Tag: media

Fact Check: ICE DID NOT Arrest 500 U.S. Citizens for Immigration Violations

Claims that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrested more than 500 American citizens since President Donald Trump returned to office in January 2025 misrepresent the findings of an October 6, 2026, ProPublica investigation.

The report identified 506 U.S. citizens detained by federal immigration agents between January 2025 and September 2026. It did not establish that ICE formally arrested 500 citizens, that all the detentions were immigration arrests, or that 500 Americans were mistakenly identified as illegal immigrants.

The ProPublica investigation counted anyone held against their will by immigration agents for any period of time. That included people who were temporarily prevented from leaving until they showed ID or proof of citizenship.

Under that definition, a citizen briefly detained during an immigration raid could be counted alongside someone formally arrested on suspicion of assaulting a federal officer. Although both encounters may constitute detention under the Fourth Amendment, they are not necessarily equivalent to a formal criminal arrest.

ProPublica’s own headline described more than 500 American citizens as having been detained, rather than arrested. Public and social media sources misquoting the original article have changed the terminology from detention to arrest, materially altering the meaning of the findings.

More than 100 Americans were detained after federal agents questioned their citizenship. A much larger category involved more than 300 Americans detained after allegations that they assaulted, obstructed, or interfered with federal immigration officers. These encounters frequently occurred during immigration raids, protests, or confrontations involving people inhibiting immigration enforcement activities.

Being an American citizen does not provide immunity from arrest for violating federal criminal law. Title 18, Section 111 of the United States Code makes it a federal offense to forcibly assault, resist, impede, intimidate, or interfere with designated federal officers performing their official duties. Therefore, an American citizen accused of assaulting an ICE officer may be arrested and prosecuted under federal criminal law.

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Axios Looks for Silver Lining in Trump’s Tinfoil Economy

Axios (10/5/26) thinks it’s spotted a mystery: “President Trump’s economic data keeps getting stronger. His economic polling keeps getting worse by the day.”

Or as the political news site put it in an earlier story (9/30/26): “America’s economy is roaring ahead. And Americans feel lousy about it.”

As both stories note, people don’t feel like the economy is “roaring ahead.” So what’s the proof that they’re wrong? As is its wont, Axios provides bullet points in the October 5 piece to lay out the “ample evidence the economy is, statistically speaking, relatively strong.”

First up: “Economic growth is solid and accelerating.” The link that backs that up goes to the September 30 piece, which reported, “The economy grew at a 2.2% annualized rate in the second quarter, a sharp upgrade from the 1.5% previously reported.”

Is 2.2% growth “relatively strong,” though? Average annual GDP growth since 1947 is 3.2%, a full percentage point higher. If that seems like too long a time frame for comparison, the Biden years—a period when the economy was rarely described as “roaring ahead” or “relatively strong”—averaged 3.7% annual GDP growth. Leaving out 2021—an exceptional year when the economy bounced back strongly from the Covid recession—still leaves Biden’s economy growing at 2.8% a year.

Relatively speaking, then, Trump’s growth is rather weak. It’s not “accelerating,” either; over the six quarters so far of Trump’s second term, the average annual growth rate has been 2.2%—the same as in the most recent quarter.

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Watch the Hosts of ‘The View’ Openly Campaign for Texas Democrat James Talarico on the Air

This week, Ana Navarro, Whoopi Goldberg, and the rest of the crew on ‘The View’ openly campaigned for far left Texas Democrat James Talarico on the air, in what seems to be a clear violation of FCC rules.

This has been happening a lot lately. Less than two weeks ago, Ana Navarro openly campaigned for a Democrat running for a House seat in Florida.

Trump’s FCC has been looking into these claims. It couldn’t be more obvious, could it?

The hosts are openly cheerleading for the Democrats to win.

Transcript via NewsBusters:

SUNNY HOSTIN: I think we will. I think we will see Texas go blue, actually.

I really do.

