LUTHMANN NOTE: She left the EDNY US Attorney’s Office for private practice, and the first order of business was to sue Donald Trump. Moira Kim Penza helped build the Summer Zervos case against the 45th and 47th President and the government’s case against me by stacking accusations, inferences, and ugly suppositions until they resembled a verdict. Now the spotlight has reached her household, and suddenly the lawfare-media cartel wants velvet ropes around the uncomfortable questions. No. Nathan Cullerton’s conduct belongs to Cullerton, but Penza owns the public brand she sold: fearless examiner of sex, secrecy, credibility and unequal power. Penza does not get to declare supposition admissible against defendants and forbidden when it reaches her own door. Same microscope. Same inferences. Same rules. This piece is “The Kid the Scandal Erased,” first available on NY News Press.

By Richard Luthmann

The Child Erased From the Scandal

(NEW YORK, NEW YORK) – Everybody reported the kiss. Almost nobody reported the kid. Maybe we’ll have to wait for the divorce papers in New York Supreme.

Nathaniel D. Cullerton, 45, a married Wachtell litigation partner, was identified by the Daily Mail, New York Post, and other outlets as the man filmed passionately kissing 29-year-old associate Kelsey A. Borenzweig on a Central Park bench. Wachtell lists them in the same department and credited both on the OpenAI team that defeated Elon Musk‘s blockbuster lawsuit.

The Daily Mail tracked Cullerton to the $2.3 million Upper East Side co-op he shares with Moira Kim Penza, called Borenzweig his underling and presented Penza as the accomplished, humiliated wife.

It found the lawyers, the apartment, the marriage and the money. Yet the family portrait still had a person missing.

I state from firsthand knowledge that Penza and Cullerton have a son, now roughly 8 or 9 years old. I will not publish his name, school, photograph, exact birthday, or any detail that could expose him. My assertion can be independently confirmed and corroborated by dozens of New York attorneys who know the scandal-engulfed (soon-to-be-former) couple, and no reliable source has established that the couple is childless, either because they can’t.

If my firsthand account is correct, Cullerton was not merely gambling with a marriage and a reported $4 million income. He was detonating the stability, privacy, and financial security of a child’s home.

The Financial Times and Post reported that Wachtell placed him on leave and that Gibson Dunn abandoned or rescinded a lucrative offer. A story sold as elite-lawyer sex gossip may therefore be a family-court prequel with a child absorbing consequences he never created.

The kid is not tabloid garnish. He is the moral center every glossy recap managed to crop out.

The Kid The Scandal Erased: Parlato Says Just a Kiss

Renowned investigative reporter Frank Parlato sees a different scandal. In Frank Report, he argues that Jay Guapo monetized humiliation, that no child appears in the 39-second video, and that two consenting adults committed no crime.

He stresses the chasm between NXIVM’s coercion and Cullerton’s apparently voluntary kiss.

No blackmail. No starvation. No branding. No complainant. Parlato says Wachtell and Gibson Dunn counted views before finding facts and let an influencer’s camera become judge, jury and economic executioner.

His civil-libertarian point is serious. Public shaming can become digital vigilantism, and a lawful kiss does not become unlawful at 10 million views.

Parlato also argues that Penza is accused of nothing in the Central Park bench episode and was trapped into three losing choices: stay, leave, or remain silent.

I disagree because Parlato answers the criminal-law question and ducks the family and workplace questions. Cullerton did not get caught violating a kissing statute. He got caught behaving like a cheater: a married partner kissing a younger associate from his department and major client team in broad daylight.

Here’s the part that no one can dispute: the incident involves a powerful partner, a junior colleague, a recent shared representation, a reported multimillion-dollar employment consequence, and the husband of a former federal prosecutor whose public reputation was built substantially through cases about sex, coercion, credibility, secrecy, exploitation, and power.

Unless some undisclosed marital arrangement changes the facts, the obvious inference is betrayal. Consent between Cullerton and Borenzweig does not supply consent from Cullerton’s wife, child, partners, clients, or colleagues who may bear the fallout. They owe fiduciary duties to others greater than the “morals of the meat market.”

Nor does consent erase hierarchy. Wachtell’s reported investigation and Gibson Dunn’s reported retreat show that the institutions saw more than romance.

Parlato asks what crime occurred. I ask what obligations were torched, what disclosures were skipped, what favoritism questions now infect the team, and which innocent family member pays when a multimillion-dollar career implodes.

A kiss can be legal and consensual yet still reveal catastrophic judgment.

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The Kid The Scandal Erased: Dominatrix Claims and Dirty Fed Whispers

Moira Kim Penza has always been the hypocrisy story. She built prestige by prosecuting Keith Raniere, marketing herself around sex trafficking and powerful abusers, and joining Summer Zervos’s politically radioactive case against Donald Trump.

Her firm says she can “go for the jugular.” I know that posture because she led the prosecution against me.

Penza and the EDNY lawfare machine portrayed me as a dangerous cartoon assembled from cooperators, insinuation, and worst-case supposition. My record is public. So is my position that prosecutors inflated the narrative, struck foul blows, and converted accusations into punishment before anyone tested the whole picture.

No one had a better bullshit detector than the late great Judge Jack Weinstein. On Moira Kim Penza, Jack called bullshit.

Penza mastered reputational prosecution. Now her household has entered the dock of public opinion. Good. What’s good for the goose is good for the gander.

Put the claims on the record where they belong: as claims. I have long alleged that Penza engaged in dominatrix activity and that sex-related items were discovered in the Cadman Plaza desk she left behind. As an AUSA, she would show up to court in fishnet stockings, see-through pants, and greasy hair. It didn’t look like she was coming to work from Fifth Avenue, unless the co-op has a basement dungeon.

In blunt terms, I have her “banging” an FBI agent connected to the Raniere investigation. Ask her who else was up in Ithaca when Cornell Law School gave her an award. It must have been one hell of a “celebration,” but they weren’t stupid enough to do it on a bench in the quad. The public record confirms work with FBI agents like Michael Weniger, Michael Lever, Delise Jeffrey, and Maegan Rees.

Penza has not publicly answered these specific claims. The bench video proves none of them. But it reopens my longstanding question: did the celebrated sex-and-power prosecutor live by one moral code publicly while operating under another privately?

Sexual coercion and sexual-misconduct litigation are unusually prominent in Moria’s public identity: the Raniere prosecution is the centerpiece of her biography; her firm expressly credits that case with helping pave the way for later prosecutions of powerful individuals; the firm promoted her Zervos role; and it highlights her pro bono representation of sexually harassed restaurant workers.

Living by one moral code publicly while operating under another privately? It is precisely the kind of question Penza’s agents and prosecutors would have used to squeeze a target.

The Kid The Scandal Erased: The Daily Mail Halo

Then there is the Daily Mail treatment. Its reporters tracked the pair, approached Cullerton near the Fifth Avenue home and sought comment from the lawyers and Wachtell. But the narrative placed a flattering halo around Penza: star NXIVM prosecutor, elite partner, wronged wife in a $2.3 million co-op.

It reads like a crisis-communications storyboard whether or not any publicist touched it.

No evidence reviewed here shows that Penza, her firm, or an operative planted, paid for, or controlled the story. Still, its frame performs the same function. Cullerton becomes the reckless husband. Borenzweig becomes the young underling. Penza becomes the decorated innocent. The unreported child disappears, and Penza’s disputed history never enters the frame.

The hypocrisy question cannot be buried. Marriage does not transfer Cullerton’s guilt to Penza. But she owns the brand she sold: fearless truth-teller, champion of victims, examiner of secret sexual power, and prosecutor willing to infer motive from circumstances.

The lawfare-media machine demands moral discovery for defendants while requesting velvet-rope privacy for its own. I reject that privilege. Cullerton was caught in conduct outlets treated as cheating. Parlato calls it consensual and victimless.

I see it differently. I see a wife, a workplace hierarchy, a lost fortune, and a minor son the press erased. I also see unresolved allegations about Penza that deserve answers, not automatic belief.

The verdict is not that every rumor is true. It is that Moira Kim Penza cannot call supposition evidence when government uses it—and forbidden gossip when the spotlight reaches her door.

Same microscope. Same inferences. Same rules.

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LUTHMANN NOTE: The legal establishment will hide behind count structures, plea credits, and sentencing guidelines because the raw numbers are indefensible. James Lebuhn mailed bullet imagery directly to federal judges and received a 6-month sentence. Paul Boyne published offensive political speech, contacted no judges directly, hadn’t set foot in the Nutmeg State for decades, and received a 20-year sentence. No one must approve of Annapolis Graduate, former U.S. Navy nuclear engineer and defense contractor, devout Roman Catholic, and self-described “White Christian Nationalist” Boyne’s rhetoric to recognize a grotesque abuse of proportionality. Connecticut did not sentence a violent predator. It buried an elderly, medically fragile critic of its family-court machine, which he believes is infiltrated by pedophiles and designer child traffickers. When mercy depends on which judges were targeted and which institutional narrative the defendant offended, justice stops being blind. It becomes a political weapon wearing a black robe. This piece is “Six Months for Bullets,” first available on The Family Court Circus.

By Frankie Pressmann and Richard Luthmann

(NEW HAVEN, CONNECTICUT) – Paul Boyne is 64 years old, medically fragile, and serving a sentence likely to consume what remains of his life. Connecticut Superior Court Judge Peter Brown sentenced him to 20 years in prison, followed by 10 years of special parole, after a jury convicted him on 18 stalking-related counts arising from inflammatory blog posts about Connecticut judges. Boyne had no prior criminal record. He did not shoot anyone. He did not travel to a judge’s home. He did not mail ammunition, display a weapon or carry out an act of physical violence. He wrote words—sometimes ugly, sometimes reckless, sometimes plainly offensive—on a website devoted to exposing what he believed was corruption inside Connecticut’s family-court machine.

Then there is James Lebuhn.

Lebuhn mailed letters to two federal judges containing photographs of bullets. The letters warned that citizens knew what the judges were doing, disliked their actions, and believed they were damaging “our democracy.” The message concluded with an unmistakable warning: be careful, because public anger was rising. The apparent targets were U.S. District Judges Matthew Kacsmaryk and Aileen Cannon, both appointed by President Donald Trump. Lebuhn also admitted sending similar letters to federal employees.

His sentence was six months.

Not six years. Not 20 years. Six months.

The lawyers will immediately reach for procedural distinctions. Lebuhn pleaded guilty. Boyne went to trial. Lebuhn accepted responsibility. Boyne remained defiant. Boyne faced more counts under different statutes. Those differences exist, but they cannot carry the moral weight being placed upon them. They do not explain how one government treats bullet imagery mailed directly to judges as a six-month offense while another government treats political blogging as grounds to bury an elderly, sick man beneath a sentence ordinarily associated with killers, armed predators and career criminals.

Six Months for Bullets: Mercy for the Approved Narrative

Federal Judge Sara Ellis did not excuse Lebuhn’s conduct. She recognized that threatening judges is serious and that judicial families should not have to fear that political anger will arrive at their front doors. That is correct. A government that cannot protect judges from genuine threats cannot preserve an independent judiciary.

But Ellis also saw Lebuhn as a human being.

His lawyer described a man who had collapsed under financial and family stress, lost his job as a financial analyst, taken work as a bus driver, and cooperated with federal investigators. He confessed. He expressed shame. The court considered the circumstances surrounding the offense and imposed incarceration, but it stopped at six months. Lebuhn received punishment tempered by proportionality and mercy.

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Paul Boyne received something altogether different.

Connecticut transformed his writings into 18 felonies, prosecuted him inside the same judicial system he had spent years denouncing, and then stacked consecutive terms until the number reached 20 years. Boyne’s posts reportedly included home addresses, photographs of residences, references to death and crude attacks involving religion and perceived sexual orientation. Those facts should not be minimized. Some of the material was reprehensible and gave prosecutors powerful evidence.

But the prosecution was never merely about frightening language. Boyne’s entire public identity had become entwined with his criticism of Connecticut’s family courts, judicial officers and politically connected insiders. He accused the system of protecting itself, silencing critics and turning family litigation into an industry of punishment. Connecticut then answered that criticism by making an example of him.

Lebuhn attacked judges associated with Trump while invoking the culturally approved language of saving democracy. Boyne attacked judges embedded in an entrenched state courthouse establishment while accusing them of corruption. One defendant’s politics fit comfortably within the dominant institutional narrative. The other defendant declared war on the institution holding the keys to his cell.

Only one was granted meaningful mercy.

Six Months for Bullets: The Sentence Was the Message

No responsible comparison can pretend these cases are identical. Boyne was convicted after trial on 18 counts. Lebuhn pleaded guilty to two federal charges. The statutes, sentencing frameworks, and evidentiary records differed. But equal justice cannot be reduced to a scavenger hunt for technical distinctions. Every criminal case contains different facts. The real question is whether the punishment imposed remains proportionate to the conduct.

Lebuhn deliberately mailed bullet photographs to federal judges. Boyne published inflammatory rhetoric on a political website.

Lebuhn received six months. Boyne received 20 years, followed by another decade of government control.

That disparity should disturb anyone who still believes sentencing is supposed to measure danger, culpability and actual harm rather than political usefulness. Boyne deserved a fair adjudication and, after conviction, a proportionate sentence. He did not deserve institutional annihilation. A 20-year term for a medically fragile 64-year-old blogger is not correction. It is a slow-motion death sentence delivered through paperwork, consecutive terms and the sterile vocabulary of judicial discretion.

The Lebuhn sentence exposes the central fraud in Connecticut’s treatment of Boyne. Threatening judges does not automatically require decades in prison. Even mailing bullet imagery directly to judges can result in six months when the defendant pleads, apologizes, and is presented as a troubled man worthy of rehabilitation.

Boyne was denied that humanity. His refusal to validate Connecticut’s narrative became evidence that he had learned nothing. His insistence that the prosecution was political retaliation became another reason to punish him. His criticism of the judiciary was not merely evidence in the case. It became the unforgivable offense beneath the offense.

No court has found that politics dictated these sentences. No document will openly say that attacking Trump judges earns leniency while attacking establishment judges earns burial.

The numbers say enough. Six months for bullets. Twenty years for a blog.

That is not equal justice. It is a warning.

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LUTHMANN NOTE: Canada’s ruling class wants the privileges of American partnership without the discipline of American reciprocity. It wants U.S. consumers, U.S. pipelines, U.S. investment, U.S. military protection and unrestricted entry into the world’s richest market—then throws a tantrum when President Donald Trump puts American workers first. The Gordie Howe Bridge ceremony exposed the fraud. Canada celebrated a bridge to Detroit while excluding Detroit. It invoked Mr. Hockey while insulting the city that made him immortal. Gordie Howe knew how to respond when an opponent crossed the line: score, assist, and drop the gloves. America should do the same. This piece is “Canada Drops the Gloves,” first available on NY News Press.

By Matt “Sully” Sullivan and Dick LaFontaine

Canada’s political class has spent the current trade confrontation whining, posturing and demanding deference from the United States while refusing to confront the basic reality beneath the relationship: America holds the cards.

Ottawa and the provinces speak as though Canada and the United States arrive at the bargaining table as economic equals, each possessing comparable leverage and each equally capable of walking away. They do not.

One is the world’s dominant economic and military power, the center of the North American market and the primary guarantor of continental security. The other built much of its modern prosperity around privileged access to that power’s consumers, infrastructure, capital and financial system.

Canada may be a sovereign nation, but sovereignty does not erase dependency, and patriotic speeches do not repeal arithmetic.

The United States is Canada’s indispensable customer, investment engine, transportation corridor and continental shield. Canada is useful to America in energy, automobiles, minerals, agriculture and defense, but America is essential to Canada on an entirely different scale.

Canadian politicians can call that arrogant. They can call it bullying. They can wrap themselves in maple leaves, summon the cameras and perform wounded nationalism for television audiences. None of that changes the underlying imbalance.

The arithmetic remains undefeated, and no amount of anti-Trump theatrics can disguise the fact that Canada’s economic model depends heavily on access to the American marketplace.

That is why the opening of the Gordie Howe International Bridge became such a perfect monument to Canadian hypocrisy. The bridge connects Windsor, Ontario, with Detroit, Michigan. It was built to accelerate commerce with America, named for a Canadian who became immortal in an American city and justified economically by the enormous market waiting on the Detroit side.

Yet Canadian officials transformed its opening into another exercise in anti-Trump grievance theater. It was built through cooperation, opened with resentment and named for a man who would have had no patience for crybabies.

Canada Drops the Gloves: Canada’s Provincial Temper Tantrum

Canadian governments have not simply objected to American tariffs. They have embraced retaliatory barriers, stripped American products from government-controlled shelves and promoted procurement schemes designed to punish U.S. businesses.

Provincial liquor authorities pulled American wine, beer and spirits. Politicians promoted “Buy Canadian” mandates. Ottawa imposed retaliatory tariffs on American goods. Canadian officials then portrayed their own restrictions as noble acts of patriotic resistance while condemning comparable American measures as economic aggression.

That is not principled free trade. It is Canadian entitlement dressed up as national courage.

For decades, Canada’s political establishment grew comfortable with an arrangement in which American consumers absorbed Canadian exports, American capital supported Canadian industries and American power maintained the security architecture protecting both countries.

The arrangement worked so long as Washington accepted every imbalance, overlooked every restriction and treated Canadian access to the U.S. market as untouchable. Canadian officials learned that they could protect domestic industries, regulate American products, manipulate provincial purchasing systems and still expect Washington to preserve the broader relationship at almost any cost.

That was not a partnership of equals. It was a habit of American accommodation.

Donald Trump changed the terms. President Trump’s MAGA agenda begins with a proposition so simple that the permanent political class pretends not to understand it: the American government should put American workers, manufacturers, farmers and taxpayers first.

Trade policy is not supposed to be a global charity program administered by Washington on behalf of foreign governments. It is supposed to advance the prosperity, security and bargaining power of the American people.

That means trade must be reciprocal. Foreign governments do not get unlimited access to the American market while restricting American goods at home. Allies do not get to build industries around U.S. demand and then lecture Washington when the president finally demands a fair deal.

Canada cannot obstruct American automobiles, alcohol, agricultural products and other goods, then collapse into hysterics when America answers. Reciprocity is not aggression. It is what happens when the adult in the room finally stops subsidizing the tantrum.

More than 70% of Canada’s merchandise exports go to the United States. Canadian factories, farms, mines, pipelines, railroads and ports are structured around the American market. Ottawa may fantasize about replacing America with Europe or Asia, but dreams do not move cargo, and speeches do not relocate geography. Europe is across the Atlantic. Asia is across the Pacific.

America is across the street, and that fact defines the relationship more powerfully than every press conference held in Ottawa.

Canada Drops the Gloves: Mr. Hockey—and Mr. Detroit

The symbolism of the Gordie Howe International Bridge is almost too perfect. Gordie Howe was born in Saskatchewan, but he became “Mr. Hockey” in Detroit. He spent his first 25 NHL seasons wearing the winged wheel of the Detroit Red Wings. He scored 801 regular-season NHL goals, won four Stanley Cups and became one of the toughest, most respected and most complete athletes in professional sports.

Howe was Canadian by birth and Detroit by destiny, a man whose career embodied what the cross-border relationship could produce when talent, opportunity, grit and loyalty worked together.

His name belongs on a bridge joining Windsor and Detroit because his life represented the relationship at its best: Canadian talent meeting American opportunity and producing something larger than either side could have created alone.

Howe did not diminish Canada by becoming a Detroit legend, and Detroit did not erase his Canadian roots by embracing him as one of its own. He became a symbol of both countries precisely because he understood strength, loyalty and mutual respect.

Canadian officials dishonored that spirit by turning the bridge’s opening into a political snub. A joint celebration had been planned. After the Trump administration announced new tariffs, Canada canceled the arrangement and staged its own ceremony without American or Michigan officials.

Canada celebrated alone on an international bridge, standing across the river from Detroit while opening a trade artery whose entire purpose is to carry Canadian goods, workers and commerce into the United States.

The absurdity is breathtaking. Canada financed the approximately C$6.4 billion project, and Canadian taxpayers may rightly take pride in that investment. But the bridge has value because America is on the other side. Without Detroit, the structure would be a very expensive pier extending toward the world’s largest consumer market.

Canadian officials invoked Gordie Howe while excluding representatives of the city that made him a legend. That was not strength. It was smallness. It was not sovereignty. It was spite.

The ceremony did not embarrass Donald Trump. It embarrassed Canada.

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Canada Drops the Gloves: America Should Control the Terms

The United States should not respond with more symbolism. It should respond with leverage. America should use every lawful economic tool available to enforce reciprocal market access and make clear that Canadian access to the U.S. economy is not an entitlement. It is a privilege governed by agreements, obligations and the continuing consent of the American people.

