Loyola University student Sheridan Gorman murdered by Venezuelan illegal alien Jose Medina-Medina
Former Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich joined Laura Ingraham on Fox News to discuss the tragic and preventable murder of 18-year-old Loyola University student Sheridan Gorman.
Early in the morning on Thursday of last week, Gorman was shot and killed near the Chicago campus by one of Joe Biden’s illegals.
The masked gunman approached a group of students walking in Rogers Park and opened fire, shooting Gorman in the head. She died at the scene.
On Sunday, it was confirmed that the masked gunman who killed Gorman is a 25-year-old illegal alien from Venezuela who entered the US under the Biden Regime. Police took Jose Medina-Medina into custody.
Laura Ingraham: Governor, I’ve run along the lakefront. It’s beautiful. It’s a lot of families, people out there. But a source was telling Fox that this illegal was wearing a mask at 1:30 in the morning, armed. He wasn’t looking for a party. He was looking for a killing.
Rod Blagojevich: Look, it’s a heart-wrenching story, and it’s heartbreaking. I’m a father of two daughters. My two young daughters have walked that very beach that that young girl, Sheridan Gorman, walked, where she died.
And, you know, Pritzker puts out a statement through a spokesperson. He doesn’t say anything himself. And he waits four days.
And the only reason they’re even saying anything is because he’s starting to feel the heat. People have noticed that the governor has been silent on this, when he’s always talking about how bad ICE is and all these other things that he opposes, that really are about enforcing the law.
But he’s out there, and he’s cowardly, and he’s doing what he’s doing behind the scenes through a third party. And what he is is a reflection of what today’s Democratic Party is.
And who are these Democrats?
They’re for open borders. They’re for sanctuary cities. They’re for defund the police. They’re for no cash bail. And all they do is endlessly attack law enforcement and ICE agents. And it leads to the sort of thing that just happened to this young girl. And I think about this young girl, again, as a father myself of two daughters. I think about her just beginning her young adulthood, beautiful young girl, a daughter, a sister. Probably went away for the first time in her life to college, making her parents proud, and this happens to her.
And it could have easily been avoided if Governor Pritzker and Mayor Johnson did one simple thing: do their jobs. Enforce the law, do their jobs to protect the people.
Laura Ingraham: Rod, you know what I was thinking? All the times we heard Brandon Johnson and Pritzker run to the cameras anytime someone is jostled outside of an ICE facility, or any— right? I mean, jostled, and they’re running to the cameras. ‘Oh, this is an outrage.’
We have a girl dead, and they’re issuing statements through spokespeople generally.
Rod Blagojevich: Yeah, that’s right. And Pritzker’s doing this. He’s— because of his political ambitions, he’s putting together a commission to study the wrongs of ICE agents if and when the Democrats win election, so he can prosecute officers of the law, not illegal immigrants who are criminals.
Laura Ingraham: One of your, one of your friends, I’m sure, and it’s an older woman, will play the soundbite, uh, had a comment about this. Chicago lawmaker, um, how reacted to Sheridan’s murder. Check this out.
Ingraham then played a video of Maria Hadden, a Democrat alderwoman, where she asserts Gorman may have just ‘been in the wrong place at the wrong time’ and that she and her friends might have startled the shooter.
Maria Hadden: The kids were out doing normal, normal things people do in the neighborhood, and it sounds like this might have been a wrong place, wrong time, running into a person who had a gun. They might have startled this person at the end of the pier. We don’t believe there is cause for broader community concern.
Laura Ingraham: 15 seconds, Governor.
Rod Blagojevich: Chicago and Illinois are the wrong place in the wrong time because we got the wrong people leading our state and our city.
Watch:
Former Illinois governor: This could have ‘easily been avoided’ if Pritzker, Johnson did their jobs | Fox News Video https://t.co/6ZVdHfpURI
Another beautiful young American woman is dead, brutally gunned down in sanctuary hellhole Chicago, because Joe Biden’s open border policies and radical Democrat politicians let a Venezuelan illegal alien roam free to commit murder.
As The Gateway Pundit reported, 18-year-old Loyola University freshman Sheridan Gorman was shot in the head execution-style while walking with friends near Tobey Prinz Beach Park in the early morning hours of March 19th.
The killer is Jose Medina, a 25-year-old illegal alien from Venezuela who was caught and released at the border by the Biden regime in May 2023, then released again by Chicago cops after a shoplifting bust.
DHS Acting Assistant Secretary Lauren Bis nailed it: “Sheridan Gorman had her whole life ahead of her before this cold-blooded killer decided to end her life. She was failed by open border policies and sanctuary politicians who RELEASED this illegal alien TWICE before he went on to commit this heinous murder.”
But if you ask the Democrat sycophants in the media, the problem isn’t the illegal invasion, it’s the “guns.”
During a heated segment on NewsNation, former Townhall Editor and Fox News contributor Katie Pavlich went toe-to-toe with liberal strategist and professional gaslighter Chris Hahn.
What followed was a masterclass in Leftist delusion, as Hahn desperately tried to shield the “sanctuary” narrative from the cold, hard reality of its deadly consequences.
