Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will meet with President Donald Trump on Wednesday in Washington to discuss negotiations with Iran, the prime minister’s office announced in a statement on Saturday. Netanyahu had previously been scheduled to visit Washington later in the month. The statement said that “any negotiation” between the U.S. and Iran “must include limits on ballistic missiles,” rather than focusing just on Tehran’s nuclear energy program. A senior White House official told Axios that Netanyahu is the one who requested to advance the previously scheduled trip and meet with the U.S. president this week. The visit will be Netanyahu’s seventh meeting with Trump since the president began his second term, and comes as the United States and Iran resume talks over a possible nuclear agreement to avert war. After talks between U.S. and Iranian officials on Friday, Trump signaled a willingness to accept a deal focused solely on Iran’s nuclear program, describing those discussions with Tehran as “very good talks” and confirming that another meeting is scheduled for early next week. White House officials had previously sought to broaden the scope of negotiations. “I think a deal can be reached,” Trump said, adding that the administration was “in no rush” and had “plenty of time.” Asked whether a nuclear-only agreement that did not address other issues would be acceptable, Trump said it would, provided Iran is barred from obtaining nuclear weapons. “Yeah, there’s a deal that would be acceptable,” Trump said. “But the one thing right up front — no nuclear weapons.” Trump said Iran now appears willing to accept limits it previously rejected, warning that failure to reach an agreement would carry “very steep” consequences. Iran’s Foreign Minister Araghchi said Saturday that the missile issue is “purely defensive” and “cannot be negotiated, neither now nor in the future.” The post Netanyahu to Visit Washington Wednesday appeared first on The American Conservative.

Thank You, GOD!

The unrest in Minneapolis has died down, and the Trump administration is pulling 700 immigration enforcement officers out of the area. But all of the national media scrutiny has obsessed over Team Trump. It has rarely acted to “hold government accountable” when the governing comes from Democrats, like Gov. Tim Walz or Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey. NPR was eagerly touting its new NPR/PBS Marist Poll to underline the effectiveness of their advocacy: 65% of Americans, up from 54% in June of 2025, think the actions of [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] have “gone too far” in enforcing immigration laws, and 62% say the actions of ICE are making Americans “somewhat less safe, or much less safe.” The New Republic underlined what NPR and PBS were cooking: “Brutal New Poll Wrecks Trump’s Main Claim on ICE.” Now ask yourself this question: Did PBS and NPR ever ask the public for their evaluation of ICE under President Joe Biden, when there was a mass importation of illegal aliens? Pollsters may have asked about their approval of Biden on the immigration issue. But this polling is specific and suggestive, intended to punish ICE deportation efforts. Pollsters don’t ask if the actions of ICE protesters have “gone too far.” The media have soft-pedaled violent extremists in the streets, who are painted as passionate heroes, just as Black Lives Matters were boosted for their “racial reckoning” in the George Floyd riots of 2020. James Freeman at The Wall Street Journal asked the rhetorical question: “Who Watches the ‘ICE Watchers’?” National media outlets have implied that these protesters—including Renee Good and Alex Pretti, who were shot by federal agents as they interfered and threatened law-enforcement activities—were somehow not radical activists, when their tactics were clearly radical. Freeman drew attention to a Christina Buttons article for City Journal about how leftists were training in Minneapolis to wreck ICE activities and protect illegal aliens, who they describe as “vulnerable community members.” Buttons entered into the training programs of “Defend the 612” (the Minneapolis area code): “Our reporting reveals that members and related officials have encouraged protesters to impede law enforcement; pushed civilians toward legally and physically risky confrontations; and helped mobilize a counterprotest that turned violent.” Good’s death represented a beautiful recruiting opportunity: “The evening Good died, Defend the 612 held an ’emergency vigil,’ during which flyers were distributed directing attendees to join the group. At Defend the 612’s training session the following day, (organizer Andrew) Fahlstrom reported about 1,000 new signups.” These leftists were very focused on getting the “mainstream” media to reinforce their interference with ICE: “Members characterized their media work as ‘propaganda’ and insisted on the need to ‘maintain control of your narratives.’ To that end, participants discussed the need to condition their speech to journalists on retaining editorial control over how stories are written.” Buttons noted that Fahlstrom’s “ICE Watch” activist orientation on Jan. 8 featured Jill Garvey, founder of a radical-left group called “States at the Core,” which were active in resisting ICE in Chicago last year. Here’s where National “Public” Radio reenters the picture to help the Left “maintain control of their narratives.” Last November, so-called domestic extremism correspondent Odette Yousef gushed over Garvey and did a “ride along” with the domestic extremists engaged in ICE-busting activities in Chicago. In the elitist media’s groupthink, the left-wing extremists never go too far, no matter how violent or destructive their tactics. Their goal isn’t keeping the streets safe. Their goal is destroying President Donald Trump and the Republicans. Any extreme tactic that hurts those people in the polls serves an important “progressive” purpose. We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal. The post Pollsters Don’t Ask If Anti-ICE Activists Have ‘Gone Too Far’ appeared first on The Daily Signal.