Washington should challenge discriminatory provincial liquor systems, demand equal treatment for American automobiles and agricultural products, scrutinize Canadian subsidies and impose targeted tariffs wherever Canadian officials refuse to negotiate fairly.

There should be no more automatic exemptions, no more diplomatic babysitting and no more sacrificing American industries to preserve the feelings of Canadian politicians. The purpose of American trade policy is not to keep Ottawa comfortable. It is to defend American prosperity.

If Canadian leaders want to wage a symbolic economic war through liquor shelves, procurement rules and political speeches, they should understand that the United States possesses vastly more economic firepower and is fully entitled to use it.

Canada’s exposure is enormous. Windsor depends on cross-border automotive trade. Canadian oil and gas producers depend on American pipelines, refineries and customers. Canadian lumber, minerals, farm products and manufactured goods enter the United States on a scale no alternative market can quickly replace.

Canada needs the American marketplace, and that reality should shape every negotiation, tariff schedule and diplomatic exchange.

For too long, Washington behaved as though Canadian dependence created an American responsibility to preserve Canada’s preferred economic arrangements. It does not. The United States government owes duties to the American people, not to Canadian premiers, provincial liquor monopolies, Ottawa bureaucrats or multinational corporations that profit from one-sided trade.

America First means exactly that: the American government no longer apologizes for using American power in defense of American interests.

The strongest nation does not need to scream, bluff or sabotage its own infrastructure. It simply sets the terms and enforces them. Canada may complain. Canada may retaliate. Canada may stage another ceremony and invite nobody but itself.

Then Canada can look south and remember where its customers are, where its largest market remains and which country still possesses the decisive leverage.

The Gordie Howe Hat Trick

A Gordie Howe hat trick consists of a goal, an assist and a fight. That is exactly what American trade policy now requires.

The goal is full reciprocity. The assist goes to American workers, manufacturers, farmers, energy producers and exporters who spent decades competing against foreign governments while their own leaders apologized for defending them.

The fight is against every politician, lobbyist, bureaucrat and multinational interest that grew rich from managed American decline.

Donald Trump understands what Canada’s leadership refuses to accept: respect does not come from surrender. It comes from strength. Canada is sovereign. It can remove American products from its shelves, promote protectionist purchasing policies and stage anti-American political spectacles.

But sovereignty works both ways. The United States is equally sovereign, and it can restrict access, revoke exemptions, impose tariffs and force Canada to decide how much its theatrics are worth.

Partnership does not mean America plays the sucker. Friendship does not mean permanent concessions. Good neighbors do not demand access to your house while blocking your products at the door. For too long, the American ruling class confused politeness with policy and restraint with weakness.

MAGA rejects that confusion. It recognizes that alliances survive not because one side endlessly submits, but because both sides understand the cost of disrespect.

The Gordie Howe International Bridge should stand as a monument to continental commerce, shared prosperity and the possibilities created when two neighboring nations work together. Instead, its opening exposed the weakness, insecurity and pettiness of Canada’s political leadership. Canada celebrated the gateway while insulting the destination. That is the bridge of irony.

Gordie Howe understood how respect was earned. He could score. He could create opportunities for his teammates. And when an opponent crossed the line, he could drop the gloves and settle the matter. America should follow his example.

Score the goal. Make the assist. Then give Canada the Gordie Howe hat trick.

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LUTHMANN NOTE: “Bring Back Bernie Goetz” is not a call for bloodshed. It is an indictment of a legal system that has begun treating speech like violence while denying speakers the contextual protections available to defendants who use actual force. Nobody should attack a judge, lawyer, social worker, former spouse, journalist, or government employee as a general matter. But government cannot demand peaceful conduct while imposing life-consuming punishment on citizens who use speech and publications rather than weapons. Shiloh Hendrix was convicted for being “rude.” Paul Boyne received twenty years in prison and ten years of special parole for writing blog posts. Nobody was shot, stabbed, or physically attacked. Reality calls bullshit. The law should place a canyon between words and wounds. Minnesota and Connecticut are filling it with concrete. This piece is “Punished For Not Shooting,” first published on The Family Court Circus.

By Richard Luthmann

The Poisonous Lesson

America’s blue-state speech police have stumbled into a theory so reckless that it deserves a name: Bring Back Bernie Goetz. Not as an endorsement of vigilantism. Not as a call to settle political or family disputes with gunfire. As an indictment of a legal order that increasingly erases the line between ugly words and violent deeds, then punishes the words with sentences approaching those imposed for homicide.

When government announces that speech is “conduct,” treats blog posts as stalking, and converts insults into criminal disorder, it teaches a poisonous lesson. The citizen who complains, curses, publishes, protests, or warns may face the machinery of the state without ever laying a hand on anyone.

Meanwhile, the citizen who uses actual force can at least invoke the ancient defenses of necessity, self-defense, and defense of others.

That is the perverse comparison. In 1984, Bernhard Goetz shot four young men on a New York subway after he said he believed he was about to be robbed. A jury later acquitted him of attempted murder and assault, although it convicted him of unlawful gun possession.

A civil jury later found him liable. Goetz was not “vindicated” in every forum, and his conduct should not be romanticized. But he received something modern speech defendants are increasingly denied: a jury was permitted to evaluate his fear, his perceptions, and his justification before deciding whether his violent act was criminal.

The speech defendant, by contrast, may see context stripped away while prosecutors simply rename expression a “course of conduct.” The frightening thesis writes itself: when words and bullets draw comparable punishment, the state has made words irrationally dangerous.

Punished For Not Shooting: Connecticut’s Twenty-Year Warning

Paul Boyne is the warning flare burning over Connecticut. Boyne, the founder and former publisher associated with The Family Court Circus, became the target of a sprawling prosecution based on writings about Connecticut judges.

The disputed publications were branded the “Hateful Eight,” a label that did half the prosecution’s rhetorical work before jurors ever assessed the constitutional line between political invective and true threats.

On March 10, 2026, a jury convicted Boyne on six cyber stalking-related counts. On May 26, Judge Peter Brown imposed a total effective sentence of twenty years in prison followed by ten years of special parole.

For a man in his sixties, twenty years is not merely punishment. It is a practical death sentence. The U.S. Government’s own actuarial tables show that Boyne is not expected to live out his prison term. And that is before factoring in serious health comorbidities, the medical costs of which will ultimately be covered by Connecticut taxpayers to warehouse him.

The government’s theory was not that Boyne fired eight shots, planted eight bombs, or assaulted eight judges. It was that writings, references, images, and repeated communications collectively became criminal stalking. Connecticut says the stalking case concerned menacing directed speech and a prolonged pattern, not protected criticism.

Reality calls bullshit.

True threats are not protected, and judges do not surrender their right to safety by taking the bench. But constitutional analysis cannot end when prosecutors utter the phrase “course of conduct.” Under Counterman v. Colorado, the state must prove at least recklessness regarding the threatening character of speech.

The First Amendment requires breathing space precisely because juries can confuse rage, satire, hyperbole and political hatred with a serious expression of intended unlawful violence.

When eight publications produce twenty years behind bars, every American journalist, blogger and furious parent should ask whether Connecticut punished a threat—or punished the intolerable fact that a citizen would not shut up.

Punished For Not Shooting: Anti-Deterrence by the State

The moral hazard becomes obvious when the Boyne sentence is compared with punishment for actual violence. The argument is not that Boyne should have used a weapon. He should not have. No parent, advocate, or litigant should attack a judge, lawyer, social worker, former spouse, or government employee, leaving them in a pool of blood in their driveway or the courthouse parking lot. That would be legally and morally wrong.

The argument here is that Connecticut has built a sentencing structure capable of making restraint look irrational. If a person believes officials are destroying his family, and he responds with publications rather than physical force, the legal system should preserve a canyon between those choices.

Speech may be sanctionable when it crosses into a true threat, targeted intimidation, or criminal solicitation. But punishment must still reflect the decisive fact that nobody was shot, stabbed, or physically attacked.

Instead, Boyne received twenty years of incarceration and ten years of special parole. The sentence communicates that a keyboard can be treated like a firearm and denunciation like bloodshed. That is not deterrence. It is anti-deterrence. The state should want aggrieved citizens to speak, petition, expose, appeal, demonstrate, publish, and seek elections. Those are the pressure-release valves of a republic. When officials weld those valves shut, they do not eliminate grievance. They redirect it.

This is where “Bring Back Bernie Goetz” lands with brutal force. Goetz used bullets and obtained a self-defense trial on the major charges. Boyne used words and received a sentence that will likely consume the remainder of his life.

The comparison is intentionally shocking because the incentive is shocking. A legal order that punishes speech as severely as violence risks teaching unstable or desperate people that peaceful escalation offers no sentencing advantage.

Government cannot preach de-escalation while destroying the legal value of restraint. If Paul Boyne will die in prison anyway, wouldn’t it have been more rational to use eight bullets instead of eight blog posts?

And won’t it be for the “next” Paul Boyne?

Punished For Not Shooting: The Shiloh Hendrix Conversion Trick

Shiloh Hendrix presents the smaller but culturally revealing version of the same disease. Hendrix was prosecuted in Rochester, Minnesota, where, in April 2025, she was recorded using a racial slur during a playground confrontation.

An unsupervised Black child tried to rob her, so she defended herself. In so doing, she called the thieving child a “nigger.”

Sharmake Omar, a Somalian in the park, filmed Hendrix with his phone.

The language was vile for some. For the Blue State ruling class, it deserved condemnation, counterspeech, social consequences, and moral disgust. For some Black preachers, it’s part of the lexicon.

Offensive expression does not become constitutionally unprotected merely because millions of Libtards, snowflakes, or Islamo-Marxists despise it.

In July 2026, an Olmsted County jury returned a split verdict. Hendrix was acquitted of the disorderly-conduct count involving the child but convicted of a count involving the man who filmed and confronted her. The conviction rested on the combined words and behavior directed toward the Somalian cameraman, and prosecutors argued that her demeanor suggested possible physical escalation.

The result was probation, 200 hours of community service and a $1,000 fine. That is nowhere near Boyne’s punishment, but it demonstrates the same semantic maneuver: expression becomes “behavior,” behavior becomes “conduct,” and conduct becomes a crime.

Minnesota’s disorderly-conduct statute expressly reaches offensive, obscene or abusive language tending reasonably to arouse alarm, anger or resentment. That text should alarm civil libertarians across the political spectrum.

The First Amendment exists largely to protect speech that creates anger and resentment. “Fighting words” remain a narrow historical exception, not a roving license to prosecute slurs, insults or confrontational tone.

Hendrix may be contemptible to some because of her speech. But contemptibility is not a criminal code.

Once the state can imprison or supervise citizens because their language is offensive and emotionally provocative, constitutional protection depends on whether prosecutors, jurors and judges share the speaker’s politics and social standing.

The better question is whether Hendrix would have been contemptible if she’d said nothing and just reached for pepper spray or a taser. Maybe we wouldn’t even know her name.

But somehow, it’s become illegal for a white woman to defend herself and her child in Minnesota. Ask Sandra Grazzini-Rucki.

The Family Court Circus

Punished For Not Shooting: Calling Speech “Conduct”

The central constitutional danger is the conversion trick: call speech conduct, then insist the First Amendment has left the building. Every act of communication involves conduct in a literal sense.

A writer types. A protester marches. A newspaper prints. A speaker moves air. A citizen clicks “publish.”

If physical implementation alone allows government to evade constitutional scrutiny, the Free Speech Clause protects nothing more consequential than silent thought.

The Supreme Court has long recognized that government may regulate genuinely nonexpressive conduct and may punish narrow categories of expression, including true threats, incitement, criminal solicitation and certain integral components of crime. But labels do not decide cases.

In Counterman, the Court warned that threat prosecutions require a subjective mental-state safeguard because the absence of such protection chills speech beyond the law’s legitimate boundary. The government must show that the speaker at least consciously disregarded a substantial risk that the communication would be understood as threatening violence.

That requirement is not a gift to bad people. It is a buffer protecting everyone who writes angrily, speaks clumsily, uses metaphor, quotes violent language, publishes satire or condemns powerful officials.

The danger grows when courts aggregate protected items into an unprotected “course.” Eight posts that are individually protected do not automatically become criminal because a prosecutor stacks them together. Repetition can matter to context, intent and impact, but arithmetic cannot repeal the First Amendment.

Nor can emotional injury become a universal solvent. Political speech routinely causes fear, fury, humiliation and resentment.

The answer is disciplined line-drawing: identify the specific statement, the recipient, the threatened unlawful violence, the speaker’s mental state and the causal connection. Anything less invites punishment by atmosphere, which was the exact flaw in Judge Peter Brown’s courtroom in the Boyne case.

Punished For Not Shooting: What Goetz Actually Proves

Goetz shows why a working theory that bypasses speech can be stated with precision. The New York Court of Appeals held that justification includes the defendant’s actual beliefs while also requiring an objective assessment of reasonableness.

At trial, Goetz was acquitted of attempted murder and assault but convicted of carrying an unlicensed firearm. Years later, a civil jury awarded substantial damages to Darrell Cabey. The legal record is mixed, morally contested, and inseparable from the racial fear and urban disorder of 1980s New York.

Yet the contrast remains constitutionally useful. Goetz’s use of force triggered doctrines built to distinguish aggression from justified defense. The jury examined imminence, perception, proportionality, and reasonableness. Those questions are demanding.

By comparison, modern speech prosecutions can collapse the inquiry into whether the target felt alarmed, whether the words were repeated, and whether officials characterize the communications as menacing. That is a far more manipulable test, especially when the target is a judge, prosecutor, or institution capable of activating the criminal apparatus.

Self-defense law is not a blank check. Deadly force generally requires an imminent threat of death or serious bodily harm and must satisfy jurisdiction-specific rules concerning necessity, proportionality, and retreat. The delivery of a child in family court to psychopaths, abusers, and/or child rapists does not automatically authorize violence against the officials involved. Not under the laws of man. (Matthew 18:6 – “Whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin, it would be better for him to have a great millstone hung around his neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea.”)

But government also has a categorical duty not to make speech a sentencing substitute for violence. The law should reward the person who chooses publication over physical confrontation. It should create an enormous penalty gap between words and wounds.

When that gap disappears, the state has not made society safer. It has made the peaceful option less rational.

Punished For Not Shooting: Viewpoint Control With Handcuffs

The political asymmetry makes the danger worse. “Hate speech” is not a freestanding exception to the First Amendment. America rejected the European model in which government commissions supervise acceptable opinion.

Yet blue-state prosecutors increasingly reach for stalking, harassment, disorderly conduct, and bias-inflected theories to accomplish indirectly what the Constitution forbids directly.

The forbidden viewpoint is recoded as harmful conduct. The unpopular speaker is recoded as a public-safety threat. The criminal case then arrives wearing therapeutic language about trauma, dignity, and fear.

None of this means threats should be tolerated, even though many are by Blue State prosecutors. A specific, serious communication of intended unlawful violence may be prosecuted. Repeated unwanted contact directed privately at an individual can present different constitutional questions from public commentary about officials.

Doxxing combined with threats can create real danger. “Digital Hitmen” get paid good money and go relatively unmolested – so long as they are leftists.

The modern problem is the refusal to distinguish these categories with surgical care. When a judge criticized in public reporting becomes both the alleged victim and a member of the institution adjudicating the critic, the need for transparency, neutral judges, exact jury instructions, and meaningful appellate review becomes overwhelming.

Boyne’s sentence is therefore bigger than Boyne. Hendrix’s conviction is bigger than Hendrix. Both speakers used language many Americans find repulsive. That is why their cases matter.

Popular speakers do not need a First Amendment. The socially protected do not need a Bill of Rights. Constitutional law is tested when the defendant is abrasive, obsessive, hateful, reckless, or impossible to defend at a dinner party. If courts may erase speech protections whenever prosecutors prove expression was ugly and persistent, then the First Amendment has become a civility code administered by the permanent political class.

That is not public safety. It is viewpoint control with handcuffs.

Restore the Line Before It Breaks

“Bring Back Bernie Goetz” is not a legal or policy proposal. It is a fire alarm for the ruling class. It describes the monstrous incentive created when government punishes words so heavily that violent conduct appears to offer equal punishment plus an affirmative defense.

No responsible citizen should act on that comparison. No one should attack judges, social workers, lawyers, journalists, protesters, parents or children. The cure for this tyranny is constitutional reform, not bloodshed.

Until and unless reality calls bullshit.

Legislatures should rewrite stalking and disorderly-conduct laws to separate public advocacy from targeted unwanted communication; require proof tied to specific statements; incorporate Counterman’s recklessness floor; and demand clear findings of a serious threat of unlawful violence.

Courts should reject the theory that repetition alone converts protected commentary into criminal conduct. Sentencing judges should preserve a proportionality gap between speech offenses and physical violence. Appellate courts should treat these cases as First Amendment emergencies, not routine disputes over evidentiary sufficiency.

Journalists should stop allowing prosecutors to hide controversial speech behind adjectives such as “hateful,” “menacing,” and “disturbing.” Publish the words. Test them against the constitutional standard.

The state’s message must be unmistakable: use words, courts, elections, cameras, public records, and appeals—and never use violence except where law recognizes immediate and necessary defense against an imminent physical threat. The citizen who chooses speech over force must be treated as having made the safer, more civilized choice, even when his speech is vicious.

Connecticut’s twenty-year sentence for Boyne threatens to reverse that moral hierarchy. Minnesota’s prosecution of Hendrix shows how quickly offensive language can be relabeled conduct.

A republic that criminalizes its pressure valves should not be surprised when pressure builds.

Restore the line between speech and violence before someone takes the state’s perverse lesson literally.

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The Family Court Circus

LUTHMANN NOTE: Zohran Mamdani has mastered the politics of imaginary courage. He points across the Atlantic, threatens a foreign leader he cannot arrest, and collects applause from activists who confuse performance with power. Then he turns away from an NYPD system operating inside his own government. A secret I-Card has kept me outside New York for roughly a year without a warrant, charge, court date, or publicly stated legal basis. I have missed reporting assignments, weddings, funerals, reunions, and civic events. Mamdani could demand answers today. He will not. The mayor is not powerless. He is selective—and selective courage is political fraud. These facts are true: Zohran Mamdani is a political cancer and Israeli doctors are some of the best in the world. Maybe my next trip to New York will be to report on a “Mossad Operation.” This piece is “The Mayor of Make-Believe,” first available on NY News Press.

By M. Thomas Nast and Rick LaRivière with Richard Luthmann

The Arrest That Never Could Happen

(NEW YORK, NEW YORK) – Zohran Mamdani has discovered the cheapest trick in municipal politics: threaten a man 6,000 miles away while ignoring the abuses sitting inside his own police department.

For more than a year, Mamdani promised that Benjamin Netanyahu would be arrested if the Israeli prime minister entered New York City.

Then the lawyers arrived.

The United States is not a party to the Rome Statute, New York City has no independent authority to execute an International Criminal Court warrant, and a mayor cannot transform the NYPD into a freelance foreign-policy tribunal.

Mamdani finally admitted the city lacks that power, but not before recording another theatrical indictment of Netanyahu for the cameras.

Reuters, The Associated Press, USA Today, and The Washington Post all reported the same retreat: The arrest promise was legally impossible, so Mamdani shifted the burden to Washington while preserving the performance.

This was not law enforcement. It was content creation with a police badge in the background. The mayor wanted the imagery of handcuffs without the inconvenience of jurisdiction, due process, or constitutional limits.

That is the first hypocrisy. He rages against power he does not possess while refusing to use power he unquestionably does possess.

The mayor commands the NYPD. He appoints the police commissioner. His administration can order an audit of stale Investigation Cards, require written probable-cause reviews, impose expiration and renewal rules, and direct the department to purge entries that no longer have a lawful basis.

Yet Mamdani’s City Hall has shown no comparable urgency about these invisible, warrant-like restraints imposed on ordinary people.

Netanyahu gets a global video. New Yorkers trapped by secret police paperwork get silence.

The Mayor of Make-Believe: The Secret Warrant That Isn’t A Warrant

An NYPD I-Card is not a judicial warrant. It is an internal computerized notification identifying someone as a perpetrator, suspect, or witness. New York’s highest court has now emphasized the constitutional danger.

In People v. Cuencas, the Court of Appeals explained that I-Cards carry different classifications, including “probable cause to arrest,” “suspect only,” and “witness.”

In April 2026, People v. Palacios reversed a conviction because prosecutors failed to prove that arresting officers actually received and relied upon lawful probable-cause information transmitted through an I-Card.

The message is unmistakable: An electronic flag does not manufacture probable cause, and police bureaucracy cannot substitute for evidence.

Reporter Richard Luthmann, a contributor to this outlet, has lived under one of these shadows for roughly a year. According to his published account and related filings, the Staten Island I-Card has no accompanying warrant, pending charge, court date, or publicly articulated legal basis.

Yet its practical effect is exile. Returning to New York City risks detention by officers encountering a database entry that operates like a warrant while evading the safeguards of one.