Katie Pavlich: What gives when it comes to arresting and deporting people like this before they commit violent crimes against young women?
Chris Hahn: I mean, look, it’s hard to determine who is going to commit a violent crime before they commit violent crimes. Statistically speaking, immigrants—whether they are documented or undocumented—commit crimes at a lower rate, particularly violent crimes, than do native-born Americans. So it’s hard to kind of figure that out.
Katie Pavlich: But isn’t the bottom line that they shouldn’t be here at all? Shouldn’t they not be here at all? I mean, why are you willing to run the risk? Given they shouldn’t be here at all, the first step is breaking the law to get into the country. Just trust that they’re going to be fine—young, military-aged men from Venezuela?
Chris Hahn: Because most of them—because most of them are. And that’s the statistical truth.
Katie Pavlich: So you’re willing to put illegal behavior and illegal aliens into the country?
Chris Hahn: I know it doesn’t fit the narrative, but the vast, overwhelming majority—
Katie Pavlich: That’s actually not true—
Chris Hahn: —immigrate to this country just like our families did.
Katie Pavlich: Not illegally.
Chris Hahn: —are good, law-abiding citizens who want to make this world a better place for their families, just like our families did. And look, I feel for the family here, but to boil this down into immigration policy is wrong. It’s law enforcement policy. It’s too many guns in this world. Why are we not talking about that?
Katie Pavlich: Well, do you think this guy went through a background check? Let’s talk about it.
Chris Hahn: You know, I mean, let’s go to whatever it is that makes Trump okay and talk about his immigration policy.
Katie Pavlich: I did not mention Trump.
Chris Hahn: The fact of the matter is, Katie, that this is a horrible situation. It should not be politicized. And I think that everybody should join hands and say, look, this family deserved better. Whether they were failed by Chicago or by our immigration system, they were failed. And hopefully they get justice.
Katie Pavlich: Let’s key in on that, because I agree with you—this family deserved better. You’re saying they did not deserve this. Okay, so what is the policy position, the real action that prevents this from happening again? I would argue that not allowing violent criminals into the country—and then deporting them when they commit crimes, whether it’s shoplifting or murder—is a start. What is your solution?
Chris Hahn: Well, I think, again, violent criminals who are in this country should be deported, period.
Katie Pavlich: So this guy had a record and then went on to murder a young woman. You think he should have stayed after the shoplifting charge? Because if he had been deported, he wouldn’t have been here.
Chris Hahn: My reading of what has happened here is that he was charged with shoplifting. He did not have a shoplifting record. He was not convicted of shoplifting, right? So once he was convicted—
Katie Pavlich: He was still charged with the crime as an illegal alien in the country.
Chris Hahn: Again—
Katie Pavlich: How many crimes should illegal aliens commit before we get rid of them? This guy’s not a citizen.
Chris Hahn: There are a lot of people in this country who are undocumented. There are a lot of people in this country who are undocumented who are doing great things in this country—
Katie Pavlich: Not this guy.
Chris Hahn: —and there are a lot of Americans in this country who also commit murders, right? So what are we going to do here?
Katie Pavlich: So are we going to justify keeping this guy here?
Chris Hahn: So we’re going to try to politicize this? This is going to be a big political issue on the right, because they’re going to try to distract from the chaos that the president of the United States has caused this nation and this world for a couple of days with this. And it might satisfy their base—who they’re starting to lose—for a little while.
Katie Pavlich: I don’t think this is about—
Chris Hahn: But then they will realize that they have been fooled yet again by the president and his allies on the right.
Katie Pavlich: Well, this isn’t about scoring political points with the base.
Chris Hahn: Oh, it is. Believe me, it is.
Katie Pavlich: It’s about preventing young women—like this young woman, women like Laken Riley—from being murdered by people who are here illegally in the country that we could have kicked out a long time ago.
Chris Hahn: And nobody should be murdered by anybody. We should get rid of guns right now. We need to make it hard for people to get guns so they can’t shoot people.
Katie Pavlich: Chicago has some of the most intense gun control in the entire country, and if this guy wasn’t here, he wouldn’t have been able to commit this crime against a young American woman who’s now dead.
Israeli settlers carried out more than 20 attacks across the West Bank overnight Saturday into Sunday morning, setting fire to Palestinian homes, buildings, and vehicles. Eleven Palestinians were reported wounded, according to Israeli and Palestinian sources.
In the village of Jalud, CCTV footage recorded on Saturday evening shows a large mob of settlers entering the area before attacking homes and setting fires, in what Palestinians and human rights observers described as an attempted pogrom.
In the village of Qaryout, Israeli settlers torched homes and cars in what residents described as an attempt to burn families alive. The same village saw two Palestinians killed just two weeks ago.
A message which circulated before the attacks in a WhatsApp group used by settlers said: “Revenge campaign across Judea and Samaria: Jews won’t remain silent over spilled Jewish blood.” Israelis refer to the West Bank as “Judea and Samara.” Right-wing groups called for revenge after the death of an Israeli settler activist, Yehudah Sherman, was reportedly killed this weekend in a car accident while driving his ATV. Video footage from the crash site shows Palestinian residents and the Palestinian Red Crescent attempting to help and rescue Sherman.
