The belief that the United Kingdom is experiencing decline, the view that there are negative elements to modern life, and the feeling of unrest after terror attacks are among "far-right narratives" pushed by Russian intelligence that bear "no resemblance to reality," Prime Minister Andy Burnham declared as he announced plans for a new National Centre for Information Defence.

The post Burnham Announces ‘Ministry of Truth’ to ‘Defend Democracy’ From ‘Russia-Amplified Far-Right Narratives’ appeared first on Breitbart.

The Justice Department unsealed an indictment against a former U.S. Postal Service worker accusing him of tossing about 300 mail-in ballots into a dumpster ahead of the June Utah primary.

Damon Matai Seei, 34, of Payson, Utah, was indicted by a federal grand jury on Sept. 16. The indictment was sealed. He was arrested and appeared for his arraignment at the Orrin G. Hatch U.S. Courthouse Tuesday afternoon.

He was charged with unlawful secretion, destruction, and delay of mail.

Seei has denied the charges against him and pleaded not guilty.

“When American voters lawfully cast their vote, they should feel confident that it is counted,” acting Deputy Attorney General Trent McCotter said. “Allegedly throwing away hundreds of ballots is a serious federal crime that undermines the integrity of our elections. Ballot integrity is not a partisan issue.”

The case comes amid fierce debate about the safety of mail-in ballots. The U.S. Postal Service adopted guidelines to prevent potential tampering or fraud with ballots. Two federal judges in separate cases issued injunctions against the Postal Service policy from going into effect.

The policy was set to require states to enroll mail-in voters in a federal portal to verify their legal eligibility and base ballot mailings on compliance. It requires all mail-in ballots for federal elections to be transmitted in envelopes with new design requirements.

The Justice Department claims that on June 3, Seei was a letter carrier for the U.S. Postal Service and was entrusted to deliver mail to at least 300 Eagle Mountain, Utah, residents.

This included hundreds of mail-in ballots sent to Eagle Mountain residents to allow them to vote in a June 23, 2026, primary election.

Prosecutors allege Seei threw away some of the mail he was entrusted to deliver in a dumpster in a church parking lot.

Seei’s next court appearance is scheduled for Nov. 30.

The case was investigated jointly by the U.S. Postal Service Office of Inspector General and Homeland Security Investigations.

Also on Tuesday, HSI announced it had made 160 arrests and had 1,600 ongoing cases. Before this, the Justice Department charged or arrested about two dozen people in the month of September alone for alleged voter fraud-related crimes.

“Postal Service employees entrusted with delivering mail must uphold the highest standards of integrity,” said U.S. Postal Service Assistant Inspector General of Investigation Robert Kwalwasser. “Those who destroy mail intended for recipients will be held accountable for their criminal actions.”

Sen. Jon Husted, R-Ohio, became the latest GOP candidate to call for a quick end to the Iran war.

Imagine a judge imposing a million-dollar fine for jaywalking. Or suppose a shoplifter stole a tube of toothpaste from CVS and was ordered to pay $10,000. Those punishments would strike nearly everyone as outrageous—not because the offenses are imaginary, but because the penalties would be wildly disproportionate to them. The Eighth Amendment’s excessive fines clause forbids precisely that kind of governmental overreach: “excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed.”

On Dec. 1, the Supreme Court will hear argument in Jouppi v. Alaska, a case arising from the misdemeanor transportation of alcohol into a “dry” Alaskan village. Kenneth Jouppi received the minimum sentence authorized by law: three days in jail, a $1,500 fine, and probation. Alaska insisted that was not enough. It also wanted his airplane—worth approximately $95,000 and essential to his livelihood. The Alaska Supreme Court agreed.

8 Centuries of Proportionality

The prohibition on excessive fines is no constitutional afterthought. Its lineage reaches back at least to Magna Carta in 1215, passed through the English Bill of Rights of 1689, and appeared in colonial charters and early state constitutions before becoming part of our Bill of Rights in 1791.

Chapter 14 of Magna Carta declared that a freeman should be fined for a minor offense only “in accordance with the degree of the offence,” and for a grave offense only “in accordance with the gravity of the offence.” It further required that the penalty preserve the offender’s “contenement”—his means of living. Merchants were to retain their merchandise, and villeins their “waynage,” the farming equipment, animals, and carts necessary to work.

As professor John F. Stinneford explains in “The Heritage Guide to the Constitution,” the historic rule required proportionality in two senses: The fine had to fit the gravity of the offense, and it could not destroy the offender’s ability to support himself. Both principles matter here. An airplane is not incidental property to an Alaskan air-taxi operator. It is his waynage.