In September not only one but eight pollsters had Talarico ahead. 51 to 45 percent. That’s significant given a Democrat hasn’t won statewide office in 30 years. That same poll showed that he is leading Paxton among women, 56 percent to 40 percent. Among voters, 18 to 29, 66 percent to 22 percent. And among Hispanics 62 percent to 30 percent. We are talking about Texas. He is going to win this race.

GOLDBERG: We’ll see. We’ll see.

GOLDBERG: Remember. As – I’m sorry. As you guys pointed out the other day, we’ve seen this before. We have seen – I and suddenly some weird number comes out. And you’re going, ‘wait, what happened?’ So, fingers crossed.

ANA NAVARRO: You’re not kidding. 2016 left me scarred.

GOLDBERG: I know.

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The Left Doesn’t Count Votes. It Finds Them.

f you saw a recent NYT report on Brazil’s election between incumbent socialist president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and conservative Flávio Bolsonaro, you may have noticed that the Left’s “paper of record” made an astounding, if unintended, admission in the headline: it reveals its conception of elections. In its words, “Flávio Bolsonaro’s first round lead leaves President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva three weeks to find the votes to stop Brazil’s rightward shift” (italics mine). It doesn’t say “prevail in the election by voter turnout,” but it casts the election as an implied political obligation to manufacture ballots to block voter will and engineer an imposed social order against it. This is clearly the Left’s intention in November.

While this may read as routine journalism, or perhaps just wishful thinking on the writers’ part, it may strike some readers as more of a Freudian slip about how the Left’s mental worldview works: leftist parties operate under a duty to manufacture enough ballots to overcome an election deficit. If your candidate falls behind, you intervene on the sidelines to close the gap. This is now their “normalized” concept of an election.

More than that, progressives have inverted the structure of an election from one that sets two opponents in passive receipt of votes to an actively managed, planned event that aids one side during the election. What was traditionally an arm’s-length contest becomes a pre-existing agreement.

Rather than preserving a quiet period after the close of campaigning to measure the public result of candidate marketing through voluntary voter turnout, the election becomes merely part of their total political campaign operation. It turns votes into indicators, and the indicators into corrective ballot measures.

This obviously goes by other names, such as rigging, stealing, cheating, and fraud, but the extraordinary aspect of this language in the NYT is how it reveals a shift in political psychology and a determination to make that abnormal psychology generally accepted behavior. It resembles the Left’s efforts to make people think that transgender athletes are legitimate contestants among biological females: it asks you to accept a fraud as a right, and, more than that, that you are wrong for questioning it. That is how election fraud works: objections violate a higher moral standing claimed by the victor, even though the victor obtained it through deception.

To use an analogy, it is like two horses in a race where the spectators rush the racetrack on the losing horse, inject him with amphetamines, block the other rider, and the racing judge looks the other way, while the crowd is asked to keep quiet out of fairness to the horse.

To use a good legal analogy, it would be like two legal opponents in a trial, along with their lawyers, actually accompanying the jury into the deliberation room and trying to measure which way they’re leaning and “tip” the scales. Jurors privately deliberate after closing arguments because they weigh what they heard and reach a protected verdict based only on the evidence presented in open court.

Elections are the same: voters effectively go into private deliberation after hearing both sides, cast their ballots in private, and the verdict is then announced in the open “public court.” We have certain appeal processes for election irregularity (e.g., Florida in 2000 and Bush v. Gore), or for an election “mistrial,” as in a deadlock (a runoff or recount), including the discretion to count state electors (e.g., Pence, 2021). In all cases, the counting or verdict is subject to a quiet period, and campaigning of any kind must stand down.

The other key factor in Brazil that is reframing the Left’s vision of elections is based on its paranoia that any conservative candidate is a Trump candidate and ally and part of a larger plan to aid and abet President Trump’s mandates (“Brazil Is a Sign of Things to Come,” NYT, 10.5.26). But South America (and Cuba as well) has been dragging behind the West economically for decades because of its leftist political corruption and because it swings in the extreme between Left populists and Right militarists. Rarely has an actual business conservative, or even a moderate leader, emerged.

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BBC pays white staff less than ethnic minorities – report 

White employees at the BBC earn less than their ethnic minority colleagues in six of seven salary grades, according to the British broadcaster’s 2025/26 annual report. The figures have raised new questions about the corporation’s drive to promote ethnic minority staff and its possible impact on pay.

