Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem is recommending the U.S. implement new travel bans.  

“I am recommending a full travel ban on every damn country that’s been flooding our nation with killers, leeches, and entitlement junkies,” Noem wrote on X Monday night.  

“Our forefathers built this nation on blood, sweat, and the unyielding love of freedom—not for foreign invaders to slaughter our heroes, suck dry our hard-earned tax dollars, or snatch the benefits owed to AMERICANS,” the DHS secretary added.  

Noem’s post followed a meeting she had with President Donald Trump only days after an Afghan national shot two National Guard members in Washington, D.C. U.S. Army Spc. Sarah Beckstrom, 20, died after the Wednesday shooting, and U.S. Air Force Staff Sgt. Andrew Wolfe is still in the hospital but is showing positive signs of recovery, according to West Virginia Gov. Patrick Morrisey. Both Beckstrom and Wolfe were West Virginia National Guard members.  

Following the shooting, Trump directed U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services to pause all asylum decisions. When asked about the move, Trump told reporters he thought the administration would maintain the pause for a “long time.”  

“We don’t want those people. We have enough problems,” Trump said Sunday, adding, “Many of them are no good and they shouldn’t be in our country.” 

Trump named the African country of Somalia as a nation whose citizens he does not want to enter the U.S. 

Two days after the attack on the National Guard members, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced that the U.S. had paused the issuance of all visas to Afghans.  

“The United States has no higher priority than protecting our nation and our people,” Rubio said.  

Thousands of Afghans came to the U.S. after the fall of Kabul to the Taliban in 2021, many of whom worked alongside U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan and feared for their safety under terrorist rule. 

Trump shared a photo on Truth Social of hundreds of Afghans packed into a large plane headed to the U.S. during the fall of Kabul.  

“This is part of the horrendous airlift from Afghanistan,” Trump wrote above the image on Thanksgiving Day. “Hundreds of thousands of people poured into our Country totally unvetted and unchecked. We will fix it, but will never forget what Crooked Joe Biden and his Thugs did to our Country!”  

Trump continued in a second post, pledging to “permanently pause migration from all Third World Countries to allow the U.S. system to fully recover, terminate all of the millions of Biden illegal admissions, including those signed by Sleepy Joe Biden’s Autopen, and remove anyone who is not a net asset to the United States, or is incapable of loving our Country.”  

Trump also pledged to “end all Federal benefits and subsidies to noncitizens of our Country, denaturalize migrants who undermine domestic tranquility, and deport any Foreign National who is a public charge, security risk, or non-compatible with Western Civilization.”  

Since taking office, Trump has prioritized securing America’s borders and stopping the flow of illegal immigration into the U.S. after over 10 million illegal immigrants entered the U.S. under the four years of the Biden administration.  

In September, DHS announced that over two million illegal aliens had either chosen to self-deport or had been removed from the U.S. since the start of the Trump administration in January.   

This is a developing story and may be updated.  

The post Noem Recommends Travel Ban on Nations Sending ‘Killers’ to US  appeared first on The Daily Signal.

The company that makes brands such as Sharpie, Mr. Coffee, Yankee Candle, and Graco said Monday it will slim its workforce to be more competitive.

The post Sharpie Maker Cutting 900 Jobs to Strengthen Competitiveness appeared first on Breitbart.

A massive (and healthy) shift in public opinion has occurred, with only 33 percent of adults believing a college education is worth the cost.

The post Nolte: 63% Now Believe College Is Not Worth the Cost appeared first on Breitbart.

Comedienne and former talk show host Ellen DeGeneres and her wife Portia de Rossi are reportedly heading back to the United States from Great Britain despite claims that they abandoned the U.S. over Donald Trump's election last year. 

The post Ellen DeGeneres and Portia de Rossi Reportedly Leaving U.K. After Ditching U.S. Over Trump appeared first on Breitbart.

Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Communications and Information Arielle Roth said during a speech on Tuesday at the Free State Foundation that the Trump administration has overhauled the failed Biden-era BEAD program, which is projected to save $21 billion and will expand internet access for Americans everywhere, Breitbart News has learned exclusively.

The post Exclusive — Assistant Commerce Sec. Arielle Roth: Trump Admin Transformed Biden’s Broadband ‘Boondoggle’ into Massive Savings appeared first on Breitbart.

Costco has filed a lawsuit in the U.S. Court of International Trade seeking to preserve its right to a refund of tariffs paid under President Donald Trump’s use of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act. The warehouse club chain filed

The post Costco Sues U.S. Government To Protect Possible Tariff Refunds appeared first on Breitbart.

As a pessimistic Boomer (and Big Law veteran) who channels Robert Bork, I regard the state of our politics in the MAGA era the same way Charles Dickens did in A Tale of Two Cities nearly two centuries ago: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” I try to temper my gloominess about the current zeitgeist by aiming for a perspective somewhere between Pollyanna and Jeremiah.

Thanks to President Trump, the 6-to-3 originalist majority on the Supreme Court is the only thing standing between us and the abyss—a hellish combination of Deep State corruption, socialist economics, cultish wokeism, and cultural degeneracy. Yes, President Trump has over three years left in his second term, and is heroically trying to drain the swamp. But Congress is gridlocked, the midterms loom, and recent election results suggest the MAGA agenda is not as popular as Trump’s 2024 drubbing of Kamala Harris might indicate. She was, after all, the weakest Democratic candidate for president since Michael Dukakis in 1988. Unlike Trump in 2024, the Bush/Quayle ticket won an Electoral College landslide, and a majority of the popular vote. The nation is much more divided now.

Despite all of this, unlike my friend Jesse Merriam, I am encouraged by the state of the conservative legal movement—at least relative to the Left’s capture of so many other American institutions.

Merriam provides a partial roll call of favorable Supreme Court decisions issued in recent years, but omits other important victories. For example, Janus v. AFSCME (2018) disallowed the payment of compulsory agency fees to unions by non-consenting government employees, overturning Abood v. Detroit Board of Education (1977). U.S. v. Skrmetti (2025) rejected an equal protection challenge to a ban on “transgender” procedures for minors, allaying concerns over Justice Gorsuch’s misstep in Bostock. Other notable reversals are on the horizon, including Humphrey’s Executor v. United States (1935), which hamstrung the unitary executive, and possibly Griggs v. Duke Power Co. (1971), which ushered in the disastrous doctrine of disparate impact.

The Court will never be able to fix all the errors that have accumulated since it began to meet in 1790. Perfection is a utopian fantasy, especially in politics. For the first time in nearly a century, however, the Court is tacking in a conservative direction after decades of disappointment from feckless Republican-appointed justices. Recall that Roe v. Wade (1973) was a Burger Court decision written by a Nixon appointee. And Nixon was not alone in making bad Supreme Court appointments. William Brennan and Earl Warren were both nominated by Dwight David Eisenhower. The only solid conservative appointed by Nixon was William Rehnquist, who thereafter earned the title of  “Lone Ranger” due to writing 52 solitary dissents. This was the extent of the conservative legal movement at the time.

Reagan disappointed with Sandra Day O’Connor and Anthony Kennedy, but scored bigly with Antonin Scalia. The elder Bush gave us David Souter—but also Clarence Thomas. Bush 43 absurdly nominated Harriet Miers before settling on the stalwart Samuel Alito. In short, the Supreme Court was often a mess before Donald Trump. And the resulting constitutional jurisprudence was an incoherent mélange of liberal pablum, a doctrinal wasteland. But not anymore.

A good deal of the credit for this must go to the Federalist Society, founded in 1982 (after I graduated from law school). I am a longtime FedSoc member and used to attend the National Lawyers Convention in Washington, D.C., each November until the event grew so big that it was unworkably large and lacked intimacy.

