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US Supreme Court Takes Up Challenge to Hawaii’s Gun Law

The U.S. Supreme Court agreed on Oct. 3 to take up a new Second Amendment case related to a Hawaii law that bars the carrying of handguns on private property open to the public, such as restaurants, malls, and many businesses.

The nine justices took up an appeal by three Hawaii residents who have concealed carry licenses, and a state-based gun rights advocacy group challenging Hawaii’s law while seeking to reverse a lower court’s determination that the state law complies with the Second Amendment.

Hawaii’s gun law bans firearms on private property unless the owner has specifically allowed them on the premises. It also blocks firearms in places such as beaches, parks, bars, and restaurants that serve alcohol.

Hawaii’s measure was challenged by state residents Jason Wolford, Alison Wolford, and Atom Kasprzycki—who own firearms and have concealed carry licenses—along with the Hawaii Firearms Coalition, a gun rights organization. The defendant is listed as Hawaii Attorney General Anne E. Lopez.

In a petition to the high court submitted earlier this year, the plaintiffs ask whether the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, which upheld the state law, “erred in holding … that Hawaii may presumptively prohibit the carry of handguns by licensed concealed carry permit holders on private property open to the public.”

A judge blocked the Hawaii law after it was challenged in court by the gun rights group and the three Maui residents. The Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, however, largely reversed that decision and allowed Hawaii to enforce the law.

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FAFO: Karoline Leavitt says President Trump is Planning to Cut Federal Funding to Portland Amid Violence From “Leftwing Domestic Terrorists” – “We Will Not Fund States That Allow Anarchy”

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt on Friday addressed the incident in Portland, Oregon, where Republican journalist Nick Sortor was swarmed and attacked by Antifa thugs, then arrested by Portland police. 

The Gateway Pundit reported on the incident, which is now under investigation by the Department of Justice.

“Portland: it’s FO [Find Out] time. Buckle up,” Assistant Attorney Harmeet Dhillon, who will lead the investigation, said in an X post.

Leavitt announced to reporters on Friday that not only has the Portland Police Department come into the DOJ’s crosshairs, but President Trump is now taking steps to cut federal aid to the city, citing the lawlessness in the streets.

“Since June alone,” she said, “radical left-wing lunatics have violently breached the ICE facility by using a stop sign as a battering ram, hurled explosives and other projectiles at law enforcement, repeatedly assault and dox officers, berate their law-abiding neighbors, and have even rolled out a guillotine in front of the ICE facility.”

In addition to cutting funding, “there will also be an additional surge of federal resources to Portland immediately, including enhanced CBP and ICE resources. Law and order will prevail, and President Trump will make sure of it,” Leavitt said.

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BlackRock & Blackstone Are Buying Local Power Companies

Globalist equity firms are scooping up local energy companies across the country — and it looks like they’re just getting started. The official reason is to invest in America’s artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure.

The buyouts are already triggering pushback and anxiety at the local level. The Associated Press recently reported that “private equity giants like BlackRock and Blackstone are buying local utilities to power AI-driven data centers, sparking ratepayer and regulator concerns.”

Worries about rising power bills have been mounting in tandem with the buildup of AI data centers around the country. Earlier this year, the AP reported:

Rising power bills are “something legislators have been hearing a lot about. … More people are speaking out at the public utility commission in the past year than I’ve ever seen before,” said Charlotte Shuff of the Oregon Citizens’ Utility Board, a consumer advocacy group. “There’s a massive outcry.

… Tricia Pridemore, who sits on Georgia’s Public Service Commission and is president of the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners, pointed to an already tightened electricity supply and increasing costs for power lines, utility poles, transformers and generators as utilities replace aging equipment or harden it against extreme weather.

The AI race is well underway, and it’s no surprise that these massive international asset firms, given their history, are eager to support a technology with unprecedented potential for surveillance, manipulation, and outright control. There’s also the prospect of a great return on investment, which is the official primary goal of these equity firms. But, as history shows, these multi-trillion dollar entities are not afraid to throw around their monetary might and bully companies into incorporating into their brand political causes such as climate alarmism and the “trans” agenda.  

BlackRock and Blackstone used to be the same company before separating in 1988. Together they control more than $13 trillion in assets. The bulk of that, about $12 trillion, is BlackRock’s, while Blackstone has reported about $1.2 trillion in assets. Only two countries have GDPs larger than $13 trillion — the U.S. and China.

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Illegal Immigrants and Federal Health Benefits: What to Know

Republicans and Democrats offer competing claims about whether people who entered the country unlawfully are benefiting from Medicaid.