A Clause Too Rarely Enforced

The Supreme Court has decided only a handful of cases under the excessive fines clause.

In Browning-Ferris Industries v. Kelco Disposal (1989), the court explained that the clause restrains the sovereign’s power to use prosecution and fines for improper ends. In Austin v. United States (1993), it held that civil forfeitures can qualify as fines when they operate as punishment. And in United States v. Bajakajian (1998), the court supplied the governing rule: A punitive forfeiture violates the Constitution when it is “grossly disproportional to the gravity of a defendant’s offense.”

United States v. Bajakajian involved a family preparing to fly from Los Angeles to Italy with more than $347,000 in cash. Federal law requires disclosure of transported currency exceeding $10,000. After the defendant falsely denied carrying additional money, the government sought forfeiture of the entire amount. The district court found that the money was not connected to any other crime and concluded that full forfeiture would be “extraordinarily harsh” and “grossly disproportionate.” It ordered forfeiture of $15,000 instead, along with probation and a $5,000 fine. The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed.

Writing for the court, Justice Clarence Thomas rejected the government’s claim that taking all the money served a merely remedial purpose. A forfeiture imposed as punishment is a fine, whether the government demands cash or property. And the “touchstone” of the constitutional inquiry, he wrote, “is the principle of proportionality: The amount of the forfeiture must bear some relationship to the gravity of the offense that it is designed to punish.”

The court declined to demand mathematical precision. Legislatures ordinarily define punishments, and judges must respect that role. But deference is not abdication. The excessive fines clause exists because governments have powerful incentives to turn punishment into revenue and forfeiture into leverage. A constitutional boundary that disappears whenever the legislature labels a forfeiture “mandatory” is no boundary at all.

From a 6-Pack to an Airplane

Jouppi operates an air-taxi business in Alaska. On April 3, 2012, he was preparing to fly a passenger from Fairbanks to Beaver, a community that prohibits the sale, importation, and possession of alcohol. The passenger’s groceries contained beer—three cases in all, including one visible six-pack in a shopping bag. Jouppi maintained that he did not know the passenger was carrying alcohol.

The state charged Jouppi, his company, and the passenger with knowingly transporting alcohol into a dry community, a misdemeanor. The passenger pleaded guilty. Jouppi and his company were tried by a jury and convicted on a general verdict form that did not establish how much alcohol Jouppi knew was aboard. The trial judge imposed the statutory minimum: three days in jail, a $1,500 fine, and three years of probation.

Alaska nevertheless demanded forfeiture of the airplane. The trial judge repeatedly refused, concluding that taking the plane would be an excessive fine. After years of appellate back-and-forth, the Alaska Supreme Court upheld the forfeiture “as a matter of law.” Its reasoning effectively treated the broad statutory category of the offense as more important than Jouppi’s actual conduct, the modest sentence imposed, the uncertain quantity he knowingly transported, or the devastating economic effect of confiscating his principal business asset.

Why Alaska Should Lose

The Buckeye Institute’s amicus brief identifies the central error: “The Excessive Fines Clause requires courts to weigh the gravity of the specific defendant’s wrongdoing, not the abstract category of the offense.” That distinction is indispensable. Governments have evaded limits on fines for centuries by describing offenses at a level of generality that makes almost any penalty appear plausible. Modern forfeiture regimes invite the same maneuver.

First, Jouppi was convicted of a misdemeanor, not bootlegging, organized crime, or trafficking for profit. The general verdict did not determine whether he knowingly transported one visible six-pack or all three cases. That ambiguity is not trivial. Six beers and dozens of beers reflect different conduct and potentially different culpability. Where the state chose a verdict form that left the matter unresolved, it should not receive the benefit of the harshest possible assumption at sentencing.

Second, the trial judge was closest to the evidence and best positioned to assess Jouppi’s culpability. He had a range of lawful punishments available and selected the minimum. He also found that confiscating the airplane would be excessive. That judgment deserves weight, especially because Jouppi, an 83-year-old Air Force veteran, relied on the aircraft to earn a living. The Constitution should not permit the state to convert a low-level misdemeanor into economic ruin.

Third, the value of the property bears little relationship to the punishment the trial court considered appropriate. The airplane was worth roughly $95,000—nine and a half times the $10,000 maximum statutory fine and more than 60 times the $1,500 fine the judge actually selected. The Alaska Supreme Court’s approach risks turning statutory authorization into constitutional permission. But the Eighth Amendment is a limit on legislative and executive power, not an invitation to rubber-stamp it.