During that year, Luthmann has been unable to report New York stories in person and has missed weddings, funerals, reunions and civic events.

On July 31, he will again be absent when the Italian-American Civil Rights League gathers in Little Italy ahead of the centennial Feast of San Gennaro—an event celebrating immigrant sacrifice, family and the right not to have one’s history erased. Luthmann is an IACRL member.

The irony is savage. New York City’s mayor lectures the world about justice while a journalist remains banished by an untested police notation.

NY News Press

The Mayor of Make-Believe: Mamdani’s Selected Courage

That silence becomes uglier when Staten Island politics enters the frame. Luthmann contends that the I-Card serves the interests of District Attorney Michael McMahon, a longtime establishment Democrat and political adversary whose office has repeatedly been the subject of Luthmann’s reporting.

The backdrop is the notorious “Part N” controversy, in which Luthmann alleged that narcotics matters were steered into a prosecution-friendly courtroom connected to McMahon’s wife, Judge Judith McMahon. Public reporting has described those accusations and the claimed effort to route sensitive applications away from less accommodating judges.

“For me, the Part N saga shows that the McMahons and those like them hate Black and brown people,” Luthmann said. “That is who their justice scams overwhelmingly target. It makes sense. The Republicans are the party of Lincoln and liberty. The Establishment Democrats control the New York Courts and the prosecutors’ offices, and the DSA hates white people. They are all racists.”

Luthmann’s point is that the machinery deserves scrutiny precisely because narcotics enforcement, secret warrant practices and prosecutor-friendly judicial routing can fall hardest on Black and Latino defendants.

If Mamdani believes the system is structurally biased, here is a test requiring no foreign-policy cosplay: Order an independent review of Staten Island I-Cards. Publish their racial and geographic impact. Identify who requested each card. Require current probable cause. Delete every stale, unsupported, or retaliatory entry.

The hypocrisy is even more glaring because McMahon was not some distant political beneficiary of the Luthmann I-Card—he was personally the complainant on the NYPD report that set the machinery in motion.

According to the underlying records, McMahon claimed he feared for his safety after receiving a Substack email, described Luthmann as a “stranger,” and supplied the allegations used to justify a criminal-contempt investigation and the warrant-like police flag.

Luthmann says those assertions are materially false: McMahon had known of him for years, the email contained no threat against McMahon, and authorities have produced no proof that Luthmann was ever properly served with the order he supposedly violated. To the extent McMahon repeated those claims in sworn complaints, affidavits, or testimony, the contradictions raise serious questions of possible perjury and filing a false instrument—not merely political exaggeration.

“Mamdani does not need international jurisdiction to investigate the fact that the McMahons are liars and political hacks. He needs only the courage to ask the NYPD brass to examine whether a sitting district attorney used his personal influence and the NYPD database to turn false claims into an extrajudicial arrest trap,” Luthmann said.

Instead, Mamdani appears content to leave the McMahon machine undisturbed while staging confrontations with Netanyahu.

That is establishment pandering disguised as insurgent politics.

The socialist mayor who campaigned against entrenched power suddenly loses his voice when the entrenched power wears a Democratic Party label. He can denounce an Israeli leader before breakfast, but he cannot ask why a journalist and political opponent of the Staten Island district attorney remains effectively barred from the city by secret police paperwork.

Fraud is not always a lie. Sometimes it is selective courage.

The Mayor of Make-Believe: The Executioner in Queens

The hypocrisy does not stop there. There is the case of Ashrafuzzaman Khan, a Queens resident convicted in absentia by Bangladesh’s International Crimes Tribunal for crimes against humanity committed during the 1971 liberation war.

Khan is a longtime New York resident and former Queens imam who was sentenced to death for participating in the murders of 18 intellectuals. Other reporting documented his leadership ties to the Islamic Circle of North America and ICNA’s removal of references to him after the conviction became public.

The Bangladeshi judgment, the fairness of proceedings conducted in absentia, and any American immigration consequences are matters for federal authorities and courts—not the mayor.

That is exactly the point.

Mamdani’s standard should be consistent. If he wants to use his office as a moral megaphone against alleged or adjudicated war criminals, he must answer some hard questions:

• Why does his outrage appear almost exclusively calibrated toward Israel?

• Why no mayoral video demanding a renewed federal review of Khan’s citizenship, immigration history and alleged conduct?

• Why no insistence that due process be pursued wherever the accused comes from, whatever organization sheltered him and whichever constituency might become uncomfortable?

Mamdani cannot arrest Khan either. But he can request federal action, condemn the crimes and stand with the victims.

Instead, Netanyahu receives obsession while Khan receives obscurity.

New Yorkers notice selective prosecution—even rhetorical prosecution. A mayor who spends political capital pretending to command international criminal law while declining to clean up constitutionally dangerous police practices at home is not governing.

He is auditioning.

If Mamdani continues choosing ideological theater over municipal justice, “one-term mayor” will stop sounding like partisan wish-casting and start looking like the city’s verdict.

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LUTHMANN NOTE: The families of murdered Americans should never be forced to crawl through congressional hallways begging the government to enforce judgments already entered by its own courts. Iran and its proxies financed bombings, hijackings, battlefield attacks and civilian slaughter. The victims proved their cases. The judgments are real. Yet Washington keeps discovering new urgency when diplomats want Iranian assets unfrozen and endless patience when widows and wounded veterans want justice. That inversion is not only morally diseased; it is sick to its core. Pay the victims before rewarding Tehran. Preserve every available asset. Fund every lawful judgment. The scumbags of humanity have received enough accommodation. It is time their victims receive justice, or else it is time to burn Tehran to the ground. If they won’t pay in dollars, they should pay with their civilization before they destroy ours. This piece is “Tehran’s Unpaid Blood Debt,” first available on NY News Press.

By Richard Luthmann

A Quarter-Century Waiting Room

(WASHINGTON, D.C.) — There is something obscenely rotten in a system that can identify the architects of mass murder, prove their responsibility in American courts, enter final judgments for the dead and wounded—and then tell their families to keep waiting.

Waiting is what Janlyn Scauso has done for nearly twenty-five years. Her husband, FDNY firefighter Dennis Scauso of Hazardous Materials Company No. 1, ran toward the World Trade Center when civilized people were running away. He was killed when the South Tower collapsed on September 11, 2001.

Janlyn was left to carry the grief, raise the memory, and repeatedly explain to Washington why a court judgment should mean something when the defendant is a terrorism-sponsoring government.

On Monday, victims and families from attacks spanning four decades gathered at Upper Senate Park before heading into congressional meetings. Their message was brutally simple: “Don’t Leave Us Behind.” They represented the 1983 Beirut embassy and Marine barracks bombings, TWA Flight 847, Khobar Towers, the East Africa embassy bombings, 9/11, Iranian-backed attacks in Iraq, the 2016 Bastille Day massacre and Hamas’ October 7 atrocities.

They are not professional mourners. They are survivors, widows, veterans, children and Gold Star families forced into becoming lobbyists because the machinery of government moves faster to negotiate with Tehran than to honor Americans already holding lawful judgments.

The obscenity is not merely delay. It is inversion. The victims must beg. The bureaucrats deliberate. The diplomats bargain. The killers’ sponsors count their assets. The scumbags of humanity get strategy sessions; American families get another anniversary.

Tehran’s Unpaid Blood Debt: Janlyn Carries Dennis Forward

Scauso’s presence gives the Washington effort its moral center. She is not presenting an abstract policy paper. She is carrying Dennis into every meeting, every hallway, and every conversation where officials might otherwise reduce terrorism judgments to a line item.

Since 9/11, Janlyn Scauso has spoken publicly about loss, resilience and remembrance, preserving the story of a firefighter who answered the call and never came home. Joined in advocacy by her daughters, Gabrielle and Juliette Scauso, their testimony also exposes what government language conceals: “unpaid judgment” means a family lived through murder, survived years of litigation, proved its case and still has not received the justice the court ordered.

Around her stood others with their own permanent dates. Angela Mistrulli lost her father, Joseph, on the 107th floor of the North Tower when she was seventeen.

Jane Sharp Synnestvedt survived seventeen days as a hostage after Hezbollah-linked terrorists hijacked TWA Flight 847.

Preston Kaplan endured an Iranian-made explosively formed projectile in Baghdad, more than sixty surgeries and a below-the-knee amputation, while his wife, Nicole, became caregiver and advocate.

David King escaped the burning Pentagon with catastrophic burns.

Thomas Lawrence survived Khobar Towers.

Anne Dammarell was shattered by the 1983 U.S. Embassy bombing in Beirut. Itamar Shapira survived the October 7 “death shelter.”

Mindy Kleinberg lost her husband and helped force creation of the 9/11 Commission.

Different attacks. Different decades. The same criminal pipeline: governments and proxies using money, explosives, hijackers and fanatic foot soldiers to slaughter innocents, then hiding behind borders, diplomacy and time. These witnesses make bureaucratic evasion impossible.

NY News Press

Tehran’s Unpaid Blood Debt: Gillen and Malliotakis Step Up

The immediate legislative fight is over the U.S. Victims of State-Sponsored Terrorism Fund, created to compensate people holding final American judgments arising from international terrorism committed by designated state sponsors.

The Fund’s governing law has been amended repeatedly since 2015, including through the USVSST Fund Clarification Act, the Sudan Claims Resolution Act and the Fairness for 9/11 Families Act. Yet the basic scandal remains: many families with judgments are still waiting for full payment, even after the Justice Department announced a record distribution exceeding $2.8 billion in January.

That is why Representatives Laura Gillen, a New York Democrat, and Nicole Malliotakis, a New York Republican, deserve a clear nod for doing what Washington rarely does well: crossing the aisle on behalf of people who have already paid the highest price.

Their stand-alone version of Amendment 1120 would strengthen the Fund, protect victims holding unpaid terrorism judgments and preserve repayment through future terrorism-related recoveries. The families came to Capitol Hill to demand that Congress enact the protection rather than bury it under parliamentary maneuvering, partisan warfare or some eleventh-hour deal made for convenience.

This should not be difficult. When an American court enters judgment against a state sponsor of terrorism, the United States must treat that judgment as more than ceremonial parchment. A nation that cannot enforce its own judgments against the financiers of murdered Americans teaches every hostile government the same lesson: wait long enough, hire enough intermediaries, survive enough news cycles, and Washington may eventually value diplomatic flexibility more than the blood on the floor.

Tehran’s Unpaid Blood Debt: No Payday for Terrorists

The families’ open letter to President Donald Trump puts the question where it belongs: no Iranian assets should be released, transferred, unfrozen, or returned—and no sanctions should be lifted or relieved—before outstanding terrorism judgments owed to American victims are resolved.

The group says more than $156 billion in damages awarded by United States courts remains unpaid. It warns that any financial relief to Tehran frees other money for Hamas, Hezbollah, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Iran’s wider proxy system of exported murder.

That demand is neither radical nor partisan. Congress previously addressed terrorism claims before normalization involving Libya and Sudan. The principle is elemental: do not reward the sponsor before paying the victims. Do not return leverage to the government found liable while widows, wounded veterans and orphaned children are still holding judgments. Do not ask Janlyn Scauso to accept another speech while the people who financed terror receive assets, concessions or renewed international legitimacy.

Justice delayed is not always justice denied. Sometimes it is justice degraded—whittled down by bureaucracy until accountability becomes a commemorative phrase spoken once a year. That is what these families are fighting. They are not asking Washington to resurrect the dead or erase the scars. They are asking their country to stand behind its courts, protect the Fund and place American victims ahead of Iran’s treasury and its terrorist proxies.

Dennis Scauso answered America’s call in minutes. His family has waited decades for America to answer theirs. Congress and the administration should stop making the victims chase justice through the halls of power.

Pay the judgments. Preserve the assets. Punish the sponsors. And never leave these families behind.

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LUTHMANN NOTE: The issue is not whether two daredevils are photogenic, romantic, or good at feeding the algorithm. The issue is whether a serious city still knows how to defend the line between liberty and lawlessness. New York’s greatest landmarks were built by discipline, engineering, sacrifice, and ordered ambition. They were not built so influencers could turn them into unauthorized stunt sets while the public safety system scrambles below. A civilization can survive crime. It cannot survive the cultural decision to applaud disorder as creativity. Rome learned that lesson late. New York’s time is running out. This piece is “Empire State of Decay,” first available on NY News Press.

By Matt “Sully” Sullivan and Dick LaFontaine

Bread, Circuses, and a City Testing Its Own Limits

New York does not fall in one day. Neither did Rome. Civilizations rarely collapse because one foreign army crosses one border or one madman lights one match. They decay first in the habits of daily life. The laws become optional. Authority becomes theatrical. Serious people are mocked as scolds. Recklessness gets repackaged as art. Crime gets explained away as sociology. Disorder gets renamed “expression.” Then, when the public finally notices the smoke, the professional class insists the fire is manageable.

That is the context for the Empire State Building stunt. On July 1, 2026, Russian daredevil climbers Angela Nikolau and Ivan Kuznetsov, also known as Ivan Beerkus or Vanya Beerkus, climbed the spire of the Empire State Building, unfurled a banner, staged a proposal, came down, and were arrested. Reuters reported that the banner carried a peace message and that the couple was charged with offenses including burglary and trespassing. ABC News reported that police and Empire State Building security were reviewing surveillance to determine how they entered and evaded screening at the observation deck.

The romance is not the story. The proposal is not the story. The Instagram content is not the story. The story is that two people allegedly penetrated one of the most iconic and security-sensitive landmarks in America, turned the skyline into their personal stage, and forced the public safety apparatus of New York City to react. That is not harmless whimsy. That is civilizational arrogance in stunt form.

Empire State of Decay: The Human Cost of “Victimless” Spectacle

The modern defense of lawlessness usually begins with a shrug. Who got hurt? Nobody died. The pictures were dramatic. The banner said something sweet. The couple is attractive. Their followers loved it. Netflix already introduced them to the public in Skywalkers: A Love Story. Therefore, the argument goes, this was not really a crime. It was performance.

That is the poison. A society that cannot distinguish between creativity and criminal trespass has already begun negotiating with its own decline. Scaling a secured skyscraper is not a private act. It is a public imposition. It risks the climbers’ lives, the lives of responders, and the safety of anyone below. It tests building security. It forces police into dangerous positions. It creates copycat incentives for every fame-hungry daredevil with a GoPro, a social media account, and a childish belief that consequences are for ordinary people.

The couple’s brand is not accidental. Reuters noted they are known for high-risk climbing and were featured in the 2024 Netflix documentary Skywalkers: A Love Story. Cosmopolitan likewise described them as a thrill-seeking couple known for urban climbing adventures around the world, with past stunts in places from Chicago to China.

That matters because the Empire State Building was not a spontaneous mistake. It appears to fit a pattern: transgression, spectacle, monetization, applause. The city becomes the unpaid production crew. The police become the safety net. The courts become the after-party. The public becomes the mark. This is how order erodes: not always through riots, but through tolerated exceptions that teach everyone else the rules are negotiable.

NY News Press

Empire State of Decay: Rome Had Coliseums. New York Has Viral Trespass.

Rome’s elites understood spectacle. Bread and circuses were not merely entertainment; they were anesthesia. Keep the crowd distracted. Keep the symbols glowing. Keep the machinery wobbling behind marble and ceremony. By the time the public realizes discipline has gone soft, the barbarians are not at the gate. They are already inside the operating system.

New York’s version is different but recognizable. A city can report encouraging crime numbers and still suffer visible disorder. Both things can be true. The NYPD announced that the first half of 2026 brought the fewest shooting incidents, shooting victims, and murders in recorded city history, with 322 shooting incidents, 381 shooting victims, and 122 murders. Major crime was reported down nearly 6% citywide. Those numbers deserve real credit, especially for the officers doing dangerous work under political pressure.

But statistics do not erase civic perception. New Yorkers live in the gap between official charts and street reality. They see subway chaos. They see retail theft. They see emotionally disturbed people abandoned to sidewalks and platforms. They see foreign nationals turn the Empire State Building into a stunt platform and wonder whether anyone in authority still knows how to say no without apologizing.

Even the crime story is uneven. The New York Post reported fresh concern over subway and bus crime in multiple patrol boroughs, including increases in transit robberies and felonious assaults, despite the broader citywide decline.

That is the danger zone: a city improving on paper while weakening in spirit. Rome had roads, aqueducts, and legions. It still lost the will to enforce the civilization those things served.

Empire State of Decay: Ordered Liberty or Managed Decline

The answer is not panic. The answer is seriousness. The Empire State Building climb was not the end of New York. It was not the sack of Rome. It was a flare shot into the night sky, illuminating the soft assumptions of a culture that too often confuses indulgence with compassion and spectacle with meaning.

Ordered liberty is not authoritarianism. It is the condition that allows civilization to function. The artist gets to paint because the building is secure. The tourist gets to dream because the landmark is protected. The commuter gets to move because the platform is orderly. The shopkeeper gets to open because theft has consequences. The police officer gets to go home because the political class backs the rule of law instead of treating enforcement as a public relations liability.

New York needs consequences that match the act. Trespass on critical infrastructure cannot become a cost of doing business for influencers, activists, daredevils, or documentary stars. The law should not bend because the stunt came with a romantic soundtrack. If anything, high-profile acts demand clearer accountability because they teach the culture what will be rewarded.

Rome’s decline was not just corruption or invasion. It was the steady exhaustion of civic duty. Citizens stopped believing the rules were shared. Elites stopped acting like guardians. Spectacle replaced seriousness. That is the lesson New York should hear while there is still time.

The Empire State Building once symbolized ambition, discipline, engineering, and American confidence. It should not become a prop for the age of managed decline. New York can still choose order. But it has to choose it out loud.

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LUTHMANN NOTE: The Bicentennial was not perfect because America was not perfect. That was the point. The country had endured assassination, riots, Vietnam, Watergate, inflation, recession, and cultural upheaval, yet still found a way to stand beneath the same flag. Today, the permanent political class has trained Americans to litigate every symbol, fracture every memory, and turn patriotism into a partisan weapon. This division is not accidental. It is cultivated, funded, organized, and amplified by grievance merchants, paid agitators, academic radicals, media arsonists, and political operators who profit from national exhaustion. The old poison of communism has been scrubbed, rebranded, and repackaged by the Red-Green Coalition for a new and dangerously naive generation. But America is not dead. It is waiting for adults to reclaim the story, defend the inheritance, and teach young Americans that liberty is not oppression. America’s 250th birthday should not be a funeral procession. It should be a call to civic arms. This piece is “Two Birthdays Apart.”

By Greg Maresca

In 1976, America threw itself a birthday party unlike anything before or since. The Bicentennial was not just a commemoration of 200 years of independence – it was a coast‑to‑coast block party of red, white and blue.

School children memorized the Declaration of Independence, where Thomas Jefferson blamed King George III, because Trump was still over two centuries later.

But I digress.

As Operation Sail brought a parade of tall ships into New York Harbor, the largest flag ever made was unfurled from the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge to greet them, only to be shredded by the wind in 90 minutes.

The flag unfurled across the harbor like a widescreen epic, a ribbon of red, white, and blue stitching Staten Island to Brooklyn in one long, heroic shot. It pulled the past into the present, greeting every ship that sailed into the world’s greatest city that was rolling out a patriotic red carpet.

It was the kind of moment that made you stop, breathe, and let the scene wash over you.

Photographed in that fleeting moment from the Brooklyn side, the image captured the Bicentennial. That photo was on display in my parents’ home for the rest of their lives. It was a quiet reminder that what endures most isn’t perfection, but something bold enough to try, just like the American Republic it represents.

In 1976, families lined highways to watch wagon trains retrace colonial routes. Even amid a recession, Watergate’s hangover and the long shadow of the Cold War, Americans found a way to feel like one people celebrating one story.

Fast-forward to 2026, and the mood is unmistakably different. The nation observes rather than celebrates its 250th year not with a unified drumbeat, but with a fractured soundtrack of competing narratives, grievances, and uncertainties.

Patriotism has not disappeared, but it has splintered, claimed by factions, questioned by others, and often overshadowed by the clamor of cultural and political division.

The contrast between 1976 and 2026 is not nostalgia talking. It reflects how the country once understood patriotism as a shared civic ritual, even when citizens disagreed. In 1976, Americans could argue about Watergate and Vietnam and still stand shoulder-to-shoulder for a parade.

Patriotism was a common language, not a partisan dialect.

That unity came from proximity. In 1976, people consumed the same news broadcasts, read the same newspapers and magazines. The Bicentennial was a national event because Americans still experienced national life together. When the tall ships sailed into New York Harbor, tens of millions watched the same images at the same time. It created a sense of “us,” however imperfect.

FL Gulf News

By 2026, the information landscape has Americans living in fragmented realities shaped by algorithms and curated social media feeds.

Patriotism has become contested terrain.

