FIRST ON THE DAILY SIGNAL—Amid the partisan gridlock of a government shutdown, the Senate confirmed 107 of President Donald Trump’s nominees this week, many of whom will play major roles in the administration.

Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., who chairs the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP), is celebrating the confirmation of 15 nominees who were cleared out of his committee after months of Democrat delays.

“As Chairman of the HELP Committee, I’m focused on putting President Trump’s team in place as quickly as possible. These nominees are crucial to advancing Republicans’ pro-worker, pro-family, pro-patient agenda,” said Cassidy, who is a physician, in a statement first provided to The Daily Signal.

“While Democrats continue to hold the government hostage, Senate Republicans are working to deliver results for the American people.” 

The massive wave of confirmations is thanks to a recent Senate rules change, which allows the Senate to confirm some nominees in groups, as opposed to individually.

 Senate Republican Leadership proposed the rules change after months of Democrats slow-walking confirmations by not allowing for unanimous consent or voice votes.

This week’s roster of nominees passed by a 51-47 vote Tuesday, with no Democrats voting for it.

The confirmation of 15 nominees is a major leap forward for Cassidy’s HELP committee, as a statement from Cassidy’s office notes that “Under Cassidy’s leadership, the Committee has voted to advance 28 of Trump’s nominees, 24 of which have been confirmed by the Senate.”

Among the nominees are Kirsten Baesler, who will serve as Assistant Secretary for Elementary and Secondary Education in the Department of Education; Brian Christine, who will serve as an Assistant Secretary of Health and Human Services, and David Keeling, who will serve as an Assistant Secretary of Labor. 

On Thursday, the HELP committee will continue its work as it considers five more of Trump’s nominees.

The post Sen. Cassidy Applauds Senate Confirming HELP Nominees appeared first on The Daily Signal.

Los Angeles Rams legend and NFL Hall of Famer Eric Dickerson is no fan of the league's choice of pop star Bad Bunny as this year's Super Bowl halftime show entertainment, saying that if the performer truly does not like America, he should "keep his a** out."

The post Eric Dickerson Blasts NFL, Bad Bunny Over Super Bowl Halftime Show: ‘Keep His A** in Puerto Rico!’ appeared first on Breitbart.

In July, Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne Jr. penned a piece titled, “The good news about murder,” purporting to explain how and why violent crime rates rose during the pandemic years but have drastically fallen since.

The problem?  In his column, he conspicuously ignores the pre-pandemic crime spikes in cities with “progressive” policies and conveniently memory holes the pro-criminal policies of elected Soros-backed rogue prosecutors and anti-police lawmakers.

In failing to seriously consider, much less acknowledge, the impact of the rogue prosecutor movement (which began in 2016) and anti-police measures like police defunding (which also began well before the pandemic), Dionne’s piece distorts beyond recognition the causes and effects of the crime spike that began in 2017, not 2020.

As a result, he also overlooks what ultimately drove crime rates down—a topic one of us (Stimson) co-wrote an entire book on.

Dionne, like many on the left, buys into the so-called pandemic crime wave as a way to divert attention from the fact that crime rates exploded in Chicago, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, St. Louis, and other cities years before the pandemic.  

Viruses don’t cause crime to rise. Crimes are committed by criminals. And the crime spike was set in motion by choices—specifically, the choices of “progressive” prosecutors, who issued wholesale non-prosecution policies, and of local leaders, who defunded and demonized their police departments. 

Either Dionne is blissfully ignorant of these realities and their consequences, or he’s engaged in editorial flimflam.   

The “Progressive” Decision Not to Prosecute

The last nationwide crime spike peaked around 1992.  Then, crime rates fell dramatically across the country—up until the 2016 election of the first Soros-backed soft-on-crime “progressive” prosecutors.

Well before the pandemic, The Heritage Foundation observed that crime rates were rising in large cities—including Philadelphia, San Francisco, Boston, and Chicago—immediately after soft-on-crime prosecutors were elected through financial support from George Soros and his network of wealthy ultra-liberal friends.

Once elected, these prosecutors promulgated policies that watered down many felonies to misdemeanors, prohibited prosecuting many/most misdemeanors, eliminated cash bail, imposed lighter sentences, declined to prosecute entire categories of crimes, prohibited violent juveniles from being prosecuted as adults, and more.

The results were predictable, traceable, and tragic. In 2020, for instance, Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner’s leniency toward repeat offender Hassan Elliott (through reduced charges, lax bail, and failure to enforce parole violations) enabled Elliott to remain free and murder veteran police officer James O’Connor.

Often, the increased rates of violence predate the pandemic—meaning they could not have been caused by it. In Baltimore, homicides surged beginning in 2015—well before COVID—with the city averaging 331 killings per year between 2015 and 2019, putting the murder rate far above pre-2015 levels.

