Jesse Van Rootselaar, 18, killed eight people and wounded approximately 25 others on Tuesday in Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia — a rampage that began at a private residence and ended inside a secondary school where he once attended class. Van Rootselaar then turned the gun on himself.
RCMP Deputy Commissioner Dwayne McDonald identified Van Rootselaar on Wednesday and confirmed what initial reports had already made plain: the shooter was a biological male who had identified as female for roughly the past six years. An early police alert had described the gunman as a "female in a dress."
The dead include Van Rootselaar's mother, Jennifer Strang, 39; his 11-year-old stepbrother; a 39-year-old female teacher; three 12-year-old female students; and two male students, ages 12 and 13. Most of the victims inside the school were found in the library, according to the New York Post. One was found in a stairwell.
Only two mass shootings in Canadian history have claimed more lives.
This was not a case where nobody saw anything coming. According to McDonald, police had visited the Van Rootselaar family home on multiple occasions over the past several years due to concerns about his mental health. On more than one occasion, Van Rootselaar was taken into custody for assessment under Canada's Mental Health Act.
He dropped out of Tumbler Ridge Secondary School roughly four years ago. Firearms were seized from the family home approximately two years before the shooting, then returned to the lawful owner after a petition. Whether those were the same two firearms recovered at the school, one long gun and one modified handgun, remains unclear.
Read that sequence again. An 18-year-old with a documented mental health crisis history, multiple police contacts, and a previous firearms seizure walked into a school of 160 students on a Tuesday afternoon and executed children in a library. The system touched this case repeatedly. It did not hold.
At a press briefing following the massacre, a police superintendent referred to Van Rootselaar as a "gunperson."
Not a gunman. Gunperson.
Eight people are dead, including five children, and a Canadian law enforcement official — standing at a podium to address a grieving nation — reached for a word that does not exist in any dictionary, in any language, because the real one might offend the sensibilities of people who care more about lexicon than lives. This is where the institutional rot shows itself. Not in the grand policy failures, but in the small, reflexive capitulations that reveal what the system actually prioritizes when the cameras are rolling.
When McDonald was asked directly whether there was a correlation between Van Rootselaar's transgender identification and the shooting, he said it was "too early to say."
That will be the posture for as long as it can be maintained. It always is.
Tumbler Ridge is now the latest entry in a list that the media treats as a coincidence, and the public is discouraged from examining too closely:
No honest person argues that transgender identity causes mass violence. But no honest person can look at this list and refuse to ask questions about the mental health infrastructure surrounding gender transitions — particularly for minors. Van Rootselaar began transitioning at roughly 12 years old. By 14, he had dropped out of school. By 18, he was a mass killer.
The political establishment treats any inquiry into this pattern as bigotry. That framing protects institutions and ideologies at the expense of the very people they claim to champion and, in this case, at the expense of five dead children in a school library in rural British Columbia.
Jennifer Strang, Van Rootselaar's mother and his first victim on Tuesday, had posted publicly about her child's transition. In July 2024, she shared a trans-inclusive Pride flag on Instagram alongside a pointed message:
"I really hope the hate I see online is just bored old people and not true hatred. Do better and educate yourself before spewing bulls–t online."
The same post asked:
"Do you have any idea how many kids are killing themselves over this kind of hate?"
It carried the hashtag #ProtectTransKids. Strang described herself as a "conservative-leaning libertarian."
There is nothing to be gained from cruelty toward a murdered woman. Strang clearly loved her child and was navigating an impossible situation under enormous cultural pressure. But the post inadvertently illustrates the trap: a parent told by every mainstream institution that affirmation is the only moral path, that skepticism equals hatred, that the sole threat to her child's life came from outside the home.
The mental health system touched this family. The schools touched this family. The police touched this family. None of it was enough — and the cultural framework that surrounded all of it made honest assessment harder, not easier.
Tumbler Ridge is a small community. The secondary school holds roughly 160 students. About 100 were evacuated to safety after spending more than two hours barricaded in classrooms, waiting. The RCMP emergency alert wasn't canceled until 5:45 p.m., more than four hours after the first reports came in at 1:20 p.m.
The Canadian flag was lowered to half-staff at Parliament in Ottawa. Prime Minister Mark Carney was photographed speaking to the media about the attack on Wednesday. The gestures are familiar because the cycle is familiar.
Canada's gun control regime is already among the strictest in the Western world. Firearms were seized from this home and returned through the legal process. The shooter had repeated mental health interventions. The school knew him — he was a former student. Every layer of the system that was supposed to prevent this outcome had contact with Jesse Van Rootselaar, and every layer failed.
The question that matters isn't whether Canada needs another gun law. It's why the laws, the mental health protocols, and the institutional checkpoints that already existed produced nothing but a body count. And it's whether a culture that treats a 12-year-old's decision to transition as settled and sacred — beyond question, beyond scrutiny — is a culture capable of seeing a crisis before it walks through the school door.
Five children went to school on Tuesday in a town most Canadians couldn't find on a map. They didn't come home. Their families deserve more than a flag at half-staff and a word that doesn't exist.
Pope Leo XIV accepted the resignation of Gregory Aymond, the Roman Catholic Archbishop of New Orleans, on Wednesday — a departure that lands squarely amid a $305 million settlement for an estimated 600 survivors of clergy sexual abuse.
The timing is not coincidental. It is, at best, institutional choreography.
Aymond submitted his resignation in November 2024 upon turning 75, as Church law requires. But the acceptance came only after months of maneuvering: a federal bankruptcy case filed in 2020, a reported settlement reached in December 2025, a letter of apology issued on January 3, and meetings with survivors that concluded just one day before the Pope's announcement. The machinery of accountability moved at the Church's preferred pace — not the survivors'.