This case offers the Supreme Court an overdue opportunity to give United States v. Bajakajian practical force. Courts assessing a forfeiture should examine the defendant’s actual conduct, the harm caused, the penalties selected by the sentencing judge, the property’s value, and whether confiscation would strip the defendant of the means to earn a living. No single consideration should be mechanically dispositive, but neither may the government hide behind an offense label broad enough to swallow the constitutional rule.

The excessive fines clause was born from a simple insight: the power to punish must not become the power to destroy. Eight centuries after Magna Carta, that principle remains necessary because the temptation to use fines and forfeitures for improper ends remains very much alive.

Alaska punished Jouppi with jail, probation, and a fine for a misdemeanor involving beer. Taking a $95,000 airplane on top of that is not justice calibrated to wrongdoing. It is precisely the kind of disproportionate exaction the Eighth Amendment forbids. The Supreme Court should reverse.

With the Supreme Court preparing to consider challenges involving AR-15-style rifle bans, a new Marquette poll finds Americans almost evenly divided over whether the Second Amendment protects possession of those rifles.

The post New Survey: Americans Split On Semi-Auto Ban Challenge, Other Supreme Court Issues appeared first on The Truth About Guns.

The Texas Rangers are investigating Camp Mystic and its leadership over 27 deaths in the July 4, 2025, floods, with investigators examining possible charges including manslaughter and criminally negligent homicide, The New York Times reported.

Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum is blaming the raging cartel violence that she is unable to control in her country on the meddling of the U.S. government for arresting the leader of the Sinaloa Cartel. Her comments come at a time when the U.S. government continues to pressure Mexico to eradicate terrorist cartels and go after politicians who protect cartels.

The post Mexican President Blames Raging Cartel Violence on U.S. Meddling appeared first on Breitbart.

A previously convicted sex offender from Alaska received a sentence of three years' probation for paying to have a woman from Honduras and her 14-year-old daughter brought over the border.

The post Alaskan Sex Offender Given Probation After Bringing Migrant Mom, Child Across Border appeared first on Breitbart.

If ProPublica's two key subjects including a criminal and a man with repeated history of targeting Republicans was not enough to cast a shadow of doubt on the credibility and bias of this story and outlet, let's not forget the outlet has spent years running anti-Republican propaganda.

Illinois lawmakers are considering a licensing system that would charge firearm manufacturers based partly on the costs and incidence of firearm injuries and deaths in the state.

The post Illinois Bill Would Bill Gun Makers for Criminals’ Crimes appeared first on The Truth About Guns.

Chilean President José Antonio Kast used his first-ever address as head of state to the United Nations General Assembly on Tuesday to condemn the socialist policies of his predecessors and promise would-be investors that a conservative Chile was worth betting on.

The post ‘Our Decade’ — Chile’s José Antonio Kast Celebrates Latin America’s Conservative Wave at U.N. appeared first on Breitbart.

Conservative activist Bonnie Wallace, who has been vocal about sexually explicit books in Texas public schools, is now calling attention to books in school libraries that contain extreme violent content.

Wallace has attended multiple school board meetings to show trustees that books containing sexually explicit material are available in their school libraries and should be removed.

“Nobody really knows what’s in the books until you start researching and delving into it,” Wallace told the Daily Signal. “Then, it’s like, ‘What in the world are we doing?’”

Wallace’s Lawsuit With Houston ISD 

Wallace filed a lawsuit against Houston ISD after the school board removed her from a March 2026 school board meeting where she read from “A Court of Silver Flames,” a Sarah J. Maas fantasy romance novel filled with sexually explicit content.

Her lawsuit alleges that Houston ISD violated her First Amendment rights by stopping her from speaking and removing her from the meeting.

Books With Violent Content in Texas Schools

However, Wallace is now raising concerns about books that describe or depict violent acts that she says are inappropriate for minors. The activist provided the Daily Signal with information on multiple books found in many Texas public school libraries that contain extreme violent content.

The first, “By the Time You Read This, I’ll Be Dead,” by author Julie Anne Peters, follows a character who plans to commit suicide after experiencing long-term bullying. Wallace says the book teaches children “how to kill themselves correctly the first time,” particularly because it depicts the character using websites to create a countdown to her planned death.

“Suicide rates are the highest they’ve ever been, and it would seem very common sense to not have books that glamorize or trivialize suicide paid for by tax dollars,” Wallace told the Daily Signal. 

The activist says this is not the only book available in school libraries that should concern parents.