Even so, legal academia remains captured by the far-left, as is the ABA. Democratic leaders have vowed to pack the Supreme Court should they regain control of Congress. Most state bar associations, virtually all large law firms (in particular their robust “pro bono” programs), and the majority of lower federal court judges appointed by Obama and Biden (who are responsible for the judicial resistance to Trump 2.0 raging in many blue states and blue cities) are a testament to the Left’s still considerable power.

The “biggest enemies” of the conservative legal movement have not been “vanquished,” as Merriam asserts. They have merely been held at bay temporarily. We are still engaged in a perilous conflict with the Left.

When he assumed that Hillary Clinton would be elected in 2016, Harvard Law School professor Mark Tushnet, a Marxist who was hired when Justice Elena Kagan was dean, candidly revealed the Left’s blueprint for transforming the Court. In a post for the influential Balkinization blog entitled “Abandoning Defensive Crouch Liberal Constitutionalism,” Tushnet published a veritable Rules for (Legal) Radicals: the wholesale overruling of disfavored precedents, giving no quarter to the “losers” in the culture wars (that is, us), emulating the uber-activist Justices William Brennan and Thurgood Marshall, and so forth. Tushnet, writing in mid-2016, concluded his overconfident reverie with this note of warning: “Of course all bets are off if Donald Trump becomes President.”

The Left’s ruthless ambition remains unfulfilled. Given the caprice of the electorate, the Sword of Damocles dangles ominously every four years. Our current safety is fragile, and subject to the whims of politics. We live in fraught times.

I understand the griping that goes on in some circles on the Right about FedSoc being part of “Con, Inc.,” being preoccupied with legal minutiae instead of cultural issues, and favoring “establishment” candidates for Supreme Court appointments. I must admit to having indulged in some of this myself from time to time. However, no organization—or movement—is perfect. Some of the FedSoc’s clique of insiders were slow to get aboard the Trump Train. In 2016 some self-proclaimed “originalists” even endorsed Hillary Clinton. (Most of the signatories thankfully came to their senses later on.) The fact remains that FedSoc is the only countervailing force in a legal community overwhelmingly dominated by the Left. Despite its David vs. Goliath disadvantage, it has served as a battle flag around which center-right lawyers, law students, law professors, and judges can—and do—rally.

Critics may charge that FedSoc is just a “debating club” with no fixed “legal agenda,” to use Merriam’s words, and encompasses almost disparate factions on the Right (libertarians and social conservatives). True, but if the organization advocated specific policies, judges would be precluded by ethical rules from participating. FedSoc’s only agenda is restoring the rule of law envisioned by the American Founders.

FedSoc is not static, and the focus on debate creates a marketplace of ideas that winnows out the losers. In the past decade, various theories were advanced on the Right, given a platform by FedSoc, and disappeared for want of a following, such as right-on-crime (criminal justice reform), “judicial engagement” (libertarian judicial activism), and “common-good originalism,” which was motivated by the perception that “original” originalism had stalled. Of course, Dobbs and SFFA v. Harvard showed that patience has its virtues.

FedSoc is dynamic, just as conservative politics is dynamic. Tellingly, FedSoc increasingly showcases conservative talent from outside the Beltway. Fifth Circuit Judge Andrew Oldham, author of the epic 130-page dissent in W.M.M. v. Trump (an Alien Enemies Act case) that persuaded his court to grant rehearing en banc, delivered the 24th Annual Barbara K. Olson Memorial Lecture at this year’s FedSoc National Lawyers Convention. Similarly, MAGA-friendly South Texas College of Law professor Josh Blackman has supplanted familiar Acela corridor scholars as a leading legal commentator for both FedSoc and The Heritage Foundation.

The conservative legal movement is not monolithic, because the Right consists of a diverse assortment of factions with different points of view. This distinguishes us from the activists on the Left, who largely march in lockstep in their common quest for power and control. This is a strength of our movement.