According to People, the New Orleans Archdiocese filed for federal bankruptcy protection in 2020. That filing, whatever its legal merits, effectively froze individual lawsuits and channeled hundreds of abuse claims into a single proceeding. In December 2025, the Archdiocese and its insurers reportedly agreed to a $305 million settlement to be divided among approximately 600 survivors.
Do the math. That's roughly $508,000 per survivor — before legal fees, before taxes, before accounting for decades of trauma that no dollar figure was designed to address.
Attorney Reagan Charleston Thomas, whose firm represents survivors in active civil cases against the Catholic Diocese of Lafayette in Louisiana, framed the stakes plainly:
"No settlement can undo decades of trauma. The true measure of justice will be whether the Church prioritizes survivors over institutional reputation and commits to meaningful, lasting change that protects children going forward."
She's right about one thing: money alone doesn't constitute accountability. But accountability requires more than settlements negotiated under the cover of bankruptcy proceedings. It requires sunlight, and institutions like the Catholic Church have spent generations pulling the curtains shut.
Aymond issued a letter of apology on January 3. Some survivors rejected it.
That single detail says more than any press release. After years of institutional concealment, after a bankruptcy filing that consolidated claims on the Church's terms, after scheduling survivor meetings during Carnival and Super Bowl weekend, the outgoing archbishop offered words. Some of the people those words were meant for said no.
Thomas, the attorney, outlined what actual reform looks like:
"Leadership changes within the Catholic Church may signal a new chapter, but for survivors of clergy abuse, accountability must mean more than symbolism. It requires full transparency from Church leadership, the release of records, independent oversight, and concrete reforms to ensure abuse is never concealed again."
Full transparency. Release of records. Independent oversight. These are not radical demands. They are the bare minimum any institution would face after enabling the abuse of hundreds of children. The fact that they still need to be stated tells you everything about how far the Church has yet to go.
James F. Checchio, the former bishop of Metuchen, New Jersey, has been serving as coadjutor archbishop since September. He will formally take over as Archbishop of New Orleans, with his first Mass in the role scheduled for Ash Wednesday, February 18.
Checchio offered a statement that was polished, careful, and almost aggressively forward-looking:
"These three months since my arrival in New Orleans have gone by very quickly as I learn more about our local Church and seek to understand how God is calling me to best serve this beautiful part of His vineyard."
A beautiful part of His vineyard. One wonders what the 600 survivors think of that metaphor.
None of this is new. The playbook has been running for decades across dioceses nationwide: abuse occurs, leadership looks away, victims are silenced or ignored, lawsuits mount, bankruptcy is filed, a settlement is reached, leadership turns over, and the institution declares a new chapter. The cycle resets. The press releases get warmer. The structural incentives remain unchanged.
Conservatives have long understood that institutions — even venerable ones — are capable of profound corruption when accountability mechanisms fail. The Catholic Church's abuse crisis is not a story about faith. It is a story about power wielded without oversight, about hierarchies that protected themselves at the expense of the most vulnerable people in their care.
That distinction matters. Millions of faithful Catholics deserve a Church that matches their devotion with integrity. What they've gotten instead, in too many dioceses, is an institution that treated children as collateral damage and treated transparency as a threat.
Aymond is gone. Checchio steps in. The $305 million will eventually be divided. And somewhere in New Orleans, 600 people are still living with what was done to them — long after the press cycle moves on.
Pre-kindergarten teachers in New York City are headed to City Hall this Thursday to demand higher pay — and the timing is no accident.
The rally lands squarely in the middle of Mayor Zohran Mamdani's ambitious rollout of universal child care, a $6 billion initiative that promises to reshape how the city handles early childhood education. The teachers who would actually deliver that promise say they can barely afford to live in the city that needs them.
This is the arithmetic that progressive ambition always seems to forget: you can announce a massive new government program, hold the press conference, bask in the applause — but someone has to show up and do the work. And those people have bills.
The numbers tell the story plainly. As reported by Newsweek, an audit released by the city comptroller two years ago found that 90 percent of community-based lead teachers with master's degrees earned less than their public school counterparts in early childhood education. In the Bronx and Brooklyn, certified teachers can start at $36,000 or less per year.
Thirty-six thousand dollars. In New York City. With a master's degree.
Rebecca Schneider-Kaplan, a pre-K teacher who spoke to Chalkbeat, captured the frustration:
"It's just a complete lack of respect. I needed two degrees to become an early childhood educator, but I cannot afford to pay back my loans because I don't make enough money."
That's not a radical demand. That's a woman who did everything the credentialing system told her to do and got rewarded with a salary that wouldn't cover a studio apartment in most of the boroughs she serves.
Mayor Mamdani wasted no time. Within his first days in office, he and Governor Kathy Hochul laid out the first phase of universal child care for children ages 2 to 4. The pair approved a new "2-Care" program extending free child care to 2-year-olds, with 2,000 new free spots set to open this fall. The broader partnership aims to support nearly 100,000 additional children. Before even taking office, Mamdani had assembled a specialized team to execute the initiative.
His campaign website framed the stakes in migration terms that conservatives will find familiar, if unintentionally ironic:
"After rent, the biggest cost for New York's working families is child care. It's literally driving them out of the city: New Yorkers with children under 6 are leaving at double the rate of all others."
Families fleeing New York isn't exactly breaking news. But Mamdani's proposed solution — a $6 billion government child care apparatus covering children from six weeks to five years old — is a breathtaking expansion of the state into the earliest years of family life. He also campaigned on restructuring mayoral control of schools, a departure from two decades of city policy.
The scale of the ambition is the tell. This isn't a targeted program for families in crisis. It's a universal entitlement, and entitlements have a way of consuming everything around them — including the workforce that makes them function.
