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Category: News
March 13, 2025
William Upton
Media
Politics

Michelle Obama Podcast Only Draws a Few Thousand Subscribers Despite Media Blitz.

Former First Lady Michelle Obama launched a new podcast with her brother, IMO with Michelle Obama and Craig Robinson—but you can’t be blamed if you didn’t know. Despite an intense marketing campaign, the digital offering garnered only around 12,000 subscribers in its first 14 hours on YouTube earlier on Thursday. Even several hours later, that number still stood at just over 20,000.

While Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not publish real-time subscriber numbers, on neither site does IMO boast more than a few thousand reviews, with around 8,000 on Apple and just under 5,000 on Spotify. The podcast has received disproportional media attention and paid promotion, which typically translates to fairly quick success. However, that isn’t the case with the Michelle Obama offering.

Dramatic media headlines speculating about a possible divorce, based on a rather mundane complaint the former First Lady makes regarding her husband Barack Obama, do not even seem to be enough to generate listener interest.

Discussing their marriage, Mrs. Obama told her brother, “Barack, you know, he had to adjust to what ‘on time’ was for me.” She continued, revealing that former President Obama would wait until the last minute to use the bathroom or find his glasses when the family was about to leave.

“I was like, ‘Dude, a 3 o’clock departure means you’ve done all that,’ you know, it’s like, don’t start looking for your glasses at the 3 o’clock departure,” Mrs. Obama recalled, though she conceded her husband has gotten more timely: “He’s improved over 30 years of marriage, but that was a ‘you must adjust.'”

While the former First Lady’s absence from Jimmy Carter‘s funeral and President Donald J. Trump‘s inauguration—both attended by former President Obama—has fueled separation rumors, this remains speculation.

Image by Gage Skidmore.

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Former First Lady Michelle Obama launched a new podcast with her brother, IMO with Michelle Obama and Craig Robinson—but you can't be blamed if you didn't know. Despite an intense marketing campaign, the digital offering garnered only around 12,000 subscribers in its first 14 hours on YouTube earlier on Thursday. Even several hours later, that number still stood at just over 20,000. show more
March 13, 2025
William Upton
War
World

Putin Appears to Agree to Ceasefire ‘Framework’ — But No Confirmed Deal Yet.

Russian President Vladimir Putin appears to have agreed to the framework of a ceasefire deal with Ukraine proposed by U.S. President Donald J. Trump. However, the Russian leader stopped short of confirming that he accepts the terms of the U.S.-brokered plan as written and recently agreed to by Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky.

The comments from Putin, made during a Thursday press conference with Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko, mark significant progress in Trump’s efforts to end the three-year-long conflict between Russia and Ukraine. Russian officials had until recently refused to acknowledge Trump’s special envoy, Steve Witkoff, and, as early as Thursday morning, had flatly dismissed the American-negotiated ceasefire deal.

“We agree with the proposals for the ceasefire, but our position is based on the assumption that the ceasefire would lead to a long-term peace. Something that would remove the initial reasons for the crisis,” Putin said. The Russian president added that he would discuss the proposal further with U.S. negotiators and perhaps speak over the phone with President Trump about the plan.

Earlier on Thursday, the Russian government’s negotiator, Yuri Ushakov, appeared to reject the ceasefire proposal outright in off-the-cuff comments made to Russian media. However, an overnight move by President Trump’s Treasury Department to cut off all Russian oil sales to the European Union allowed under a sanctions exemption issued by the former Biden government may have pushed Putin to reverse course.

Putin specifically cited the issue of restoring Russian oil and gas sales to European nations during the press conference on Thursday.

WATCH:

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Russian President Vladimir Putin appears to have agreed to the framework of a ceasefire deal with Ukraine proposed by U.S. President Donald J. Trump. However, the Russian leader stopped short of confirming that he accepts the terms of the U.S.-brokered plan as written and recently agreed to by Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky. show more
March 13, 2025
Christopher Tomlinson
Crime
UK

Pride Group Founder Guilty of Raping 12-Year-Old Boy.

A co-founder of an LGBT Pride group has been found guilty of raping a 12-year-old boy in the United Kingdom after meeting the child on the homosexual hook-up app Grindr. Stephen Ireland, who was charged last month, raped his victim at his apartment on April 19, 2024.

Ireland was prolific on social media, criticizing Trump supporters and deriding other users for being “trans exclusionary, racist and narrow minded,” among other smears.

The Pride organizer was also found guilty of child pornography offenses, including six counts of making indecent images of children. His partner, 27-year-old David Sutton, who lives with Ireland, has also pleaded guilty to three counts of making indecent images of children.