The conservative legal movement, like conservative politics in general, continues to evolve due to shifting challenges, personalities, and circumstances. President Trump’s election in 2016 and re-election in 2024 will continue to alter the course of the Supreme Court for decades. The movement cannot be divorced from conservative politics in general. As Merriam has noted elsewhere, the conservative legal movement “must have in place a powerful electoral constituency,” that is, popular support. This means we face both political and cultural issues.

Has originalism become obsolete in 2025? Is Merriam right that it consists only of “technocratic exercises,” “performative jousting over narrow interpretive questions,” and “shadow-boxing legal liberalism”? Does originalism reflect a stagnant (or “calcified”) strategy “designed for a different country and a different time”? I don’t think so. Originalism is manifestly working. Courts are not legislatures. Per Federalist 78, they have “no influence over either the sword or the purse…and can take no active resolution whatever. [The judiciary] may truly be said to have neither FORCE nor WILL, but merely judgment.”

Jettisoning this limited role in lieu of becoming “guardians of our social order” and stewards of “civilizational restoration” would abandon the premises of our Constitution. It would create a “bevy of Platonic guardians” who would be indistinguishable from the left-wing judicial activists under the New Deal and the Warren and Burger courts, whose destructive handiwork we are in the process of undoing. Conservatives, unlike leftist apparatchiks, should honor the Constitution and the blessings of liberty it was designed to foster.

The post A Tale of Two Trends appeared first on The American Mind.

For years, gun control advocates have clung to a now-tired narrative on the costs and benefits of civilian gun ownership. The narrative paints the Second Amendment as the primary cause of an alleged (and seemingly perpetual) “gun violence epidemic,” while insisting that ordinary civilians rarely rely on firearms for self-defense. Prominent gun control groups like Everytown routinely weaponize this narrative to lament the very existence of the right to keep and bear arms—and to advocate for increasingly severe restrictions on civilian gun ownership. 

There’s just one problem: Gun control advocates’ own data tells a very different story. 

Earlier this month, Everytown invited American gun owners to attend the group’s online gun safety training classes, which lectured attendees on the fact that defensive gun uses are an “exceedingly rare” phenomenon. Astute gun owners, however, noticed something peculiar—the numbers simply did not add up.

The lecturers insisted, on the one hand, that the nation suffered from a gun violence epidemic because an average of 47,000 Americans died from gunshot wounds annually over the last five years (at least half of those deaths are suicides). Yet, on the other hand, the training materials stated that those supposedly “rare” defensive gun uses occurred at an average of 69,000 times annually since 2019—making them 22% more “common” than the gun deaths allegedly reaching epidemic levels.  

In other words, Everytown inadvertently admitted that Second Amendment advocates have been right all along—ordinary Americans routinely rely on the right to keep and bear arms.   

Everytown’s numbers are, of course, also extreme outliers in the overall body of research on the prevalence of defensive gun use. Almost every major study—including the most recent report on the subject by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention—has found that Americans use their firearms in self-defense between 500,000 and 3 million times annually. In 2021, a professor at the Georgetown McDonough School of Business conducted the most comprehensive study ever undertaken on the issue, concluding that roughly 1.6 million defensive gun uses occur in the U.S. every year.  

For this reason, The Daily Signal publishes a monthly article highlighting some of the previous month’s many news stories on defensive gun use that you may have missed—or that might not have made it to the national spotlight in the first place. 

(Read accounts from past months and years here.) 

The examples below represent only a small portion of the news stories on defensive gun use during crimes that we found in October. You can explore more using The Heritage Foundation’s interactive Defensive Gun Use Database. 