“The law prohibits undocumented immigrants from getting payments from Medicare, Medicaid, or the ACA. There’s no money, not a penny of federal dollars that are going there,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) said on Sept. 30.

Yet Republicans say millions of people who entered the country illegally do receive federal health benefits.

“By some estimates, 20 million illegal aliens came [here] from every country, all around the world,” House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) told reporters on Oct. 2, referring to the years of the Biden administration.

“[Democrats] gave them all this parole status so that they could get enrolled onto taxpayer benefits.”

The war of words has erupted during a government shutdown because of Democrats’ demand that all health-related portions of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBB) be repealed as part of a continuing funding resolution.

The dispute is over competing visions for the scope of government-funded health. Democrats favor a more expansive list of noncitizens who can apply for federal benefits. Republicans, through the OBBB, have shortened the list considerably.

Here’s a look at which immigrants can now apply for Medicaid, and how that’s set to change in 2026.

Qualified Aliens

Under current federal law, “qualified aliens” can apply for federal benefits. This category includes people lawfully admitted for permanent residence.

Generally, there is a five-year waiting period before eligibility begins, though most states waive that for immigrant children and pregnant women.

Parolees are also qualified aliens. Federal law gives the director of Homeland Security the discretion to release them into the United States temporarily, “only on a case-by-case basis for urgent humanitarian reasons or significant public benefit.”

More than 2.8 million people were paroled into the country between February 2021 and January 2025, according to the Department of Homeland Security. Parolees are eligible for Medicare, Medicaid, or the ACA Marketplace after one year.

Immigrants who are granted asylum or refugee status are also qualified aliens. They have no waiting period.

Qualified aliens also include people who are under an order of deportation that has been withheld, come from certain designated countries, are victims of domestic violence, are victims of sex trafficking, are members of certain Indian tribes, or certain others.

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OpenAI’s Video Generation App Sora 2 Is ‘Hollywood’s Most Terrifying Nightmare’ — Here’s Everything We Know

OpenAI’s artificial intelligence-generated video maker called “Sora 2” has launched and it is throwing Hollywood and the entertainment industry into full-blown panic with “nightmare” predictions of the looming end of the showbiz industry as we know it.

Sora 2 is OpenAI’s latest text-to-video generation program, which allows a user to create realistic, movie-quality video by just talking through the scenes desired while the software generates the images. But what is shocking everyone in Hollywood is the ease with which Sora 2 can plunk copyrighted characters and realistic representations of known actors right into the scenes generated by users. And it can be done in minutes, not months or years.

Some of the video generated by Sora 2, for instance, have placed Pokémon character Pikachu into famous movies, such as Saving Private Ryan.

The latest version is far from perfect. It sometimes struggles with dialog, and some have noticed when you slow the video down, a lot of strange glitches appear to flick in and out of the frame — but they are often glitches that go unseen when the video is played in normal time, according to the Hollywood Reporter.

But the program is still shockingly good for what it can do and it has Hollywood on edge, fearful that anyone with access to Sora 2 can create a cinematic quality video by just talking through their scenes with the program. No studios, producers, actors, directors, costumers, musicians, or artists of any kind required.

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Telegram Founder Pavel Durov Slams French Investigation, Warns of Global Crackdown on Privacy and Free Speech

Telegram CEO Pavel Durov made no attempt to hide his frustration with French authorities during a wide-ranging conversation on The Lex Fridman Podcast, describing the French government’s investigation into him and his company as “Kafkaesque,” “absurd,” and deeply damaging.

He warned that efforts to undermine digital privacy are accelerating not just in France, but across Europe and beyond, using pretexts like child protection and election integrity to justify surveillance and censorship.

Throughout the interview, Durov painted a grim picture of what he sees as growing authoritarianism disguised as public safety.

“Every dictator in the world justifies taking away your rights with very reasonable-sounding justifications,” he said, warning that citizens often don’t realize the gravity of their loss until it’s too late. “Every message they send is monitored. They can’t assemble. It’s over.”

Durov flatly rejected the idea that any government, including France’s, could force Telegram to grant access to users’ private conversations.

“Nothing,” he responded when asked if there was any scenario in which French intelligence could gain a backdoor.

He emphasized that Telegram does not and will not use personal data to power ad targeting, saying, “We would never use…your personal messaging data or your context data or your metadata or your activity data to target ads.”

Despite facing legal pressure and travel restrictions stemming from the French case, Durov said Telegram remains firm in its refusal to censor political content or violate users’ privacy.