Both men were convicted after a trial that lasted a month, with the court hearing that the 12-year-old was lured to the apartment and made to watch pornography with Ireland as well as consume drugs. While the pair were found guilty of child sex crimes, they were acquitted of kidnapping.

The pair were initially charged with 38 separate offenses and attempted to pass off their horrific online chats as “fantasy,” which included talk of kidnapping children from schools while pretending to be talent scouts.

Image by Benoît Prieur.

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A co-founder of an LGBT Pride group has been found guilty of raping a 12-year-old boy in the United Kingdom after meeting the child on the homosexual hook-up app Grindr. Stephen Ireland, who was charged last month, raped his victim at his apartment on April 19, 2024. show more
March 13, 2025
News
World

Trump Pressures NATO Allies to Start Paying Their Way.

President Donald J. Trump is again calling on members of the NATO military alliance to pay more money into their own defense budgets. This comes as President Trump receives NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte at the White House, continuing ongoing discussions about military commitments within the alliance.

Trump has persistently urged NATO members to meet the agreed benchmark of spending two percent of GDP on defense. He has previously remarked that the United States might not fulfill its defense obligations under NATO to those members who fail to meet their obligations, despite NATO’s founding treaty mandating collective defense in the event of an attack against a member state.

During Trump’s first term as president, many NATO members were well under the agreed benchmark of two percent of GDP for defense spending, with only a handful of countries, such as Poland, managing to meet the target. Meanwhile, particularly “delinquent” countries such as Germany were enriching the Russian state by striking energy deals with it.

Since his inauguration in January, President Trump has already persuaded some NATO allies, including Lithuania and Estonia, to pledge to spend as much as five percent of GDP on defense. The increase would mean the two Baltic nations will spend more than Poland, which currently spends four percent of GDP.

Trump spelled out his goal while speaking to the World Economic Forum (WEF) in January, saying, “I’m also going to ask all NATO nations to increase defense spending to five percent of GDP, which is what it should have been years ago.”

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President Donald J. Trump is again calling on members of the NATO military alliance to pay more money into their own defense budgets. This comes as President Trump receives NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte at the White House, continuing ongoing discussions about military commitments within the alliance. show more
March 13, 2025
Christopher Tomlinson
Culture
Religion

Jordan Peterson Paper Links ‘Christ is King’ to Extremism with Shoddy Scholarship.

Canadian psychologist and political commentator Dr. Jordan Peterson has co-authored a brief report that claims the Christian phrase “Christ is King” has been hijacked by online extremists. However, the report is full of basic errors.

Thy Name in Vain: How Online Extremists Hijacked ‘Christ is King’ is a 21-page paper authored by Peterson and around a dozen others, and claims that the phrase is being “weaponized” on social media platforms like X (formerly Twitter). It alleges that the phrase is being used by “Nazis” and others to promote “hate speech.”

While the report correctly notes Pope Pius XI instituted the Feast of Christ the King in 1925, it incorrectly claims the phrase was only used in liturgy and hymns. In fact, Christians have extensively used the phrase “Viva Cristo Rey” or “Long Live Christ the King.” For instance, it was a rallying cry in Mexico in the 1920s when the secularist government was brutally oppressing Catholics.

The phrase finds its ultimate roots in the Crucifixion itself, with Christ’s executioners having nailed a board reading ‘INRI’—short for Iesus Nazarenus, Rex Iudaeorum, meaning ‘Jesus the Nazarene, King of the Jews’—to the Cross. Christ is also named “King of kings and Lord of lords” in St. Paul’s epistles and the Book of Revelation.

BASIC ERRORS.

The report highlights comments from social media personalities such as Andrew Tate, despite the fact he is a Muslim. Additionally, the document gets basic facts wrong regarding Catholic Church ecclesiology. For instance, it claims Bishop Joseph Strickland, who has also stated “Christ is King” on social media, is “a former Catholic bishop.” However, while Strickland was removed from the diocese of Tyler, Texas, in 2023, he remains a Roman Catholic bishop in good standing with the Church. The removal was purely an administrative measure and not a laicization or excommunication.

Rev. Johnnie Moore, another author of the report, has been ratioed on X by users after posting a video promoting the report. Nearly all of the comments affirm that “Christ is King” or are deeply critical of Moore.

Political commentator Jack Posobiec, also a target of the report, noted that Moore appears to have connections with various Islamic states, such as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), asking, “What is going on here?”

Jack Montgomery and Will Upton contributed to this report.

Image by Lawrence OP.