Residents from Washington to California reported seeing a green fireball zoom through the skies in the early hours of Monday morning.
The American Meteor Society reported on Monday morning that it had received over 200 reports of a “green fireball” from residents in Seattle stretching all the way to San Francisco.
Manager of the American Meteor Society Mike Hankey stated, “A fireball meteor came into the atmosphere, and … it was a small rock from an asteroid, fragment from an asteroid.”
WATCH:
Did you see the meteor this morning? A bright green fireball was reported from Portland to Seattle. If you did see it, share your photos and video with us. https://t.co/ftL1YwTIOepic.twitter.com/ys64HxrQA6
Several people reported seeing a “bright green fireball” over the Pacific Northwest early Monday morning, according to the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry.
Between 5:55 a.m. and 6:20 a.m., dozens of reports were submitted to the American Meteor Society’s fireball log from the San Francisco area all the way to Seattle.
According to Jim Todd with OMSI, fireballs are bright meteors that can be seen from a distance of about 60 to 80 miles above.
When meteors travel through the atmosphere, Todd said that they create fiction causing the meteors to burn up.
Another angle of the bright meteor:
@wkyc Reports a bright fireball streaking across central California overnight Monday was likely a meteor entering the atmosphere.
Across the globe, conservative leaders are gaining political ground. Top row (left to right): Donald Trump, United States; Karol Nawrocki, Poland; Giorgia Meloni, Italy; Nayib Bukele, El Salvador. Bottom row (left to right): Sanae Takaichi, Japan; Daniel Noboa, Ecuador; Viktor Orbán, Hungary.
Just a few years ago, during the Biden era, it seemed the whole world had shifted left, with only a few outposts, such as Hungary and Poland, standing against the tide of woke ideology and the drift toward socialism. Today, that trend is reversing.
A right-wing movement is building across Latin America and Europe and, to a lesser extent, Asia and Africa, with many countries now led by conservative governments and several others likely to shift in the next election cycle.
In Argentina, Javier Milei won the presidency in November 2023 on a libertarian, anarcho-capitalist platform and followed with a strong midterm performance in October 2025, securing more than 40 percent of the national vote.
In Ecuador, incumbent Daniel Noboa won re-election in April 2025, defeating a left-wing challenger in a campaign focused on crime and corruption.
El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele, re-elected in 2024, is one of the region’s most prominent conservative leaders, known for his hardline anti-gang policies that have transformed El Salvador from one of the most dangerous nations in the Americas to one of the safest.
Paraguay’s Santiago Peña governs in alignment with Milei’s emerging regional bloc, while Panama’s José Raúl Mulino won the presidency in 2024, defeating a center-left incumbent. In the Dominican Republic, Luis Abinader serves as a center-right president.
Bolivia also shifted right, with Senator Rodrigo Paz Pereira winning the October 2025 presidential runoff, ending decades of dominance by the leftist Movimiento al Socialismo party.
In Chile, voters elected José Antonio Kast to the presidency for the 2026–2030 term, delivering the largest vote total in the country’s history.
Honduras elected conservative candidate Nasry Asfura in November 2025 with 40.3 percent of the vote, and Costa Rica followed in early 2026, electing Laura Fernández Delgado by a wide margin while her Sovereign People’s Party secured a legislative majority.
Peru remains an outlier in terms of political stability rather than ideology. José Jerí, a member of the right-wing Somos Peru party, became interim president in October 2025 following the impeachment of Dina Boluarte, but was himself impeached in February 2026, underscoring the country’s political turmoil.
Venezuela may also be shifting. On January 3, 2026, U.S. special forces captured Nicolás Maduro and flew him to New York to face narcoterrorism charges, ending his rule after more than a decade.
His vice president, Delcy Rodríguez, assumed the interim presidency, but the regime’s core institutions, including the military, Supreme Court, and ruling Socialist Party, remained intact.
Opposition candidate Edmundo González Urrutia is widely believed to have won the contested 2024 election by a large margin.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio has called for free and fair elections, with U.S. officials suggesting they could take place by 2027. Whether Venezuela transitions to democracy or stabilizes under a reconfigured authoritarian system remains uncertain.
Looking ahead, several elections could strengthen the region’s conservative shift.
In Colombia, President Gustavo Petro’s term ends in 2026, and given his unpopularity and the country’s historical tendency toward right-leaning governments, analysts expect a difficult path for his coalition to retain power.
Brazil will hold elections in October 2026, with multiple conservative candidates in the race.
While Lula leads in polling, figures such as Flávio Bolsonaro and São Paulo Governor Tarcísio de Freitas remain competitive, even as Jair Bolsonaro is barred from running following his conviction related to an alleged January 2023 coup attempt.
Peru is also expected to hold a presidential election in 2026, with right-wing Congresswoman Keiko Fujimori among the leading contenders. If trends continue, these elections could expand conservative influence across the region, potentially leaving Mexico as the only major leftist holdout.
In Europe, the pattern is similar. In Germany, Friedrich Merz of the Christian Democratic Union/Christian Social Union won the February 2025 snap election after the collapse of Olaf Scholz’s coalition government in late 2024.