For some, it means honoring tradition and national heritage. For others, it means confronting historical failures. For still others, it is a word they avoid altogether, fearing it has been politicized beyond recognition.

The result is a country where even the flag can spark debate instead of unity.

The Bicentennial benefited from something America has since lost: a cultural instinct to celebrate what we share rather than amplify what divides us.

In 1976, we were still close enough to World War II and the moon landings to remember collective achievement. Citizens believed they were part of a larger story, one worth celebrating even when some chapters were messy.

In 2026, many view history through the lens of dispute rather than continuity, where government, media and education are now battlegrounds for ideological conflict. The sense of belonging to a common denominator has been replaced by a culture that rewards outrage more than understanding.

Division is not the opposite of patriotism – indifference is.

Americans may be divided, but they are not indifferent.

The challenge of the nation’s 250th anniversary is whether we can rekindle the shared sense of purpose that defined the Bicentennial.

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LUTHMANN NOTE: Greg Maresca nails the quiet tragedy here. America does not lack information. It lacks shared meaning. The old Bicentennial Minute worked because it did not scream, spin, or sneer. It simply reminded Americans that the Republic was built through sacrifice, argument, courage, failure, and renewal. That kind of civic ritual is exactly what the ruling-class media machine refuses to give the country now. A daily “250th Minute” would have been easy, cheap, patriotic, and useful. Maybe that is why it never happened. A nation that forgets its story becomes easier to manage. This piece is “That Bonded Minute,” also available on FL Gulf News.

By Greg Maresca

As America marches toward its 250th birthday, a revival of CBS’s Bicentennial Minute, the nightly Emmy-winning feature that aired from July 4, 1974, through December 31, 1976, would have been a scheduling coup on any and all media platforms.

For those old enough to recall, the Bicentennial Minute was a one-minute historical vignette featured at the end of CBS’ primetime programming during the run-up to America’s 200th birthday. Each segment marked what had happened on that particular day “two hundred years ago,” turning America’s Revolution into a daily chronicle that was graceful and thought-provoking.

These historical snippets were born in a different America, yet they spoke to needs that remain painfully familiar. When the series began, the country was emerging from Watergate and Vietnam and battling high inflation. Trust in institutions was low and the national mood unsettled.

Yet every night for nearly two and a half years, Americans paused for sixty seconds to hear: “Two hundred years ago today…”

What made it powerful wasn’t its length, but its simple one-minute, one-narrator, one-historical-moment format, delivered in primetime when tens of millions were watching. It was patriotic without being jingoistic, educational without being preachy, and unifying without being naïve.

That formula did something profound by anchoring the present to the past.

It reminded viewers that the American story was not a vague abstraction but a sequence of real days, real decisions, real people. The Revolution wasn’t a mythic blur; it was a lived timeline reminding citizens they belong to something greater than themselves. Placing that timeline inside primetime television, CBS made American history a shared civic experience rather than a private study.

In 1976, the Bicentennial was a national celebration with parades, tall ships, reenactments, the Freedom Train, and a wave of patriotic symbolism. But the Bicentennial Minute was the quiet heartbeat beneath it all: a daily pulse of historical memory.

Our public schools are turning out students who know less civics and history than their counterparts did 50 years ago. If ever there were a moment to reteach a nation its own story, this was it.

But it never happened. That’s tragic because the Bicentennial Minute was memorable to a high school freshman in 1976, when the country still believed that knowing its past was essential to shaping its future.

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Fast‑forward to 2026. The nation again finds itself fragmented and unable to agree on basic facts, let alone shared meaning. The Smithsonian’s historians note that the 250th anniversary is inherently plural, describing it as a “mosaic of perspectives,” not a single narrative. However, such a mosaic still needs plenty of grout.

Another Bicentennial Minute message would have offered a shared civic touchpoint in a media landscape that no longer has very many.

In 1976, Americans watched the same four networks. Today, we live tucked away in algorithmic silos. A modern Minute broadcast on television, radio, streaming platforms, and social media would have cut across those divides to create a communal moment.

Moreover, it would have reframed patriotism as reflection rather than performance. It would be a daily reminder that the American experiment has always been contested, unfinished, and worth examining.

The Revolution was a long, uncertain, improvisational struggle underscoring that national identity is not fixed; it is built, argued over, and renewed.

The Bicentennial Minute did not lecture or moralize. It offered a tranquil, factual, and reflective tone, which is rare in today’s media landscape. It was a reminder that history is not something we visit in museums but something we inhabit daily.

With Americans again searching for common ground, readopting a “Semi quincentennial Minute” would have provided exactly that.

One minute daily is no heavy lift. But in a divided country, it might have been enough to remind Americans that they still share a story.

After all, the next chapter is ours to write.

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LUTHMANN NOTE: This is the nightmare scenario conservatives warned about when the administrative state discovered therapy language. First, they say your politics are misinformation. Then they say your movement is extremism. Then they say your loyalty is brainwashing. Finally, they say your leader is a cult boss, and your community is evidence. Frank Parlato, the man who took down the NXIVM cult, makes a simple point: the OneTaste case is not just about OneTaste. It is about whether prosecutors can use “mind control” theories to criminalize persuasion, discipline, belief, and dissent. MAGA should pay attention because this weapon was built with Trump voters in mind. This piece is “Cult Cop Comes For MAGA,” originally published in Art Voice.

By Frank Parlato

In 2025, the Department of Justice won a forced-labor conspiracy conviction without charging forced labor and without proving that the defendants, Nicole Daedone and Rachel Cherwitz, of the sexual wellness company OneTaste, forced anyone to labor.

This is about the man whose theory made that possible.

Who Is Steven Hassan?

On its own, Steven Hassan’s career might not appear unique or nationally important.

He makes his living “deprogramming” people who have begun to believe they were in a cult.

From belief in a cult to belief that they were in a cult is the service he provides.

Hassan believes he was in a cult once himself.

He spent two and a half years in the 1970s in the Unification Church, known among those who believe it to be a cult as the Moonies.

His family deprogrammed him, which is to say they persuaded him that the church was a cult after all.

Hassan has spent the ensuing 50 years teaching others how to identify cults, and whenever possible, rescue people through therapy for which he charges by the hour, reportedly in the $300 per hour range.

There are others who do what Hassan does. Many have a therapy practice; some have written a book, published a blog, hosted or appeared on a podcast, or all of the above.

Hassan would be indistinguishable from these but for three facts:

Federal law enforcement has adopted his theories.

He has targeted President Trump and the MAGA movement as a cult in need of prosecution.

In 2025, his theory led to a federal conviction, and in 2026, to a prison sentence for the aforementioned Daedone and Cherwitz of OneTaste, the forced-labor conspiracy defendants, who set a precedent that, while they forced no one to labor, they were convicted of forced-labor conspiracy.

Cult Cop Comes For MAGA: The Scheme

Hassan calls his theory of forced labor/coercive control/undue influence the BITE model.

BITE stands for Behavior, Information, Thought, Emotion.

If you are a member of a group that exerts a degree of control over behavior, what information you receive, your thoughts and emotions, what you know, think, feel, and do, you are in a cult, Hassan says.

The challenge with the BITE model, which Hassan does not treat as a flaw, but as its signal advantage, is that the categories have no set definitions.

It is up to the expert to decide.

What a cult believer calls observance — the fast, the prayer schedule, the dress, the rule of life — Hassan can recognize as behavior control.

What a believer calls doctrine — the teaching that the faith is true and rival claims are false — Hassan can easily recognize as information control.

What a cult member calls teaching — the lessons, the worldview, the way of seeing the world which the believers come to hold as their own — Hassan, because he is an expert, can recognize as thought control.

What a cult member calls faith — the conviction the adherent feels, the love of the practice, the peace, or the fear (such as reward or punishment in the afterlife) — Hassan can recognize as emotion control.

Cult Cop Comes For MAGA: A Cult Test With No Wrong Answers

Hassan has applied his cult test to, among others —

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormons)

Jehovah’s Witnesses

Opus Dei

Chabad-Lubavitch

Hillsong

Bethel

The International House of Prayer

People of Praise

Transcendental Meditation

Amway

Mary Kay

Herbalife

Alcoholics Anonymous

Synanon

The Heritage Foundation

The Federalist Society

Fox News

Norman Vincent Peale: “Peale taught his followers to control their thoughts by pushing aside self-doubt, a form of self-hypnosis akin to thought stopping.”

Westboro Baptist Church

International Churches of Christ

Cult-like corporations: “Certain corporations behave in a cult-like manner; employees are expected to dress and speak the same, to honor the corporate doctrine and management.”

The vaccine-skeptical public

The 77 million Americans who voted for Trump.

Art Voice

Cult Cop Comes For MAGA: The Book That Named the President a Cult Leader

In 2019, Simon & Schuster published Hassan’s The Cult of Trump.

He extended the cult designation from Trump to the evangelical leadership, the political operation, donors, supporting institutions, and the population of people who voted for Trump.

In short, the entire MAGA movement.

His claim is that 77 million Trump voters are not voting badly, not stubbornly, or foolishly. If they voted for him, they weren’t choosing. They were programmed, exhibiting symptoms of undue influence.

His phrase for it is that they were brainwashed. The remedy is deprogramming for the followers and prison for the cult leaders of MAGA, which include Trump and all his supporters who influence others to vote for him.

Deprogramming is what Hassan does for a living.

Cult Cop Comes For MAGA: The Door Into Government

This theory of Hassan’s might not mean much in practical terms, but for the fact that federal law enforcement has adopted the BITE model.

In November 2015, the FBI’s Law Enforcement Bulletin — the Bureau’s professional journal, produced by its Training Division — published an article that adopted Hassan’s BITE model by name, reproduced all four of its categories in full, and credited the framework directly to him.

In 2023, Paul Chang — a regional anti-human-trafficking coordinator and the national co-chair of a Biden White House anti-trafficking initiative — said on Hassan’s podcast that every Enhanced Collaborative Model task force, in every federal district in the country, operates on the doctrine Hassan developed.

The Conviction

In the prosecution of Nicole Daedone and Rachel Cherwitz, it finally worked.

The US Attorney for the Eastern District of NY won a forced-labor conspiracy conviction without proving that anyone had been forced to labor.

The serious harm it proved was purely psychological: the followers were in a BITE model cult.

There was the brainwashing of nine adult, college-educated women who said the consent they once gave had not been real.

No chains, locked doors, or guns. Nine brainwashed witnesses out of 35,000 participants.

The government proved fear, shunning, and, when they left, a lost community.

That was the serious harm.

Hassan had identified OneTaste as a cult on a BBC documentary two years before the indictment. Prosecutors suggested defense attorneys listen to that same podcast to understand the case.

He treated (helped deprogram) Michal Neria, the lead complaining witness. He also did the same for Ayries Blanck, the government’s original star witness, until that witness became unusable after the defense showed she had fabricated evidence.

The BITE doctrine produced prison sentences: nine years for Daedone and six and a half years for Cherwitz.

The Woman Who Refused

The sentence imposed on Cherwitz is where the doctrine reveals itself.

Cherwitz did not found OneTaste. She came to it as a participant, rose through devotion, and was paid, the government acknowledged, only marginally more than the women it called her victims.

The government first classified Cherwitz as a victim. It offered her the status of a cooperator. The price was confession. She had only to repeat what the nine other witnesses had said: that she had been controlled, that her belief had never been hers, that the philosophy she lived by had made her its victim.

She refused.

The witnesses who accepted the government-approved account of cult-hood received restitution. Cherwitz, who refused it, received 78 months.

The crime was no longer labor. It was refusal.

The difference between the victims and Cherwitz was not labor. It was not force. It was a recantation.

The woman who refused was made a criminal.

Cult Cop Comes For MAGA: What Hassan Has Asked For

Hassan is explicit about what he wants next.

He has proposed rewriting the legal definition of undue influence to reflect his BITE model.

Here is his potential law following the BITE model and Hassan’s published theories:

§ 1. Definition of Undue Influence.

Undue influence occurs when any person, by any means, implants in the mind of another a thought, belief, or intention that did not originate with that person, and thereby induces an act or decision the influenced person would not otherwise have made.

§ 2. Methods.

Undue influence may be established by proof of control, in whole or in part, over any one of the following:

(a) the person’s behavior, including their associations, movements, schedule, or daily conduct;

(b) the information available to the person, including what they are permitted to read, hear, or believe;

(c) the person’s thoughts, including the ideas, doctrines, or convictions they hold; or

(d) the person’s emotions, including the inducement of love, fear, guilt, or loyalty.

§ 3. Proof.

It shall not be necessary to prove fraud, duress, threat, financial loss, or a confidential or fiduciary relationship. The presence of any method described in § 2 shall be sufficient.

§ 4. Burden.

Upon a showing under § 2, the influenced act is presumed involuntary. The burden shall rest upon the accused to prove the thought was the other person’s own.

Cult Cop Comes For MAGA: A Federal Ministry of Mind Control

Hassan has proposed a federal body, tied to the FBI and IRS, with authority to investigate communities for “mind control.”

The new federal law enforcement office would review houses of worship, advocacy groups, and political organizations for signs of undue influence, coordinating with the FBI and IRS to ensure that any community found to be shaping its members’ beliefs could have its tax status and its leaders examined accordingly.

He has also proposed that mental health training across psychiatry, psychology, and social work incorporate his BITE model as standard practice.

Under the new curriculum, every therapist, psychiatrist, and social worker would be trained to screen clients for undue influence — to ask, as a matter of standard intake, whether a patient’s faith, politics, or marriage had shaped their thinking in ways the model flags as control, and to chart the answer.

He has proposed that candidates for President be required, as a condition of seeking office, to submit to a neuropsychiatric evaluation by a professional committee, with periodic reassessment.

Before any candidate could appear on a ballot, a standing committee of mental health professionals would certify them fit for office — and could, on periodic review, withdraw that certification, so that the question of who may be President would rest not with the voters but with the handful of experts empowered to decide who is sound enough to ask for their vote.

The flexibility of BITE would give the government and its experts new power.

And shrewd members of Congress have already begun to use Hassan’s ideology.

In 2022, Jamie Raskin publicly thanked Hassan and spoke of consulting deprogrammers to deprogram Republican colleagues who are in the cult of Trump.

In April 2026, Raskin demanded a comprehensive neuropsychiatric assessment of the President.

One can feel confident that the model will be applied to any party not in power.

Cult Cop Comes For MAGA: The Weapon Cuts Both Ways

The BITE model is part of the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division.

Used by one administration to dismantle cults on the right, it is available to the next administration to get rid of cults on the left, such as:

Twin Oaks and the Federation of Egalitarian Communities — secular, idealistic income-sharing communes where members surrender their earnings, hold property in common, are assigned their labor, and leave after years with almost nothing.

The Catholic Worker Movement — Dorothy Day’s houses of hospitality, where live-in workers surrender income, accept communal discipline, and frame the labor as a calling that costs them to leave.

Earth First! and the Animal Liberation Front — cell-structured, ideologically absolute, demanding the whole of a member’s loyalty: mission-driven labor and total commitment, the structure the government criminalized in Brooklyn.

The mosque, the campus encampment, the worker co-op — communities that govern how members pray, speak, or pool their money, that recruit the searching, and that treat departure as betrayal.

Black Lives Matter — a morally absolute ideology adopted as the lens through which members see the world, recruiting the grieving and the wounded, policing outsiders’ vocabulary, treating dissent as betrayal. Thought control, in the prosecution’s vocabulary.

Cult Cop Comes For MAGA: What It Looks Like in Tennessee

Outside Nashville, Pastor Greg Locke preaches twice a week in a converted tent. He told his members COVID was a hoax and to refuse the vaccine, says a Christian cannot vote a certain way, preached near the Capitol on January 6, and is, in his followers’ words, “a mouthpiece of God.” Some sold everything and moved across the country to be near him. They have reorganized their lives and their finances around the church.

Every element the US Attorney for the Eastern District of New York called a forced-labor conspiracy in the OneTaste case is present, taught openly, on video: the charismatic leader whose word is treated as God’s, the followers who uprooted their lives to join, the pooled money, the teaching that the outside world is dangerous, or unenlightened – and worse than OneTaste – the fear of damnation for those who leave — a threat far graver than the shunning the government proved at OneTaste.

Daedone was convicted on those facts. Locke has the same facts. The only thing standing between the two is that no prosecutor has yet signed the indictment.

The same is true of a thousand small-church pastors who blend faith with politics before their congregations.

Cult Cop Comes For MAGA: Why This Belongs on the President’s Desk

President Trump has said he has worked to restore the justice system, to end “the era of lawlessness and the weaponization of the Department of Justice,” and to reclaim the nation’s constitutional heritage.

The OneTaste precedent is a conviction built on a theory of the mind, a theory supplied by Hassan, who has spent years aiming that theory at the President, embedded in the training of trafficking task forces in the country, and validated in a federal courtroom.

A pardon of Daedone and Cherwitz does not repeal the precedent. It would remove the test case on which the precedent rests.

A pardon is not mercy for these two women. It is the President acting, in one case, where he can, against the weaponization he says he returned to office to end.

If he did pardon the OneTaste women, however, Hassan would make his final point: Trump is a cult leader who freed another cult leader, and that all the world’s a cult and its followers are merely brainwashed players in it, unable to think for themselves.

Fortunately, we have men like Hassan who can do our thinking for us and empower the government to enforce it.

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LUTHMANN NOTE: This is the test. Trump’s DOJ can talk all day about ending weaponized justice, but the question is whether it will open the files when the paper trail points back at James Comey. Comey is under indictment, yet DOJ is still protecting records that may show how he used federal power against Johnny T Tortora in an old Yonkers vendetta. The government will not even tell me how many pages it has. That tells me I am right over the target. If the files clear Comey, release them. If they bury him, America deserves to see them. This piece is “Trump’s DOJ is Protecting Comey,” first available on FL Gulf News.

By Frankie Pressman with Richard Luthmann

Fort Myers Has The Comey File Now

(FORT MYERS, FLORIDA) — Richard Luthmann’s Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the United States Department of Justice is not a paperwork dispute. It is a knife fight over the buried federal records behind the 1997 murder of Richard Ortiz in Yonkers, New York, and the two-decade law-enforcement campaign that followed against John “Johnny T” Tortora.

To Luthmann, this is the paper trail behind a prosecution and persecution that ran through Westchester County, the Southern District of New York, the FBI’s New York Field Office, and the old Yonkers power structure.

The names matter. Judge Jeanine Pirro, now U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, was Westchester District Attorney when the Ortiz murder case first came through local law enforcement. James Comey later sat in two federal seats that matter: U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York and later Director of the FBI.

Luthmann’s theory, built from interviews, court records, FOIA responses, and statements from Tortora, is blunt: Comey pursued Tortora for years because of perceived Yonkers beefs, old grudges, and a personal law-enforcement mythology that turned Johnny T into a target before there was viable evidence.

Now, in light of Comey’s prosecution in the Eastern District of North Carolina, these records have gained new relevance. Is James Comey a “crooked cop” as President Trump has stated? Did Comey knowingly frame Johnny T in the Richard Ortiz murder to settle old scores? Or is there another explanation that lines up with the facts and can be supported by the records?

Trump’s DOJ is Protecting Comey: The Backstory

On Nov. 11, 1997, Richard Ortiz, a 29-year-old Yonkers petty criminal and known police informant with a RAP sheet a mile long, was found fatally stabbed under a bridge near The Mill Tavern on Lockwood Avenue. The murder should have been a local homicide investigation; instead, it became the buried fuse for a decades-long federal vendetta against Johnny T Tortora.

Judge Pirro had the first crack at Johnny T and passed. That matters. Back in 1998, when the Ortiz murder was still fresh, and the case should have been strongest, Westchester prosecutors did not move on John “Johnny T” Tortora. Judge Pirro saw the case was built on sand, and the word of Carmine Francomano was not enough to sell a used car, let alone carry a murder prosecution.

But when James Comey became U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York in 2001, Johnny T suddenly found himself picked up on roughly $1,000 worth of alleged “stolen goods in interstate commerce” and held in federal lockup while the government tried to reverse-engineer the Ortiz murder case around him.

Then came 9/11. The federal government had bigger fish to fry than old Yonkers grudges, and Johnny T was cut loose. But Comey’s obsession did not die; it waited.

More than a decade later, Comey became FBI Director in 2013, and the old machinery came back to life. Luthmann’s theory is that Comey’s FBI coordinated with local Yonkers law enforcement, including Detective John T. Geiss, to reopen the cold Ortiz murder file and pin it on Tortora.

The Bureau then spent untold taxpayer money dressing up a rotten case with raids, agents, theater, and mob-case window dressing, but when the smoke cleared, there was no “there” there.

To Luthmann, this was not justice. It was a Comey vanity project, a federal vendetta dressed up as law enforcement, and the public has every right to know how Comey operated, who helped him, who protected him, and whether the former FBI Director was acting like a crooked cop with a federal badge.