What's unfolding in New York is a pattern so common in progressive governance that it should have its own name: announce the program, fund the infrastructure, forget the people.
New York City's early childhood system already serves around 160,000 children. Mamdani wants to add nearly 100,000 more. The teachers currently in the system are telling him, publicly and loudly, that they're already underpaid. And his response so far? Silence — at least publicly. The fact sheet contains no direct statement from the mayor or his administration addressing the wage demands.
Alex Beene, a financial literacy instructor at the University of Tennessee at Martin, outlined the tension in comments to Newsweek:
"Mayor Mamdani's initial efforts to introduce and expand child care to more families in the city was met with praise from most, as child care remains a barrier for many working families who struggle to find affordable options—if any options at all—available. However, some are raising concerns about the city working on child care coverage before providing more financial support for teachers who are wanting better pay and benefits."
That's the polite version. The blunt version: Mamdani built the storefront before paying the staff.
The $6 billion price tag for universal child care has no publicly cited budget document or legislative vehicle behind it, at least not in any detail that's been made available. That alone should give taxpayers pause. New York City has a long and inglorious history of ambitious social spending programs that balloon past their initial estimates, degrade in quality, and become permanent fixtures of the budget regardless of outcomes.
And here's the deeper concern: universal government child care doesn't just cost money. It reorganizes the relationship between families and the state. It creates a system where the default assumption is that children belong in institutional care from six weeks old, and where families who make different choices — a parent staying home, a grandparent providing care, a neighborhood co-op — receive nothing for their trouble. The universality is the point, and it's also the problem.
None of this means pre-K teachers don't deserve better compensation. They clearly do, by the city's own audit. But the solution to that problem isn't a $6 billion expansion that treats government as the natural custodian of every toddler in the five boroughs. It's a more honest conversation about what the city can actually afford to do well — and whether doing less, but doing it competently and fairly, might serve families better than another progressive moon shot that leaves its own workers behind.
Thursday's rally at City Hall will test whether Mamdani can hold his coalition together. The teachers marching aren't his political opponents — they're his natural allies, the very people his signature initiative depends on. When your own workforce is protesting your flagship program before it's fully operational, the problem isn't messaging. It's math.
Mamdani promised New York families that the government would take care of their children. The people he's asking to deliver on that promise are telling him they can't take care of themselves. That's not backlash. That's a bill coming due.
The Supreme Court slapped down a federal appeals court that had handed a convicted would-be killer a path back to trial, and only one justice objected.
Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented from the unsigned order reversing the lower court's ruling in the case of Charles Brandon Martin, a Maryland inmate serving a life sentence for shooting his girlfriend in the head. Jackson did not explain her disagreement.
According to Knewz.com, the rest of the Court found the appeals court had botched the legal standard so thoroughly that it warranted summary reversal. No oral arguments, no extended briefing. Just a clear correction.
The case itself is as ugly as they come. And the procedural history reveals something worth paying attention to: how many layers of the federal judiciary were willing to second-guess a state conviction on increasingly thin grounds before the Supreme Court stepped in.
Martin was convicted of shooting Jodi Torok — his girlfriend — in the head. Prosecutors laid out a straightforward motive: the relationship soured when Torok learned she was expecting. Martin pushed her to terminate the pregnancy. She refused and told him she planned to seek child support.
Weeks later, a friend discovered Torok unconscious with a gunshot wound to the head.
The evidence at trial was considerable. A .380-caliber shell casing and bullet were recovered from the scene. Federal records confirmed Martin owned a .380-caliber semiautomatic handgun capable of firing that round. Investigators recovered a modified Gatorade bottle they believed may have functioned as a makeshift silencer. A single hair found on tape attached to the bottle could not be matched to 99.94 percent of North America's population — though experts could not rule Martin out.
Then there was the testimony from another girlfriend, who told the jury she saw Martin looking up gun silencers on his laptop before the shooting.
The jury convicted. Martin received a life sentence.
Martin's post-conviction argument centered on a forensic report analyzing five computers seized from his home. Prosecutors had not disclosed the report, and Martin argued this violated his due-process rights. The report, according to the case record, showed that keyword searches of the computers produced no results.
A state post-conviction court agreed and ordered a new trial. Maryland's intermediate appeals court reversed that order. Then Martin took his case to federal court — where a district judge granted him relief, and a divided federal appellate panel did the same.
That's four bites at the apple across two court systems before the Supreme Court finally called a halt.
The legal framework here matters. Under the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996, federal courts can intervene in state convictions only if the state court decision was "contrary to, or involved an unreasonable application of, clearly established federal law," or rested on "an unreasonable determination of the facts." The bar is intentionally high. The challenger must show the state court was wrong so badly that every fair-minded jurist would disagree.
The Supreme Court found the federal appeals panel blew past that standard entirely. The unsigned opinion stated the lower panel "contravened these well-settled principles in two ways" — misreading the legal standard and concluding "that no fair-minded jurist could find the forensic report on the computer to be immaterial."
The Court was blunt about the strength of the prosecution's case:
"Based on all the evidence, a fair-minded jurist could easily conclude that disclosure of the forensic report on the laptop would not have made a difference."
The record, the Court found, contained "strong support" that Martin "would have been convicted" even if the forensic report had "severely impeached" the girlfriend's testimony about the silencer searches. The eyewitness testimony was one thread in a much thicker rope — the gun, the casing, the makeshift silencer, the hair, the motive.
Justice Jackson's dissent came without explanation. The Court noted only that she would have denied the request to hear the case — meaning she wouldn't have touched it at all, leaving the appeals court's ruling intact and Martin's path to a new trial open.
No reasoning. No written opinion. Just a quiet signal of disagreement with the entire bench.