Merz’s conservatives secured 208 seats in the 630-seat Bundestag, while the AfD placed second with 152 seats, its best result ever, doubling its support from 10.3 percent in 2021.
AfD leader Alice Weidel, the party’s chancellor candidate, has become the face of Germany’s fastest-growing political force.
She told supporters the result put the party on a path to government, if not now, then at the next election in four years.
An economist by background, she blames globalization for Germany’s problems, calls for tighter immigration restrictions, and supports a return to fossil fuels, citing Margaret Thatcher as her political model.
She received support from Elon Musk and was the first AfD politician invited to a pre-election TV debate, where she sparred with Chancellor Scholz and CDU leader Merz.
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán described her as the future of Germany, and Vice President JD Vance met with her during his February 2025 Munich trip.
In May 2025, Germany’s Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution classified the AfD as a confirmed right-wing extremist organization, though a 2026 court injunction suspended that designation.
All mainstream parties maintain a firewall against coalition with the AfD, leaving Weidel with influence but no executive power for now. She is part of a growing group of women leading Europe’s right, alongside Italy’s Giorgia Meloni and France’s Marine Le Pen.
Austria’s far-right Freedom Party finished first in the September 2024 elections.
After coalition talks collapsed and Chancellor Nehammer resigned, President Van der Bellen tasked Freedom Party leader Herbert Kickl with forming a government.
Giorgia Meloni has consolidated her position in Italy since taking power in 2022.
Her Brothers of Italy party won over 28 percent of Italy’s EU vote, and she remains one of the few European leaders enjoying strong popular support. In Poland, conservative nationalist Karol Nawrocki narrowly won the presidency in 2025.
Hungary’s Viktor Orbán remains entrenched in power, with his Fidesz party heading the Patriots for Europe group in the European Parliament, which holds 84 seats.
In the Netherlands, right-wing parties won the most votes in 2023, and Geert Wilders’s Party for Freedom remains a major force, with his coalition forming the Dutch government.
Marine Le Pen’s National Rally in France won 31.4 percent of the vote in EU elections, prompting President Macron to dissolve parliament and call snap elections.
Only a coalition of the left and centrists blocked the RN’s path to power in the second round.
In the United Kingdom, while Labour holds power, Reform UK has made significant gains, winning roughly 42 percent of seats in local elections and taking eight authorities from Conservative strongholds.
Prime Minister Starmer recently described Reform as his main competitor for No. 10 Downing Street.
Across the 2024 EU Parliament elections, populist or far-right parties came in first in France, Italy, Austria, Hungary, and Slovakia, and placed second in Germany, Poland, and the Netherlands.
Right-wing populists are now in government or supporting ruling coalitions in Belgium, Croatia, Finland, Hungary, the Netherlands, Slovakia, and Sweden.
In Asia, the most significant recent development is Japan. Sanae Takaichi took office as Japan’s first female prime minister in October 2025, called a snap election, and won a landslide in February 2026, securing the strongest majority for a Japanese government since World War II.
The LDP now has enough seats to override the upper house, propose constitutional amendments, and chair all lower house committees.
Takaichi has pledged to revise security and defense policies to bolster Japan’s offensive military capabilities, lift a ban on weapons exports, and push tighter immigration measures.
In India, Narendra Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party won a third consecutive victory in 2024 but were forced into a coalition after losing their outright majority.
In Indonesia, Prabowo Subianto won the February 2024 presidential election with 58 percent of the vote in the first round. He leads Gerindra, a nationalist, right-wing populist party, and assumed the presidency in October 2024.
Benjamin Netanyahu pieced together the most right-wing and religious government in Israel’s history following his 2022 victory.
He has dominated Israeli politics for three decades, serving as prime minister for eighteen of the last twenty-nine years. Elections are expected by October 2026, with the opposition remaining split, creating a structural opportunity for Netanyahu to remain in power.
The consistent pattern across these cases is economic discontent, opposition to illegal immigration, anti-crime sentiment, and voter dissatisfaction with incumbent centrist or left-leaning governments.
ICE agents are now stationed at U.S. airports, helping to alleviate long lines caused by Democrats holding up TSA funding. The agents will also be conducting immigration enforcement. Photo courtesy of Danpaluska, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons.
Airports across the United States have been plagued by long lines and lengthy delays caused by a budget dispute that has left DHS partially unfunded for over a month, marking the third-longest government shutdown in U.S. history.
Senate Democrats proposed funding TSA, FEMA, CISA, the Coast Guard, and other DHS agencies while explicitly excluding ICE and CBP, defunding those law enforcement agencies.
Republicans blocked that bill, arguing it would support Democrats’ open-border initiatives that protect illegal immigrants, and have insisted on funding the entire department together. Democrats have refused unless it is accompanied by reforms that would hamstring immigration enforcement.
Senator Ted Cruz noted that millions of Americans were facing two-, three-, and four-hour waits at airports and missing flights for spring break.
President Trump responded by deploying ICE officers to supplement TSA at airport checkpoints, alleviating the operational strain on understaffed airports while placing immigration enforcement personnel in position to conduct enforcement actions.
