wife inside of their home and then shot and killed himself.”

“This has been an ongoing domestic dispute surrounding what seems to be a complicated or messy divorce,” he added.

Fairfax reportedly shot and killed his wife in the basement, then went to his bedroom and shot and killed himself. The former lieutenant governor had accused his wife of assaulting him in January, but when police investigated, they found that “the alleged assault never occurred,” the chief explained.

The couple’s teenage son and daughter were at home at the time, police said.

Davis said the shooting was “certainly a traumatic event for those children to live through.”

The police chief described the shooting as a “fall from grace for a relatively high-profile family.” He described it as “tragic for the children to lose both parents,” and “extra tragic” that they were in the home when it happened.

Fairfax served as Virginia’s lieutenant governor from 2018 to 2022, alongside Gov. Ralph Northam.

Two women accused Fairfax of sexual assault in 2019. Vanessa Tyson accused Fairfax of forcing her to perform oral sex in 2004. Meredith Watson accused him of raping her in 2000, when both were at Duke University. Both accusers are black, as was Fairfax.

Fairfax compared the accusations to lynching, and denied the accusations in both cases. He married his wife Cerina in 2006.

“My heart goes out to the Fairfax family today, particularly the children,” former Attorney General Jason Miyares, a Republican, wrote on X. “For anyone struggling with this kind of darkness, the most courageous thing you can do is ask for help. There is more help and friendship out there than we realize.”

He quoted Isaiah 41:10: “So do not fear, for I am with you; do not be dismayed, for I am your God. I will strengthen you and help you; I will uphold you with my righteous right hand.”

This is a breaking news story and may be updated.

The post BREAKING: Former Dem Lt. Gov. Found Dead in Apparent Murder-Suicide, Police Confirm appeared first on The Daily Signal.

The president on Tuesday announced on Truth Social that he was endorsing Air Force veteran and former CIA officer Eric Conroy for Ohio’s 1st Congressional District.

He drew a strong contrast between Conroy and Democrat incumbent Rep. Greg Landsman, noting that “Eric Conroy is one of the strongest Republican Candidates in the Country, whereas the current Congressman, Greg Landsman, is a weak Radical Left Democrat, who puts our Country, and Safety, LAST. Eric, on the other hand, will ALWAYS put Ohio, and America, FIRST.”

Conroy pinned Trump’s endorsement on X as he thanked the president for the “honor” of his support.

“I am honored to have President Trump’s endorsement,” Conroy also said in a statement. “The President fights every day for the forgotten men and women of this country, and I will do exactly that every day in Congress for the commonsense, hardworking people of southwest Ohio.”

That same day, Conroy reposted on X the announcement of a joint House Republican leadership endorsement from Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La.; House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, R-La.; House Republican Conference Chairwoman Lisa McClain, R-Mich.; and House Majority Whip Tom Emmer, R-Minn.

Conroy was previously endorsed by Sens. Cynthia Lummis, R-Wyo., and Bernie Moreno, R-Ohio.

On Wednesday afternoon, Conroy touted his fundraising success as proof of his leadership.

“Winning this seat isn’t about making a statement—it’s about having the resources, the record, and the toughness to take the fight to Greg Landsman and win,” Conroy said in a statement. “These numbers prove this campaign has what it takes.

“Republicans can’t afford a charity case asking Washington to save us in the fall. There are too many races competing for money. We need a candidate who can raise the money, lead the charge, and force national groups to invest in this race.”

Though Landsman was once seen as enjoying a healthy advantage in the race, redrawn maps for 2026 have given Republicans a stronger position than in previous years.

Trump lashed out against Landsman and his record, calling the congressman “a true Radical Left Extremist who does not represent the Values of Southwest Ohio and the Great City of Cincinnati.” He cited the lawmaker’s positions on borders, men playing in women’s sports, LGBTQ+ issues, and defunding police.

“Sadly, Greg also voted against the Biggest Tax Cut in History, and fought ferociously against my America First Trade Policies, most specifically TARIFFS, which charge other Countries for access to our Markets while protecting our important Industries, and strengthening our Supply Chains,” Trump added.

Conroy took aim at Landsman’s liberal record as well.