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Canadian psychologist and political commentator Dr. Jordan Peterson has co-authored a brief report that claims the Christian phrase "Christ is King" has been hijacked by online extremists. However, the report is full of basic errors. show more
March 13, 2025
William Upton
Lawfare

LAWFARE: Trump Faces More Than Double The Number of Lawsuits Than Any Prior President In First Two Months.

The Democratic Party’s lawfare efforts against President Donald J. Trump during his first two months in the White House have reached unprecedented levels. In his first two months in office, President Trump has faced over 100 legal challenges to his administration’s policies, more than double that faced by any other president at the same point in their term.

According to data published by Just Security that tracks court filings against the Trump administration, the total number of legal actions taken since the America First leader was inaugurated on January 20, 2025, has reached 119. Nearly 20 legal actions were filed against the Trump White House during President Trump’s first week in office.

Meanwhile, Josh Hammer—senior counsel at the Article III Project—contends the scale of the lawfare being waged against the Trump White House—abetted by far-left federal judges—is tantamount to a “judicial insurrection.” Hammer argued during a recent appearance on Stephen K. Bannon’s War Room that the Democratic lawfare campaign is a direct threat to the separation of powers, gravely undermining the constitutional authority of the executive branch.

JUDICIAL INSURRECTION.

“What we’re seeing is not just judicial activism… I mean, this is a full-on judicial insurrection, going back to the very first days of this administration in power,” Hammer told Bannon. “The first Trump administration from 2017 to 2021 faced, by my count, I believe, it was 65 so-called nationwide injunctions, which, by the way, is more than the first 44 presidents of the United States combined, literally in all of American history, faced there.”

Hammer added: “Whether it’s a judge in Washington State, or Ohio, or Washington, D.C., or Florida, or Hawaii, the notion that you can issue a TRO, a temporary restraining order, and thereby try to bring a federal executive branch policy and executive order to a halt, it’s completely anathema. It’s bat-crap crazy. That’s not how the separation of powers works.”

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The Democratic Party's lawfare efforts against President Donald J. Trump during his first two months in the White House have reached unprecedented levels. In his first two months in office, President Trump has faced over 100 legal challenges to his administration's policies, more than double that faced by any other president at the same point in their term. show more
March 12, 2025
Jack Montgomery
Immigration

Trump’s ICE Reveals Biden Regime ‘Cooked the Books’ on Illegals, ‘Purposely Misleading’ the Public.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrests since President Donald J. Trump took office are already outpacing arrests made in all of 2024, the agency said Wednesday—and the Biden government had been “cooking the books” to produce its numbers. “We have uncovered that the previous administration… was cooking the books on ICE data,” acting ICE Director Todd Lyons told reporters. “They were purposely misleading the American people by categorizing individuals processed and released into the interior of the United States as ICE arrests.”

Lyons confirmed a “comprehensive review was done internally here with ICE,” finding “tens of thousands of cases that were recorded as arrests when, in fact, these instances were illegal aliens that were simply processed and released into the American communities,” he said.

Senior officials report that the majority of the 113,431 arrests made in FY 2024 were so-called “pass-through” arrests, meaning that ICE did not take enforcement action against those migrants and instead released them into the interior. No arrests made by ICE under the Trump administration have been pass-through arrests: “What we are doing now is actual immigration enforcement, not enforcement theater,” an official said.

For interior arrests, ICE made 33,242 at-large arrests in FY 2024. For comparison, officials say ICE made 32,809 arrests from January 20 to March 10, meaning they will surpass the FY 2024 number this week.

The Trump administration says its efforts are already yielding positive results. Just this week, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) announced that it had replaced the controversial CBP One app with a new CBP Home app that helps facilitate self-deportations.

“After four years of not being allowed to effectively do their jobs, our agents and officers are excited to get to work and fulfill the agency’s mission,” Lyons said.

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U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrests since President Donald J. Trump took office are already outpacing arrests made in all of 2024, the agency said Wednesday—and the Biden government had been "cooking the books" to produce its numbers. "We have uncovered that the previous administration… was cooking the books on ICE data," acting ICE Director Todd Lyons told reporters. "They were purposely misleading the American people by categorizing individuals processed and released into the interior of the United States as ICE arrests." show more
March 12, 2025
Immigration
News

Ex-Obama Aides Slam ADL for Backing Trump Deportations.

Two former Obama government officials have criticized the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) for its endorsement of President Donald J. Trump’s order to deport foreign-born students protesting Israel. The controversy follows the arrest of Mahmoud Khalil, a permanent U.S. resident with British government ties, by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) under the new directive targeting student protesters who support the Hamas terrorist group.

The ADL expressed its support for Khalil’s detention, citing the need for significant repercussions for those involved in activities such as providing material support to foreign terrorist organizations and inciting violence. The organization added that Khalil’s arrest should serve as a deterrent against future antisemitic protests.