The FOIA case seeks records on Tortora, Geiss, Francomano, Saez, Ortiz, and the investigation and prosecution arising from the 1997 Ortiz murder; the amended complaint alleges DOJ failed to conduct an adequate search, failed to route the request properly, invoked privacy-based non-disclosure despite Tortora’s authorization, and failed to release segregable non-exempt material.

The murder charges eventually fell apart when push came to shove. What remained was obstruction, innuendo, and a federal machine that had already spent too much money and institutional credibility to admit the central accusation was rotten.

Now the Trump DOJ is in Fort Myers, being directed from the Beltway to defend the secrecy wall around the very documents that could expose Comey’s black hand in the caper.

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Trump’s DOJ is Protecting Comey: The Yonkers Beef Theory

The Ortiz murder was a local homicide before it became a federal theater production. According to Luthmann’s reporting and Tortora’s account, Jeanine Pirro’s office passed on charging Tortora back in the late 1990s because the case was too weak and the key storyteller, Carmine Francomano, was a known cooperating criminal with every reason to shift blame and save himself.

That point is central. If the local district attorney looked at the case near the time of the murder and did not trust Francomano enough to move on Tortora, what changed years later? Luthmann’s answer is that evidence did not change. Power did.

Comey’s connection to Yonkers is not some incidental footnote. He came out of that world. Yonkers history also places the Comey family name deep inside the city’s police command structure through his grandfather, William J. Comey, listed by Yonkers as a police leader whose career rose to the department’s top ranks. That does not prove misconduct. It proves why the file matters.

Luthmann’s theory is that Comey carried old institutional loyalties, cultural resentments, and law-enforcement grudges into the federal system, where he had the power to turn an old local beef into a federal prosecution. Tortora was exactly the kind of Italian-American street figure Comey and his crowd loved to hate: known, liked, connected, and not easily cowed.

That is why the documents matter. Luthmann is not merely looking for a file. He is looking for the decision tree. Who revived the Ortiz murder theory? Who vouched for Francomano? Who pushed the FBI? Who approved the search strategy? Who tolerated the lack of corroboration? Who decided that a dead cold case could be repackaged into a federal mob drama?

Trump’s DOJ is Protecting Comey: When The Murder Case Collapsed

The federal government’s story was supposed to be simple: Johnny T Tortora was the mastermind behind the Ortiz murder, and the FBI had finally cracked a cold case. But Luthmann’s theory is that the whole thing was a Comey-era frame-job from jump, built around weak witnesses, cooperating criminals, and a narrative that could not survive real pressure.

When it came time to prove the murder case, the government did not deliver the cinematic conviction it had sold to the public. The murder charges did not hold. The feds pivoted to obstruction and sentencing smoke, using the shadow of the Ortiz murder to poison the atmosphere around Tortora without proving the central accusation.

That is the old federal trick. If they cannot convict you of the monster story, they still use the monster story to define you. If they cannot prove the murder, they imply it. If the RAT testimony buckles, they call it relevant background. If the target survives the main charge, they drag him through pretrial detention, raids, financial ruin, and public disgrace until the process itself becomes the punishment.

Luthmann says that is precisely what happened to Tortora.

This is why the Trump DOJ’s conduct now looks so ugly. The case is no longer about whether the old prosecution can be saved. It is about whether the public can see how it was built.

If the documents show clean work, release them. If the documents show a lawful investigation, produce the Vaughn index and defend the exemptions.

But refusing even to give a meaningful accounting screams institutional panic and the Deep State’s black hand.

Trump’s DOJ is Protecting Comey: Protection Others Never Get

The central question is savage and simple: why is the Trump Department of Justice protecting James Comey while Comey is under federal indictment? Any ordinary defendant under the federal hammer would get no such cushion. The government would not hide helpful records in another case. It would not politely shield potentially damaging institutional history. It would not build procedural walls around documents that might show bias, vendetta, or abuse of office. It would squeeze, search, leak, posture, indict, and then tell the judge the defendant had no right to complain because federal prosecutors act in good faith.

Comey is different. The same Justice Department that has put him in the dock in North Carolina is, in Fort Myers, defending the bureaucratic machinery that keeps the Ortiz/Tortora records out of public view.

Luthmann’s conclusion is that this is not a contradiction. It is exposure. The Trump DOJ may have changed the sign on the door, but the permanent bureaucracy still knows how to protect one of its own. The Deep State does not need to win every public fight. It only needs to control the files, slow the search, narrow the request, invoke privacy, and make the truth expensive enough that most people quit.

Luthmann is not quitting. His view is that the Comey indictment makes the FOIA fight more urgent, not less.

If Comey is now a federal criminal defendant, the public interest in his prior exercises of federal power skyrockets. The Ortiz file may show whether Comey’s conduct in federal office was public service or personal vendetta wearing a badge.

Trump’s DOJ is Protecting Comey: The Case Management Report Shows The Wall

The newly filed Case Management Report in Luthmann v. United States Department of Justice lays out the battlefield. Luthmann seeks records concerning Tortora, Detective John T. Geiss, Carmine Francomano, Abdill Saez, Richard Ortiz, and the investigation and prosecution arising from Ortiz’s 1997 murder in Yonkers.

Luthmann says DOJ failed to conduct a search reasonably calculated to locate responsive records, failed to process or route the request properly inside the Department, improperly invoked privacy-based nonconfirmation despite Tortora’s written authorization, and failed to release reasonably segregable non-exempt material.

Luthmann also points to outside law-enforcement correspondence from the NYPD identifying likely federal custodians, including the FBI’s New York Field Office and the United States Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York.

The government’s answer is classic institutional defense. DOJ says both components responded, both administrative decisions were affirmed, and the case should move under the standard FOIA summary-judgment track after the government provides declarations.

In plain English, the government wants the court to trust the agency first and let the same institution accused of hiding the ball explain where the ball is.

Luthmann sees it differently.

“The Government won’t even tell me how many pages of documents they have,” he says. “That’s how you know I’m right over the target, and they are circling the wagons. The decisions are coming directly from Deep State operators in Washington DC.”

That is the whole story in one sentence. The fight is not merely over production. It is over whether the bureaucracy gets to decide what the public is allowed to know about its own corruption.

The Litmus Test For Trump’s DOJ

This case is now a litmus test for the Trump administration. It is easy to campaign against weaponized justice. It is easy to denounce lawfare from a podium. It is easy to say the Deep State must be dismantled. The hard part comes when the government’s own lawyers walk into federal court and defend the same secrecy practices that protected the old machine.

That is what is happening in Fort Myers. Luthmann is asking for the documents. The DOJ is defending the maze. The case is before U.S. District Court Judge Sheri Polster Chappell and U.S. Magistrate Judge Kevin Huguelet.

“The absurdity of the case is that the DOJ’s Office of Information Policy is telling me that they have no information,” said Luthmann. “If that’s not Deep State bullshit, I don’t know what is. Like many Americans, I’m waiting for the day when the President takes control of all of this, cleans house, and gives the people back the government we deserve.”

If the Trump DOJ is serious, it should not be protecting Comey’s paper trail. It should be dragging the Ortiz/Tortora file into sunlight, forcing every component to search, requiring every office to account for what it has, and demanding real explanations for every withholding.

The FBI New York Field Office, SDNY, OIP, EOUSA, and Main Justice should not be allowed to play bureaucratic three-card monte with records that may expose a federal vendetta.

To Luthmann, the issue is not whether Comey is convicted in North Carolina. Comey is presumed innocent in that case unless proven guilty. The issue is whether federal power protected him for years while he allegedly used government office to settle old Yonkers scores.

The Ortiz records could be devastating because they may show the difference between justice and score-settling.

If those documents prove Luthmann wrong, release them. If they prove him right, then Fort Myers may become the place where Comey’s halo finally cracks, and the Deep State’s fingerprints show through the glass.

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LUTHMANN NOTE: Trump did not “lose control” with Kristen Welker. He lost patience with the lie. Americans are tired of being told that slow counts, late ballots, and magical political reversals are normal when they always seem to benefit the same machine. Spencer Pratt is the latest proof. He was in position, then California did what California does: count, wait, shift, explain, and scold. France can count paper ballots the same day. California cannot because California does not want to. The Trump DOJ must treat THE STEAL like Biden treated J6: investigate everyone, preserve everything, and prosecute the machine. This piece is “Trump Was Right: Treat The Steal Like J6,” first available on FLGulfNews.com.

By Richard Luthmann

Donald Trump did not walk out of his “Meet the Press” interview because he lost control. He walked out because the American people have lost patience with a media class that keeps insulting their eyes, their memory, and their intelligence.

Kristen Welker tried the same tired routine that the corporate press has performed since 2020. She demanded that Trump accept the official story, bow before the sacred ballot bureaucracy, and pretend that elections which take days to “finish” are somehow cleaner than elections counted in the open, on paper, by the close of business.

Trump refused. Good.

When Welker tried to launder California’s slow-motion ballot dump as normal procedure, Trump said the quiet part loud enough for the whole country to hear: “You’re either crooked, or you’re stupid.”

That was not an insult. That was a diagnosis.

The press keeps asking Americans not to believe what they are watching in real time. Spencer Pratt was ahead. Then the days passed. Then the mail ballots surged. Then the machine began to do what the machine always does in California. It bent the result back toward the preferred political outcome and told the rest of us to shut up and respect the process.

No. Respect is earned. Legitimacy is earned. Consent of the governed is earned. California has earned suspicion.

Trump Was Right: Spencer Pratt Is the Latest Proof

Spencer Pratt was not supposed to be a serious candidate for mayor of Los Angeles. That was the first mistake the political class made. They laughed because he came from reality television. They sneered because he did not carry the stale perfume of the Los Angeles donor circuit. They mocked him because he was not one of their credentialed, committee-approved, consultant-packaged municipal creatures.

But Pratt understood something the machine could not tolerate: Los Angeles is collapsing in front of its own citizens, and the people who broke it are asking for another contract.

That is why this race mattered. It was not merely Bass versus Pratt versus Raman. It was not merely a local race about potholes, homelessness, fires, crime, housing, and municipal rot. It was a referendum on whether a regular person, speaking with blunt outrage after watching his home and his city get wrecked, could crash the cartel’s party and force a real choice.

For several days after election night, the public saw Pratt sitting in second place, positioned to face Karen Bass in the runoff.

Then came the familiar California ritual. More ballots. More waiting. More explanations. More official voices telling everyone that this is simply how California does it. By Sunday, Nithya Raman had leapfrogged Pratt, and the political universe had magically repaired itself.

The runoff was no longer a machine Democrat against a disruptive outsider. It was a machine Democrat against an avowed left-wing progressive wrapped in the language of municipal compassion.

That is not democracy inspiring confidence. That is a crime scene asking for applause.

Trump Was Right: France Can Count. Why Can’t California?

Here is the question every American should ask: If France can count national elections with paper ballots, in person, by hand, and do it the same day, why can’t California count Los Angeles without turning the process into a weeklong political séance?

The answer is not competence. The answer is will.

The French use paper ballots. They vote in person. They show identification. They sign next to their names. Volunteers count ballots one by one. The paper controls. If there is a dispute, the paper is recounted manually. France banned mail-in voting decades ago because of fraud concerns. France did not decide that democracy required turning every election into a ballot-harvesting warehouse operation. France did not decide that public trust was less important than convenience theater.

California made the opposite choice. California built a system that cannot produce confidence because it was never designed to produce confidence. It was designed to produce flexibility. Flexibility is the enemy of clean elections. Flexibility lets ballots arrive late, narratives shift late, totals move late, and outcomes harden after the public has already seen the original signal.

That is why same-day, in-person voting with voter ID is the only serious answer. Not because Republicans need it. Not because Trump wants it. Because a republic cannot survive if half the country believes elections are being “finished” after the voters have already spoken.

The left knows this. They do not oppose voter ID because they think Americans are too helpless to identify themselves. Americans need ID to fly, bank, drive, buy alcohol, pick up prescriptions, enter office buildings, and function in daily life. The left opposes voter ID because clean rules limit dirty opportunities.

FLGulfNews.com

Trump Was Right: California Has Destroyed Consent

California has become a warning label for the rest of the republic. It is what happens when one-party rule, ballot laxity, media arrogance, municipal decay, and ideological extremism fuse into one smug machine.

If you are a productive, law-abiding, tax-paying person in California, this is the signal to sell and leave. Texas will take you. Florida will take you. Tennessee will take you. The Carolinas will take you. There are still places in this union where government remembers that citizens are sovereign and bureaucrats are employees.

That is the genius of federalism. Americans are not trapped inside failed states. They can vote with their feet. They can take their businesses, families, churches, schools, payrolls, habits, and ambitions to states that still believe civilization is worth defending.

But flight is only temporary treatment. It is not a cure. You can leave California, but if California-style elections become the national model, there will be nowhere left to run.

That is why the SAVE Act is not a side issue. It is central. Proof of citizenship, voter ID, clean rolls, same-day voting, and paper ballots are not extremist demands. They are the minimum conditions for national survival.

When votes are ignored, delayed, diluted, harvested, cured, discovered, and dropped into the count after the public has already seen the shape of the race, people stop believing in government. When people stop believing in government, the system no longer rests on consent. It rests on coercion. That is tyranny with a better logo.

Los Angeles is now offering voters a choice between a machine Democrat and an avowed socialist. That is not a runoff. That is a hostage note.

No, Los Angeles is not worth saving if Los Angeles keeps choosing the people and systems that destroyed it. Spencer Pratt may have been the last flare shot into the sky before the city disappears into its own ideological smog.

Treat The Steal Like Biden Treated J6

The main lesson is simple: Trump’s Department of Justice must treat THE STEAL the way Biden’s Department of Justice treated January 6.

No more hearings for television. No more polite letters. No more stern statements from Republican lawyers who secretly want to get invited back to Georgetown dinner parties. If Democrats insisted that January 6 was an existential threat to democracy, then stolen elections, ballot manipulation, and institutionalized election fraud are infinitely greater threats.

One day at the Capitol did not cancel the republic. But a ballot system that lets political machines manufacture outcomes after election night absolutely can.

Investigate everyone. Subpoena everyone. Preserve every ballot, every envelope, every signature record, every server log, every chain-of-custody document, every text message, every county communication, every campaign contact, every nonprofit ballot operation, every curing operation, and every late-count decision that changed the shape of this race.

If officials, operatives, lawyers, activists, vendors, or political fixers helped steal the Los Angeles mayoral primary from Spencer Pratt, then expose them, indict them, and perp walk them.

The Democrats made the rules. They criminalized political opposition. They called skepticism insurrection. They raided homes, destroyed reputations, bankrupted defendants, and built a national morality play around “democracy.” Fine. Apply the standard back to them.

If democracy is sacred, then ballot theft is sacrilege. If institutions matter, then election offices cannot operate like partisan laundromats. If the rule of law matters, then the law must finally reach the people who have treated elections as a counting-room hustle.

Trump was right in 2020. Trump is right now. California is not slow because it is careful. California is slow because slow gives the machine room to work. Spencer Pratt proves it.

“You’re either crooked, or you’re stupid” may be the most honest sentence ever spoken on “Meet the Press.” America has had enough of both.

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LUTHMANN NOTE: This case is not about excusing threats. It is about refusing to let the programmers escape the blast radius. Justin Christopher Moore is presumed innocent, and the government must prove every element. But America has eyes. For ten years, the anti-Trump media machine has sold hysteria as civic virtue and demonology as journalism. When unstable people are told every day that Trump is Hitler and democracy dies unless somebody stops him, some of them will believe the script. The defendant owns his alleged conduct. The media owns the climate it helped create. That is the story they do not want told. This piece is “Trump Death Threat Shocker,” first available on NYNewsPress.com.

By Frankie Pressman and Richard Luthmann

The Threat Was Real. The Bigger Question Is Who Lit The Fuse.

Federal authorities have arrested a 53-year-old Brooklyn man accused of sending grotesque death threats against President Donald J. Trump through the official White House website, but the criminal complaint raises a question far larger than one sick message from one troubled man.

Justin Christopher Moore allegedly told Trump he was “in the process” of planning his execution, vowed to shoot him at his next public speaking event, and promised a “bullet in the brain.” Prosecutors say he included his name, address, email, and phone number with each message, then admitted to Secret Service agents that he sent the threats.

This was neither anonymous cloak-and-dagger tradecraft nor a sophisticated assassination cell hiding behind encrypted channels. This was a man allegedly standing in front of his own Brooklyn residence, walking back and forth, telling agents he understood the threats were illegal, while also conceding he had not yet started the “planning process.”

That does not make the threat harmless. It makes it more alarming. The federal detention order found Moore’s release would pose a serious danger to the community, citing strong evidence, weak community ties, lack of stable employment, and exposure to a lengthy period of incarceration if convicted.

He is presumed innocent, but the alleged words are not ambiguous political hyperbole. They are ugly, direct, violent threats against a sitting President of the United States.

Yet the more disturbing issue is not merely that one mentally unstable person allegedly crossed the criminal line. The issue is whether America’s TDS-Deep State Media complex has built an emotional slaughterhouse where unstable people are fed daily panic, hatred, and apocalyptic fantasies until one of them decides he has a sacred duty to act.

Trump Death Threat Shocker: The Paper Trail Is Worse Than The Headlines

The case is not rumor, meme, or partisan telephone. It is now a federal criminal matter in the Eastern District of New York, docketed as United States v. Justin Christopher Moore, No. 1:26-mj-00106-VMS. The complaint was filed on May 26, 2026, before Chief Magistrate Judge Vera M. Scanlon. Moore is charged under 18 U.S.C. § 871, the federal statute covering threats against the President of the United States.

The sworn complaint was made by Rafael Mercedes, a Special Agent with the United States Secret Service assigned to the Joint Terrorism Task Force in the Secret Service’s New York Office. That assignment matters. This was not treated as a customer-service glitch, a crank email, or a political rant tucked away in a folder. The government put a terrorism and violent-extremism investigator on the facts.

The docket shows Moore appeared for arraignment, initial appearance, and attorney appointment proceedings on May 26. AUSA Samuel Rackear appeared for the government.

The appearing federal defender did not present a bail application. Judge Scanlon entered an order of detention, issued a medical memo, gave Rule 5(f) warnings to the government, and set a preliminary hearing for June 9, 2026, at 11:00 a.m.

Federal Bureau of Prisons records now show Moore held at Brooklyn’s infamous Metropolitan Detention Center, the troubled federal jail long associated with violence, dysfunction, contraband, staffing problems, and complaints over dangerous conditions. That detail makes the case even darker: a man accused of threatening to kill President Trump, with the docket already noting a “medical memo,” has been moved from alleged TDS-fueled delusion into one of the federal system’s most notorious pressure cookers.

Trump Death Threat Shocker: The Complaint Reads Like A Symptom Of A Bigger Disease

According to the sworn complaint, the Secret Service began investigating a series of threatening statements Moore allegedly submitted through www.whitehouse.gov. The threats were not limited to Trump. The complaint says they included violence against the President and other political figures.

Moore allegedly submitted three messages through the White House “Contact Us” page on May 24. With each one, he allegedly submitted his name, address, email, and phone number. That detail is stunning. The alleged threat-maker did not merely want Trump to receive the message. He apparently wanted the government to know exactly who was sending it.

That is not evidence of sophistication. It is evidence of either rage, compulsion, delusion, suicidal bravado, political obsession, or some ugly cocktail of all four.

The first message allegedly said Moore was “in the process” of planning Trump’s execution and claimed Trump needed to be “taken out” over homelessness and reduced subsidies. Moore allegedly wrote that he had plans for representatives in the House and one senator, but Trump was the “prime target.”

The second message allegedly promised to kill Trump at his next public speaking engagement, to get a gun, and to put a bullet in his brain.

The third message allegedly thanked Trump for supporting the repeal of subsidies for people who need them, then threatened a bullet in the brain and a knife to the throat.

That is not a policy disagreement. That is political dehumanization arriving at its logical endpoint.

NYNewsPress.com

Trump Death Threat Shocker: The “Moral Rescue” Delusion Is The Dangerous Part

Moore’s alleged motive language matters because political violence rarely erupts in a vacuum. It usually wears a moral costume. The would-be actor convinces himself he is not a criminal, but a rescuer. He is not committing evil; he is preventing evil. He is not murdering a human being; he is stopping a monster.

That is the toxin that now floods American political media, especially when Donald Trump is the target. The message has been repeated for a decade in cable-news panels, prestige-press hysteria, late-night monologues, academic slogans, activist fundraising emails, bureaucratic leaks, and Deep State whisper campaigns: Trump is not an elected official to be opposed, defeated, criticized, mocked, or investigated within constitutional boundaries.

For the TDS Media Machine, Trump is the end of democracy, the new Hitler, the fascist invader, the existential emergency, the human extinction event in a red tie.

Then the same people act shocked when the most fragile minds in the country receive that message literally.

