The far-right Daily Wire faced mass layoffs this week " gutting the team of the long-prominent outlet initially founded by conservative activist Ben Shapiro. According to The Wrap, "Ben Shapiro's right-wing media company confirmed the layoffs in a statement to media on Friday afternoon, saying that impacted staffers are 'a number of teams' and layoffs were largely concentrated to its Nashville headquarters. 'Today, The Daily Wire made a difficult decision to restructure the organization, which included layoffs to a number of teams,' a spokesperson said." The Daily Wire has been the focus of drama in previous years, one of the biggest incidents being the firing of right-wing star Candace Owens for pushing antisemitic conspiracy theories.
Florida's Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd took aim at MAGA influencer and Jan. 6 riot participant Craig Long on Friday after the pro-Trump figure was caught in a human trafficking sting operation. The sheriff laughed at a press conference that the arrest would provide the influencer with "some content for his social media." "Then there's Craig Long we arrested " some of you may recognize him," Judd said, speaking during a press conference announcing that the sting operation had yielded 266 arrests. "He's an influencer, he also owns Craig Long Fitness in Tampa, [Florida] " he was [soliciting]. Did I tell you that he's married? That he's got 125k followers on Instagram, 560k followers on TikTok? Well, I'm gonna give him some content for his social media today." According to CBS-affiliate 10 Tampa Bay, Long, 41, was a participant in the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, and is an influential MAGA influencer and strong supporter of President Donald Trump.
This January, in a drab committee room of the New Hampshire state legislature, a Republican state lawmaker teamed up with a German Holocaust denier to propose that the state's public schools incorporate a conspiracy theory when developing their lesson plans: namely, that the Nazis' murder of six million Jews during the Holocaust was a hoax. Though their effort failed, the incident was just the latest example of antisemitic extremism creeping further into the American political mainstream, to the point that prominent conservative voices have warned of a "cancer" destroying the pro-Trump MAGA movement from within. And in a sign of just how normalized these incidents of anti-Jewish bigotry have become, the state lawmaker responsible for the effort, Rep. Matt Sabourin dit Choinire, appears to have faced no consequences and minimal backlash from Republican leadership in New Hampshire.
Donald Trump has said the US navy acted "like pirates" as he described an operation seizing a ship amid the tit-for-tat American blockade of Iranian ports. "We ... land on top of it and we took over the ship. We took over the cargo, took over the oil. It's a very profitable business," said Trump at a rally in Florida on Friday. "We're like pirates," he added to cheers from the crowd. "We're sort of like pirates. But we're not playing games." Trump's comparison of US naval activity to piracy comes as legal experts raise alarms about Iran's blockade of the vital strait of Hormuz and its plans to charge a fee for ships passing through it. Tehran effectively closed the waterway " a key route for oil and gas shipments " after the start of the US-Israeli air campaign against Iran on 28 February.
In testimony Wednesday on Capitol Hill, a Pentagon official placed the cost of the Defense Department's Operation Epic Fury at about $25 billion, a figure that did not fully account for damaged or destroyed equipment or U.S. military installations damaged. As Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, appeared before lawmakers this week to defend the Pentagon's sprawling $1.5 trillion budget request, U.S. officials familiar with internal assessments suggested the war's price tag is closer to $50 billion so far.
The orange child rapist choked out 1.2 million Americans.