It's worth noting what Jackson was effectively endorsing by declining to act: a federal appellate panel overriding a state appellate court on a standard specifically designed to prevent exactly that kind of second-guessing. AEDPA exists because Congress recognized that federal habeas review was becoming an endless loop — a mechanism for relitigating state convictions until a sympathetic panel materialized. That is precisely what happened here, court by court, until the Supreme Court reversed the chain.
The procedural history of this case is a miniature lesson in how the federal judiciary can erode state criminal convictions through sheer persistence. A state court convicted Martin. A state appeals court upheld the conviction. A state post-conviction court wobbled, but the state appellate court corrected it. Then the federal courts came in and did what AEDPA was written to prevent — treated a debatable state-court judgment as an unreasonable one.
The Supreme Court's unsigned, summary reversal sends a message: the standard means what it says. Federal courts do not get to substitute their judgment for the state court's simply because they might have weighed the evidence differently. The question is whether any fair-minded jurist could have reached the state court's conclusion. In this case, the answer was obvious enough that the Court didn't even need to hear arguments.
A woman was shot in the head. A jury weighed the evidence and convicted the man who did it. The system worked until a federal appeals panel decided it knew better.
Eight justices disagreed. One didn't bother to say why.
Kentucky Congressman Thomas Massie wants to set the record straight: he didn't vote against requiring proof of citizenship to vote. He voted against the procedural maneuver that bundled that bill with other measures and suspended House transparency rules in the process.
According to KATU, the House passed the procedural rule 216-215, advancing the SAVE Act alongside three other measures toward a floor vote. Massie was on the losing side of that razor-thin tally — and almost immediately, the rumor mill started grinding.
Massie took to X to kill the narrative before it spread further:
"There's a false rumor that I voted against the Save America Act today."
His actual objection had nothing to do with the substance of the bill. It had everything to do with how leadership packaged it.
"I voted against a 'rule' that allows it to get a vote, but the 'rule' also suspends house rules and allows spending bills to come to the floor with no 24hr notice!"
He also clarified his position on the legislation, stating that he plans to support it when it reaches the floor for a vote.
For anyone unfamiliar with House procedure — which is most of the country, and reasonably so — a "rule" vote isn't a vote on the bill itself. It's a vote on the terms under which the bill reaches the floor: what amendments are allowed, what else gets bundled in, and what procedural safeguards get waived.
Massie's objection is one that fiscal conservatives have raised for years: leadership uses must-pass or popular legislation as a vehicle to ram through spending measures without adequate review. Bundling the SAVE Act with three other unspecified measures — and waiving the 24-hour notice requirement for spending bills — is exactly the kind of procedural shortcut that lets Congress avoid scrutiny on what it's actually funding.
This is the permanent tension inside the House GOP. The rank-and-file members who care about process get painted as obstructionists by people who only read the headline. Massie supports the SAVE Act. He just doesn't support the legislative equivalent of hiding vegetables in a smoothie.
The SAVE Act would require proof of citizenship when registering to vote in federal elections. That's it. The fact that this is even controversial tells you everything about where the Democratic Party has landed on election integrity.
The legislation has been championed by multiple House Republicans, with Florida Rep. Anna Paulina Luna emerging as one of its most vocal advocates. Luna has made clear she's willing to use procedural leverage of her own to force action. Back in January, she posted on X:
"If the Senate does not pass the SAVE Act and/or schedule a date for a vote by the time we return, I have enough votes from other members to shut down the floor of the House."
That's the kind of hardball that moves legislation. Whether the Senate takes her seriously is another question, but the threat itself signals where the energy is inside the House conference.
It's easy to dismiss Massie's vote as a procedural tantrum. It isn't. The 24-hour notice rule for spending bills exists for a reason: so that members — and by extension, their constituents — can actually read what they're voting on before they vote on it. When leadership waives that requirement, it's not efficiency. It's concealment.
Republicans spent years rightly hammering Nancy Pelosi for her "pass it to find out what's in it" approach to legislating. The principle doesn't change because the speaker's chair switched parties. If anything, the standard should be higher. Conservatives who campaigned on transparency and fiscal discipline can't abandon those commitments the moment they become inconvenient for the whip count.
Massie will vote for the SAVE Act when it reaches the floor on its own terms. The 216-215 margin means the rule passed anyway — the bill advances regardless. Nothing was delayed. Nothing was killed.
What Massie did was refuse to let a good bill provide cover for bad process. That's not obstruction. That's the job.
Tracy Scroggins, who spent his entire ten-year NFL career rushing quarterbacks for the Detroit Lions, has died at the age of 56. His family announced his passing in a statement provided to TMZ on Monday, Feb. 9, attributing his death to the long-term effects of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE).
Fifty-six years old. A man who clawed his way out of poverty in Checotah, Oklahoma, played a decade of professional football, and then spent his retirement fighting a disease that can only be confirmed after you're already gone.
His family's statement carried the weight you'd expect and a pointed accusation:
"Playing in the NFL gave Tracy the opportunity to pursue his lifelong dream and to rise from poverty. However, unfortunately, the NFL was also ultimately the cause of his untimely demise. Tracy spent every moment of retirement courageously battling the devastating effects of CTE."
That is a family's grief — raw, direct, and aimed squarely at the league that made Scroggins famous. Whether it holds up medically is another question entirely.
According to People, Scroggins was drafted 53rd overall in the second round of the 1992 NFL Draft after playing at Coffeyville Community College and then the University of Tulsa, where he helped lead the Golden Hurricane to a 10-2 record and a victory in the 1991 Freedom Bowl.
He never played for another franchise. From 1992 to 2001, Scroggins anchored the Lions' pass rush, racking up 60.5 career sacks — third on the franchise's all-time list behind Robert Porcher (95.5) and Michael Cofer (62.5). He was part of the Lions teams that, alongside Hall of Fame running back Barry Sanders, made the playoffs three consecutive seasons from 1993 to 1995.