“The more pressure I get, the more resilient and defiant I become,” he said, accusing French authorities of trying to “humiliate” him and millions of Telegram users through coercive tactics.

Durov described encounters with French intelligence officials who allegedly tried to pressure him into shutting down Telegram channels during elections in Romania and Moldova, actions he said would have amounted to “political censorship.”

He recounted being approached while detained in France and asked to disable channels that criticized preferred candidates of Western-aligned governments. “If you think that, because I’m stuck here, you can tell me what to do, you are very wrong,” Durov said he told one official.

He made it clear that Telegram had only taken down content in Moldova that actually violated platform rules, refusing broader demands that lacked justification.

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Federal Court Rules Bans on Carrying Firearms in Post Offices Are Unconstitutional, Democrats Hardest Hit

In a win for the Second Amendment and law-abiding gun owners across America, a federal court has ruled that bans on carrying firearms in U.S. Post Offices are unconstitutional.

And, yes, as I wrote in the headline, “Democrats hardest hit,” given that the gun-grabbing Democrat Party never saw a firearm it didn’t want to control, restrict, or outright ban.

As reported by RedState’s sister site, “Bearing Arms,” on Wednesday, Chief United States District Judge Reed O’Connor handed down an opinion on Firearms Policy Coalition Inc, et.al. v. Bondi. FPC was joined by the Second Amendment Foundation (SAF) in challenging the federal law.

The ruling also applies to carrying firearms on property surrounding post offices.

Here’s more, via Bearing Arms:

O’Connor wrote that the law “is unconstitutional under the Second Amendment with respect to Plaintiffs’ (and their members) possession and carrying of firearms inside of an ordinary United States Post Office or the surrounding Post Office property.” There’s nothing in the order limiting it to Texas and applies to all members of the Second Amendment Foundation and Firearms Policy Coalition.

The complaint was originally filed in June 2024 and the named defendant was then-Attorney General Garland. “So if the government seeks to restrict firearms in a particular location as a ‘sensitive place,’ it must prove that its current restriction is sufficiently analogous to a ‘well-established and representative historical analogue,’” the complaint said.

This order in Texas comes at the heels of the Department of Justice dropping a bid for an appeal in a criminal matter involving carriage on U.S. Postal Service property. U.S. v. Ayala in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Florida involved defendant Ayala’s possession of a firearm on postal grounds. District Court Judge Kathryn Kimball Mizelle wrote that: “The United States fails to meet its burden of pointing to a historical tradition of firearms regulation justifying Ayala’s indictment under § 930(a).”

Judge O’Connor struck down both the federal statute (18 U.S.C. § 930(a)) and USPS regulation (39 C.F.R. § 232.1(l)) that prohibited firearm possession and carry at ordinary post offices — not those situated on military bases or within multi-use federal complexes.

Such rulings, whether favorable to Second Amendment rights or against, highlight the decades-old debate between the left, which absurdly blames “gun violence” — as if firearms themselves committed crimes — and the right, which correctly asserts that “the only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.”

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Federal Government Freezes $2.1 Billion for Chicago Transit Projects Over Alleged Race-Based Contracting

The federal government will withhold $2.1 billion for two Chicago infrastructure projects, the U.S. Department of Transportation has announced, citing a new rule that bars race- and sex-based contracting requirements from federal grant programs.

The agency said in an Oct. 3 statement that the Chicago Transit Authority’s (CTA’s) Red Line Extension and Red and Purple Modernization Program have been placed under administrative review “to determine whether any unconstitutional practices are occurring.”

The suspension follows similar moves in New York earlier this week, where $18 billion for the Hudson Tunnel and Second Avenue Subway projects was also put on hold, amid similar concerns around constitutionality.

White House Budget Director Russell Vought took to X to say that the reason the two projects have been put on hold is to “ensure funding is not flowing via race-based contracting.”

The pause stems from an interim final rule the Transportation Department issued on Sept. 30 that rewrites the agency’s longstanding Disadvantaged Business Enterprise (DBE) program, which aims to assist small businesses owned and controlled by “socially and economically disadvantaged individuals.” The rule now states the department must operate its programs “in a nondiscriminatory fashion,” and it specifically “removes race- and sex-based presumptions of social and economic disadvantage that violate the U.S. Constitution.”

Under the new standard, all applying businesses must make individualized showings of disadvantage to qualify as DBEs. The rule eliminates automatic presumptions previously granted to women and members of certain racial and ethnic groups.