“Greg Landsman voted against the largest tax cut in American history, he wants to defund [Immigration and Customs Enforcement], supported defunding the police, and voted to allow transgender men to compete in girls’ sports. Landsman’s radical agenda is out of touch with Southwest Ohio,” the candidate said.

Last week, however, the Cook Political Report changed Ohio’s 1st Congressional District race from “Toss-Up” to “Lean D.”

The Daily Signal reached out to Landsman’s campaign regarding Trump’s post and endorsement of Conroy. The campaign did not immediately return a request for comment.

The president also announced other endorsements in key House races, including in California’s 48th Congressional District, Georgia’s 1st and 10th Congressional Districts, Nebraska’s 2nd Congressional District, New Mexico’s 2nd Congressional District, Washington’s 3rd Congressional District, and Nevada’s 1st and 3rd Congressional Districts.

The post Trump Makes Endorsement in Key House Race appeared first on The Daily Signal.

The move comes after the first lady made a rare trip to Capitol Hill on Wednesday, where she addressed members of the House Ways and Means Committee and urged Congress to put her foster care initiatives into law.

“New legislation for the foster care community is a moral imperative,” Trump told the committee.

Daines, along with co-sponsor Sen. Maggie Hassan, D-N.H., will bring the Foster Youth Education and Workforce Opportunity Act to the Senate.

The bill incorporates language from a November presidential executive order expanding educational opportunities for children in the foster care system, and it creates additional workforce pathways for those transitioning out of care.

“One of the greatest gifts that we can give our children is the opportunity to succeed,” Daines told The Daily Signal.

“Unfortunately, foster youth aging out of the system often lack access to the education and workforce training needed to build a career, especially in rural states like Montana,” he added.

Each year, more than 20,000 children age out of the foster care system and face barriers to employment and education. By their mid-20s, former foster youth earn roughly 50% less than their peers.

The legislation would expand education and training vouchers from $5,000 to $12,000 annually and allow the funds to be used more flexibly for apprenticeships and technical education. The bill also targets challenges in rural states, including transportation gaps and complex application processes.

“My goal is to prepare these individuals to secure entry-level jobs, become financially independent, and eventually innovate, create new businesses, and generate employment opportunities,” Trump said during the committee hearing.

“Our bill will support the first lady’s efforts to improve pathways to success for America’s foster youth and set them up for a bright future,” Daines said. “I’ll fight to get it across the finish line.”

Daines noted that companion legislation has been introduced in the House by Reps. Nathaniel Moran, R-Texas; Max Miller, R-Ohio; Dwight Evans, D-Pa.; and Judy Chu, D-Calif.

The post EXCLUSIVE: Daines Moves to Revamp Foster Care System appeared first on The Daily Signal.

The Stopping Wasteful Allowances for Lawmaker Wrongdoing and Ensuring Legal Liability Act would prohibit the use of taxpayer dollars to settle sexual harassment and other misconduct claims involving members of Congress and senior staff.

“For decades, the swamp in Washington, D.C., has protected its own—letting corrupt politicians bury misconduct behind closed doors while sticking taxpayers with the bill,” Gosar wrote in a press release. “That ends now. If a member of Congress or professional staff breaks the law or abuses their position, they should pay the price themselves, not the American people, and not in secret.”

Gosar introduced the bill after Rep. Eric Swalwell, D-Calif., was accused by multiple former staffers of sexual harassment, and one instance, rape. Critics have accused the Congressional environment of shielding Swalwell from his allegations.

The measure is cosponsored by Reps. Andy Biggs of Arizona, Lauren Boebert of Colorado, Tim Burchett of Tennessee, Buddy Carter of Georgia, Randy Fine of Florida, and Anna Paulina Luna of Florida. It would eliminate what critics have described as a congressional “slush fund” used to resolve misconduct claims with public money.

Under the bill, lawmakers and certain congressional staff would be required to certify under oath that they did not use taxpayer funds to settle claims. The legislation would bar the use of federal dollars for such settlements and require those found liable to pay all costs out of pocket, with no reimbursements, campaign funds, or pass-throughs.

In February, Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, R-Fla., introduced a similar effort, which would have ended the taxpayer “slush fund.” Her effort overwhelmingly failed.

Gosar’s proposal would also create a public, searchable database listing lawmakers and staff who settled claims or were found liable, including the amount paid and the nature of the misconduct, while maintaining protections for victims. In addition, the bill would disclose all taxpayer funded settlements dating back to 1995.