Trump stated that ICE at airports will help catch illegal aliens, a claim liberals such as Hollywood actor Jon Favreau have disputed by arguing that no illegal aliens enter the country by plane.
“Ah yes, people usually enter the country illegally by just booking a plane ticket,” he mockingly tweeted.
That argument is flatly contradicted by official government data. In FY 2023, over 510,000 people overstayed their visas. These are people who entered legally by air or sea and then remained unlawfully.
DHS publishes annual Entry/Exit Overstay Reports to Congress tracking this population, and overstays are estimated to constitute approximately 40 percent of the total illegal alien population residing in the United States.
TSA sends ICE lists of people flying through U.S. airports several times per week, including names and photos, which ICE checks against its own records and, if a target is identified, dispatches officers to make an arrest.
This is something neither airlines nor TSA are equipped or authorized to do. Airlines are private carriers with no immigration enforcement authority and no access to ICE databases.
TSA’s statutory mandate is aviation security, screening for weapons and threats to flight safety, not immigration enforcement. TSA can share passenger data with ICE but cannot itself act on immigration violations.
Without ICE present, a person flagged in ICE databases boards the plane unimpeded. The presence of ICE officers at airports closes that gap by placing the agency with both the database access and the enforcement authority in the same location as the traveler.
The argument that requiring a visa to book or board a flight prevents illegal entry is also false. Airline document checks are limited to a visual examination to confirm a visa is present in the passport and that dates appear valid.
IATA acknowledges that airline systems may confirm the presence of a visa but rarely provide information about its specific permissions or restrictions.
CBP operates a voluntary Document Validation Program through the APIS system, which vets passenger information against CBP databases and sends response messages to carriers indicating whether a passenger is cleared, requires additional screening, or should be denied boarding.
However, this is a system-dependent pre-departure process and does not give airline staff real-time access to revocation databases on their own.
The Department of State can revoke a visa electronically, and while CBP will see the revocation and communicate it to the airline, if the revocation is recent or the holder has moved, they may not have received notification.
The information asymmetry is real and is resolved through CBP, not the airline.
A prior overstay or visa violation can also render a visa invalid for future travel even though the physical document still appears valid in the passport.
If a traveler is confirmed to have overstayed, CBP can bar reentry for three or ten years, a determination that lives in CBP’s databases.
This is precisely why ICE and CBP enforcement at ports of entry is necessary, as the airline has no independent means of knowing a visa has been invalidated by prior travel history.
ICE at airports will also catch people attempting to leave after being in the country illegally. In numerous documented cases, illegal aliens were arrested while waiting to board a flight because they had outstanding deportation orders, demonstrating that departure does not automatically exempt someone from accountability.
The government’s self-deportation mechanism requires registration through the CBP Home app under Project Homecoming, which is distinct from simply buying a ticket and voluntarily leaving the country.
Leaving without registering through the app can still trigger reentry bars, affect pending immigration cases, or lead to arrest and possible detention. The consequences can include not being allowed to return to the U.S., even for a short visit.
After reviewing the many ways in which illegal aliens could be entering or fleeing the country through commercial flights at U.S. airports, it raises the question of why ICE was not stationed there before.
Because Democrats refused to fund TSA, ICE is now being deployed at U.S. airports, and the system may become permanent.
Iranian missile and drone strikes are down 90 percent, and much of the evidence on the ground suggests that the regime’s military power is failing. At the same time, a number of U.S. allies appear increasingly open to supporting the United States. M-ATF, from military.ir and iranmilitaryforum.net, CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Iran has threatened to completely close the Strait of Hormuz and strike energy and desalination infrastructure across the region. Colonel Ebrahim Zolfaqari, spokesman for Iran’s Khatam al-Anbiya military command headquarters, warned that if Iran’s fuel infrastructure is attacked, all energy, information technology systems, and desalination infrastructure used by America and its allies in the region will be struck.
Parliament Speaker Mohammad-Bagher Ghalibaf echoed the threat on X, warning that critical infrastructure, energy, and oil across the region will be irreversibly destroyed and oil prices will remain elevated for a prolonged period if Iran’s power plants are struck. A UN official warned that Iran is poised to strike desalination plants across the region within days, which would trigger a water crisis affecting Gulf states and Israel.
The IRGC-affiliated Mehr news agency released a map showing power plants across the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Kuwait that could be targeted, with the message “Say goodbye to electricity!” IRGC-affiliated media also circulated a map marking Doha, including the headquarters of Al Jazeera, as a potential target, advising residents of the Qatari capital to evacuate.
Iran launched two ballistic missiles at the joint U.S.-UK base at Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean, approximately 2,000 miles from Iran. Iranian Foreign Minister Araghchi warned Britain that any permission granted to the United States to use its bases for operations against Iran would be regarded as a direct act of aggression.
Some analysts see these threats as defiance, a sign that the IRGC refuses to surrender. Others view them as a desperate attempt to force a negotiated end to a war the IRGC cannot win, and the Islamic regime cannot survive.