According to the BBC’s 2025/26 pay gap report, highlighted by The Telegraph on Wednesday, black, Asian, mixed-race and other ethnic minority employees earn 13.2% more in median hourly pay than white colleagues in the lowest salary band. Even among the broadcaster’s most senior executives, the gap stands at 5.3%.

White employees came out ahead in just one category, where their median hourly pay was 0.6% higher. Across the BBC as a whole, however, white staff still earned 0.7% more, largely because they held a greater share of the highest-paid jobs.

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NY Times Suggests Babies Are Not Conscious

The New York Times has decided the open question in science this week is whether a baby is conscious. Not a cluster of cells. Not a theoretical model. An actual newborn baby.

Carl Zimmer’s 5 October piece, “Are Babies Conscious?” (yes that’s a real headline) walks readers through a lab test and then informs them that a “squirming, gurgling infant” does not seem conscious, “at least not in the way adults are.”

Zimmer’s setup is the oddball-sound test. A subject hears three low tones and a high one, over and over, then a run of four low tones. Adult brains throw a brief, distinctive blip at the break. People in a coma do not. People who are asleep do not. The Times then puts a newborn in the same frame and asks whether the blip will be there.

Are Babies Conscious? As scientists map the birth of consciousness, they hope to gain a better understanding of how it evolved in humans in the first place. https://t.co/g1D5A4wRtF— Patrick Emerton (@egregiousknave) October 5, 2026

Er what? https://t.co/ZqhoAq4dJk— m o d e r n i t y (@ModernityNews) October 6, 2026

The paper calls it an active scientific debate. Dr Topun Austin, a neonatologist at the University of Cambridge, is quoted defining the thing under study: “Consciousness is a process of being receptive to the outside world and mixing that with our own internal world, to create the feeling of who we are and where we are.“

A caption under the piece states that there was a time when our brains were too rudimentary to support consciousness. Zimmer’s own promo line said he had found scientists “on a mission to find out when consciousness begins in babies.”

The reaction online was immediate, and it was not about neuroscience. It was about where the line moves next.

@ModernityNews Ever get the feeling we’re living inside a cautionary tale?

Like we’re all just trapped in a dystopian ’70s sci-fi movie, while Charlton Heston screams about the sanctity of human life? pic.twitter.com/oxA1EaZhXJ— Alpha Of The Betas (@AlphaOfTheBetas) October 6, 2026

“Are Babies Conscious?”

Give this a few more years and they’ll claim consciousness doesn’t begin until the baby is one years old, so abortion should be legal up to that point. pic.twitter.com/hLxMdTzZzC— Arthur in California (@ArthurReturnss) October 5, 2026

@JackPosobiec This is setting to push for post-birth abortion down the line.— Emmanuel Gonzalez (@Emm_Gonzalez38) October 6, 2026

@JackPosobiec They want abortion legality to extend into early childhood— Paul Joseph Tinkle (@PTinkleIndy) October 5, 2026

@JackPosobiec Anyone who has had a child knows that babies are conscious. Only the childless hacks at the NYT are confused.— Andrew McCann (@andymccann) October 5, 2026

All this is going on while we’re debating whether ‘machines can be conscious’, a disturbing irony.

Incredible that we’re debating whether “machines can be conscious” while Democrats still haven’t acknowledged that babies in a mother’s womb have consciousness.— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) October 3, 2026

Of course, there are countless studies that indicate infants, even unborn infants have consciousness as we understand it.

In January, neonatologist Carlo Bellieni of the University of Siena published “A Rudimentary Consciousness Appears in the Late Fetal Period” in EC Gynaecology, reviewing 31 clinical trials from the last decade on fetal anatomy, perception and memory. His conclusion: the early appearance of memory is a sign of rudimental consciousness, and it does not depend on whether the fetus is inside or outside the womb, only on the grade of brain development.