If you tell unstable people every day that a political figure is Hitler, that democracy dies unless he is stopped, that normal legal process is too slow, that institutions are collapsing, that courts are illegitimate when they rule the wrong way, and that millions will suffer unless somebody does something, you are not merely offering commentary. You are building a permission structure.

The threat-maker still owns the threat. The criminal defendant still answers for his own alleged conduct. But the programmers should not be allowed to hide behind studio lights and mastheads after years of psychological napalm.

Trump Death Threat Shocker: The Street Encounter Shows The Red Warning Light

The complaint says agents located Moore outside his Brooklyn residence on May 25, the day after the alleged White House messages. He was walking back and forth outside his apartment building when agents approached and asked if they could speak with him.

He was not placed under arrest immediately. During the encounter, an agent allegedly told him they were there because he made threats online and asked whether he had sent them. Moore allegedly replied, in substance, “Yeah, I did.” He allegedly added that he had also made threats against Vice President JD Vance and “about 18 reps,” meaning representatives. When asked whether he understood it was illegal to make such threats, Moore allegedly said he did.

When asked whether he had planned out his threat to kill the President, Moore allegedly replied that he had not started the planning process yet.

That detail should make every serious person stop playing cable-news games. This was not merely a vulgar social-media tantrum. It was an alleged threat against the President, the Vice President, and members of Congress, made through an official federal website, followed by an alleged admission to federal agents.

At the same time, the alleged conduct had the ragged quality of a man unraveling in public. The court docket’s medical memo reference signals what the system itself saw: this was a dangerous case with a medical dimension. That does not excuse the alleged threats. It explains why propaganda aimed at unstable minds is so reckless.

Trump Death Threat Shocker: Mental Illness Does Not Erase Accountability, But It Explains Vulnerability

Public reports say Moore has a history of bipolar disorder and schizophrenia. Serious mental illness can make a person more vulnerable to obsession, fixation, paranoia, grandiosity, perceived missions, and warped interpretations of political messaging. It can turn media narratives into commands. It can convert political theater into personal delusion.

That is why responsible societies do not spray gasoline into crowded rooms and then blame only the match.

This is the missing conversation. The same corporate media class that claims disinformation kills suddenly goes mute when its own anti-Trump mythology becomes the oxygen supply for unstable political rage. They lecture America about “stochastic terrorism” when a conservative meme offends them, but when years of Trump-is-Hitler programming are followed by real threats, assassination attempts, and deranged plots, they retreat into sterile language about “isolated incidents.”

That dodge is no longer credible.

A mentally ill man may be legally responsible for what he allegedly wrote. Federal agents and prosecutors were right to move quickly. But the culture that helps manufacture the emotional state in which killing Trump becomes thinkable must also be examined.

Moore allegedly used the White House website, gave his own identifying information, and admitted what he did. That is not a mastermind. That is a flashing red warning light.

Trump Death Threat Shocker: Judge Scanlon’s Detention Order Was Not Ambiguous

The detention order entered by Judge Scanlon did not treat Moore as harmless. It found, by clear and convincing evidence, that no condition or combination of release conditions would reasonably assure the safety of any other person and the community.

The form checked several reasons for detention: the weight of evidence against Moore was strong; he faced a lengthy period of incarceration if convicted; he lacked significant family or other community ties; he lacked stable employment; and his release posed serious danger to any person or the community.

The handwritten notation also reflected that the defendant reserved the right to make a bail application later, if appropriate. In plain English, the court did not close the courthouse door, but it did lock the jail door for now.

Balance matters. Conservatives should not pretend due process is optional just because the target was Trump. Moore is presumed innocent. The government must prove its case. The defense is entitled to discovery, Brady material, Giglio impeachment information, and a meaningful opportunity to challenge the prosecution’s evidence. Judge Scanlon’s Rule 5(f) order confirmed those government obligations.

But due process does not require stupidity. When a defendant is accused of repeatedly threatening to murder the sitting President, allegedly admitting the threats, allegedly naming other political figures, and allegedly giving a timeline of “coming weeks,” detention is not tyranny. It is civilization defending itself while the legal process runs.

The bigger question is why the TDS Media Machine masterminds are not in the jail cells next to him.

Trump Death Threat Shocker: The TDS Machine Has Normalized Political Dehumanization

Trump Derangement Syndrome is not just a punchline anymore. It is an operating system. It trains people to interpret every Trump policy as mass murder, every rally as a fascist revival, every judicial appointment as the death of liberty, every deportation order as genocide, every spending cut as an execution order, and every supporter as an accomplice.

Under that programming, compromise becomes cowardice. Elections become illegitimate unless they produce the approved result. Courts become corrupt unless they injure Trump. Prosecutors become heroes when they indict him and villains when they charge his enemies.

The public is not invited to reason. It is ordered to panic.

That is how democratic politics becomes a fever ward. The press used to understand the difference between criticism and demonology. Not anymore. The Deep State-media complex has spent years erasing that line because Trump is useful to them as a monster. He drives ratings, donations, clicks, institutional self-importance, and bureaucratic resistance. The permanent political class needed a villain large enough to justify its own excesses, and Trump became the all-purpose devil.

But when fragile people absorb that script, they do not always respond with subscriptions, votes, or angry posts. Some respond with threats. Some travel. Some buy weapons. Some try to become the hero in the movie they have been shown every night.

The Media Cannot Wash Its Hands Like Pilate.

There is a grotesque ritual after every anti-Trump threat. The same outlets that framed Trump as an existential menace suddenly discover nuance. They warn against “politicizing” the matter. They remind readers that mental illness is complicated. They speak softly about motive. They scrub their own fingerprints from the emotional crime scene.

But if the roles were reversed, the coverage would be nuclear. If a right-wing schizophrenic allegedly threatened a Democrat president after consuming years of conservative media calling him a tyrant, the entire political right would be placed on trial before sunset. Every commentator, meme page, podcast, local activist, and elected Republican would be accused of creating a climate of violence.

That double standard is the tell. The issue is not whether Democrats and media figures are criminally liable for Moore’s alleged threats. They are not, based on what is publicly reported. The issue is moral, cultural, and political responsibility.

Speech is protected. Opinion is protected. Harsh criticism is protected. But protected speech can still be reckless, dishonest, manipulative, and socially poisonous. And in some places, protected speech can be criminalized for precisely these reasons. Ask Paul Boyne in Connecticut.

The First Amendment protects a media company’s right to scream “fascism” for ten years, but it does not require the rest of us to pretend there are no consequences when unstable people begin acting like they believe it.

The criminal complaint is about Moore. The political indictment is about the machine that keeps feeding fragile citizens an apocalypse narrative and then claims innocence when one of them snaps.

The Real Story Is The Manufactured Simulation

This is where journalism must perform its real function: unconcealment. Not the lazy fact-checking game where regime-friendly outlets pretend every isolated fact exists in a vacuum, but the deeper work of revealing the structure underneath the event.

The Moore case, if the allegations are proven, is not merely a criminal docket in Brooklyn federal court. It is a glimpse into the machinery of political simulation. A man reportedly suffering from serious mental-health issues allegedly heard the national script, processed it through his broken mind, and decided the President needed to be “taken care of.”

The script did not write itself. It was produced, repeated, monetized, and laundered through respectable institutions.

The American people are allowed to ask whether the TDS-Deep State Media complex is programming mentally ill and emotionally unstable people. They are allowed to ask whether endless “Trump is Hitler” messaging has consequences. They are allowed to ask why threats against Trump are always individualized while threats by Trump supporters are collectivized into national morality plays.

They are allowed to demand that the press apply one standard, not two.

And they are allowed to insist that political opposition remain political, not homicidal.

Moore deserves due process. Trump deserves protection. The country deserves honesty. If the press keeps programming panic, some broken people will keep mistaking panic for orders.

That is not democracy. That is psychological warfare with a body count waiting at the end of the script.

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LUTHMANN NOTE: Frank Parlato gets to the bone of the matter: the pardon is not some royal bauble, and it is not a sentimental Hallmark card from the Oval Office. It is a constitutional emergency brake placed there by men who understood human nature, government ambition, and prosecutorial cruelty. Trump saw what the regime refuses to admit. The federal justice system does not merely punish the guilty. It grinds people into pleas, rewards liars, stacks charges, breaks families, and calls the wreckage justice. In that world, a pardon is not mercy. A pardon is the republic remembering its soul. This piece is “Trump’s Pardon Revolution,” first available at FrankReport.com.

By Frank Parlato

What Trump Did That No One Else Had Done

Donald Trump did something no modern president had done.

He treated clemency as a constitutional answer to institutional abuse. Other presidents used the pardon quietly and defensively, usually at the end of a term and with little explanation. Trump used it openly, early, and without apology. He said the pardon existed to correct the weaponization of the law.

He appointed Alice Johnson as Pardon Czar. He created a Weaponization Working Group inside the Justice Department. He defended the pardon openly, at rallies and on the record. He argued that the federal justice system had become too powerful to correct its own abuses, and that the Constitution gave the president a tool to correct what the rest of the system would not.

Trump’s innovation was that he did not present clemency as an exception but defended the pardon as necessary to the preservation of justice.

Trump’s Pardon Revolution: Alice Johnson and the Visible Argument

He commuted the sentence of Alice Marie Johnson in 2018 after she had served 21 years of a life sentence for a first-time, nonviolent drug offense. He issued the full pardon in 2020.

In 2025, he made her Pardon Czar.

He looked at her case the way ordinary people look at suffering. He saw something wrong and stopped it.

He opened the prison door and let her walk back into the world.

Alice Johnson walked out of prison and into a speaking role at the Republican National Convention. She walked into a job advising the White House on clemency.

A grandmother. A woman. A human being who had been given back her life while there was still life left to live.

Every president before Trump had treated clemency as a political liability. Trump treated it as an asset.

He looked at the pardon and saw a way to interrupt suffering. A way to return a mother, a grandfather, or a forgotten prisoner to the ordinary world where people laugh, eat dinner, and hold children again.

When Trump brought Alice Johnson on stage, he brought her before the nation so the people could look directly at what the law had done to a living woman.

Birthdays gone.

Children grew up without her.

Ordinary afternoons gone.

And when she stood there smiling and speaking before the country, something became impossible to ignore: the system had almost buried a human being forever and called it justice.

The Constitution and the Framers Saw This Coming

Trump understood that the federal criminal justice system had become a tool for ambition and retribution.

The system looks legitimate. There are grand juries, indictments, hearings, trials, sentencing guidelines, and appeals. The public sees all of it and assumes the outcome must be justice.

Yet Trump’s critics still treat the pardon as though there is something improper about using it.

The Framers did not share that idea. They placed it in the Constitution. Article II, Section 2: The president “shall have Power to grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offences against the United States.”

Hamilton wrote in Federalist 74 that without an “easy access to exceptions in favor of unfortunate guilt, justice would wear a countenance too sanguinary and cruel.”

Hamilton was saying that without a way to correct unjust or excessive punishment, the system that calls itself justice becomes cruel.

He was describing the system we have now, 238 years later.

When Trump pardoned Michael Flynn, the official White House statement called the prosecution “an outrageous abuse of power” and “the relentless, partisan pursuit of an innocent man.”

Years later, the lawyer for Changpeng Zhao, another Trump pardon recipient, told the Wall Street Journal that his client had been “pardoned for justice.” Not mercy, justice.

There are people sitting in prison cells who write letters year after year to strangers in Washington, hoping somebody will finally read their names with an open heart.

Too often, the letters disappear into offices where nobody wishes to risk criticism by helping them.

Trump said the doors might open.

Eugene Debs sat in federal prison for a speech against the First World War. Woodrow Wilson would not let him out. Warren Harding pardoned him. Debs walked out and was received by the country as the hero he was. The prosecution had been the injustice. The pardon was justice.

Trump’s Pardon Revolution: Plea Coercion and the 97 Percent

Trump understood that the Department of Justice had become what the Framers warned us of.

The Department of Justice secures convictions through plea coercion in 97% of federal cases. It stacks charges to threaten decades in prison, so the defendant will accept seven years rather than risk 30.

Seven years if he pleads. Thirty if he fights and loses at trial.

Maybe he is guilty. Maybe he is not. But suddenly, fighting becomes something expensive, almost impossible to afford.

The defendant accepts the plea deal because the government has left him no intelligent way to risk the gamble of a trial.

The law calls this justice.

FrankReport.com

The Cooperator Problem

Prosecutors use cooperators who are incentivized to lie. They bargain with men facing charges. Tell us the story we need, and you walk away sooner. Maybe you walk away now.

So men speak. Some tell the truth. Some tell half of it. They learn fast that certain stories lighten sentences while others leave the prison door shut. The prosecutor rewards the right story, not the true one.

Cooperators are not a footnote in federal prosecution. They are the foundation. Roughly half of all federal cases rely on cooperator or informant testimony.

And here is the part the public rarely sees: the cooperator is often the real criminal in the case. He has done worse than the person he testifies against. He stole more, lied more, hurt more people. But he was offered the deal. He took it, and points the finger at someone higher profile, someone the prosecutor wants more than him.

The man with the worse record walks out lighter. The man he names goes to prison longer. The cooperator lies because the system rewards lying. He gives the prosecutor the story the prosecutor needs.

There is another phenomenon. Inside the federal prosecutor’s office, the proudest conviction is not the easy one.

Anyone can convict a clearly guilty defendant. The prized conviction is the difficult case, the one where the defense had a real argument, the one the office said could not be won. Former Ninth Circuit Chief Judge Alex Kozinski wrote in 2015 about this incentive structure inside federal prosecution. The career rewards the difficult conviction. The difficult conviction becomes the prized one. Sometimes that means convicting a man who never should have been prosecuted at all.

Trump’s Pardon Revolution: Pretrial Detention as a Plea Tool

Pretrial detention is another tool of injustice.

The detention centers are supposed to hold the presumed innocent. In practice, federal detention centers are harsher than the maximum-security prisons.

Prosecutors push for detention often not because of flight risk or danger to the community but to extract pleas or ensure victory at trial. The harshness takes the fight out of a defendant. It makes preparing for trial impossible. No quiet space to review discovery. No reliable access to counsel. No sleep. Lights on 24/7.

No clear head. Terrible food. The body breaks down before the case is heard.

Prosecutors also use asset forfeiture to bankrupt defendants before trial so they cannot afford defense. Asset forfeiture allows the government to seize a defendant’s money, home, business, and bank accounts at the moment of indictment, before any conviction, based on the prosecutor’s allegation alone. The defendant is left unable to hire counsel of his choice and forced to rely on whatever the court will give him, which is exactly the outcome the prosecutor wanted.

Whatever is not seized disappears fast into legal bills. The business dies in the meantime. The defendant loses his job and can’t find work.

The children hear whispers at school. Friends disappear. The family begins selling things.

The Trial Penalty and Stacked Charges

Then there is the penalty for just going to trial.

Prosecutors stack charges. They take a single underlying act and break it apart into as many separate federal counts as the statute book allows, so that one alleged crime becomes five or ten or twenty charges, each carrying its own potential sentence, multiplying the defendant’s exposure and pressuring him to plead guilty to one count rather than risk being convicted on all of them at trial.

One allegedly fraudulent email can be charged as wire fraud, mail fraud, conspiracy, money laundering, money laundering conspiracy, monetary transactions in criminal proceeds, bank fraud, false statements to a bank, aggravated identity theft, and obstruction.

An innocent defendant who takes it to trial has to run the table. If he is acquitted on nine counts and convicted on one, something juries often do as a compromise verdict, the court punishes him in effect for the nine.

The judge can still consider acquitted conduct under § 3553(a) in sentencing. The defendant loses the acceptance-of-responsibility reduction.

Run the table or take the plea. That is the choice the system gives him.

Trump’s Pardon Revolution: The Captured Jury

The judicial coopting of the jury is another problem.

The Framers expected the jury to acquit when prosecutions were unjust. They expected jurors to use their nullification power as a check on government overreach.

Once the jury box held something wild and stubborn in it. Twelve ordinary citizens could stand between the government and the accused and say:

No farther.

Not this time.

Not in our name.

Now jurors enter the courtroom and are told their duty is obedience. Take the law exactly as given.

Jurors who admit an awareness of nullification are dismissed. Jurors who hesitate to convict are pressured by deliberation dynamics.

And if the jurors still hesitate, the judge calls them out and sternly urges them to keep trying for agreement, because the system dislikes a hung jury.

The Hung Jury Was the Citizen’s Veto

But the hung jury is the system working, not failing.

The Framers required jury unanimity on purpose. If twelve citizens cannot agree, the government has not made its case. The hung jury is the check the Framers wanted.

The Allen charge, sometimes called the dynamite charge, is the instruction a federal judge gives a deadlocked jury, urging the holdouts to reconsider their position in light of the majority view. It destroys the hung jury. When the jury reports it cannot agree, the judge sends them back with a stern instruction urging the minority to reconsider in light of the majority.

The dissenters, usually the holdouts for acquittal, capitulate.

The constitutional protection of a hung jury becomes a procedural inconvenience the judge maneuvers around.

The Framers wanted prosecutions to fail when the evidence did not compel agreement.

Most human beings do not enjoy standing alone against a room full of certainty. When the judge adds pressure, the federal jury becomes an intimidation chamber.

Twelve citizens are pulled out of their lives, sat in a windowless room, told they cannot leave until they reach unanimity, and presented with the prosecutor’s narrative for weeks while the defense fights to introduce evidence the judge has excluded.

Sustained.

Denied.

The verdict that emerges is not the community’s conscience.

Trump’s Pardon Revolution: The Number That Ends the Argument

The DOJ counts on it.

Ninety-seven percent of federal defendants plead guilty. Of the few who go to trial, the government wins most of the time.

In fiscal year 2022, according to federal court data, the federal government prosecuted 66,068 defendants. 290 walked out with an acquittal. 0.44 percent. The federal government convicted 227 out of every 228 defendants it chose to punish. The conviction rate is 99.56 percent.

Either federal prosecutors are the most accurate human beings who have ever lived, or the system has been engineered to produce conviction regardless of guilt.

No legitimate system of justice produces those numbers. Almost everybody pleads. Almost everybody who fights loses.

A republic built on liberty was never supposed to produce conviction rates that move with the certainty of factory output.

The Stacked Deck

Human institutions fail. Prosecutors are ambitious. They are political. They make mistakes and follow incentives like every other bureaucracy.

No human institution is right 99.6 percent of the time about something as complicated and tragic as human guilt.

Not schools.

Not churches.

Not families.

Not governments.

The federal prosecutor walks into court knowing the court favors the government. He knows the judge will usually defer to him on evidence and on what the jury is allowed to hear.

The defendant’s money is gone. The house may be gone soon.

The defendant no longer sleeps properly. He no longer laughs naturally. He sits in court tired down into his bones.

The prosecutor knows this.

He charges aggressively because the cost is zero, and overcharging leverages pleas. He uses cooperators he knows are lying because he knows the judge will limit the defense’s efforts to impeach them.

He knows the jury has been instructed in a way that funnels them toward a verdict of conviction. He knows the appellate court will affirm on “harmless-error” grounds.

Trump’s Pardon Revolution: The System Needs More Pardons, Not Fewer

Trump was the first modern president to see the modern system for what it is.

This is a system that requires more pardons, not fewer.

The federal prisons hold tens of thousands of people convicted under laws stretched past their meaning, pleas taken under pressure, and juries pushed toward conviction.

Some of them are guilty of something. Most are guilty of less than what they were convicted of. A significant number are guilty of nothing.

But there are always voices insisting that punishment must continue longer, that forgiveness is dangerous, that somebody has not suffered enough.

They are wrong.

The slogan should be “when in doubt, pardon.” Whenever the question is wrongful conviction, the answer is pardon.

Whenever the question is a prosecution that should never have been brought, pardon.

Whenever the question is a sentence that exceeds the offense, pardon. Whenever the question is a statute applied beyond its intended scope, pardon.

Whenever the question is a defendant broken by the system before trial, pardon.

The Pardon Is the Constitution Correcting Itself

The pardon was written into the Constitution because the founders understood that governments make injustices, too.

The pardon is justice. The pardon is not outside the law. It is the law correcting itself. The last human interruption placed inside the system by men who knew the criminal justice system alone could never be trusted completely with liberty.

The Framers did not design the pardon because they expected perfection from the system. They designed it because they expected imperfection from every part of it.

The pardon is the last great instrument of correction in a federal criminal system that has exhausted every other corrective remedy.

The pardon is the republic correcting its own “justice” system before the system crushes one life too many.

Justice is the release of those whom a system has wrongly imprisoned.

Mercy says: You did wrong, but enough suffering has already been carried.

Justice says: You should never have been trapped this way to begin with.

Yet people speak of the rule of law as though law means only prosecutors, prisons, and convictions.

But the Constitution placed the pardon beside all those things.