This coincides with when rogue prosecutor Marilyn Mosby became the state’s attorney for Baltimore in January 2015. Under her tenure, not just murder, but rape, aggravated assault, and robbery numbers increased.

The connection between the crime rates and the crime-causing radical policies of the rogue prosecutor movement also helps explain why crime has gone back down since 2022. Increasingly, progressive prosecutors’ policies have faced public backlash, including in Los Angeles, Chicago, St. Louis, and San Francisco.

Denizens of blue cities, who originally voted for “reform” district attorneys, realized that those attorneys’ policies caused crime to go up—and so threw them out of office.  Not coincidently, when George Gascon, Kim Foxx, Rachael Gardner, and Chesa Boudin left or were removed from office, crime rates in their cities plummeted. 

Dionne lists Baltimore as the city with the largest recent improvement in its murder rate, a 59% drop since 2021.  What he ignores, or doesn’t realize, is that the main reason crime rates dropped is because voters had enough of Mosby and her pro-criminal policies and replaced her with Ivan Bates, who pledged to avoid his predecessor’s mistakes. 

When did Mosby lose her primary to Bates? July 2022.

What happened next—namely, the very crime drop that Dionne identifies—simply confirmed the negative effects of soft-on-crime prosecuting.

“The numbers don’t lie,” explained Maryland Public Policy Institute fellow Sean Kennedy. “Ivan Bates’s model of targeting the most violent or violence-prone offenders (gun carrying criminals) is the primary driver of Baltimore’s miraculous success.”

These facts are stubborn things—but Dionne neverconsiders them. He would sooner blame President Donald Trump’s immigration enforcement—which he says (without evidence) could increase crime—than identify the elephant in the room: You can’t cut down on violence if you don’t punish it.

The “Progressive” Decision Not to Police

Dionne somehow also misses the other elephant in the room: the decision to reduce police budgets. In 2020 and 2021, as the “defund the police” movement gained momentum after George Floyd’s death, dozens of major cities—including Los Angeles, New York, Seattle, and Minneapolis—slashed police expenditures by hundreds of millions of dollars.

These cuts weren’t limited to administrative excess; they also hit recruitment, training, and staffing, leaving departments unable to keep pace with rising violence.

When Dionne discusses the “defund the police” movement, he only notes the “backlash and political recriminations that worked against Democrats.” His column glosses over the much more important (and patently obvious) fact that cutting police budgets increased criminal activity.

A May 2025 study across 15 large cities demonstrates what common sense would otherwise presume: “[T]he sooner police activity (arrests and stops) began to recover from their post-Floyd slide, the earlier murder numbers began to drop.”

On this point, Dionne tries to have his cake and eat it too by defending both “effective policing” and so-called “crime-fighting progressive mayors.” But anyone who has followed criminal justice in the past half-decade knows that the latter phrase is a self-contradiction. Dionne might as well describe “anti-interventionist war hawks” or “pro-tariff free traders,” for, in each case, the adjective cuts directly against the noun.

Ultimately, crime surged, not merely from lockdowns, but because prosecutors and policymakers abandoned enforcement, and crime has returned to more normal levels only where those errors have begun to be corrected.

Attributing the shift to the pandemic treats the surge as an environmental disease rather than something our leaders helped create. This is not only overly simplistic, but actively harmful: We can only continue down the path to recovery if we admit that our policies—our decisions—backfired, and must, in turn, be corrected.

The post Washington Post Columnist’s Deceptive Op-Ed on Murder Rates—and Why it Matters appeared first on The Daily Signal.

Today at 3:00pm ET, President Trump will hold a roundtable on Antifa as a domestic terror group operating inside the United States.  Livestream Links Below: . . Posted in 1st Amendment, Antifa, Domestic Terrorism, media bias, President Trump, Terrorist Attacks, Uncategorized

The post President Trump Hosts a Roundtable on Antifa as a Domestic Terrorist Network appeared first on The Last Refuge.

Gun Owners of America Files Motion for Summary Judgment Against ATF, Challenging NFA Provisions

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

October 8, 2025

Washington, D.C.—Yesterday, Gun Owners of America, Inc., Gun Owners Foundation, together with a coalition of plaintiffs including Firearms Regulatory Accountability Coalition, Inc., Silencer Shop Foundation, B&T USA, LLC, Palmetto State Armory, LLC, SilencerCo Weapons Research, LLC, Brady Wetz, and fifteen states led by Texas, filed a motion for summary judgment in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas.

The motion seeks both a declaratory judgment that certain provisions of the National Firearms Act (NFA) are unconstitutional and an injunction to halt their enforcement as applied to newly “untaxed” firearms—including short-barreled shotguns, short-barreled rifles, silencers, and so-called “any other weapons” (AOWs).

GOA’s coalition of plaintiffs challenged the NFA’s making, transfer, and possession restrictions on these “untaxed” firearms, arguing they are unconstitutional following the passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (Pub. L. No. 119-21) (“OBBB”), which President Donald J. Trump signed into law on July 4, 2025.