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How Zionists Shape Europe’s Media

One of Europe’s most powerful media moguls has a message for the continent: “We shall all be Zionists.” In May 2026, Axel Springer CEO Mathias Döpfner used those words to close a speech to the World Jewish Congress after declaring, “I am a Zionist.” A month later, his group, which owns Bild, Welt, Politico and Business Insider, completed its acquisition of Telegraph Media Group, expanding its reach further into the British media market.

At Axel Springer, the pro-Israel position has long gone beyond Döpfner’s personal views and is embedded in the media group’s official principles. Elsewhere in Europe’s media landscape, similar narratives are advanced through owners, boards of directors, specialized outlets, journalist outreach and political norms that make the Israeli perspective the default and familiar frame.

Mathias Döpfner’s Media Empire

Mathias Döpfner has been openly pro-Israel for years. In 2021, Axel Springer flew an Israeli flag outside its Berlin headquarters, and when some employees objected, he said anyone troubled by it should “look for a new job,” describing solidarity with Israel as a “German duty.”

In 2021, Döpfner was also pushing into German party politics. Before the Bundestag election, he asked Bild executives whether they could do more for the liberal Free Democratic Party, or FDP, and later urged then-editor-in-chief Julian Reichelt to give the party stronger backing. Bild subsequently denied that its coverage followed instructions from its owner.

In 2023, Die Zeit published internal messages in which Döpfner wrote, “Zionismus über alles. Israel my country,” roughly meaning, “Zionism above all. Israel is my country.” Axel Springer accused the newspaper of taking private messages out of context, but the wording was considerably stronger than conventional support for Israel.

Axel Springer’s corporate rules give that political position an institutional dimension. Its constitution, known as the Springer Essentials, lists Israel’s right to exist among the company’s core principles, while Döpfner has described those values as “non-negotiable” and argued that media companies cannot be neutral and should openly stand for certain principles.

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FCC Chairman Carr scolds Democrats for opposing transgender ‘warning’ label in kids’ TV ratings

When a novel flu epidemic hit Springfield on a 1993 episode of The Simpsons, devout Christian neighbor Ned Flanders feared that his chuckling at a suggestive joke on Married … with Children might have prompted divine wrath.

“Oh, the network slogan is true!” Flanders wailed, referring to the home of The Simpsons and Married … with Children. “Watch Fox and be damned for all eternity!”

Thirty-three years later, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr aims to mitigate another epidemic spreading under the radar in children’s TV programming, lest it widely infect impressionable eyes and ears: gender ideology.

He has thrice publicly excoriated congressional Democrats in the past two weeks for opposing the shorthanded commission’s work to “ensure that parents have the information necessary to decide what is appropriate for their own kids and families to watch,” as Carr posted Monday afternoon on X and had reposted by Tuesday morning in case anyone missed it.

Carr first blasted “nearly 70” Democratic lawmakers Sept. 28 for “pushing to prevent parents from having any say over their children being exposed to controversial gender identity ideologies” on TV, referring to a June 5 letter from Massachusetts Sen. Ed Markey and a June 22 letter led by California Rep. Mark Takano, signed by 68 House Democrats in all.

He pointed to Disney Jr.’s 2018 reboot of the 1980s cartoon Muppet Babies, which in the episode “Gonzo-rella” has male Gonzo wearing a “princess dress to a royal ball,” passing as a girl and going by plural pronouns. Netflix’s Strawberry Short Cake reboot “promotes a trans character that wears clothing that matches the transgender pride flag,” Carr said.

Contrary to these brands promoting themselves as “family friendly […] the FCC’s record is now replete with all sorts of examples of Hollywood and New York programmers going around parents to promote their gender ideologies,” he said.

In both posts, Carr shared Takano-specific images of his Sept. 22 response letter to apparently every Democrat who signed the congressman’s letter. He does not appear to have shared the original 204-page PDF beyond page 14 of the commission’s document feed as of Tuesday night; the most recent letters posted to Carr’s own commission page are from 2025.