The legislation further requires that allegations involving potential criminal conduct be referred directly to the Department of Justice, prohibiting nondisclosure agreements or internal resolutions that prevent referral. Those who attempt to circumvent the law would face enhanced penalties, including double damages and mandatory ethics investigations enforced by the attorney general.

“This is about ending the two-tiered system in Washington, D.C., where politicians play by their own rules,” Gosar said. “The SWALWELL Act restores accountability, enforces transparency, and makes it clear: If you betray the public trust, you will be exposed, and you will pay for it.”

The post SWALWELL Act Aims to Deliver a ‘Blow’ to DC ‘Culture of Corruption’ appeared first on The Daily Signal.

The state Senate shoehorned this tax hike via a Democrat-sponsored amendment into a House bill that covers a royalty agreement with Marathon Petroleum Corporation. The amendment would impose a top marginal tax rate of more than 9% on privately held oil companies, as opposed to publicly traded ones like ExxonMobil or Marathon.

It’s a messy change to Alaska’s tax system that would impose significant costs on privately held energy producers, called S corps, which have strict limits on the number of owners or shareholders. They’re often much smaller than their publicly traded brothers, the C corps. The tax hike would impose the higher taxes of C corps onto certain S corps in Alaska.

Of course, the state Senate didn’t bother vetting the knock-on effects of such a change, and no one provided any empirical modeling of the economic impact. Members of Alaska’s Legislature aren’t even sure which companies in the state would be impacted—further evidence that this change hasn’t been adequately contemplated.

Rewriting Alaska’s corporate tax code would create tremendous uncertainty in the oil sector, which already faces significant structural challenges, including declining production from mature fields, limited lease availability, and the high costs associated with exploration and development.

After years of stagnation and decline, oil production is finally projected to increase, with the U.S. Energy Information Administration forecasting growth in 2026. But that forecast is not a foregone conclusion.

Oil and gas investment is highly sensitive to policy changes, particularly for S corps that are very responsive to tax treatment when financing capital-intensive projects like oil development.

Imposing new taxes on these entities risks undermining the very investment needed to sustain and grow Alaska’s energy output and its economy. The solution to a so-called revenue shortfall is not to hike taxes, but to encourage investment.

This change would do exactly the opposite. It not only makes investment in Alaska’s oil sector less profitable, but it makes it riskier. By rewriting part of the corporate tax code to target specific companies, it’ll make other businesses and industries worry if they’ll be next to face a tax hike.

The fact is that incentives matter. If you tax something more, you get less of it. Higher taxes on energy producers organized as S corps would reduce economic activity in the sector, meaning less energy production and less domestic investment. That’s exactly the opposite of what the nation needs right now and will only exacerbate high prices at the pump.

Alaska should be encouraging exploration and production, while fast-tracking new projects. A larger energy sector is the best way to increase tax revenue, as opposed to strangling less economic activity with higher taxes.

The irony here is that the Alaska Legislature previously rejected this proposal—just last year.

Fortunately, the House also just rejected the Senate’s offending amendment, but there’s still a chance the tax hike gets shoehorned back into legislation and ends up on the governor’s desk.

Everyone, from the Alaska Legislature and governor to the American people broadly, should understand the effects we can expect from this kind of tax increase. Investment and production will fall, putting further upward pressure on energy prices. Employment in the oil and gas industry will suffer and economic growth in Alaska will be hamstrung.

All this negative fallout would be bad enough during normal times with relatively low oil prices, but it’s substantially worse with today’s elevated prices stemming from the Iran war.

Alaskan lawmakers would do well to remember the fragility of both the global energy sector abroad and the American consumer here at home before upending the tax code.

The post Will an Alaskan Tax Hike Make the Oil Crisis Worse? appeared first on The Daily Signal.

Like it or not, Virginia is constantly comparing herself to next-door Maryland. Out of the 47 seats in the Maryland Senate, 34 are held by Democrats.

Still, those senators chose to leave mid-decade redistricting in a committee drawer rather than comply with former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder and his nationwide redistricting campaign.

To be fair, President Donald Trump did say it would be nice if Texas—ordered by the courts to redraw a few districts because they failed the Voting Rights Act “majority-minority” litmus test—made a few more Republican-majority seats.

