• Vile Hamas dogs celebrate dead babies: The awfulness coming out of Gaza concerning the treatment of a young mother and her two baby boys by the murdering dogs of Hamas has become unspeakable. First, we saw with our own eyes the crowds of Hamas militants and their twisted supporters celebrating and shouting “Victory!” in Arabic over the caskets of four deceased Israeli citizens, including (ostensibly) Shiri Bibas, 32, and her two sons, four-year-old Ariel and nine-month-old Kfir. First, we were told by the terrorists that these innocents died in an Israeli airstrike, but now we learn through the Israel Defense Forces that the terrorists murdered the two baby boys in cold blood, by hand, and then tried to cover it up. Furthermore, the body supposedly belonging to Shiri is not hers but that of an unidentified victim. Some cultures are demonstrably inferior, and we shouldn’t be afraid to say so.

• McConnell won’t run for reelection in 2026: It came as welcome news yesterday to reform-minded Republicans when, on the day of his 83rd birthday, longtime former GOP Senate Leader Mitch McConnell announced that he won’t seek reelection in 2026. Hallelujah. Even just a month into Donald Trump’s 2.0 term, McConnell has proven his willingness to stand athwart the people’s mandate by opposing Trump at critical moments, even voting to the left of the party’s two most conspicuous Senate RINOs, Maine’s Susan Collins and Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski. McConnell has antagonized the good people of solidly red Kentucky, which went for Trump by nearly 31 points over Kamala Harris. Still, there’s potential trouble on the horizon if Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear, a centrist Democrat, decides to vie for McConnell’s vacant seat. Beshear says he has no interest in running for the Senate, but politicians have been known to change their minds.

• A breathless nation awaits Pothole Pete’s “huge” decision: Having skedaddled from deep-red Indiana and relocated to deep-purple Michigan, former small-town mayor and transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg has a decision to make: Should he try to carpetbag his way to a U.S. Senate seat soon to be vacated by Michigan Democrat Gary Peters, or should he instead seek the Donkey Party’s nomination for president in 2028? An AP puff piece puts it this way: “Some believe the Democratic Party’s next savior is living here, huddled with family, in the relative obscurity of a small city on the shores of Lake Michigan. Pete Buttigieg has yet to decide if that’s a responsibility he wants.” That the despondent Democrats might actually turn their lonely eyes toward the accomplishment-free Buttigieg shows just how bereft of talent is that sorry party’s bench.

• Stephen Miller schools the White House press corps: Rarely in the history of White House press briefings have a man and a moment come together as splendidly as they did yesterday when one of Donald Trump’s great communicators, senior adviser Stephen Miller, delivered an Article II civics lesson to the assembled media. Miller chastised their failure to report on Joe Biden’s mental incompetence, then shifted to their inability to understand how our constitutional system works. He explained the American president’s Article II powers under the Constitution’s Vesting Clause, whereby “the executive power shall be vested in a president, singular,” who then “appoints staff to then impose that democratic will onto the government.” He added, “The existential threat to democracy is the unelected bureaucracy of lifetime-tenured civil servants who believe they answer to no one, who [believe] they can set their own agenda no matter what Americans vote for.” Boom.

• Judge declines to stop Trump’s fed worker firings: U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper on Thursday rejected demands from labor unions led by the National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU) that the court stop Donald Trump’s firing of recent federal worker hires. In his decision, Cooper noted that the unions currently lacked standing and must first go through the Federal Labor Relations Authority (FLRA) before bringing their case. In short, Cooper directed the unions to follow the established process. The Trump administration has targeted federal workers who have been on the job less than two years due in part to their probationary status, making firing them easier.

• Cartels given terrorist designation: Eight Central and South American cartels were officially designated as foreign terrorist organizations (FTO) by the Trump administration on Wednesday. The list includes Venezuela’s Tren de Aragua and El Salvador’s MS-13. The six other cartels are based in Mexico. Furthermore, these cartels were formally designated as Specially Designated Global Terrorists (SDGT). Both the FTO and SDGT designations expand the Trump administration’s ability to crack down on these criminal organizations, including laying the groundwork for using armed drones to target and kill cartel leaders and destroy illicit cartel sites. Due to Trump’s aggressive border enforcement, Border Czar Tom Homan anticipates increasing violence from cartels, observing, “We’re taking money out of their pocket.”

• Christians martyred in Congo: A horrific story much of the mainstream media has ignored comes out of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), where 70 Christians were brutally murdered by members of the rebel group Allied Democratic Forces (ADF), which has ties to the Islamic State. According to Jeff King, president of International Christian Concern, a persecution watchdog, “This recent massacre … is not an isolated incident but part of a grim tapestry of violence that has claimed over 6 million lives in the DRC over two decades of on-and-off war.” He noted, “The vast majority of the DRC’s residents are Christian, so this is a religious genocide carried out by radical Islamic terrorists.”

• WaPo’s big science lie: The Washington Post recently made a fool of itself with an article objecting to Donald Trump’s executive order officially recognizing only “two sexes.” The Post asserted that according to “experts and a significant body of academic research, the definitions [Trump] used are oversimplified and inaccurate.” The article quotes a few “experts” who reject the binary designation of human biological sex because of the existence of sexual-based birth defects or nonfunctioning sex organs, which supposedly debunk the science. Meanwhile, what’s really behind this nonsensical embrace of ideology against scientific reality is a radical agenda that has long attacked natural human sexuality. The Rainbow Mafia’s impact has been sizable, as a recent Gallup poll found that 9.3% of American adults now identify as LGBTQ. That’s a massive jump from 2012, when 3.5% of adults identified as members of the gender cult.

Headlines

• Senate border budget triumphs after all-night session while Trump-backed House bill lags (Fox News)

• DHS to remove legal status of half a million immigrants (Newsweek)

• Trump threatens to withhold federal funding from Maine over defiance of trans athlete order (National Review)

• PepsiCo announces end to DEI policies (Daily Wire)

• Three buses explode near Tel Aviv in suspected strategically planned terror attack (Times of Israel)

• Humor: 10 things Kash Patel’s FBI will be investigating first (Babylon Bee)

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