The Detroit Lions acknowledged one of their own in a statement posted to X:
"We join the NFL community in mourning the loss of Lions Legend Tracy Scroggins, who played his entire 10-year career in Detroit (1992-2001)."
Ten years in one city. That kind of loyalty barely exists in the modern NFL. Scroggins was a Lion, period.
Here's what matters and what too often gets lost in these stories: CTE cannot be diagnosed in a living person. It is confirmed only through a neuropathological autopsy performed after death. The family's statement did not indicate whether Scroggins will undergo the necessary testing to confirm the diagnosis they've attributed to him.
That's not a reason to dismiss their grief or their suspicion. The pattern across former NFL players is well-documented enough that a family watching a loved one deteriorate in retirement would naturally draw the connection. But there is a difference between a family's belief and a confirmed medical finding, and honest reporting requires noting it.
The broader CTE conversation in football sits at a difficult intersection of real human suffering and institutional accountability — two things that don't always produce clean answers. The NFL has paid billions in settlements to former players. Awareness has changed the way the game is played, coached, and officiated. Whether any of it is enough remains an open question that each new death reopens.
The instinct in media coverage of stories like this is to fast-track the narrative: football did this, the NFL is guilty, another life destroyed by the sport. And sometimes that framing captures something real. But it also flattens the man into a cautionary tale.
His family pushed back against exactly that impulse, even in the same statement that blamed the league:
"While many knew him for his career as a professional football player in the NFL, those closest to him knew him as a kind-hearted and generous man who cared deeply for his family and friends."
Scroggins rose from poverty in small-town Oklahoma, bet on himself through junior college and a mid-major university, and earned a decade in the most physically punishing sport on the planet. That trajectory — grit, persistence, self-reliance — is the kind of American story worth telling on its own terms, not just as a prelude to tragedy.
The family also described him as "a devoted father, cherished family member, and loyal friend whose life was marked by remarkable strength and perseverance." Those aren't the words of people who see their loved one as a victim. They're the words of people who watched a strong man fight something he couldn't beat.
Millions of Americans love football. It's woven into community, tradition, Friday nights, and fall Saturdays in a way that defies easy political categorization. That love doesn't require ignoring what the sport costs some of the men who play it.
But it also doesn't require accepting every activist framing of the NFL as a uniquely predatory institution. Players make choices. They're compensated — often extraordinarily well — for the risks they assume. That's not callousness. It's the same respect for individual agency that governs how we think about miners, soldiers, and roughnecks. Dangerous work done by men who understood the stakes.
Tracy Scroggins understood. He played the game, earned his living, and by every account gave everything he had to the Lions and to his family.
He was fifty-six. That's not enough time.
Rep. Ilhan Omar fired back at President Trump after his Tuesday night Fox Business interview by posting a statement on X that accused him of using Somalia as a distraction and labeled the Republican Party the "Pedophile Protection Party."
Omar, who boasts more than 2.7 million followers on the platform, wrote:
"The leader of the Pedophile Protection Party is trying to deflect attention from his name being all over the Epstein files. At least in Somalia they execute pedophiles not elect them."
As reported by TMZ, the post came in response to Trump's Fox Business appearance, during which he referred to Omar as a "fake congresswoman" and claimed Somali immigrants are damaging the state of Minnesota.
Start with the obvious. A sitting member of Congress just called the President of the United States the leader of a pedophile protection party. Not in a private conversation. Not in a heated floor debate. On a social media platform with millions of followers, in writing, deliberately.
This is the same Ilhan Omar who has spent years demanding that political rhetoric be toned down, that language has consequences, and that words from powerful people can inspire violence. Apparently, those rules expire the moment she's the one behind the keyboard.
Then there's the second half of her statement — the casual endorsement of Somalia's approach to criminal justice. Omar, who was born in Somalia and moved to the United States at age 12, held up a country with no functioning independent judiciary as a model for how to handle crime. She praised execution as policy, from the safety of a congressional seat in the nation that gave her refuge.
If any Republican had praised extrajudicial killing in a foreign country as aspirational, the calls for resignation would already be trending.
Omar's post leans on the Epstein files — the documents connected to convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein that have received significant attention over the past several months. Trump is mentioned numerous times in those files. He has denied all accusations of wrongdoing and has said he cut off his relationship with Epstein decades ago.
None of that context made it into Omar's post, of course. Nuance doesn't generate engagement. What she offered instead was guilt by association, dressed up as moral clarity.
The Epstein files name a sprawling list of powerful figures across both parties, across industries, across continents. Selectively weaponizing those documents against one political opponent while ignoring the rest isn't accountability. It's opposition research with a righteous veneer.
Omar accused Trump of deflecting. Worth examining what she herself was deflecting from.
Trump's comments on the Fox Business interview centered on the impact of Somali immigration on Minnesota — a topic that is politically uncomfortable for Omar but entirely legitimate as a matter of public policy. Immigration's effects on communities, public services, and social cohesion are fair game for any elected official to discuss. That's not bigotry. That's governance.
Rather than engage on substance — defend the community she represents, cite outcomes, push back with data — Omar reached for the most incendiary accusation available. She skipped past policy and went straight to labeling an entire political party as enablers of child abuse.
This is a pattern with Omar that conservatives have watched repeat for years. When the policy argument gets difficult, change the subject to something so inflammatory that no one remembers what the original conversation was about. Trump talks about immigration in Minnesota, and within hours, the national discourse shifts to Epstein and pedophilia. The original point vanishes.