But otherwise, it has been the former attorney general’s organization, the National Democratic Redistricting Committee, which has used that premise to try to gerrymander California, Illinois, Missouri, Utah, North Carolina, Ohio, and Virginia.

The Virginia Public Access Project, which frequently reports on campaign financing, made a stunning revelation this week: Of the $64 million that had been given to “vote yes” Democrats on the issue of redistricting, only 3% has come from Virginians.

Yes, all those ads on your phone and television are being paid for by non-Virginians telling you to approve a “temporary” suspension of the commonwealth’s Constitution—all to benefit one political party, and to turn their slight representative majority into a supermajority for the next six years.

They must not want you to figure out what Maryland’s Democrats have said—that this is wrong.

Sure, the Virginia Supreme Court promises that it will begin proceedings later in the week, on appeal of a lower-court ruling, that the whole process violated several Virginia laws and should not have been allowed. It will be interesting to see what the justices do.

But before that, Virginia’s voters can say “no,” just like Maryland’s Democrat senators.

According to the registrar from heavily Democrat Albemarle County, voter turnout in this Charlottesville suburb is over 12,000 votes so far. That number is higher than this point in 2025’s gubernatorial election. However, that’s far short of the 56,000 voters that voted by the end of that county’s 2025’s general election.

The point is, there are lots of votes still out there. And according to an un-scientific survey of a half-dozen people that have been door-knocking and phone-banking, half the people they talk to have no idea that this vote is taking place. Don’t be shy—tell a friend.

Saturday will be the last day to vote early in-person at your registrar’s office. Then, Tuesday, April 21, is it. Polls will be open by 7 a.m. in most regular polling locations. Some areas like Harrisonburg have set up temporary special locations, so check with your local registrar.

If people get out and vote, at least we can be sure that these votes will be coming from Virginians.

The post Virginia Voters Should Look to Democrat-Run Maryland on Redistricting appeared first on The Daily Signal.

This forum could be uncomfortable for House Democrats who oppose enforcing immigration laws, said Rep. Jeff Van Drew, R-N.J., chairman of the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Oversight, which is holding the hearing.

“People keep arguing the legal loopholes and technicalities. I want members of this committee who don’t believe in enforcement to look these mothers in the eyes,” Van Drew told The Daily Signal. “We are not going to have lawyers, not analysts, but real people.”

Van Drew said illegal immigrants charged or convicted of serious crimes should be returned to their country of origin. Instead, many blue cities and states refuse to cooperate with federal immigration authorities such as Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

“I hope that those colleagues on the other side of the aisle who don’t believe in detention or deportation of criminal illegal aliens—people who have been indicted or convicted of major crimes like drug distribution or rape—will see the toll of sanctuary policies,” Van Drew said.

Van Drew pointed to Minnesota and California as states with some of the worst sanctuary policies. He also included his own state of New Jersey, which bars state and local law enforcement from assisting ICE.

Jen Heiling—the mother of Brady Heiling, who was killed last July at age 19—is set to testify to the panel.

Last July in Wisconsin, an illegal alien from Honduras was charged with two felony counts—vehicular homicide and impaired driving—after she allegedly struck a vehicle, killing 18-year-old Hallie Helgeson and severely injuring Heiling, who died from his injuries days later, according to the Department of Homeland Security.

Also scheduled to testify is Patricia Fox, the mother of Carissa Aspnes, who was severely brain-damaged at age 22 in March 2025.

Aspnes was riding on the back of a friend’s motorcycle, wearing a helmet and protective gear, when a car driven by an illegal alien from Venezuela crossed multiple lanes and struck the motorcycle, causing her brain damage, CBS News reported. The driver pleaded guilty and was deported last month.

Also scheduled to testify to the House panel is Laura Wilkerson, the mother of Joshua Wilkerson, who was tortured and murdered in 2010 by an illegal alien who overstayed his visa for eight years.

Wilkerson, 18, was from Pearland, Texas, and was killed by a 19-year-old illegal immigrant from Belize, who admitted to beating him to death, according to the Houston Chronicle.

Van Drew said he is hopeful the hearing will help change the focus from the plight of illegal aliens to the victims of crime.

Most members of Congress won’t experience the pain of losing a child, Van Drew said. But he said needless deaths are occurring because illegal aliens have often been arrested and released.