Jon Lovett, a former speechwriter for President Barack Obama, openly criticized the ADL’s stance. Lovett denounced the ADL’s statement as “shameful,” emphasizing that crimes should be charged accordingly without infringing upon First Amendment rights or revoking immigration status as a form of protest punishment.

Lovett expressed his disillusionment with the ADL, suggesting that the organization no longer represents American Jewish interests, and called for financial support to be withdrawn.

Ben Rhodes, who served as deputy national security adviser under Obama, echoed Lovett’s sentiments, also labeling the ADL’s statement as “shameful.”

President Trump has also cracked down on universities that have allowed antisemitic protests on their campuses, cutting millions in federal funding.

Image by nrkbeta.

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Two former Obama government officials have criticized the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) for its endorsement of President Donald J. Trump's order to deport foreign-born students protesting Israel. The controversy follows the arrest of Mahmoud Khalil, a permanent U.S. resident with British government ties, by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) under the new directive targeting student protesters who support the Hamas terrorist group. show more
March 12, 2025
News

NASA Prioritized Gender Affirmation and Diversity in Spending.

A report has revealed that the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) enacted a plethora of DEI policies under the former Biden-Harris regime. Between 2021 and 2024, the agency spent over $2.3 million on DEI-related contracts.

Over the past four years, NASA introduced various guidelines for its employees, including support for those undergoing gender transitions.

The report details substantial investments in DEI-related contracts and training. Between 2021 and 2024, NASA allotted over $2 million to LMI Consulting to integrate DEI principles into the agency’s culture and operations. Additionally, contracts for diversity training were awarded, including $90,000 to the NeuroLeadership Institute and $74,000 to Cook Ross, Inc. Significantly, a $100,000 grant was provided to the Planetary Science Institute to enhance diversity within the planetary science workforce.

A document shared by a whistleblower revealed a 22-page guide issued in 2022 titled NASA Guidance for Supporting Gender Transition/Affirmation in the Workplace.

NASA also promoted professional development with DEI messaging. One course, “Diversity All In,” and another, “The Power of Inclusion,” emphasized understanding diversity and advancing women in leadership roles.

At the federal level, President Donald J. Trump’s administration has scrapped DEI initiatives across the federal government. Many major corporations have also shifted away from DEI policies due to conservative activist pressure and President Trump’s election win last November.

Image by NASA/Joel Kowsky.

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A report has revealed that the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) enacted a plethora of DEI policies under the former Biden-Harris regime. Between 2021 and 2024, the agency spent over $2.3 million on DEI-related contracts. show more
March 12, 2025
William Upton
Corruption
Crime

Kash Patel’s FBI Arrests Corrupt Federal Bureaucrat Who Stole FEMA Funds.

Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Director Kash Patel announced his agents have arrested an allegedly corrupt federal government official charged with executing a scheme to defraud the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and lying to federal agents. On Wednesday, the Acting U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan announced charges against Serina Baker-Hill, a career federal employee who serves as the director of the U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s (CBP) Center for Excellence and Expertise over Automotive and Aerospace Engineering for the alleged fraud plot.

“Following efforts with our interagency partners, I can report that a career Director level employee at US Customs and Border Protection has been charged with allegedly attempting to defraud FEMA, as well as lying to federal agents,” FBI Director Patel stated in a post on X (formerly Twitter), adding: “This is part of the new FBI’s renewed efforts to crack down on public corruption and deliver accountability for the American people. Justice will be done.”

Baker-Hill, according to the criminal complaint, filed for FEMA assistance following the 2023 floods in Detroit, Michigan. While a FEMA inspector found that the basement of Baker-Hill’s home had suffered water damage, and Baker-Hill claimed her home was unlivable while under repair, federal investigators found that the CBP official did not use the relief funds to pay for approved expenses like rent and utilities.

“According to Baker-Hill’s bank records, none of the FEMA money was used for rental, hotel, or utility expenses,” the U.S. Attorney’s office states. They add: “Video surveillance at the home showed that Baker-Hill and her husband continued to live in the home after receiving the rental assistance funds from FEMA.”

Additionally, federal prosecutors say Baker-Hill lied to FBI and CBP agents when questioned regarding the FEMA funds.

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Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Director Kash Patel announced his agents have arrested an allegedly corrupt federal government official charged with executing a scheme to defraud the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and lying to federal agents. On Wednesday, the Acting U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan announced charges against Serina Baker-Hill, a career federal employee who serves as the director of the U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s (CBP) Center for Excellence and Expertise over Automotive and Aerospace Engineering for the alleged fraud plot. show more