Victor Davis Hanson, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and classicist and military historian at Stanford, has argued the tide has turned against Iran. He has written about how wars are won and lost, including in his book The Second World Wars, and has appeared on Fox News and The Daily Signal since Operation Epic Fury began. He has said Iran’s leadership could fall within weeks if the military campaign continues uninterrupted.
Hanson’s argument rests on reading the behavior of third parties rather than the claims of either side. In Europe, the E3, the United Kingdom, France, and Germany, resolved to support proportionate defensive military measures against drones and ballistic missiles, and British Prime Minister Keir Starmer said the United States can use British bases for defensive strikes on Iran. Hanson argues this signals that Europe has read the battlefield and aligned with the winning side.
While parts of Europe are coming around, other countries still refuse to help. Spain’s Prime Minister Sánchez called the war an error and withdrew Spain’s ambassador to Israel.
In the Gulf states, Saudi Arabia’s Foreign Ministry said Iran’s targeting of its sovereignty, civilian infrastructure, and diplomatic missions constituted a clear violation of international law. In a March 17 letter to the US-UAE Business Council, UAE Ambassador Yousef Al Otaiba said the investment pledges announced the previous year would continue without disruption, with plans to accelerate deployment and increase funding.
Al Otaiba noted that Iran had launched nearly 2,000 missiles and drones at the UAE, with more than 93 percent intercepted, and that ports and airports had reopened quickly. A top UAE presidential adviser said Iran had miscalculated in targeting Gulf countries, arguing the attacks would push the region toward the US.
Al Jazeera published an op-ed headlined “The US-Israeli strategy against Iran is working,” arguing that critics were measuring the wrong things by cataloging costs while ignoring the strategic ledger. The author, Muhanad Seloom, an assistant professor at the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies, wrote that every aspect of Iran’s ability to project regional power is being degraded and collapsing in real time. He added that air defenses had been suppressed to the point where the US is flying non-stealth B-1 bombers over Iranian airspace.
On the military situation, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Dan Caine confirmed on March 19 that A-10 fighters and AH-64E Apache helicopters are operating over Iran’s southern coast, hunting and killing fast-attack watercraft in the Strait of Hormuz. The US declared localized air superiority over the southern flank of the Iranian coast by March 4. This is significant because slow, low-flying platforms are only deployed when air defenses have been suppressed.
Hanson has written that Iran’s strategy is to drag out the conflict and hope that domestic criticism, the looming midterms, rising gas prices, and pressure from allies force the United States to end the war before the regime falls.
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said on March 15 that Iran’s missile capability is down 90 percent and its drone capability is down 95 percent since the start of the war. However, Al Jazeera hypothesized that Iran may be rationing its remaining missile capacity for politically timed salvos rather than maintaining a sustained operational tempo.
Hanson has said the timeline for regime collapse, if Trump sees the campaign through, is two, three, or four weeks. Of course, this is his opinion, and events may unfold differently. What is clear is that the Iranian regime appears to be weakening, while more U.S. allies are shifting their positions, becoming less critical of the United States, and signaling that they may provide some form of assistance or hold Iran accountable.
New York City First Lady Rama Duwaji received a stern reality check about the Hamas terrorist attack on Oct. 7, 2023, after liking a social media post claiming the mass rapes committed that day were a hoax.
According to an article in the New York Post, Duwaji liked a post on social media platform Instagram in February 2024 where a user questioned the legitimacy of reporting by The New York Times regarding the attack.
“If I told you that The New York Times hired a recently graduated college student with only a couple prior articles written on the subject of food and cooking to be their lead on the ground ‘reporter’ on the ‘mass rape’ hoax they fabricated, would you believe it? That’s Adam Sella,” the post read.
It was later screenshotted and uploaded to social media platform X by The Free Press reporter Olivia Reginald, showing Duwaji liking it.
This is the screenshot showing Rama Duwaji, the wife of Zohran Mamdani, liking a post calling sexual violence on October 7 a “‘mass rape’ hoax” pic.twitter.com/e8EW3je8EE
Tali Biner attended the Nova Music Festival on Oct. 7, 2023, where she spent hours hiding from Hamas in a camper as she heard screams of pain and agony from their victims.
“I knew beyond any doubt what was happening was not just torture, it was sexual violence,” she said in an interview with the New York Post.
Gunshots rang out over pleas of “No!” and “Stop!”
When she felt it was safe to come out, Biner saw naked bodies lying on the ground.
“They dismembered bodies and sexually violated women and men, including rape and the insertion of objects into their bodies,” she said. “These are facts.”
Biner had a message for Duwaji.
“My message to Mrs. Mamdani is simple: political narratives should never cloud your judgment when it comes to the facts of October 7th. Real people suffered, were raped and were killed.”
Looking back on those awful moments, she told the New York Post, “Deep down, I also knew that if they caught me, I would make sure that they kill me as soon as possible.
“I would never allow them to sexually violate me. That determination gave me clarity, focus, and the strength to survive, to bear witness, and to remember.
“I would expect any woman — and especially Mrs. Mamdani — to at least try to imagine. To close her eyes and picture evil people breaking into her home, her safe space, assaulting her and her husband, daring to sexually violate her in front of her family, murdering her children before her eyes. This is exactly what our women and men experienced on Oct. 7th.”