“We only have three witnesses. We could have 30, or 300, or 3,000,” Van Drew said. “I don’t look forward to this hearing. Sometimes members of Congress, or others, will tell parents who lost a child, ‘I know how you feel.’ No, you don’t. I pray to God you never do.”

He noted continuous news coverage of ICE, particularly after two fatal shootings in Minnesota earlier this year, as an example of excessive criticism of the agency.

“Cut it out and stop it,” he said of the anti-ICE criticism. “I want body cams for ICE agents—I’m good with that. But they should keep their masks because they and their families are being targeted. They should have a badge ID. There should be more training for how to handle sensitive areas like churches. But the basic fact is they are catching criminals. How can you say we don’t need that?”

Deadly confrontations have occurred in sanctuary jurisdictions, Van Drew noted.

“Shootings are happening in blue cities and blue states that won’t allow their local law enforcement to work with ICE,” he said. “Nobody was killed in red states. ICE is not trained in crowd control.”

The post ‘Look These Mothers in the Eyes’: Families of Victims Killed by Illegal Aliens to Testify Before Congress appeared first on The Daily Signal.

Within a matter of two days, Swalwell went from being the top Democratic candidate for California’s highest office to announcing the end of his campaign and later resigning from Congress.

Amid the chaos, elections experts and political science professors spoke to The Daily Signal about the disorder that Swalwell’s scandal has caused, and what candidate Californians could see in the general election.

“I’ve been in politics for about 30 years and I’ve never seen such chaos like this,” California Target Book publisher Marva Diaz said.

Speculation that billionaire and failed 2020 presidential candidate Tom Steyer, along with former Rep. Katie Porter, could potentially advance to the general election has circulated online. However, experts appear split on which candidate voters will gravitate toward.

“I would be surprised if they move en masse to one candidate. I think you’re to see them get spread out over several candidates, but you could legitimately make the case for any number of candidates,” Klink Campaigns President Matt Klink told The Daily Signal. “I know that the news media has tended to look at the two frontrunners, but being Tom Steyer and Katie Porter, I think both of them have a ceiling, in terms of how high they can go.”

He added that candidates including [former California Attorney General] Xavier Becerra and San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan “have a better case to pull in some of the Swalwell voters than the presumed frontrunners” because Steyer and Porter “have some baggage that they have to deal with.”

Prior to his withdrawal, polls showed Swalwell positioned to be the Democrat candidate who would advance through the June primary and potentially become the state’s new governor. However, on Friday, the San Francisco Chronicle published a report detailing how a former staffer accused the Democrat of making advances toward her during her time on staff and allegedly sexually assaulting her. 

Later that same day, CNN published a report detailing three other women’s interactions with Swalwell. The women accused the lawmaker of abusing his power over them.

On the day that reports broke on Swalwell, prediction sites like Polymarket and Kalshi immediately shot up for Steyer to be the next choice.

But Sarah Hill, a Cal State Fullerton political science professor, told The Daily Signal that a lower-polling candidate could potentially rally the base behind them.

“What I’m seeing, and what I had wondered for a long time, [is] I think many folks are gonna move toward Xavier Becerra,” Hill said. “If you just think about experience, he’s the strongest candidate, and it has puzzled me for a long time why he wasn’t the Democratic favorite.”

According to a Kreate Strategies poll, one of the last surveys conducted prior to Swalwell’s scandal, Republican gubernatorial candidate Steve Hilton led the pack at 19%, with Steyer and Swalwell tied at 13%. Fellow Republican gubernatorial candidate Chad Bianco held third at 10%, and Porter at 8%, with others in single digits, and an estimated 26% wanting another option or undecided.

Despite both Klink and Hill’s predictions of a new possibility, University of Southern California political science professor Christian Grose predicted Steyer and Porter would rise in the polls within the coming weeks.

Diaz, though, noted that there are caveats to her prediction, which center on endorsements from top donors and how voters could react to the new information about Swalwell.

Late Tuesday evening, the California Teachers Association, which once endorsed Swalwell, announced it would be backing Steyer. The massive union’s decision marks the first major move by those who once backed the former leading candidate, stating California deserves a “Governor who has the courage to hold corporations accountable,” tackle affordability, and allow voters access to “quality public schools.”