Effective January 1, 2026, the OBBB eliminates the NFA’s taxation requirements for these categories of firearms, leaving behind vestigial registration requirements that no longer serve as proof of payment of any tax. As a result, we argued that these excessive regulatory burdens go beyond Congress’s taxing power, cannot be defended under the Commerce Clause, and violate the Second Amendment.

With the filing of this motion for summary judgment, GOA and GOF now expect the Trump Administration to take an official position on untaxed firearm registration and file a response on or before November 6, 2025.

Erich Pratt, GOA’s Senior Vice President, issued the following statement:

“The National Firearms Act’s onerous registration requirements for untaxed firearms are a relic of a taxing scheme that no longer exists.  These provisions violate the Constitution by exceeding Congress’s authority and infringing on the Second Amendment rights of law-abiding Americans.  We urge the Court to strike down these unconstitutional restrictions and protect the rights of our members, supporters, and millions of gun owners nationwide.”

John Velleco, GOF’s Executive Vice President, issued the following statement: 

“The NFA is the strictest federal gun control law in the nation’s history. Even so, NFA-regulated weapons have proliferated in recent years, quickly becoming favored tools of the home defender, hunter, and hobbyist alike.  This lawsuit takes aim at FDR-era restrictions that never should have been passed in the first place. We look forward to taking a big step towards restoring the Founders’ original vision for American gun owners.”

GOA spokesmen are available for interviews. Gun Owners of America is a nonprofit grassroots lobbying organization dedicated to protecting the right to keep and bear arms without compromise. GOA represents over two million members and activists. For more information, visit GOA’s Press Center.

-GOA-

Relatives and allies of former President Jair Bolsonaro led a peaceful walk in Brasília calling for amnesty for the January 8 protesters.

The post Bolsonaro Family Leads Peaceful Walk for Freedom of Conservative Protesters appeared first on Breitbart.

FIRST ON THE DAILY SIGNAL—Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, working without pay due to the government shutdown, arrested pedophiles, human smugglers, and thieves across the country on Tuesday.

“During the Democrats’ government shutdown, our ICE law enforcement officers are working without pay to arrest pedophiles, human smugglers, and other violent criminals from our streets,” Department of Homeland Security Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement.

ICE agents are considered essential workers during the shutdown, so they are required to report for work without receiving paychecks for their service. About 200,000 officers have been working for free during the shutdown, now in its seventh day. They will be paid retroactively after the shutdown ends.

“We will not let the government shutdown slow us down from making America safe again,” McLauglin continued. “Our law enforcement officers are working around the clock to arrest and remove heinous criminals from our country.” 

These criminals, which DHS describes as the “worst of the worst,” include Jose Estrada-Hidalgo, an illegal alien from Mexico, who was convicted of aggravated sexual assault of a child under 14 years of age in Tarrant County, Texas.

Jose Estrada-Hidalgo

Agents also arrested Milton Omar Valdez-Carrasco, another illegal alien from Mexico, who was convicted of criminal sexual contact with a minor in Vineland, New Jersey.  

Milton Omar Valdez-Carrasco

Silvino Juan Martinez-Montesinos, a criminal illegal alien from Mexico, was convicted of sexual conduct in New York.

Silvino Juan Martinez-Montesinos

Calixto Mendez-Gomez, an illegal alien from Guatemala, was arrested after being convicted of solicitation to commit human smuggling in Maricopa County, Arizona.  

Calixto Mendez-Gomez

Rafael Puerto-Urbina, a criminal illegal alien from Honduras, was apprehended due to being convicted of felony theft of property $10,000 to 60,000 in Shelby County, Tennessee.  

Rafael Puerto-Urbina

As the government enters week two of the shutdown, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem urged Americans to thank law enforcement officers for working without pay.

“We’re into the second week of the Democrats’ shutdown,” Noem said. “Our brave men and women of law enforcement—with families, bills, and car payments to make—continue to defend our homeland against violent criminals without pay. They are heroes.”

The post EXCLUSIVE: Unpaid ICE Agents Continue to Arrest Pedophiles, Smugglers, Thieves as Shutdown Drags On appeared first on The Daily Signal.

CHICAGO, IL - President Trump has graciously agreed to compromise with Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson, allowing for designation of an "ICE-free zone" in the Mayor's house.

A former teacher and cheer coach at Randolph County High School in Wedowee, Alabama, was indicted by a grand jury for having sex with a male student.

The post Alabama High School Teacher Accused of Having Sex with Student appeared first on Breitbart.

Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer and his fellow Democrats have a serious authenticity problem. That tends to happen to people who repeatedly lie about basic facts, including their own motives. […]

The post Chuck Schumer Tries to Follow in Bernie Sanders' and AOC's Footsteps with Embarrassing F-Bomb Video appeared first on The Western Journal.