She said denial of what happened that day “makes my blood boil.”
“It breaks my heart to know that with mountains of evidence and admissions of the barbarism during the 2023 attack, some people willfully choose not to believe us,” she continued.
This is not the only instance of Duwaji’s social media activities sparking controversy and outrage.
The Washington Free Beacon found old posts on social media platform Tumblr, now archived, where she glorified terrorists from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and said U.S. service members attack civilians to prop up American hegemony.
Those posts were from her teens and early 20s, but it’s clear she hasn’t changed.
She supported terrorism then. She still supports it now.
Kermit Gosnell was an abortion doctor in Philadelphia who performed late-term abortions. In 2011, he was convicted of murder when it was revealed that he murdered babies who had survived the procedure. It’s like a story straight out of a horror movie.
Abortionist Kermit Gosnell Dies in Prison After Killing Thousands of Babies
Kermit Gosnell, the former Philadelphia abortionist convicted of first-degree murder in the brutal killings of three infants born alive during illegal late-term abortions at his notorious “house of horrors” clinic, has died in prison. He was 85.
Gosnell, who was serving three consecutive life sentences without the possibility of parole plus an additional 30 years on federal drug charges, died at SCI Huntingdon, according to sources familiar with the matter.
His cause of death was not immediately released, though he had reportedly been in declining health in recent years.
The news emerged publicly via pro-life journalist Ann McElhinney, who extensively covered his 2013 trial, interviewed him in prison, and co-authored a book on the case.
In her announcement, McElhinney described Gosnell as “the abortion doctor who is thought to have murdered thousands of babies in a 30 year killing spree” and called him “a chilling monster who could sometimes come across as charming.”
She added: “Gosnell is gone, but we should take time to think of the thousands of innocent babies who were his victims. They lived for a short period of time but must not be forgotten. They achieved some measure of justice with Gosnell’s prosecution and incarceration. I think in particular of Baby Boy A, who was so big that even Gosnell’s workers were shocked by the barbarity of his killing and took a photo of him after he was murdered. … Baby Boy A lived for about an hour before he was killed.”
Here are some reactions from Twitter/X.
This is disappointing news. He got to die of natural causes. He should have been executed. https://t.co/E2jOH3xePH
Reminder that the mainstream media had to essentially be cyberbullied into covering the 2013 Kermit Gosnell trial after refusing to do so for weeks to protect the abortion industry.
Does Moscow plan to use microchipped birds to bomb Americans—and to begin controlling human minds?
TakiMag
Pigeons are often colloquially known as “flying rats.” Might this be because they are actually secretly spies, trained by intelligence services to flap around “ratting” on people like feathered Stasi and KGB informers? In Vladimir Putin’s Russia, this appears to be the plan.
Recent Western reports imply that, under a demented Russian cyber-engineering program codenamed PJN-1, small GPS-linked cameras are being strapped to birds’ chests, powered by a miniature solar panel. Then, neural chips are implanted into the birds’ brains, rendering them a form of novel “bio-drone,” far easier to manufacture than metallic ones are, birdseed being much cheaper and more plentiful than jet fuel and lithium-ion batteries. Then they can be sent out to spy on unsuspecting enemies outdoors like literal stool-pigeons, steered from afar by chairbound Russian airmen armed with nothing but reengineered PlayStation pads and live birdcam feeds on their laptops.
The pigeon-drones are being publicly marketed as designed purely for peaceful civilian use (in which case they really should be using doves), such as monitoring crop fields, providing handlers with a literal bird’s-eye view. However, just as with ordinary commercial drones in Ukraine, some warn that the cyborg birds could very easily be modified and used to deliver explosives or maybe even deadly diseases. If they were crows, they could drop Corvid-19.
Actually, this pun isn’t too far from the (alleged) truth. “Currently, the solution works with pigeons, but any bird could be used as a carrier,” explained Alexander Panov, chief executive of Neiry, the Russian biotech firm behind the scheme. “To carry more payload, we plan to use ravens. For monitoring coastal facilities, seagulls, and for larger offshore areas, albatrosses.” If the Ancient Mariner ever shot one of those, it would just explode.
I Smell a Rat
This all sounds like a joke, but it isn’t—although, as we shall see, certain aspects of the scheme are quite literally Pythonesque. Despite the whole idea’s strong similarity to TV comedy sketches like this one from the 1990s UK spoof news show The Day Today about the use of deadly “IRA bomb-dogs,” there is actual video footage of Neiry performing simple experiments in the neurological control of pigeons’ flight paths within its laboratories. Electrical impulses in their brains, delivered from a distance, appear capable of making them turn left or right by flapping their wings in the direction instructed.
On its website, Neiry already boasts of having created a “rat that is smarter than most people” in the shape of a rodent named Pythia, christened after the ancient Greek priestesses of prophecy who would go into trances and ask the Delphic Oracle to provide answers to visitors’ every question. The rat in question is supposedly able to perform a similar function by virtue of having its brain linked directly to an online Russian chatbot service. In this fashion, the clever creature has purportedly been able to answer questions about “quasars, myelin shells, the Python [computer programming] language, and Albert Einstein’s birthday.”