Although the union’s decision is a noticeable shift, more than 20 Democrats are still certified on the June primary ballot, with Swalwell’s name still on it as well. The large number of candidates has caused disarray for the party in rallying behind one person.

Despite attempts from California Democratic Party Chair Rusty Hicks to nudge lower-polling candidates to withdraw from the race, the candidates, even those polling behind Porter, have not budged.

Hill said that, with the party in full disarray, the Democratic establishment in the state is going to have to start signaling its preference to voters.

“I think … party leadership will work on kind of pulling it together, saying, ‘All right, folks, we got to figure this out.’ And they will signal strongly,” she said, adding that Swalwell lost all his endorsements and Gov. Gavin Newsom hasn’t weighed in yet.

“So, there’s a lot that Democrats can still do to try to move the voters. And they’ve kind of been waiting a bit to see how things play out,” Hill said.

On Wednesday, CNN reported that sources close to Newsom said the governor is still attempting to “make sense” of the race and will do “everything he can to prevent a lockout.” However, he reportedly has “worries” about a majority of the candidates running.

The possibility of two Republicans advancing to the general election has been discussed since late last year. While the polling odds are low, all the experts who spoke to The Daily Signal notably did not rule out the possibility.

“There’s still a small chance of a Bianco [and] Hilton general [election]. I don’t want to completely rule it out, [but] I think it’s just gone down with the Trump endorsement [of Hilton],” Grose stated.

The post California Dems in Disarray After Swalwell’s Exit appeared first on The Daily Signal.

Appearing on BBC News on Monday, Cooke responded to controversy over a White House social media image that some critics said depicted Trump as Jesus, arguing the reaction exposed a familiar pattern of selective outrage. She said the press fixates on imagery and tone while failing to respond with the same urgency when Christians face real threats. 

“There’s this moral outrage in the media today any time the White House puts something up, even in jest,” Cooke said. “But the same mainstream media never stands up for Christians.” 

Cooke pointed to a recent incident in Minneapolis in which rioters disrupted a Sunday church service. She said the lack of sustained coverage highlighted what she described as selective moral concern. 

“I don’t play this humor game,” Cooke said, arguing that media narratives often inflate symbolism while ignoring real violence. 

Cooke also addressed recent remarks from Pope Leo XIV criticizing war and warning against the use of religion to justify conflict. She argued that religious criticism of the White House over the Iran war often drowns out the nuances of Catholic doctrine and national security realities. 

While she acknowledged the importance of moral leadership and concern for human suffering, Cooke said the pope crossed a line by weighing in on U.S. military and intelligence decisions. 

“It’s one thing to talk about the human cost of war,” she said. “It’s another thing to take your pope hat off and act like the president of the United States and talk about military and intelligence that he has no business talking about.” 

A recent convert to Catholicism, Cooke emphasized that Church teaching includes just war doctrine, which allows for the use of force under certain conditions when innocent lives are threatened and when national defense is at stake. 

“When you see America being threatened, leaders have a responsibility to act,” Cooke said, adding that Trump’s decisions reflected that. 

Cooke also criticized what she described as an imbalance in how global suffering is discussed, noting that decades of Iranian aggression, including hostage-taking and attacks on Americans, are often overlooked. 

“The pope is a pastor, not a strategist,” Cooke said. “He doesn’t have the intelligence. He doesn’t have the information.” 

While Cooke said the Church plays a critical role in reminding the world of war’s human cost, she concluded that moral authority must remain within its proper bounds—especially when national security is at stake. 

The post Outrage Over Trump’s Image, Silence for Persecuted Christians: The Media’s Double Standard appeared first on The Daily Signal.

On April 20, Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which enables the government to spy on foreigners without a warrant, is set to expire.

The program, which was last extended by Congress in 2024, has long been criticized by some House Republicans, who argue it is prone to abuse and has resulted in the surveillance of American citizens.

Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, R-La., as well as House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, argue Congress has already substantially reformed the program, which they consider important for national security.

“All the abuses happened when Democrats were in the White House,” Jordan said Tuesday.

Hardliner conservatives on the House Rules Committee—a leadership-controlled panel that sets the conditions for debate of bills on the floor—allowed the extension bill to advance on Tuesday night.

They did so after President Donald Trump called on Republicans on Truth Social “to UNIFY, and vote together on the test vote to bring a clean [extension] to the floor.”