Imagine, briefly, a Republican congressman responding to a Democrat president's policy critique by calling the opposition the "Pedophile Protection Party" on social media. Imagine them praising a war-torn nation's execution practices in the same breath. The media cycle would last weeks. There would be ethics complaints, cable news panels, solemn editorials about the collapse of democrat norms.
Omar will face none of that. She never does. The congresswoman occupies a peculiar space in American politics where the standards that apply to everyone else seem to route around her — and anyone who points it out gets accused of something worse than what she actually said.
The White House was contacted about Omar's post. No response had been received as of the article's publication.
Omar's statement won't move the Epstein conversation forward. It won't produce new evidence, new accountability, or new transparency. It will produce clicks, shares, and cable news segments, which, one suspects, was the entire point.
What it also produces is a small, clarifying window into how some members of Congress view their role. Not as legislators. Not as representatives. As combatants in a content war, where the most reckless accusation wins the day, and the actual work of governing falls somewhere below the fold.
Minnesota deserves better than a congresswoman whose first instinct, when her record is questioned, is to call her opponents pedophile enablers from behind a screen.
Elijah Schaffer, a 32-year-old MAGA influencer with nearly 900,000 Twitter followers, spiraled into a public meltdown this week — posting a series of erratic claims that his wife and children had been kidnapped, his car stolen, and the FBI was trying to destroy his life.
The posts arrived at the same time as revelations about an alleged five-month affair with a 21-year-old employee who built her brand on opposing premarital sex.
As reported by The Daily Mail, his wife, Kezia, had already left him in December with their two sons — ages two and 15 months — and filed for divorce. She's now living in a rented house in Frisco, Texas. Schaffer filed a competing separation petition in Florida.
The affair, the meltdown, and the divorce have peeled back a layer of the conservative media ecosystem that most people in the movement would rather not look at, but probably should.
Schaffer's Twitter posts read like dispatches from a man at war with reality. On Monday, he claimed his family was missing:
"I do not know where my wife and kids are and I cannot get ahold of them. They are filed as missing persons. They have gone missing."
He escalated from there, claiming someone in his household had planted drugs and framed him, that the FBI was orchestrating his destruction, and that the Department of Homeland Security was involved. He posted a video of himself wandering a flooded hotel, saying:
"No one believes me that my life doesn't make any sense right now."
None of his claims about law enforcement involvement has been confirmed by any agency. No evidence has surfaced that Kezia or the children were ever in danger. By all accounts relayed through sources close to both parties, Kezia left voluntarily — fleeing a marriage defined by alleged verbal abuse, heavy drinking, and serial infidelity.
Milo Yiannopoulos, who posted screenshots of his private messages with Schaffer, didn't mince words:
"Your tweets have been so erratic and insane that people are asking if you killed your family."
Schaffer's response to that was to note he'd recovered his car. By Thursday night, the conspiratorial tone had given way to something more defiant — and stranger:
"I have a d**k and it works. Everyone can go cry about it. What's done in darkness will be shown in the light. I honestly gave my life to God a few months ago. We've all done things we know we shouldn't be doing. Publicly stone me. You won't make me hate myself for what I repented of."
That's not the language of a man being persecuted by federal agencies. That's damage control dressed up as spiritual warfare.
Sarah Stock — now Sarah Setka — was a podcaster at Schaffer's media company, RiftTV. She was 21. She had built a following preaching sexual restraint and traditional values. Last July, she tweeted:
"Real Christian men want to get married because sex outside of marriage is a sin regardless of whether or not you've committed the sin before."
According to sources close to Schaffer, the two had sex the night they met at CPAC last February. The affair allegedly continued for five months, with Stock traveling to Florida under the guise of work trips. A source described Schaffer's behavior during the relationship in terms that would be pathetic if they weren't so predatory:
"He and Sarah met in NYC one time, he took her out for some fancy date to give her an example of 'how she should be treated' and also dropped a ton of cash on new clothes for her. Elijah would describe Sarah as 'the best he's ever had'."
Another source said Schaffer used his own toddler as cover:
"He'd get the kids to lie for him, like he'd get like the toddler to say, 'oh, we went to the office', but really he was taking them over to the apartment."
Stock also spoke about the incident during a recorded phone call with an unidentified man. She said that on the night they met, Schaffer gave her large amounts of alcohol along with Benadryl, which led to her losing consciousness.
According to Stock, Schaffer told her that his wife was unconcerned about his actions. She recalled him saying that his wife allowed him complete freedom because he provided well for her, and that she let him act as he pleased since he believed he fulfilled his responsibilities at home.
Stock posted a vague apology on Wednesday — acknowledging "mistakes/unwise decisions" — then deleted all her social media accounts hours later. She had married Will Setka, 28, in January, converted to Catholicism in April, and had her marriage blessed by Pope Leo XIV at the Vatican. Her engagement ring photo on Instagram was captioned: "I won."
The picture of Kezia Schaffer's life that emerges from sources is grim. Originally from Tweed Heads, Australia, she met Schaffer on Instagram, moved to the United States, married him in 2019, and obtained a green card. She became a stay-at-home mother to two young boys while Schaffer — according to multiple sources — organized his professional life around his ability to drink.
"Elijah is an alcoholic and was black out drunk like 5-6 day a week when I was around him. He organized the company around a schedule where he could get drunk 24/7 and party."
Schaffer himself, in a secretly recorded conversation, admitted to a binge drinking problem:
"Do I drink sometimes, and too much? Absolutely. I consider myself having more of a binge problem, even if it is only a couple of times a week and I'll black out or whatever, and that is problematic."
The verbal abuse was also recorded. In one secretly captured rant directed at Kezia, Schaffer unleashed a stream of obscenities, calling her a "fake complainer [with] fake problems" and a "f**king stupid c**t," while also telling her to "shut the f**k up because I'm your husband."
