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Ryan Routh, DOJ Offer Opening Arguments in Trump Assassination Attempt Trial

The trial of Ryan Wesley Routh, who is charged with the Sept. 15, 2024, attempted assassination of then-presidential candidate Donald Trump, has begun in Florida amid growing concerns about politically motivated violence in the United States.

Routh, who is representing himself, and Assistant U.S. Attorney John Shipley offered opening arguments on Sept. 11 before hearing from a Secret Service agent, who testified that he confronted Routh at Trump’s golf course in West Palm Beach, Florida, in September 2024, just weeks before the presidential election.

Shipley’s opening argument laid out his findings regarding Routh’s preparations for the alleged assassination attempt, including allegedly traveling to Florida, using various aliases, using encrypted communications, and purchasing a firearm. The case, he said, is not about whether the jury likes Trump or not but whether an attempt was made on Trump’s life.

“[Routh] wanted to make sure the people of this country could not reelect [Trump],” he said.

Opening arguments began nearly a year after the incident on Sept. 15, 2024, and just a day after the assassination of conservative commentator and Trump ally Charlie Kirk. It followed a lengthy pretrial period in which Routh decided to represent himself and submitted bizarre court documents, such as one requesting to subpoena Trump and suggesting a golf match with the president that would end with either Routh dying or becoming president himself. Jury selection took place earlier in the week.

On Sept. 11, Routh, wearing a gray blazer, white shirt, and tie, could be seen smiling often in the relatively small courtroom. According to his indictment, among other things, he has been charged with an attempted assassination of a presidential candidate and faces years in prison. In 2024, he pleaded not guilty.

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Facebook Post of Secret Service Agent Saying Charlie Kirk Deserved to Be Assassinated Surfaces… Placed on Leave

A Secret Service Agent, in a Facebook post, said Charlie Kirk deserved to be assassinated.

TPUSA founder Charlie Kirk, 31, was brutally murdered in broad daylight on Wednesday during an event at Utah Valley University. A gunman climbed up onto a roof and shot Charlie Kirk from an elevated position.

Secret Service Agent Anthony Pough said Charlie Kirk, a Christian husband and father to two young children, deserved to be murdered in cold blood.

“If you are Mourning this guy… delete me. He spewed hate and racism on his show,” Anthony Pough wrote.

“You can’t circumvent karma, [sic] she doesnt [sic] leave,” he said.

“The Secret Service agent’s post is circulating in the Secret Service community with some agents upset over his sentiments because he appears to be celebrating the death of a political figure, and one whom the president is honoring with the Presidential Medal of Freedom and has often had by his side at events over the last several years,” RealClearPolitics reporter Susan Crabtree said.

“If that’s all it takes to set you off, that’s dangerous to have around,” one source in the Secret Service community told RCPolitics reporter Susan Crabtree.

“I’m mostly concerned about the morals of a person sworn to protect the rights of others to engage in politics and exercise free speech, celebrating the death of someone exercising those same rights,” the source added.

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No, South Park, You Didn’t Need to Yank the Charlie Kirk Episode

Oh, c’mon, South Park. You didn’t need to do that. This current season featured an episode about Charlie Kirk and his activism, which was pretty funny, and it’s been pulled from rotation. Amy has more: 

According to the New York Post, the episode was quietly pulled and the network did not issue a statement, noting that “industry insiders” said the episode was “temporarily pulled” from rotation on Comedy Central. It is still available on Paramount+ with a subscription. 

The current season has been a bit Trump heavy, but the program has gone after everybody for years, from the hypocrisy surrounding hate crime legislation to steroid use in sports, political correctness, global warming, and other political figures; the program has tormented everyone. Also, Kirk loved the portrayal. He had a sense of humor, and conservatives can take a joke. 

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Judge Blocks Trump Admin From Banning Illegal Immigrants From Social Programs

A federal judge on Sept. 10 ordered four federal agencies to stop banning illegal immigrants from programs such as Head Start, which provides child care for poorer families.