However, on Wednesday morning, FISA critics indicated they would still not support extending Section 702 without additional reforms, despite having allowed it to advance.

Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas, a Rules Committee member, said conservatives wanted “greater protections for citizens with respect to warrants,” as well as “greater penalties … for government officials who abuse their authority and power.”

Rep. Tim Burchett, R-Tenn., told The Daily Signal he had reservations about the secrecy of FISA courts, which authorize government surveillance.

“I never had a really good feeling about a secret judge situation that’s not open to the public. I like transparency,” Burchett said. “It’s been abused in the past. I know they’ve reduced the rate lately.”

CIA Director John Ratcliffe joined House Republicans’ Wednesday morning conference meeting to make the pitch for extending FISA.

Rep. Rick Crawford, R-Ark., who chairs the House intelligence committee, reiterated after the conference meeting his desire to extend the program, while saying there is “possibly” room for changes to FISA.

“What I’m trying to do is make sure that national security is protected,” Crawford told reporters.

Multiple FISA holdouts indicated they agreed with Ratcliffe and the administration on the importance of the program, but still desired reforms.

“Nobody’s debating the validity of whether FISA’s important or not,” Rep. Michael Cloud, R-Texas, told The Daily Signal. “The problem is the abuses we’ve seen in the past.”

“We understand and agree with the president that we need 702 authority to go after bad guys abroad,” Roy told reporters. 

“We’re fighting for greater protections, whether it’s this administration or future administrations, to ensure citizens have projections,” Roy added.

Rep. Andy Harris, R-Md., who chairs the House Freedom Caucus, acknowledged the disagreement between his faction and the president.

“Look, [Trump’s] the executive, we’re the legislative, and we’re going to see a little bit of conflict between those two today,” said Harris.

By the early afternoon, leaders indicated they needed more time to find consensus.

“We might have to do some sort of minor modification,” Johnson told a Punchbowl News reporter, citing “a few holdouts who have some ideas on what they think would be improvements to” FISA.

Johnson later indicated he believed the vote would be the following day.

Democrats made Republican leadership’s job more difficult by standing against the bill.

Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., the top Democrat on the judiciary committee, urged his colleagues to vote against a clean extension on Tuesday, calling for “independent guardrails.” 

Over 50 Democrats also signed on to a letter in opposition to a clean extension, lowering the chances of being able to rely on Democrat votes.

In March, a court granted the annual recertification of the 702 program, so it would not immediately end if Congress does not act to extend the underlying legislation. Rather, it would expire in March 2027.

The post House Conservatives Demand FISA Spy Power Reforms appeared first on The Daily Signal.

“Every day, the courageous men and women of ICE risk their lives to arrest criminal aliens to safeguard American communities,” acting Assistant Secretary Lauren Bis said in a statement. 

“Our law enforcement officers are on the frontlines arresting pedophiles, kidnappers, and violent criminals. Every single day, our officers are removing heinous criminals from our community,” she added.

The arrests come as Congress continues to fight over funding for immigration enforcement. Senate Democrats repeatedly voted against funding the Department of Homeland Security, demanding additional limits on ICE agents as a precondition.

The Department of Homeland Security has now been shut down for 60 days.

1. Filiberto Aleman-Sanchez

Filiberto Aleman-Sanchez is an illegal alien from Mexico who was arrested after being convicted for sexual contact with a child in Dallas County, Texas. 

2. Viater Twiringiyimana

Viater Twiringiyimana is a criminal illegal alien from Rwanda. He was convicted of child molestation in the first degree, residential burglary, and a no-contact order violation in Spokane, Washington. 

3. Jorge Pedro Soria-Nieto

Jorge Pedro Soria-Nieto is a criminal illegal immigrant from Mexico.

He was convicted of kidnapping an adult to sexually assault in West Valley City, Utah. 

4. Roberto Meza-Gonzalez

Roberto Meza-Gonzalez, a criminal illegal alien from Mexico, was convicted of assault with a deadly weapon: great bodily injury in Santa Ana, California. He was also arrested on Tuesday by ICE agents.

5. Rigoberto Iglesias-Diaz

Rigoberto Iglesias-Diaz is a criminal illegal alien from Cuba. He was convicted of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon in Miami, Florida. 