A friend of Kezia's described the full scope of the situation:
"She's a stay at home mom, she didn't work or anything, and I think he liked it that way. Like, he kept her. She couldn't leave him because he was the breadwinner, she'd never had a job. She stayed home and raised his babies, and he just was gone all the time out at strip clubs, getting drunk, hooking up with people, and she's such a wonderful person who didn't deserve it."
After Kezia left, Schaffer allegedly cut off her bank accounts and took all their money. Sources say she is now focused solely on securing full custody and fears retaliation for anything that becomes public. Schaffer's own post-meltdown rhetoric hasn't exactly quelled those concerns. On his RiftTV show, he said about the custody dispute:
"I'm not going to go down without, you know, a few shots fired. Figuratively, of course, we're saying. But physically too, if needed."
This didn't come from nowhere. Schaffer was fired from The Blaze in 2022 for "violating company policies and standards" after he was accused of groping fellow host Sara Gonzales while drunk at a film premiere. Australian YouTuber Sydney Watson filed a lawsuit claiming Schaffer created a sexually hostile work environment on their co-hosted podcast — The Blaze settled that suit in 2024.
In December 2022, Christian Walker publicly criticized him. Walker said he had met Schaffer’s wife, described her as very kind, and said it was disturbing to see how Schaffer treated her behind her back.
People close to Schaffer say the public fallout this week is only the latest sign of a much longer decline. According to those sources, Elijah has been struggling for months, and the events of this week represent the lowest point in an ongoing downward spiral rather than a single isolated episode.
Before the meltdown, Schaffer attended a birthday party at actor Kevin Sorbo's house, where a source said he was "obliterated and making an ass of himself, slurring his words, mixing alcohol with Xanax." He is also facing a $5 million defamation lawsuit filed by Alexis Wilkins — the girlfriend of FBI director Kash Patel — for repeatedly claiming she was an Israeli Mossad operative running a "honeypot" operation on Patel. Schaffer dismissed the suit on Twitter as "the legal equivalent of your romantic partner getting mad at you for cheating on her in her dream."
There is a temptation to treat this story as tabloid noise — a personal collapse that doesn't reflect on the broader movement. That would be a mistake.
Schaffer built his brand on Christian values, traditional marriage, and moral clarity. Stock did the same. They monetized virtue. They built audiences of people who took those positions seriously — young conservatives trying to live countercultural lives in a world that mocks restraint and fidelity. Those audiences deserved better than a 32-year-old man allegedly using his toddler as an alibi for an affair with an employee half a decade his junior, and a young woman preaching virginity while allegedly sleeping with her married boss.
The conservative movement's strength is its insistence that standards matter — that character isn't relative, that actions have consequences, that the family is the bedrock of civilization. Those principles don't bend because the person violating them has the right politics or the right enemies. If anything, the betrayal cuts deeper precisely because it comes from inside the house.
Vice President JD Vance's official X account deleted a post referencing the Armenian Genocide just hours before he landed in Azerbaijan on Tuesday — a move his office blamed on a staffer's error that managed to collide with one of the most sensitive fault lines in Caucasus diplomacy.
According to The Daily Mail, the original post included video from Vance and Second Lady Usha Vance's visit to the Armenian Genocide Memorial in Yerevan, noting the pair:
"Attended a wreath-laying ceremony at the Armenian Genocide memorial to honor the victims of the 1915 Armenian genocide."
That post vanished. In its place, press secretary Taylor Van Kirk published a sanitized version:
"The Vice President and his wife lay flowers at the eternal flame and sign the guest book on the final day of their visit to Armenia."
No genocide. No memorial. No 1.5 million Christian Armenians were killed by the Ottoman Turks between 1915 and 1923. Just flowers, a flame, and a guest book.
A Vance spokesman offered a terse explanation:
"This is an account managed by staff that primarily exists to share photos and videos of the Vice President's activities."
The implication: a staffer posted the original language without authorization, and the deletion was a correction, not a reversal. What remains unclear is what exactly constituted the "error" — whether it was the content itself, the timing relative to the Azerbaijan leg of the trip, or the posting without proper clearance. The spokesman's statement doesn't clarify, and that ambiguity is doing a lot of heavy lifting.
Vance himself never officially recognized the genocide during his two-day visit to Armenia, the highest-ranking U.S. official ever to set foot in the country. He signed a deal with Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan offering a pathway for the U.S. to invest in the construction of a nuclear power plant in Armenia. He visited the memorial. He laid the wreath. But the word "genocide" apparently couldn't survive the flight to Baku.
Azerbaijan denies that the Armenian Genocide took place. The country, led by President Ilham Aliyev — who has held power for over two decades — sides with Turkey in condemning international recognition of the genocide. Vance's next stop after Armenia was a meeting with Aliyev, where he signed a strategic partnership deal covering economic and security cooperation with Washington.
This is the diplomatic tightrope. The Trump administration brokered peace negotiations between Armenia and Azerbaijan that ended a nearly four-decade conflict between the two Caucasus rivals — an agreement President Trump has cited as one of his chief foreign policy accomplishments. The administration's engagement in the region signals Washington's intent to expand its influence in territory long dominated by Russia. Both deals — the Armenian nuclear pathway and the Azerbaijani strategic partnership — serve that larger objective.
Diplomacy requires managing contradictions. Every administration faces moments where strategic interests and moral clarity pull in opposite directions. That tension is real and unavoidable.
But here's what makes this sting: the Armenian Genocide is not a matter of historical debate in the United States. The U.S. officially recognized it in April 2021, when former President Joe Biden became the first president to use the term "genocide" in an official annual commemorative statement. That recognition took over a century to arrive. More than 1.5 million Christian Armenians were killed between 1915 and 1923. The historical record is not ambiguous.