Trump understood that the pardon is not an exception to the rule of law. The pardon is the rule of law. And will always be the law when justice is understood.

Trump understood that justice exists not to protect institutions but to protect people.

The fool keeps calling a pardon mercy. The Framers knew better.

So did Trump when he brought Alice Johnson on stage and told the country to look at what justice looks like when one person, accountable only to the people, stands up and corrects the injustices the rest of the system got wrong.

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LUTHMANN NOTE: Greg Maresca hits the nerve that polite America avoids. Memorial Day is not a sale, a picnic, or a politician’s photo-op. It is a ledger. The names carved into stone paid one debt in full. Washington, meanwhile, keeps running up another and smiling for the cameras while the bill gets mailed to children who never had a vote. That is the obscenity. The fallen understood duty. They carried the mission. They did not pass the burden to the next guy. Our leaders should try that once. One debt built freedom. The other may bury it. This piece is “Debt Remembered and Debt Ignored,” also available on FLGulfNews.com.

By Greg Maresca

Memorial Day compels Americans to confront a word we avoid: debt. Not the financial kind that Congress pretends will magically resolve itself, but the older, heavier meaning — the kind carved into headstones at Arlington and cemeteries across the country. It is the debt paid in full by those who gave their lives, so the rest of us could live free.

No interest rate can measure it. No budget line can contain it. It is final, irrevocable, and sacred.

Every year, we pause, as we should, to acknowledge that liberty is no accident. Its purchase price is steep. Many stood a post, walked point, climbed into a cockpit, or sailed into hostile waters so that we could enjoy the ordinary luxuries of American life: arguing about politics, grilling in the backyard, complaining about work, raising families in relative peace. The fallen paid the ultimate debt, while the rest of us live on the dividends of their courage.

There remains another debt that all Americans must face, one far less noble and far more self‑inflicted: the national debt that at $39 trillion is growing faster than the economy and its current path is unsustainable with interest payments amounting to $1 trillion a year – a figure most cannot comprehend.

Unlike the solemn debt honored on Memorial Day, this one grows not from sacrifice but from avoidance, avarice, and unaccountability. It is the bill we keep pushing onto future generations because those elected lack the discipline and forbearance to make the difficult choices.

The contrast is stark.

On one side are the young Americans who never hesitated when their country asked for everything. On the other, a political culture that bemoans over the smallest act of fiscal restraint. The fallen gave their lives, while Washington can’t forego a spending increase.

Memorial Day reminds us that debts must be paid.

The laws of economics will not suspend themselves out of patriotic courtesy. We borrow to fund today’s comforts while expecting tomorrow’s citizens, many of whom are not yet born, to pay the bill.

Imagine explaining this to a Marine who never made it home from Fallujah or a soldier who fell in the Korengal Valley. They understood duty in its rawest form. They lived by the credo that you don’t hand your problems over to the next guy. You handle them. You carry your weight. You complete the mission.

The contrast is telling, and that is the point.

Memorial Day should not be reduced to a political talking point; rather, it should remind us of the standards we once held. The men and women we honor this day lived with a clarity of purpose that our national budget sorely lacks. They understood that freedom requires responsibility. They knew that choices have consequences. They accepted that service is putting the country’s needs ahead of one’s personal initiatives.

If we truly want to honor their memory, we can start by adopting even a fraction of that discipline. We can demand leaders who treat the national debt as a real threat, not a distant abstraction. We can stop pretending that borrowing without limit is a harmless national pastime. And we can remember that the freedoms secured by the fallen are weakened when the nation they died for is weighed down by obligations it cannot meet.

The debt paid by America’s fallen is unpayable, but it is not unteachable. It is written in sacrifice, in folded flags, in names etched into stone.

One debt was paid in blood. The other is being charged to our children.

And if we forget the difference, then we have learned nothing from those who paid the first.

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LUTHMANN NOTE: Staten Island Advance Managing Editor Brian Laline accidentally proved my point. His own column admits Democrats are not offering voters a winning vision. They are hoping Trump stumbles and calling that strategy. That is political vulturism. Kamala Harris did not lose because Biden hid her. She lost because America finally saw her — and saw the party behind her. Inflation. Migrants. Censorship. Lawfare. Gender insanity. Elite contempt. Now Republicans are finally closing ranks against the Democrat machine, including racially engineered congressional lines dressed up as “voting rights.” The autopsy is done. Cause of death: reality. The voters wrote it in red. This piece is “Common Sense Democrats?” first available at NYNewsPress.com.

By Richard Luthmann

(STATEN ISLAND, NEW YORK) – Staten Island Advance Managing Editor Brian Laline almost wandered into the truth — then turned around before the crime scene tape. His latest “Letter From the Editor” attempts to re-frame the Democrat Party’s utter defeat in 2024, and hoodwink the masses into believing 2026 will be different because of “Common Sense Democrats.”

That’s his job. He’s a paid HACK for the Left.

Kamala Harris does not need an “autopsy report” to explain 2024. She needs a mirror, a priest, and maybe a Coast Guard escort to that Aruba beach Brian mentioned. The Democrat Party did not lose because Joe Biden kept Kamala in the shadows. It lost because when the curtain finally opened, America saw what was standing there: a cackling DEI hologram with no platform, no gravity, no connection to working people, and no answer for a country getting mugged by prices, migrants, criminals, prosecutors, censors, and bureaucrats.

Laline’s own language proves my point:

“The only reason Dems think they have a chance in November’s midterm elections, and in ’28, is because Donald J. Trump and his cronies keep shooting themselves in the foot.”

Dear old Brian concedes that Democrats are not offering America a winning affirmative vision, and in so doing, accidentally confesses the whole crime.

Democrats do not think they can win because voters love their agenda. They think they can win because Trump might trip over a landmine. That is not leadership. That is political vulturism. Laline’s own sentence proves the Democrat Party has become an opposition cult with no engine, no soul, and no message beyond: “Maybe Trump screws up.”

That is not a campaign. That is a hostage note written by consultants.

Brian also says Common Sense Democrats know what went wrong with Kamala. That is generous.

Common Sense Democrats are now an endangered species. You see one in the wild about as often as you see a clean subway platform, a balanced New York budget, or a left-wing judge who understands the First Amendment.

The Democrat Party did not just run a bad campaign. It runs a bad civilization. Kamala’s message was abortion, transgender rights, vibes, and word salad. Trump’s message was groceries, gas, borders, war, crime, and survival. That is not complicated. That is not “messaging.” That is the difference between a man talking to Americans at the dinner table and a faculty lounge scold reading from a Soros-funded clipboard.

Brian writes that Trump promised to cut grocery bills, end wars, and close the border “on Day One.” Yes. Because Trump understood the assignment. The American people did not want another lecture about “our democracy” from the people who weaponized courts, censored speech, opened borders, and treated parents like domestic terrorists. They wanted a wrecking ball.

They voted for one.

And here is where Brian goes soft: he says Democrats need to drift back to the middle.

Drift?

They need a forced extraction. The Democrat Party is not a little off course. It is in the political psych ward, eating paste, wearing a Che Guevara T-shirt, and explaining why men belong in women’s prisons. You cannot “drift” back from that. You need detox, exorcism, and maybe a RICO investigation.

The border was not an abstraction. The migrant crisis was not some MAGA fever dream. New Yorkers saw hotels, schools, shelters, budgets, services, and neighborhoods bent under the weight of an ideology that put illegal migrants ahead of citizens. Staten Island saw it. Queens saw it. Chicago saw it. Denver saw it. Florida watched the whole blue-state circus and said, “No thanks, we’re full.”

And Brian still wants to frame this like Trump simply told people what they wanted to hear.

No.

Trump told people what they were already saying when the cameras were off.

✅ He said the country was being invaded. It was.
✅ He said inflation was eating families alive. It was.
✅ He said the justice system was being weaponized. It was.
✅ He said the media was lying. It was.
✅ He said the establishment hated you. It does.

That is why Trump won. Not because Americans were tricked. Because Americans finally found a candidate willing to say the quiet part through a bullhorn.

Kamala, meanwhile, gave America the political equivalent of a corporate HR seminar after a building fire.

❌ “Reproductive justice.”
❌ “Gender-affirming care.”
❌ “Equity.”
❌ “Joy.”
❌ “Democracy.”

Lady, people could not afford eggs. And it’s not because we had a President who would not permit theocratic psychopaths nuclear weapons to destroy New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, and Washington, D.C., in one volley while the Chinese and the Russians laugh.

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Brian is right that abortion was not the “most extraordinary issue” for most voters. But let us say it harder: Democrats tried to make 2024 a national Planned Parenthood telethon while the country was living through a border crisis, a cost-of-living crisis, a crime crisis, and a legitimacy crisis. They thought suburban moms were worried about drag brunch jurisprudence. Suburban moms were worried about fentanyl, school bathrooms, grocery bills, and whether their daughters could walk through a parking lot without getting followed by some lunatic released under progressive bail reform.

That is the autopsy. Cause of death: reality.

Brian also says Democrats are making a mistake by running against Trump because Trump is not on the ballot in the midterms.

Wrong again.

Trump is always on the ballot because Trump is no longer just a candidate. Trump is the dividing line. Trump is the red flare over the battlefield. Trump is the name attached to the great sorting of American politics: citizens versus managers, workers versus parasites, parents versus commissars, speech versus censorship, borders versus chaos, and real life versus regime theater.

And now Republicans are finally acting like they understand the moment. They are closing ranks, hardening their lines, and refusing to let Democrats rig the battlefield with racially engineered congressional maps dressed up as “voting rights.” For years, Democrats used race as a cartographer’s weapon, carving districts into political plantations and then calling it justice. They sliced communities, packed voters, cracked opposition, and treated minority citizens like electoral inventory.

That game is ending.

Republicans are learning that power respects power. They are challenging the racial gerrymander racket, fighting the lawsuit machine, and pushing back against the Democrat theory that only left-wing map drawers get to define “fair representation.” The old GOP would apologize, retreat, and let the courts, NGOs, and racial-grievance industry redraw America in blue ink. The new GOP sees the scam clearly: Democrats scream “democracy” while drawing districts like political ransom notes.

Trump made that possible. He taught Republicans that surrender is not civility. It is malpractice.

So yes, Trump is on the ballot even when his name is not printed there. He is on the ballot in every redistricting fight, every border fight, every school-board fight, every courtroom ambush, every censorship scheme, and every battle over whether America belongs to its citizens or to the permanent managerial class. Democrats built their machine on racial arithmetic, institutional capture, and moral blackmail.

Democrats cannot stop running against Trump because Trump exposes them. He is the flashlight in the cockroach motel. And now, Republicans are finally bringing wire cutters.

What is the Democrats’ answer? They have Gavin Newsom slicking back his hair, rolling up his sleeves, and pretending to be the great moderate hope while California looks like a post-apocalyptic nonprofit grant proposal.

Gavin Newsom is not the cure for Kamala Harris. He is Kamala Harris with better lighting and more hair product.

The Democrats do not need better candidates. They need better instincts. They need to stop hating the people whose votes they want. They need to stop treating normal Americans as bigots, rubes, fascists, extremists, racists, transphobes, election deniers, conspiracy theorists, and threats to democracy every time those Americans ask why their cities are collapsing, and their kids are being used as lab rats in a gender-theory experiment.

Brian’s final point is that “buyer’s remorse” will not work. He is correct. But the reason matters.

Buyer’s remorse will not work because Americans remember exactly what they bought from Democrats last time: inflation, invasion, humiliation, censorship, lawfare, weakness abroad, chaos at home, and a vice president who sounded like she was assembled by a malfunctioning NPR algorithm.

So here is the real autopsy report, Kamala and Brian:

The Democratic Party died from elite contempt, open-border insanity, economic gaslighting, transgender extremism, censorship fever, lawfare addiction, and a fatal allergy to normal Americans.

No need for a blue-ribbon commission. No need for consultants. No need for another retreat in Martha’s Vineyard, where millionaires discuss “working families” over white wine.

The Common Sense Democrats already wrote the report. They wrote it in red.

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LUTHMANN NOTE: The Obamalisk is not an accident. It is a confession in granite. Obama sold America hope, healing, cool detachment, and civic uplift. Then his legacy machine built a dark tower in Chicago that looks like the Death Star joined Sauron’s Barad-dûr and hired a foundation board. The National Archives holds the real records, so this is not a traditional library. It is a monument, a stage, and a myth factory. That is the reveal. The brand said community. The building says hierarchy. The mask said democracy. The skyline says: look up. This piece is “Obama’s Dark Tower,” first available on FLGulf.news.

By Richard Luthmann

(CHICAGO, ILLINOIS) — The dark tower is never just a building. It is an announcement. In myth, fantasy, science fiction, and nightmare politics, the dark tower always means the same thing. It is power pulled upward and away from the people, distance made permanent, a command post dressed as destiny.

The ruler does not sit at a kitchen table or stand in the square. He rises above the landscape, sealed behind stone, glass, guards, and symbolism. Everyone else looks up.

That is the psychology of the Obama Presidential Center before anyone gets to the brochure.

The tower rises from Jackson Park like a psychological confession in granite. The Obama Foundation calls it a museum tower. Critics call it the “Obamalisk.”

In reality, it is a dark tower with a donor list. It does not look like hope or healing. It manifests as a fortress that survived the fall of a city, post-apocalyptic, looking like some regime headquarters left standing after everything around it burned, broken, or surrendered.

Obama’s Dark Tower: The Tell

We know the archetype before we ever reach Chicago.

First comes the ruined fantasy tower standing over urban wreckage. The fog-choked sci-fi compound squatting in a dead landscape. These are not random images. They are visual memory triggers from the same cultural basement where Sauron, Vader, prison planets, alien monoliths, and dystopian control grids live.

Then the real Obama tower appears, and the mind does the rest. The match is not exact, but it does not need to be. The resemblance is psychological, not architectural. The mood is the match, and the psychic weather is the same.

Command. Distance. Dread. Enclosure.

A hard vertical mass standing above the ordinary human scale. A place that says: enter on our terms, read the approved myth, and remember who gets the high ground. You do not need an architecture degree to see the shape and read the symbol.

Death Star. AT-AT. Scarif base. Barad-dûr. Borg Cube. Klingon prison. Blade Runner block. Arrival monolith. Doofenshmirtz Evil Inc.

The building already looks guilty, tracking the whole freak-show of comparisons, from Star Wars to Sauron to dystopian prison lore.

The Obama Foundation sells the 19-acre campus as civic uplift, opening to the public on June 19, 2026. The museum will require timed tickets. The campus will include gardens, public art, a Chicago Public Library branch, food, shops, plazas, and open space. That is the official language, the soft-focus pitch.

Hope. Hands. Community. Legacy.

But the tower does not speak that language. The tower has its own vocabulary, and it is colder, older, and more honest than the press kit.

Obama wanted altitude and permanence. He wanted a monument that made visitors look up. This is not porch politics or Main Street democracy. This is vertical power in stone.

The Obamalisk is not merely part of the Obama legacy. It is the Obama psychology made visible: polished, distant, curated, commanding, and always seen from below.

FLGulf.news

Obama’s Dark Tower: The Psychology

Barack Obama spent a career selling warmth through distance. He was cool, controlled, curated, and camera-ready. He spoke like a healer while governing like a manager, floating above conflict while the machine worked below.

His campaign symbol was hope. His operating style was command.

One of the oldest symbols in the political imagination, the dark tower sells just the opposite. It is a hierarchy poured into stone, separating ruler from ruled before anyone speaks. It puts power above the crowd, turning the ground below into a field of observation and making the ordinary person feel small, watched, and managed.

That is why the image repeats across myth, fantasy, science fiction, and dystopian politics. Sauron has Barad-dûr. Vader has the Death Star. Imperial forces have fortified bases. Dystopian regimes get concrete citadels. Mad Max worlds get bunkers. Cyberpunk worlds get sealed megastructures where the human being disappears under the machinery of control.

The dark tower always carries the same message: power has withdrawn from the street and climbed above the people. It is not a home or a commons. It is not a porch, a town hall, or a civic square. It is vertical separation. It tells the public, “You may enter on our terms.” It tells the ruler, “You are no longer among them.” That is the real psychology of the form. It is not built to mingle. It is built to dominate the horizon.

That is the psychological angle one sees in the Obamalisk.

The Obamalisk externalizes that split. It is the projection of the serene imperial self. It does not look angry. It looks certain. It does not scream. It stands there and expects obedience from the skyline. It is Obama’s political personality translated into mass, angle, height, and stone: polished on the surface, sealed at the core, and always above the crowd.

While the handlers sell a vision, the crowd sees the unconscious design clearly. The Obama Foundation said unity. The tower says command. The brochure said hope. The skyline says hierarchy.

The public looks at the Obamalisk and sees the thing beneath the brand.

Obama’s Dark Tower: The Projection

Why does the building say about the man it honors?

If Obama is America’s polished Sith Lord, the Obamalisk is honest architecture. If Obama is Sauron in a tailored suit, the tower finally gives him the right address. That does not mean Obama is a movie villain, in fact. It means the symbol fits the political psychology.

A Sith Lord does not need a messy palace. He needs a cold command node. Sauron does not need a welcoming civic center. He needs a tower that watches. The Obamalisk splits the difference. It is part museum, part monument, part concrete psyche.

The official explanation makes the gap worse. Obama Foundation Deputy Director Kim Patterson said the shape was meant to mimic “four hands coming together,” saying the building has few windows because sunlight is not friendly to artwork and artifacts inside.

That is the theater of aletheia. The institution says “hands,” while the public sees “fortress.” The brochure says “collective action,” while the eye sees “command structure.”

The hidden meaning moves into the open, showing the genre before the politics. The ruined tower, the fog base, point to one thing: a visual language of power after trust collapses.

That is why it seems post-apocalyptic, looking less built for visitors than survivors. It looks ready for the world where speech and discourse are afterthoughts, where power alone reigns.

Obama’s Dark Tower: Without The Library

Then comes the strangest part. The dark tower is not even a traditional presidential library.

The National Archives says the Barack Obama Presidential Library is the first fully digital presidential library, saying the Obama Presidential Center is privately operated and non-federal. NARA has no presence there. It keeps legal and physical custody of Obama’s records and artifacts. About 95 percent of Obama’s presidential records were born digital, with about 30 million pages of paper records.

So the so-called library is not the library in the old sense. The archive lives elsewhere. The tower performs the legacy. It is not mainly a records house. It is a monument, a stage, a brand temple, and a memory machine.

That makes the psychological reading stronger. A real library invites study. This tower invites interpretation. A real archive says, “Come inspect the record.” This center says, “Come experience the myth.”

The Obama Library sits on 19.3 acres in Jackson Park, was designed by Tod Williams and Billie Tsien, and includes four buildings. Its central feature is the 225-foot tower, the Obamalisk, lacking a traditional archive.

The verdict is simple. The Obamalisk is not a design failure. It is a reveal. It shows the thing under the Obama mask.

The mask said community; the tower says hierarchy. The mask said hope; the tower says permanence. The mask said democracy; the tower says: Look up.

It makes one wonder what they would be saying if Sauron had a press secretary.

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LUTHMANN NOTE: J. Gary DiLaura’s open letter is not polite cocktail-party commentary. It is a warning flare from an old-school FBI Special Agent, a Top Cop who got the job done, unlike James Comey, a Crooked Cop who destroyed the FBI. DiLaura believes the political class has played too cute with threats, incitement, and anti-Trump hysteria. The language is brutal. The allegations are sweeping. But the core issue is deadly serious: America cannot have one standard for Trump and another for everyone else. If public figures cross from speech into threats or incitement, investigate them. If they did not, clear them. But stop pretending the temperature is normal. It is not. The fuse is burning. Washington knows it. This piece is “Right Side Goes Nuclear,” first available on TheRightSideJGaryDiLaura.com.

By J. Gary DiLaura, FBI Special Agent (Ret.)

An Open Letter to the Forty-Seventh President of the United States

President Donald J. Trump,

Thank you for your kind words in the letter of March 6, 2026.

We MUST stop the inflammatory, illegal, treasonous, seditious, and very dangerous THREATENING “to kill, kidnap, or inflict bodily harm on the President of the United States… a federal felony under 18 U.S.C. § 871. This statute makes it illegal to “knowingly and willfully” make such threats, which is punishable by up to 5 years in prison and a fine…”

Although the Secret Service (SS) may be primary in investigative responsibility for threats, the FBI can and has assumed primary (when necessary) … well, it’s necessary. We did that several times, jointly with major investigations at their request and our requests, due to manpower issues when the crime involves these threats. But in this case, Treason will be a charge along with a few others … we do have the PC!