“Thus, the rodent has been ‘upgraded’, and can now answer questions using AI,” Neiry claims, although quite how the rat is capable of understanding human questions and then transmitting them directly into the internet is not really explained, although it is helpfully said that “the rat knows how to answer any questions using the keyboard.”
Also unclear is why precisely a human may wish to do any of this in the first place, it being far easier to just type your queries into ChatGPT personally. You may as well train an ocelot to manage your emails. What is clear, however, is why Neiry’s founder Alexander Panov wishes to perform this bizarre act of bioengineering which he aptly calls “a bit hooligan from a scientific point of view”: He wants to use it as a mere stepping-stone to controlling human minds.
Human Cattle
Working in collaboration with Moscow State University—i.e., the Russian state itself—Neiry promises, “The goal of this project is to develop invasive neural interfaces. In the future it is planned to create a user product that will help connect the human brain with the knowledge of all mankind.” Panov describes the way this will work as follows:
[BLOCK]The results of the Pythia experiment are one of the stages of the “AIntuition Project.” For example, the user will be able to feel the truth or falsity of any statement or intuitively understand which answer in the test is correct. All this will increase the efficiency of human activity. And given that the entire evolution of humanity is moving towards increasing efficiency, our project is carefully moving humans to the next step, where AI will be their faithful and reliable symbiote assistant.[/BLOCK]
But who controls what the AI thinks and knows in the first place? Why, the Kremlin, of course!
I previously wrote in The American Conservative about the Russian regime’s attempts to mentally reprogram its citizens by systematically rewriting national dictionaries, adding and deleting words so that, for example, no such country as Ukraine appeared to exist at all; pulling the same kind of trick with online databanks and deliberately making all mental access to such knowledge dependent upon online censors would be a great way to intellectually enslave humans too.
An admiring profile of Neiry Biotech in the Russian version of Forbes magazine, in which a business journalist visits Pythia’s lab and observes “rats with USB-C [cables] coming out of their heads,” explains how the company began with a new form of videogaming VR helmet in which users controlled on-screen actions with only the power of their minds. Then, it transformed this into a VR educational product for schools, before building variant headphone-based mini helmets to detect bioelectrical brain activity for health-tracking purposes, and a vocational unit designed to somehow map the brain and thereby “determine a person’s professional predisposition.” These proved commercially successful, being sold today in America under some unspecified different brand—which is alarming, as Neiry’s CEO says he subsequently used the profits from these gadgets to create outright mind-control devices.
From tiny critters like rats and pigeons, Alexander Panov moved on to mentally abusing far larger fauna like cows. He is now selling a brand of bovine brain implant dubbed Neuroroga, which purportedly causes cows to begin lactating uncontrollably upon the farmer’s command, increasing their milk yields by 25 percent. Panov’s business goal for 2026 is to have Neuroroga implanted into 6,666 cows, this number carefully chosen “so that no one doubts that we are controlled by the Devil.”
Brain Drain
Of course, Panov is only joking here. The Devil does not control his company at all. Instead, matters are far worse: Vladimir Putin does.
One major investor in Neiry Biotech is the National Technology Initiative (NTI), which pumped in nearly $5 million in 2021, the NTI being a military-industrial seed-funding outlet established on the direct orders of Putin, whilst Neiry also operates in conjunction with the Moscow State University Institute of Artificial Intelligence, which is headed up by the prominent female scientist Katerina Tikhonova—better known as Putin’s second daughter (she also used to be an acrobat).
To Russian Forbes, Panov painted his scheme as nothing more than a philanthropic quest to push mankind up onto the next intellectual level, as he had already done for rat-kind with Pythia. “We will become Homo superior, an improved person,” he said, demonstrating clear familiarity with 1970s David Bowie lyrics. He also claimed to be very big on something called “neuroethics.” and to have support in everything he does from the Russian Orthodox Church; but then, so does Vladimir Putin himself. He also joked that he planned to “enslave the world, of course,” but then backtracked, saying this was just a joke, and that “only a sense of humor” enabled him to keep on working in his very strange cow-bothering business.
On social media, though, Panov expressed one ambition which was no joke, but a serious nightmare:
[BLOCK]One of my next projects that I have been thinking about for a long time involves selling people to the state. I will share details after a pilot, but right away I warn you that everything there will be eco-friendly, socially oriented, Orthodox, and humane—no clones! The basic thesis of this startup is simple: due to declining birth rates, any state needs people. Ours especially. Different ones will do, but those who carry the basic culture will be valued more… In turn, there are Ukrainians who are, of course, Russians in terms of cultural code, just intoxicated by delusions [of being Western]… And even if only 5–7 million of the useful ones remain there, they can be reprogrammed, just like most other people, and it is much cheaper than creating and raising a person of our own culture.[/BLOCK]
However plausible you may think Panov’s plans may be (not very, probably), the key point here is not so much that he is lunatic enough to wish to pursue them, but that the Russian state is lunatic enough to actually fund them. What on earth can be motivating them to act in this wasteful and insane manner?
NWSPittsburgh) 