U.S. District Judge Mary McElroy said the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), the Department of Justice, the Department of Education, and the Department of Labor must halt, at least for now, efforts to remove illegal immigrants from the programs.

HHS and other agencies said in July they were reinterpreting a federal law called the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, which states that illegal immigrants cannot obtain “federal public benefits.”

Under previous interpretations, people accessing certain programs that lawmakers intended only for Americans and legal immigrants did not need to provide proof of legal status, officials said.

As Zachary Stieber reports for The Epoch Times, twenty attorneys general sued, alleging the new interpretation wrongly applied to programs that fell outside the act. In a motion for a preliminary injunction, or a block while the case proceeds, they also said that the government failed to provide “fair notice” to states of the change.

McElroy sided with the states, writing on Wednesday that “while reasonable policymakers can debate the merits of restricting access to programs to lawful citizens—and it is surely not this Court’s job to wade into that debate—the Agencies offer at best incomplete answers to serious questions.”

That appears to violate the Administrative Procedure Act, which lets judges block agency actions determined to be “arbitrary, capricious, an abuse of discretion, or otherwise not in accordance with law,” she said.

McElroy also pointed to the change in interpretation from decades of precedent.

“The Government argues that it has somehow interpreted this statute incorrectly for the nearly thirty years that it has been the law,” she said.

“In its view, everyone (from every past administration) has misunderstood it from the start—at least until last month, when the right way to read it became clear to the Government. The Court is skeptical of that.”

The four agencies, which had pointed to an order from President Donald Trump that directed officials to make sure that taxpayer-funded benefits are not going to illegal immigrants, did not respond to requests for comment.

New York Attorney General Letitia James, a Democrat and one of the attorneys general who sued over the change, said in a statement that “with this victory, we are protecting children’s education, safeguarding critical health care, and preserving the safety net that keeps families afloat.”

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Marco Rubio takes decisive action against foreigners celebrating Charlie Kirk’s assassination on Social Media, a firm step against political violence

On September 10, 2025, the conservative world suffered a devastating blow with the assassination of Charlie Kirk, the young and charismatic founder of Turning Point USA, during an event at Utah Valley University in Orem, Utah.

The 31-year-old activist, known for his passionate defense of conservative values and close ties to Donald Trump, was struck by a bullet to the neck from a nearby rooftop while addressing thousands of students.

This act of violence has unleashed a wave of outrage, particularly due to the mockery and celebrations that have emerged on social media, a phenomenon that U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has decided to confront with a drastic measure.

Rubio announced that he will ban any foreigner who has celebrated Kirk’s assassination online from entering the country, a decision confirmed by Deputy Secretary of State Chris Landau in a statement that reverberated on September 11, 2025.

This policy reflects Rubio’s staunch stance against illegal immigration and organized crime, aligning with the Trump administration’s priorities.

The visibly shaken president ordered flags to be flown at half-staff in Kirk’s memory and announced that he will posthumously award him the Presidential Medal of Freedom, a tribute that underscores Kirk’s importance as a “giant” of his generation, according to Trump’s remarks during a 9/11 commemorative event.

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Utah College Student Reported Suspicious Man on Losee Center Roof to FBI After Spotting Him Twice in Two Weeks Before Charlie Kirk Assassination — Says Suspect Matches Person of Interest and Was Confronted by Professor

A Utah Valley University student revealed to CNN that he spotted a suspicious man walking on or near the roof of the Losee Center twice in two weeks before Kirk was assassinated.

Even more alarming, he says the man he saw bears a striking resemblance to the person of interest whose photo has now been released by police.

The Utah Department of Public Safety released four additional photos of the suspected Charlie Kirk assassin on Thursday night.

Earlier in the day, the FBI had unveiled the first batch of images of the person of interest in the assassination.