When we bring these violations together… mostly from elected officials, we now have a MAJOR CONSPIRACY of the worst kind…TREASON (you are correct). Mr. President, it is treason, and we MUST go after the scoundrels who are trying to get you killed. That is NO BULLSHIT … it is for real. And I know SS well enough to know that you are giving them a hard time. I have not spoken to anybody in SS. I’ve been retired too long to know any of them, so don’t blame them for leaking anything. I do know when things are getting very dangerous, and I do know when the shit is going to hit the fan. Mr. President, please do what the Secret Service wants you to do. You have a family to protect and a country that loves you … don’t fuck it up …. please. In Treason, there is no Statute of Limitations, and the penalty is DEATH. We need to eliminate some of these terrorists who are stoking the fire. You must take all the precautions that the Secret Service wants!

Many of these “elected officials” are ignorant and will probably claim that they are insane…because they are! That’s why we have laws, judges, and juries! Let the jury decide. On EVERY SINGLE elected official and celebrity request in the strongest terms… no bail…they must stay behind bars, with no communication with anyone except their attorney. They have proven their ability to incite, to riot, commit dangerous felony crimes to destroy by inciting to riot…up to and including destroying our Constitution and attempts to kill the President, and whose celebratory comments of the attempts, by many of them, must not be allowed!

If we go back to your first term, there is much more PC with all on video, so there is no denying it.

THIS IS IMPORTANT…the way we MUST proceed is to get all Magistrate Arrest warrants (like they did to you and others), along with Search warrants for incriminating evidence. That was a little trick we did, totally legal! If you don’t understand what the Information is … talk to Rudy or Joe and stay the course with the” Information procedure” of the Federal Rules and FIND A REPUBLICAN DISTRICT WITH A “FRIENDLY JUDGE”. Do not go to anything Democrap …stay away from the F—n DC Districts and the entire WFO, FBI Agents. Venue can be in ANY District you want…Treason covers ENTIRE AMERICA…take your pick!!!

THE ORDER OF THINGS…START WITH THAT PIECE OF HUMAN EXCREMENT, WANNABE COMEDIAN, WHO NEVER WILL BE FUNNY… JIMMY KIMMEL…WHO JUST STEPPED ON HIS PENIS AND BOY, THIS IS GOING TO HURT. YOU WENT TOO FAR ASSHOLE…AND I’M COMING AFTER YOU…WITH WORDS OF COURSE…!

NOBODY BUT NOBODY THREATENS, MY BUDDY ‘S WIFE …OUR FIRST LADY…AND GETS AWAY WITH IT…

YOU WILL WISH YOU WERE NEVER BORN…WE WISH YOU WERE NEVER BORN…AND BORN SO STUPID. WAS YOUR MOTHER A HEAVY DRINKER OR DOING DRUGS? IS THAT WHAT HAPPENED TO YOU? …YOU AND ALL YOUR WANNABE FRIENDS WHO ARE EQUALLY AS STUPID WILL SOON JOIN YOU.

MR. PRESIDENT start with Kimmel, Hakeem Jeffries, Schumer, and Maxine Waters. They are an easy hit, tons of threats, seditious, and the PC is overwhelming for ALL OF them (The Three Stooges + ONE). Do it now…don’t procrastinate!

Director Patel should NOT run these cases at Headquarters. He must pick a jurisdiction that “fits” the case, since it can be ANYPLACE with this violation! This case Agent …a case Agent who can walk and chew gum at the same time and who knows what an INFORMATION is, must get these most dangerous people off the street! NOW…that’s part of the “why Magistrate” warrants! They are a danger to the President and his wife…that’s a fact! USA Pirro can authorize prosecution, and Director Patel should be present and allow his case Agent to present the case. The FBI Director should not present the PC…unless he wants to testify. He should allow his Agent to present the case! Your case Agent probably doesn’t know what information is, so have somebody teach him. I ALWAYS obtained Magistrate warrants …in all of my thousands of cases (that’s because I was on the two biggest and most successful squads in NYO for six years…the Truck Hijacking Squad, John Gotti crew, about 300 cases per year with 67% recovery and hundreds of subjects and the Bank Robbery Squad at 500 BRS and 60% solution, 30 working Agents, per year! NYO was the largest FBI Office… LA was the 2nd largest FBI office in the world. We solved 60% of the 500 BRs +/-. That’s more cases than LA had to solve!

Columbia, S.C. was my first office. Thirty days of orientation and one murder solved, I transferred to Charleston. That was action…that we three created. In 13 months, we arrested 200 +/fugitive deserters, Escape Federal prisoners, and a few UFAP fugitives! We responded to a rally point; there was a Bank Robbery in Myrtle Beach. Armed with a shotgun, he was ID’d as the petty cash trustee for the prison with a car! The Senior gave everybody an assignment, but us…he was mad at us for something stupid, so he directed everybody to go South …the wrong direction. My partner was angry. I said, “Let them go… ” Check your watch …what time is it? He laughed and said, “They went the wrong way.” I said, “Get my map”. I did some simple math and figured out where he would be. I told my partner, “Put that blue light, seat belt, and siren on. I’m running wide open and going to catch him. We found him with two young adults, stopped at a deli. We called for help, the Boss ordered all Agents to respond Code 3, Agents need help. He came out of the store with a bag of groceries. The cavalry was coming; we put out that he was getting in the car, we were taking him down. Denis and I caught him with the loaded shotgun, two hostages who did not know they were to be hostages, if I didn’t pull him out of that car. We cuffed him as the help arrived! We got all $18,000 and his shotgun, and we were flying high.

In my first four days on the Truck Squad …during a search warrant on a Gotti drop, I chased a loaded straight truck, I thought was suspicious and gave chase …he bailed out, and we exchanged gunshots …my first of MANY shootings. There were the proceeds of three truck hijackings on that truck. I was credited with a $750,000 recovery …my first commendation from Director Hoover and a $200 check …first of many! Not bad for being on the Squad for four days. I was always lucky, I guess. READ my book “ACTION-FBI CRIME FIGHTING – THE WAY IT WAS” … AMAZON.

Next is selecting the venue. I don’t envy you, as I don’t know how to finagle getting the crimes Comey sent away and which ones he kept… all to cripple the FBI, which he succeeded in. He ruined the FBI…it was a crime-fighting agency, extremely successful. Now it’s nothing … no criminal cases! You MUST get a Republican, America-friendly… Magistrate who believes in the Constitution, good luck with that, who recognizes the danger our First Family faces. PICK THE “RIGHT DISTRICT” …THE Magistrate District to Arrest and Search!!! We are getting all our warrants, and it MUST be a Magistrate who is a patriot and honest. Do NOT …I REPEAT, do NOT use anything WDC…NOTHING … do not use ANY DOJ Lawyers …

Director Patel… you cannot run FBI cases from HQ as Comey did. He did what he did to keep his buddies out of jail! He stayed on top of which politician, friend was in trouble …i.e., Hillary… and sabotaged that case. You must allow the local offices to run their Districts! Want to know what to do…if you get stuck…do the opposite of Comey.

Here are a few reasons why…FBI HQ has no investigative staff; they use WFO. Many Agents from WFO are too close to politicians and are prime for leaks, and other bad things. Close down HQ and set up someplace away from WDC!

HQ has no Evidence Room (steel vault) where all the evidence is stored. Leaving the temptation to store evidence in their desks…i.e., ADIC Andy McCabe…for six months!! And I’ll bet he has done that before, and so have other agents. If real FBI Agents left evidence in their locked desk…fired!

The Right Side

Below are tidbits of some of the things I addressed…

In criminal law, an information is a formal, written accusation filed by a prosecutor that initiates criminal proceedings against a defendant without a grand jury indictment. It outlines the charges and factual basis for the alleged crime, acting as a crucial charging document to begin legal processes, often in felony or, commonly, misdemeanor cases.

Key details about the information:

• Prosecutor-Led: Unlike an indictment, which requires a grand jury, an information is presented directly by a prosecutor.

• Purpose: It is used to charge an individual with an offense and must be provided to the defendant at their first court appearance.

• Usage: It is often used for speedier charges, such as when a defendant waives their right to a grand jury indictment.

• Judicial Review: While it doesn’t need a grand jury vote, an information is presented to a judge or magistrate to establish that probable cause exists.

• My notes: the FBI case Agent presents all the evidence …hearsay is allowed

Mr. President, Acting AG Blanche, Director Patel…there is plenty of PC to arrest a list of assholes who directly and indirectly want the President killed … threatening to kill, kidnap, or inflict bodily harm on the President of the United States is a federal felony under 18 U.S.C. § 871.

This statute makes it illegal to “knowingly and willfully” make such threats, which is punishable by up to 5 years in prison and a fine. The Secret Service investigates these threats.

2385. Advocating the overthrow of the government

Whoever knowingly or willfully advocates, abets, advises, or teaches the duty, necessity, desirability, or propriety of overthrowing or destroying the government of the United States or the government of any State, Territory, District, or Possession thereof, or the government of any political subdivision therein, by force or violence, or by the assassination of any officer of any such government; or

Whoever, with intent to cause the overthrow or destruction of any such government, prints, publishes, edits, issues, circulates, sells, distributes, or publicly displays any written or printed matter advocating, advising, or teaching the duty, necessity, desirability, or propriety of overthrowing or destroying any government in the United States by force or violence, or attempts to do so; or

Whoever organizes or helps or attempts to organize any society, group, or assembly of persons who teach, advocate, or encourage the overthrow or destruction of any such government by force or violence; or becomes or is a member of, or affiliates with, any such society, group, or assembly of persons, knowing the purposes thereof—

Shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than twenty years, or both, and shall be ineligible for employment by the United States or any department or agency thereof, for the five years next following his conviction.

If two or more persons conspire to commit any offense named in this section, each shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than twenty years, or both, and shall be ineligible for employment by the United States or any department or agency thereof, for the five years next following his conviction.

As used in this section, the terms “organizes” and “organize”, with respect to any society, group, or assembly of persons, include the recruiting of new members, the forming of new units, and the regrouping or expansion of existing clubs, classes, and other units of such society, group, or assembly of persons

2381. Treason

Whoever, owing allegiance to the United States, levies war against them or adheres to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort within the United States or elsewhere, is guilty of treason and shall suffer death, or shall be imprisoned not less than five years and fined under this title but not less than $10,000; and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States.

2382. Misprision of treason

Whoever, owing allegiance to the United States and having knowledge of the commission of any treason against them, conceals and does not, as soon as may be, disclose and make known the same to the President or to some judge of the United States, or to the governor or to some judge or justice of a particular State, is guilty of misprision of treason and shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than seven years, or both.

2383. Rebellion or insurrection

Whoever incites, sets on foot, assists, or engages in any rebellion or insurrection against the authority of the United States or the laws thereof, or gives aid or comfort thereto, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both; and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States.

2384. Seditious conspiracy

If two or more persons in any State or Territory, or in any place subject to the jurisdiction of the United States, conspire to overthrow, put down, or to destroy by force the Government of the United States, or to levy war against them, or to oppose by force the authority thereof, or by force to prevent, hinder, or delay the execution of any law of the United States, or by force to seize, take, or possess any property of the United States contrary to the authority thereof, they shall each be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than twenty years, or both.

Director Patel, let the FBI District Offices run their investigations… if they are capable! If you are going to make the FBI better…you need crimes to investigate, and the Democraps are a great place to start! Swallow, Shitty, Brennan, and Crapper are so dumb… turn your Agents loose and get the arrests, convince the court to keep them locked up for months, no bail. If you want help…call me…ask Frank!

Thank you for your time,

J. GARY DI LAURA
FBI SPECIAL AGENT (Ret.)

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The Right Side

LUTHMANN NOTE: Brian Laline thinks he caught Trump slipping. He didn’t. He walked straight into the same trap the media has fallen into for ten years. Trump throws out a ridiculous image, and instead of calling it what it is—trolling—they escalate it into a psychological diagnosis. That’s not journalism. That’s compulsion. Laline’s column proves the point better than any critic could. He’s not analyzing Trump anymore. He’s reacting to him. And that’s the real story. The outrage machine doesn’t just run on Trump—it runs on people like Laline who can’t stop feeding it. This piece is “Don’t Get Fooled By Brian Laline.”

By Richard Luthmann

Don’t Get Fooled By Brian Laline: He is not sounding the alarm. He is performing one.

(STATEN ISLAND, NEW YORK) – I read Brian Laline’s latest piece. Then I read it again. I wanted to be fair. I wanted to see whether there was some hidden core of sober judgment beneath the panting hysteria. There wasn’t. What I found was a Staten Island editor so consumed by Trump that he now mistakes provocation for pathology and his own revulsion for diagnosis.

Laline says he thought he “finally had him on the ropes.”

That line gives the whole game away. He is not analyzing a president. He is rooting for a knockout. He is not reporting. He is shadowboxing with the man in his own head.

The target is Trump, but the obsession belongs to Laline. That is why the column reads less like a measured civic warning and more like a frustrated confession from a man enraged that his old anti-Trump talking points no longer move anyone.

The specific trigger was Trump’s AI-generated image depicting himself in a Christ-like healing scene. Trump did post it. It drew backlash. He later said he thought it showed him “as a doctor” and added, “I make people a lot better.” Reuters reported that clearly, and so did other outlets.

But Laline does not stop at calling the image ridiculous, vain, stupid, or offensive. Those are fair shots. He leaps straight to “serious mental decline,” “mental incapacity,” and “insanity.”

That is the tell. Laline is not reacting to one image. He is using one image as an excuse to revive a fantasy he has been nursing for years: that Trump is uniquely unwell, uniquely irrational, uniquely unfit, and that the rest of America is too blind to see it unless Brian Laline finally shouts loud enough. That is not clarity. That is compulsion.

Don’t Get Fooled By Brian Laline: Orwell got the larger point right. Laline proves it by example.

George Orwell identified Laline’s transparent rhetoric decades ago in “Two Minutes Hate,” from 1984, where a regime channels public feeling toward a designated enemy to keep the crowd obedient, emotional, and intellectually lazy.

Sound familiar?

Recently, Michael Smith’s “America’s Two Minutes Hate” described the specific pattern at play. The people who rushed online to announce some grand moral break with Trump over this image “got played,” and the outrage cycle looked less like moral seriousness than a ritualized emotional release.

Laline invites collective “Trump Derangement Syndrome,” elevating the President to the level of Emmanuel Goldstein in the Orwellian sense. On the core point, Smith is right, and Laline is Exhibit A. Laline’s column is not a reasoned critique of conduct. It is a public struggle session. It is a declaration that any normal person must now agree that Trump has “gone off the rails.” It is written to force assent, not invite thought.

Look at how Laline structures the piece. He stages a running dialogue with “Pat,” his reasonable Trump-supporting foil. He sprinkles in hostile subscriber emails. He invokes older Trump controversies. He escalates from blasphemy to civilization-ending threats to bleach to insanity.

This is not an argument by evidence. It is an argument by accumulation. He wants the reader emotionally spent by the end, so the conclusion feels inevitable. Trump must be nuts. Anyone who disagrees must be in denial.

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That is exactly why the Orwellian point matters. The outrage machine does not depend on every critic being wrong about every fact. It depends on critics like Laline taking every Trump provocation as proof of the same foregone diagnosis.

Trump trolls. Laline convulses. The media class nods along. Then they call it insight.

It is not insight. It is muscle memory, and when combined with TDS, it is 100% effective at collapsing the faculty of reason.

Don’t Get Fooled By Brian Laline: He wants to sound brave. What he really sounds like is trapped.

I am not here to defend the image. It was gaudy. It was juvenile. It was bait. Trump has made a career out of baiting people who cannot resist taking the hook. That much is obvious.

Personally, here is the picture I wish Trump would post, celebrating the American Pope (a “playful troll” would go much further, hitting the “Chicago” subject matter, and there’s plenty of it—BELIEVE ME!):

What I reject is Laline’s smug insistence that the only serious reading is his reading. That is cheap. That is lazy. And from a veteran editor, it is embarrassing.

Laline writes that this is “no longer a Democrat or Republican thing.” That line is laughable. The whole column is one long partisan therapy session masquerading as civic concern. He even tells readers that “any Democrat really watching knew Biden was in serious decline,” but then says Biden might have had dementia while Trump is flirting with “insanity.” That is not balanced. That is a man trying to launder one narrative through a token concession to another.

Here is what I think is actually going on. Laline cannot stand that Trump still controls attention. He cannot stand that every vulgar image, every troll post, every absurd flourish still sends the anti-Trump class into a frenzy while much of the country shrugs and moves on. So he keeps raising the stakes. Bad judgment becomes incapacity. Vanity becomes madness. Performance becomes pathology. It is the language of a columnist who has exhausted persuasion and now substitutes alarm.

That is why I say: don’t get fooled by Brian Laline. He wants readers to believe he is the adult in the room. He isn’t. He is the latest victim of the same Trump obsession that has warped elite commentary for a decade. He sees one stupid AI image and decides he has discovered the Rosetta Stone of presidential psychosis.

No. He has discovered only his own limits.

Trump knew people like Laline would react this way. Orwell told us they would react this way. I knew they would react this way. And then they did.

That is not proof that Trump is insane. It is proof that Brian Laline is still playing a part in a script he did not write and can no longer escape.

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LUTHMANN NOTE: Washington has a habit of turning simple questions into political trench warfare, and election integrity is the latest battlefield. When overwhelming majorities of Americans support basic safeguards, ignoring that consensus isn’t leadership—it’s avoidance. The SAVE Act isn’t radical. It’s an attempt to restore confidence in a system that too many people no longer trust. And trust, once lost, is hard to rebuild. Lawmakers can debate the details all they want, but the underlying issue isn’t going away. If voters believe the system is vulnerable, perception becomes reality—and reality eventually drives political consequences. This week, Michael Volpe and I spoke with Arizona Senator Mark Finchem on this very issue. He’s the Director of the Elections Fairness Institute. I asked what I take to be a simple question: How come the French can get national elections done on the same day with paper ballots, and they’re the French? This piece by Greg Maresca is “Election Integrity Matters,” also available on FLGulf.News.

By Greg Maresca

You remember the great slogan boom of the last decade: Black Lives Matter, Blue Lives Matter, All Lives Matter, to name just three. America practically turned into a Mad Libs society of moral urgency.

In such a spirit, let’s add one more: “Elections Matter.”

For leftist activists, the idea of voting eligibility has somehow become oppressive in a country where you need a government-issued ID to board a plane, buy a six‑pack, and purchase Sudafed at a drug store. Yet, verifying who is elected president is somehow a human rights violation.

It is a beguiling double standard: bureaucracy for beer is fine, but bureaucracy for ballots is tyranny.

Enter the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act—this year’s version being the SAVE America Act—which would require proof of U.S. citizenship when registering to vote and would mandate photo ID when casting a ballot.

A 2025 Pew Research Center survey found that 83% of Americans, including 95% of Republicans and 71% of Democrats, support mandatory photo ID for voting in federal elections, nationwide.

In today’s splintered political climate, such a level of consensus is rarer than bipartisan applause on Capitol Hill during a State of the Union speech. This is not a fringe issue; it is a national consensus hiding in plain sight. If elections matter, then verifying who participates in them should not be treated like an ideological crisis.

This is nothing more than a modest proposal for basic competence.

The House passed the SAVE America Act on February 11, in a 218-213 vote with all Republicans and only one Democrat voting in favor. After the House passed it, President Trump made it a top priority, posting on social media, “I, as President, will not sign other Bills until this is passed.”

On March 17, the Senate voted 51-48 to commence formal debate on the bill.

Why this is even controversial with Democrats in Congress is beyond reproach.

FLGulf.News

The SAVE Act simply asks us to treat the ballot box with the same seriousness we treat the pharmacy counter.

Democrats insist the bill is unwarranted because the system works and similar state efforts have been struck down in court. However, those rulings did not declare citizenship verification unconstitutional; rather, they declared those attempts as poorly achieved.

Congress, unlike a governor or president, has the authority to regulate federal elections. The SAVE Act’s opponents treat past failures as proof the bill is doomed, rather than as a version that won’t collapse on judicial review.

Instead of seeing this as a reason to improve access and streamline documentation, Democrats treat it as a constitutional crisis.

Many are losing faith in elections faster than you can say “recount.” Even if improper voting by noncitizens is rare, the perception that it could happen is undermining.

Perception, in politics, is reality.

The SAVE Act attempts to address both the vulnerabilities and the imagined ones, which in today’s climate is a public service announcement.

The Senate must pass the SAVE America Act to ensure noncitizens are not voting in federal elections and that voter ID is required to make sure voters are who they say they are.

The bill is at a critical juncture, and congressional leadership needs to hear from you.

Election integrity is vital to our representative republic. Our nation needs elections free from even the appearance of fraud, and enacting the SAVE America Act will provide it.

“Elections Matter” sounds noble until you realize it is a challenge.

The SAVE Act is a straightforward attempt to align voting with the same documentation standards Americans already accept everywhere else. It acknowledges the point: without trust in elections, nothing else matters.

If we claim to care about democracy, we should act like it. If Congress can’t manage to pass a bill this basic, maybe the real integrity crisis is not in the voting booth.

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