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Unprecedented US Military Build-Up Near Venezuela Is Sign Of Possible War

Venezuela continues to be on high alert given the growing number of US military assets parked off its coast in the southern Caribbean. Venezuelan Defense Minister General Vladimir Padrinohas recently said “We’re watching them, I want you to know. And I want you to know that this doesn’t intimidate us. It doesn’t intimidate the people of Venezuela.”

He noted that American military “planes flying close to our Caribbean Sea is a vulgarity, a provocation, a threat to the security of the nation” – further calling it “military harassment.”

This comes as President Trump updated Congress on the situation in a memo this week. It stated the US was now in “a non-international armed conflict” with the cartels, which his administration earlier designated as terrorist organizations. 

Sufficient Pentagon forces have been assembled which would allow for the capture a strategic infrastructure in Venezuela, such as a port or airport, fresh reports say.

Additionally, there’s this fresh development previewed in Newsweek: “a platoon of U.S. Navy SEALs—typically comprising 16 personnel—will conduct joint drills this month with approximately 40 Argentine tactical divers,” according to a US Southern Command spokesperson.

The same publication lists five signs that possible war with Venezuela could be looming:

  • F-35B Jets in Puerto Rico
  • Pentagon Imagery
  • Cargo and Naval Deployments
  • Special Operations
  • US military units in the Caribbean

All of this also allowed The Washington Examiner to speculate in a major Thursday report, saying it “understands that military planners believe the assembled forces are now sufficient to seize and hold key strategic facilities such as ports and airfields on Venezuelan territory (the Washington Examiner is withholding some details for national security reasons).”

It adds: “US control over such locations would allow for the increased, sustained projection of U.S. military power into Venezuela from defensible positions.”

Washington Examiner further notes that Pentagon maneuvers and potential conflict preparations have been an open secret:

A Defense Department readout from late August notes how a training exercise off the U.S. Virgin Islands saw “six special tactics airmen parachuted into the Caribbean Sea with an inflatable boat, 3 miles off the shore. … Eleven more combat controllers and pararescuemen then jumped directly into [an airport] from the same aircraft, with both forces combining to take control of the airfield.”

While the Trump administration has vowed to to not start new wars – and the president has of late been boasting of solving several conflicts – Washington has been reviving ‘war on drugs’ type imagery and a rationale for the military build-up. Meanwhile Friday saw another attack on an alleged smuggling vessel in regional waters:

US STRIKES ANOTHER VESSEL IN WATERS OFF VENEZUELAN COAST

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California Ends Kamala Harris’s Truancy Law Punishing Parents

California parents will no longer face arrest if their children miss school following Gov. Gavin Newsom’s Oct. 1 decision to approve legislation repealing Kamala Harris’s truancy law.

The 2011 law that the former vice president sponsored when she served as the state’s attorney general made it a misdemeanor for parents if their children were chronically truant by missing 10 percent or more of school days, starting in kindergarten.

The law punished parents with a fine of up to $2,000 or one year in county jail. At the time, she said the bill was an “effective strategy” to reduce chronic elementary school truancy and a smart approach to crime prevention.

This week, Newsom signed into law Assembly Bill 461 to end the criminalization of truancy for parents and remove the 2011 law from the state’s penal code. Newsom did not explain why he signed AB 461 in his press release about legislation decisions on Oct. 1. The bill, one of 105 bills signed into law that day, takes effect on Jan. 1.

The bill’s author, Assemblyman Patrick Ahrens, a Silicon Valley Democrat, called the truancy law a “failed policy.”

“Thank you to Gov. Newsom for signing my bill to repeal this failed policy of criminalizing struggling California families for their children missing school,” Ahrens said in a statement. “Fining or imprisoning parents did nothing to get kids the education and support they need.”

While California’s truancy law remained on the books for more than a decade, school districts were becoming less likely to enforce the punitive measures against parents, according to EdSource, a nonprofit educational resource focused on the state’s school systems.

The first arrests under the law were of five parents in Orange County in 2011. The parents were handcuffed and taken to Orange County Jail before being released on their own recognizance for ignoring repeated requests to get their children to school.

While parents have been arrested in California under the truancy law, it was unclear how many cases resulted in criminal charges. Most school districts instead went beyond the law to reach out to parents with emails, letters, and phone calls to resolve truancy problems, according to the California District Attorney’s Association.

The new law was sponsored by End Child Poverty California, Service Employees International Union (SEIU) California, and the Western Center on Law and Poverty. Several justice and parent organizations, including the California State Parent-Teacher Association (PTA), also supported it.

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