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George Stephanopoulos’s Actress Wife Once Had Some Creepy Parenting Advice

Democrats have spent a lot of time during President Trump’s second term falsely accusing him and Republicans of being “pedophiles” and “pedophile protectors.” That’s all projection, of course, as Democrats have gone to the mattresses time and again for abusers, with Michigan recently removing 20,000 sex offenders from its registry and Tim Walz pardoning an illegal alien who sexually abused a girl to try to protect that monster from deportation.

But every accusation is a confession, and it turns out George Stephanopoulos’s wife, actress Ali Wentworth, was telling parents years ago they should watch pornography with their children, arguing that “you can’t stop them.”

Here’s more:

Ali Wentworth “would” watch porn with her teenage daughters Elliott, 17, and Harper, 15, for a very specific reason.

The “Night Cap” actress shares her two children with her husband, ABC News’ “Good Morning America” co-host, George Stephanopoulos.

“In porn, women have been conditioned to look and act a certain way,” Wentworth, 55, told Debra Messing and Mandana Dayani on the latest “The Dissenters” podcast episode (via Us Weekly).

She added: “They are performing and it’s dangerous to have boys see this as something women want.”

“You can’t stop them, so I would watch it with them,” the “Go Ask Ali” author explained. “I would look at the porn with them that one time, like, ‘They’re performing.’”

Wentworth also said she tries to sneak in lessons with her daughters when they’re scrolling through social media. “I say,  ‘Do you see this girl? There is a hole she is trying to fill,’” the actress recalled.

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Trump’s Big Bluff on Iran

The Trump administration and its supporters – including the Wall Street Journal editorial page – are working overtime these days to spin the news around the Iran war to make it appear that the US is winning and Tehran had better submit to Washington’s demands before it is wrecked, maybe even “annihilated.” Indeed, Trump is preparing the option of bringing the military hammer down on Iran after the midterm elections if Tehran has not surrendered by then.

In effect, Trump and his supporters are waging a “maximum pressure campaign” against Iran in the mainstream media.

This campaign is sure to fail. If anything, it reflects the Trump administration’s desperation. The president started a war the United States was bound to lose, and there is little he can do now to change that basic fact.

Trump’s propaganda campaign has two dimensions – one economic and the other military.

First, the administration argues that Iran is being economically strangled by the US naval blockade coupled with Operation Economic Outcast, the strategy announced by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent on 24 August 2026. At the same time, it maintains that oil is once again flowing out of the Gulf at rates not far below those that prevailed on 27 February 2026. The implications are obvious: the economic punishment being inflicted on Iran will force it to capitulate soon, while the US economy – and the international community more generally – is well on its way to recovery.

Second, the US is now building up its military forces for a massive military strike after the mid-term elections, when Trump will be free of electoral constraints. This growing threat of a devastating US attack, coupled with the economic pain being inflicted on Iran, is designed to get Tehran to quit now, before its situation becomes even worse.

There are huge problems with this strategy. It sounds persuasive when the mainstream media dutifully purveys it, but it falls apart when one looks closely at what is actually happening.

Consider the military dimension. The headlines say the US is sending 10,000 additional troops and a third aircraft carrier – the USS Theodore Roosevelt – to the Persian Gulf region, creating the impression that Iran will soon be confronting three American carriers. Moreover, the additional troops – on top of the roughly 50,000 US troops already in the region – are portrayed as evidence that Trump is seriously considering putting boots on the ground.

The aircraft carrier story, however, is quite different from what the headlines suggest. The Roosevelt is reportedly being sent to replace the USS George Washington, while the supposed third carrier, the USS George H.W. Bush, has already left the Middle East and is now in Thailand. Thus, there is presently only one carrier in the region. Indeed, this is the first time during the war that the US has only one carrier in the Middle East, and it is difficult to imagine that there will be more than two – if even that many – after the midterm elections.

The larger problem is that the Iran war is severely straining the US Navy. Its senior leaders warn that the current operational tempo is not sustainable indefinitely. Carriers and other warships are being rotated through extremely long deployments, which cause significant maintenance and readiness problems that will have to be addressed at some point. This problem is compounded by the fact that US ships have lost access to nearby logistics facilities and increasingly depend on a supply chain that reaches back to Diego Garcia, which is about 2,500 miles from the Persian Gulf.

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