• Oct. 3, Athens Township, Pennsylvania. A woman and her husband stopped by the home of her ex-husband’s mother for a visit, at her invitation. During the visit, the ex-husband—who also lived in the home—“violently attacked and assaulted” the woman’s current husband. The assailant pinned the husband to the floor, repeatedly punched him in the head, and struck him in the face with a picture frame, inflicting a serious head injury. Fearing for his life, the husband—a concealed carry permit holder—drew his firearm and fatally shot his assailant.  

• Oct. 4, San Antonio, Texas. When a masked robber entered a smoke shop late at night and brandished a firearm at an employee, the employee drew his own gun and shot the robber multiple times. The suspect’s wounds ultimately proved fatal, but the employee wasn’t injured.

• Oct. 7, Albany, Louisiana. Police say that a gun owner who shot and wounded a would-be arsonist was legally justified in his actions, noting that the man whom he shot had poured gasoline around a home and was in the process of attempting to set it on fire with someone still inside. The injured suspect faces a charge of attempted aggravated arson.   

• Oct. 10, Phoenix, Arizona. A woman fatally shot her ex-boyfriend after he forced his way into her apartment late at night while she and her two children were home. The woman told police that she’d recently ended the relationship.   

• Oct. 11, Deltona, Florida. A woman shot and injured her husband in self-defense after he forced his way into the home and assaulted her after she had locked her doors, fearing for her safety during a confrontation. Police arrested the husband, who had a history of violent criminal charges and now faces additional charges of battery, giving false information to law enforcement, and violating his probation.  

• Oct. 13, Miami, Florida. Four masked men clad in all-black clothing confronted a woman as she sat in her car in front of her home, pointed a rifle at her, and forced her inside the home at gunpoint. The intruders kicked open a locked bedroom door, only to be met with gunfire from the woman’s boyfriend, who’d armed himself when he heard the commotion. The rounds injured one intruder and sent the others fleeing. The boyfriend successfully detained the injured suspect at gunpoint until police arrived.  

• Oct. 16, Chicago, Illinois. A woman exchanged gunfire with two armed intruders who entered her home and assaulted another resident. The suspects fled and neither victim was injured during the shooting. 

• Oct. 19, Compton, California. Employees at a beauty supply store asked a man to leave after he allegedly followed a woman into the business and groped her. This enraged the man, who verbally berated employees and threw merchandise around the store before brandishing an object that appeared to be a knife and threatening to kill everyone inside. A female customer drew a gun and first fired a warning shot. When the man turned toward her, however, she fired another round, this time fatally striking him. The armed customer cooperated with investigators and wasn’t arrested.   

• Oct. 25, Carson City, Nevada. Local authorities described how a verbal altercation between two men at a gas station took a “bizarre turn” that ended with one of the men being shot in self-defense by a female resident during a home invasion. Apparently, the verbal dispute escalated into a car chase that caused two different hit-and-run accidents before one of the men—for reasons that remain unclear—forced his way into a home occupied by people with no connection to the preceding events.  

• Oct. 28, Memphis, Tennessee. A man returned to his mother’s home after being “forcefully removed” during an altercation with her husband. He broke a front glass window, reached inside through the shattered glass, and grabbed his mother by the neck, prompting her husband to shoot and critically injure him in her defense. Police later learned that the son had an active arrest warrant for theft charges.   

• Oct. 31, Humble, Texas. An off-duty sheriff’s deputy fatally shot a man who repeatedly tried to enter the deputy’s pick-up truck—where he’d just strapped in his young child—despite multiple commands to stop. The man apparently had a history of serious mental illness and family members said he’d been acting increasingly erratic in the days leading up to the shooting. 

The standard gun control narrative is one that collapses under the weight of its own (severely undercounted) data. Everytown can dress up their own contradictions and reframe them as genuine concern, but the numbers give the game away. The truth is simple: Lawful gun ownership benefits ordinary Americans, who routinely rely on their Second Amendment rights to protect life, liberty, and property.

The post Gun Control Group Accidentally Admits That Defensive Gun Uses Are Common  appeared first on The Daily Signal.