And Vance is a devout Christian. His visit to the memorial — the wreath, the eternal flame, the guest book — carried weight precisely because of who he is and what that site represents. The slaughter of Armenian Christians is among the most devastating atrocities committed against a Christian population in modern history. For a vice president of Vance's convictions to stand at that memorial and then have his own account memory-hole the reason for being there — even if a staffer pulled the trigger — lands badly.
The optics write themselves, and they don't need a liberal commentariat to sharpen them. Conservative voters who care deeply about persecuted Christians around the world — and there are millions of them — notice when the language of genocide gets quietly swapped for the language of tourism.
The "staffer did it" explanation may be entirely true. Official accounts are managed by teams. Posts go up without principal review. It happens across every administration, every office, every campaign. But the explanation doesn't resolve the underlying question: Was the deletion a staffer's cleanup of an unauthorized post, or was it a deliberate diplomatic concession to Azerbaijan dressed up as a clerical error?
If it was the former, then Vance's operation has a process problem — the vice president's account shouldn't be posting statements on the Armenian Genocide without clearance, and it shouldn't be deleting them in a way that turns a memorial visit into a news cycle about cowardice.
If it were the latter, then the administration should say so plainly. Diplomatic trade-offs are defensible when they're owned. They become indefensible when they're hidden behind a spokesman's passive voice.
None of this erases the substance of what the trip accomplished. A nuclear energy pathway with Armenia and a strategic partnership with Azerbaijan represent meaningful expansions of American influence in a region where Russia has long called the shots. Brokering peace between two nations locked in a nearly four-decade conflict is a genuine achievement. These are serious diplomatic gains.
But a deleted post about a genocide of Christians — hours before meeting the leader of a country that denies it happened — is the kind of unforced error that undermines the moral authority those gains are supposed to project. The administration can walk and chew gum. It can sign deals with Baku and still call the Armenian Genocide what it is.
The word was already posted. It was already public. Deleting it didn't make it unsaid — it just made the unsaying visible.
Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass promised reporters she'd take their questions. Then she disappeared.
At a Tuesday press conference held to announce an executive directive banning Immigration and Customs Enforcement from using city property for staging operations, Bass told the assembled media she'd handle "political questions" after the formal Q&A. Her Deputy Mayor for Communications, Amanda Crumley, confirmed it.
Bass never came back.
According to the NY Post, Kolby Lee, responsible for strategic communications for the mayor, stepped in to deliver the update, stating that the mayor would not be coming out at that moment. Lee told reporters they could email their questions instead.
One reporter in the room captured the mood perfectly: "So, she lied to us?"
The timing tells the story. Only hours before Bass took the podium, The California Post published a report exposing sweeping changes made to the Palisades After-Action Fire report before its public release in January. The first draft — a 92-page document — was 22 pages longer than the final version that saw the light of day. Twenty-two pages of material, gone.
Bass has insisted she only reviewed an early draft and asked the Los Angeles Fire Department to ensure accuracy on weather and budgeting details. She claims neither she nor her staff made edits to the report. Those claims now sit against a backdrop of a dramatically altered document that the public was never told had been reworked.
During the press conference, a reporter from The California Post tried to question Bass about the report. Crumley intervened and said the matter would be addressed separately.
They didn't take it at all.
This is not the first time Bass has treated press accountability like something to be managed rather than met. When the Palisades Fire was still burning, Bass was on a trip to Ghana. She returned to a city in crisis and refused to answer questions about the fire. The mayor who couldn't be found during the disaster now can't be found after it, either.
Bass had one off-topic question she was willing to field on Tuesday — about comments from Nithya Raman calling for more police. That she engaged with. The fire report? The missing 22 pages? The question of whether her office shaped the narrative before the public ever saw it? Those required an email.
There's a word for leaders who only answer the questions that don't threaten them. It isn't "transparent."
Bass's avoidance also has a political dimension she clearly doesn't want to discuss in front of cameras. Raman — a former ally of Bass and a democratic socialist — announced a surprise bid for mayor over the weekend. She poses a significant challenge to Bass's reelection, and the fact that a far-left challenger is now outflanking Bass on public safety by calling for more police says everything about how badly the mayor has lost the narrative.
When your democratic socialist rival is running to your right on policing, the ground has shifted beneath you in ways no executive directive can fix.
Bass's Tuesday press conference was supposed to be about the ICE directive — red meat for her progressive base, a signal that Los Angeles would resist federal immigration enforcement. But instead of controlling the news cycle, she handed reporters a better story: a mayor who promises answers and then vanishes when the questions get uncomfortable.
The suggestion that reporters email their questions deserves its own examination. Email is where accountability goes to die. It allows staffers to draft, workshop, and sanitize responses. It strips away the follow-up, the clarification, the moment when a public official's composure reveals more than their words. It is the opposite of a press conference, which is precisely why Bass's team offered it as a substitute for one she had already committed to holding.
The press conference wasn't about informing the public. It was about generating a headline. When the headline threatened to become one she couldn't control, she walked.
Los Angeles is a city still reeling from a catastrophic fire, governed by a mayor who was absent during the crisis and evasive after it. The Palisades After-Action Fire report was supposed to be the authoritative account of what went wrong. Instead, it's now a document with a 22-page gap and a mayor who insists she had nothing to do with the changes — but won't stand in front of a microphone and say so under questioning.
Bass chose Tuesday to make a public stand against federal immigration enforcement. She did not choose Tuesday to make a public stand for transparency about the worst fire in her city's recent memory. That ordering of priorities is not an accident. It's a tell.
The reporters in that room asked the right question. She lied to them. And the people of Los Angeles — the ones who lost homes, who waited for answers, who deserved a full and unaltered accounting of what happened — got exactly what Bass has given them from the start: a mayor headed for the exit.