According to Wallace, “Suicide Notes From Beautiful Girls,” by author Lynn Weingarten, contains a plot involving the murder of a diabetic parent in a way that could go undetected. 

Weingarten’s book follows the story of a teenage girl who no longer wants to live with her parents. The main character, Delia, fakes her own suicide by finding a girl at a homeless camp who resembles her and killing her. Delia then writes a fake suicide note before running away with another group of teenagers.

The teenagers later decide that Delia’s father, whom she says offended her, should die, and they inject him with a fatal amount of insulin in an attempt to make his death appear to be a suicide. 

Wallace says the book also contains drug and alcohol use.

“It’s just very deep and dark,” she said. “Why are we planting these types of thoughts into our children’s minds? I say we need to do better.”

Another book Wallace cites, “Assassination Classroom,” by author Yusei Matsui, is a 21-volume manga series that depicts teachers and students using knives and firearms in attempts to kill one another. 

Wallace says the series depicts schools as combat zones and could instill fear in children who attend school. 

“They’re reading this stuff, and then they’re afraid of each other. They’re afraid of school, and not just that, they may be the one child that decides to bring a knife or gun to schools to kill others,” Wallace said. “I think that, with tax dollars, we should have more discernment on what we’re spending money on. …The content is so deep and dark, and I would even say demonic.” 

Mother Speaks Out Against Violent Book  

A mother living in Florida spoke with the Daily Signal about her son’s experience reading the violent book “Night” by Elie Wiesel. “Night” is a memoir detailing his experiences as a prisoner in Auschwitz-Birkenau, Buna, Gleiwitz, and Buchenwald during the Holocaust.  

The book depicts graphic scenes, including beatings and physical abuse, executions, mass murder, descriptions of people dying, dead bodies, and the physical effects of starvation and imprisonment. 

The Florida mother, who asked to remain anonymous, said that after her son read the book, he experienced a crisis. 

“I remember him telling us he didn’t want to read it. I remember him telling us it was giving him nightmares,” the mother said. 

She explained that her son had nightmares over one scene depicted in the book in which babies were thrown in the air and shot, particularly because he had a younger brother.

“He’s 10 years older than his little brother,” the mother said, “so I imagine it just made him really think a lot about his baby brother being in that situation, and it was just really hard for him.” 

The Florida woman said she believes the book can bring “tremendous educational value,” but that educators should “worry about the age appropriateness and the psychological effects” the book can cause on younger minds. 

Despite pushback against the book from activists and Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, who argue that its depiction of graphic violence is age-inappropriate for middle-schoolers, the Texas State Board of Education approved the Holocaust memoir as statewide required reading for eighth-grade students. It will be implemented in 2030. 

Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick Calls Out Schools 

Last month, Patrick held a news conference alongside Wallace, where they discussed books with sexually explicit and violent content that are available in taxpayer-funded school libraries across the state. 

Patrick told reporters that school districts have been warned that there could be consequences if they do not remove such books. 

“School districts be aware. Next session, if these books are not off the shelf, we will pass a law that will knock your grade letter down one,” the lieutenant governor said. “So, if you’re an A school, you’ll be a B. If you’re a B, you’ll be a C. If you’re a C, you’ll be a D—and an F, you can’t go much lower than that to begin with. Maybe that’s why you have an F school.” 

Patrick added, “If this is what’s in your library, we also can look at potential budget issues. We are not going to have this filth and vulgarity and violence—of graphic scenes of rape, of stories of teachers and students having a sexual affair. And it’s in our school libraries.” 

Texas Prisons Prohibit Some Books Found in Schools 

The Texas Department of Criminal Justice maintains a list of thousands of books that prisoners are prohibited from possessing inside state prisons. Wallace provided the Daily Signal with that list and says some of those books are available in public school libraries.

Among those are “Lucky” by Alice Sebold, “Push” by Sapphire, and “All the Rage” by Courtney Summers, which all contain graphic depictions of rape, according to Wallace.

“The Lovely Bones” by Alice Sebold includes the sexual assault of a minor and a serial killer who preys on young girls. “After the Fire” by Will Hill includes sexual content involving a minor. “Living Dead Girl” by Elizabeth Scott also includes sexual abuse of a minor.

Wallace claims that at least 56 books on the criminal justice department’s prohibited list may be found in high schools, with some also available in elementary and junior high schools.

“The books that are highlighting graphic violence against children are undermining the value of human life,” Wallace said. “They are books that are literally eroding and minimizing the value of human life to children who don’t have the discernment to understand that this is fiction.”

“We need better laws that prohibit this and penalize school districts [that] are not complying with the new laws,” Wallace added.