The post EXCLUSIVE: ICE Arrests More Pedophiles, Kidnappers appeared first on The Daily Signal.

The survey, conducted by McLaughlin & Associates, sampled registered Democrats and Republicans equally and found that 59.8% of respondents disapprove of Senate Republicans’ job performance, including 15.8% who said they strongly disapprove.

The poll also found that 62.8% of voters disapprove of Senate Democrats’ performance, with 9.9% saying they strongly disapprove.

“The Senate has proven time and time again — whether it is failing to pass the SAVE America Act or failing to fully fund [the Department of Homeland Security], including [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] and [Customs and Border Protection]—that they are weak, ineffective, and pathetic,” Rep. Keith Self, R-Texas, told The Daily Signal in reaction to the poll, adding that it is “not hard to understand why” Americans are losing trust in the Senate.

“They need to get their act together right now, stop the procedural games, and start getting wins on the board,” he added. “Their refusal to act on critical issues such as election integrity and immigration enforcement, both vitally important to the American people, will not be forgotten.”

Rep. Mark Harris, R-N.C., echoed his colleagues’ remarks and told The Daily Signal that “the Senate should have acted yesterday and must now move without further delay to defend the integrity of our electoral process.”

Harris’ and Self’s comments came one day after the Senate returned from a two-week recess without voting on the legislation.

According to the survey, 12.1% of respondents said they would be less likely to vote in upcoming elections if the SAVE America Act does not pass, while another 12% said they were unsure whether they would turn out.

McLaughlin & Associates reported that only 25% of voters support bringing the bill to the Senate floor solely as a “show vote,” a procedural move in which lawmakers vote on legislation expected to fail in order to put members on record.

The survey found overwhelming support for election integrity measures, with 92.3% of respondents saying only U.S. citizens should be allowed to vote in federal elections. Additionally, 73% said they support requiring proof of citizenship to vote, while 64% said voters should be required to present identification at the polling place.

Only 35% of respondents said requiring valid government-issued identification to vote would prevent Americans without identification from voting. Less than 2% of respondents said they do not possess a government-issued ID.

The survey also found that 55% of respondents believe illegal immigrants receive Social Security numbers, which respondents said could facilitate their placement on state voter rolls.

DHS Funding

The poll also measured public opinion on the shutdown of the Department of Homeland Security, which has remained unfunded since February, following a breakdown in negotiations between Congress and the White House over immigration enforcement and oversight of Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

According to the survey, 44.6% of voters said they believe Democrats are responsible for the department’s closure, while 54% disagreed.

The post Senate GOP Disapproval Rating Jumps to 60% Among Swing State Voters: Poll appeared first on The Daily Signal.

“One data point does not a trend make. And the long-term trend under President [Donald] Trump has been for small business optimism to be above its 52-year average under Joe Biden,” she told The Daily Signal at a Tax Day press briefing on Wednesday.

The National Federation of Independent Business Small Business Optimism Index fell to 95.8 in March, below the index’s 52-year average of 98. The federation’s Uncertainty Index also rose four points from February, with its mark of 92 well above its historical average of 68. 

The Daily Signal asked Loeffler what relief the administration will provide small businesses amid increasing prices and falling small business optimism.

Loeffler said she thinks the decreased optimism is “temporary.”

“We’ll get back on track,” she said.

Under Biden, small business optimism remained below the index’s 52-year average rating for 34 consecutive months, Loeffler said. She explained that “small business was being crushed by regulation, massive red tape, the threat of high taxes, and all the burdens of the green New Deal.”

“So, right now, small businesses are really in growth mode,” Loeffler said. “They’re planning to hire, and the optimism is very strong. If you see in the NAM survey, National Association of Manufacturers, their optimism is up five points. So, I think this is temporary. We’ll get back on track.”

The March rating is a significant decline from recent months. The optimism index remained above the average of 98 in both January and February.

The federation’s chief economist, Bill Dunkelberg, noted that ”the dramatic spike in oil prices has spooked consumers and owners alike.”

”Small business owners are having to absorb those higher input costs and pass them along to their customers,” he said, while noting the ”positives” brought about by the 20% small business deduction in the Working Families Tax Cuts Act.

The post ‘We’ll Get Back on Track’: White House Addresses Falling Small Business Optimism Amid Iran War appeared first on The Daily Signal.