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Actress Amber Tamblyn Mocks the Fact that Charlie Kirk’s Daughter Witnessed His Gory Assassination

Actress Amber Tamblyn suggested that the assassination of Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk was a “public execution” and mocked the fact that Kirk’s daughter witnessed his horrific and gruesome murder.

“Wish granted,” Tamblyn wrote in a Thursday BlueSky post, sharing a February 24, 2024 Newsweek article, headlined, “Trump Ally Charlie Kirk Suggests Children Should Watch Public Executions.”

The actress was therefore suggesting that Kirk was “executed” for the fictitious crime of exercising his First Amendment right — seemingly in agreeance with a murderous assassin.

For context, the Newsweek article cited an episode of The Charlie Kirk Show, in which Kirk and co-hosts were hypothetically discussing murderers who have been sentenced to the death penalty receiving a public execution, surmising that crime may go down as a result.

At one point during the panel discussion, co-hosts shared their opinions about what they believed the age limitations should be for people attending a theoretical public execution — should they exist.

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Of Buggy Whips And AI Chips In PA

The buggy whip endures. Not, of course, as a commonly used piece of equipment to spur on a steed or two on your daily travels, but as a short-hand epithet deployed in conversations about the need to adapt or perish in the face of technological change and innovation.

“It’s really easy to see, in a big breakthrough, that the horse-and-buggy guys are going to go out of business,” said White House AI czar David Sacks at Sen. Dave McCormick’s historic AI and Energy Summit this past July in Pittsburgh. What wasn’t easy to see, said Sacks, was greater access to affordable housing in the suburbs, new jobs for auto workers and mechanics, and wholly new industries like F1.

Sacks’ comment is in line with how the buggy-whip metaphor has traditionally been used, since it was first entered into the common lexicon in the 1960s in a marketing textbook – as reference to one technology (the personal automobile) quickly subsuming another (the horse and buggy).

The record player, the cassette player, the VCR, the camcorder, the handheld radio, and the dashboard GPS system – buggy whips, all of them, as the home computer and the cell phone consolidated many individual components of consumer technology.

But there’s a problem with this metaphor, which stands on a surprisingly soft foundation of a just-so story about rapid change from horse to car, on two accounts – it ignores both the ongoing change in transportation more broadly (by not giving proper account to the mass adoption of passenger boating and rail in the late 1800s) and just why it was that the automotive industry was built up in Michigan and the Midwest in the early 1900s.

If artificial intelligence is truly going to be deployed at scale, it will be through adoption by everyday Americans and the industries they work in, demonstrating that technology can solve problems in the real world, overcoming the many frictions of daily life in key industries. And as Pennsylvania finds itself at the center of the data center construction boom, it’s worth re-examining the history of Detroit and the auto industry.

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Alleged Charlie Kirk Assassin Tyler Robinson’s Stellar ACT Scores Revealed – Posted by Proud Mother on Facebook Before Tragedy

New details have emerged about the suspect in the assassination of conservative icon Charlie Kirk, 22-year-old Tyler Robinson.

Moments after his name was announced, Facebook accounts believed to belong to Robinson’s parents were uncovered.

Among the posts on his mother, Amber Jones Robinson’s, Facebook account were the accused assassin’s impressive ACT scores from March 2020.

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Threat to ‘Kill All Charlie Kirks’ Spray-Painted on Seattle College Campus

A threat to “KILL ALL CHARLIE KIRKS” has been spray-painted on the sign of a Seattle, Washington college within a day of the Turning Point USA founder’s public assassination on a Utah college campus.

Seattle-based reporter Jonathan Choe shared a photo on social media showing the alarming message scrawled across the bricks in front of Seattle Central College.

“This is obviously a threat,” Choe wrote. “But what the far-left doesn’t realize is that this madness is actually catalyzing reasonable Americans to now say, ‘WE ARE ALL CHARLIE KIRK.’”

“Courage is contagious and the movement will continue,” he added.

Another disgusting message was spotted on a sign carried by a radical in downtown Seattle, reading “Charlie Kirk shot hell yes!!”

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