A few years ago, things looked pretty bleak for skeptics of transgenderism—those of us who have great compassion for those afflicted by what the “Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders” long referred to as the “disorder” of gender dysphoria, but who refuse to accept the lie that a man can become a woman or a woman can become a man. During the 2020 presidential race, then-candidate Joe Biden tweeted, “Transgender equality is the civil rights issue of our time.” As president in 2023, Biden followed up by stating, “Transgender people are some of the bravest Americans I know.” That same year, the transgender fad achieved unprecedented reach among impressionable youngsters: While Gallup reported that (an already-high) 7% of all Americans identified as LGBTQ+, that number soared to 20% of all Gen Z—and as high as 38% on some elite Ivy League campuses. But the social craze began to face setbacks. In the U.K., the National Health Service’s Cass Review cast substantial doubt on the underlying scientific evidence purporting to support “gender-affirming care.” Enterprising investigative journalists, such as Christopher F. Rufo, began to expose rampant ethical concerns with America’s gender clinics. Polling began to reflect broader concerns with the transgender narrative on issues such as women’s athletic competition. President Donald Trump, intuiting that law can shape culture just as culture can shape law, signed numerous transgender-related executive orders in the first few weeks of his second term. Now, it seems the dam may be breaking. In a landmark legal judgment on Jan. 30, a 22-year-old biological woman named Fox Varian was awarded $2 million in Westchester County Supreme Court. Varian, a “detransitioner,” had an irreversible double mastectomy when she was 16 years old. The New York court held her psychologist and surgeon liable for $1.6 million for past and future suffering, and an additional $400,00 for any future medical expenses. Varian, whose mother initially opposed the operation but consented following the surgeon’s “emphatic” insistence, became deeply depressed following the procedure. Now, she has become the first “detransitioner” to win a medical malpractice lawsuit at trial. The message out of Westchester County is clear: Doctors and psychologists are now potentially on the hook for irrevocable mutilation of patients in the name of gender ideology. The response has been swift. On Tuesday, the American Society of Plastic Surgeons became the first major medical association to recommend that transgender “surgeries” be delayed until a patient is at least 19 years old. Immediately, the American Medical Association, in a statement to National Review, reversed its previous enthusiasm for teenage “gender-affirming care”: The AMA now “agrees with ASPS that surgical interventions in minors should be generally deferred to adulthood.” On Thursday, the American Academy of Pediatrics followed suit: “The guidance from the (AAP) for health care for young people with gender dysphoria does not include a blanket recommendation for surgery for minors.” Transgenderism is having a tough time on the legal front as well. In United States v. Skrmetti, a 6-3 Supreme Court majority held that Tennessee’s comprehensive ban on transgender-related medical procedures passes constitutional muster. Justice Amy Coney Barrett, one of the more centrist Republican-nominated jurists, went out of her way to argue in a concurring opinion that transgender-identifying individuals do not constitute a “suspect class” or “discrete and insular minority,” in the court’s Fourteenth Amendment jurisprudential jargon, such that heightened judicial scrutiny is required. This term at the high court, Idaho and West Virginia recently defended their own laws that prohibit biological males from competing in women’s sports; most court-watchers expect the two states to prevail. The fundamental problem for transgender activists was always easy to spot: Transgenderism is premised on a lie, and in the long run the truth has a stubborn tendency to prevail. We know from the biological truth of sexual dimorphism, the chromosomal truth of dichotomous XX and XY structure, the biblical truth that “God created man in His image … male and female He created them,” millennia of unquestioned human experience, and basic common sense that there are precisely two sexes. That is not to deny that there are intersex, or androgynous, individuals—there are, and there always have been. And that is not to deny the very real psychological malady of gender dysphoria. But one cannot change his or her sex by subjectively identifying as such or by subjecting oneself to either hormonal treatments or a surgeon’s knife. It is simply not possible. And the notion that it ever was possible, advanced by so many cultural and societal elites for so many years, was always going to end in pain, suffering, massive legal liability, and the desecration of the Hippocratic Oath-based medical profession itself. Clicks and fads may sometimes rule the day, but the truth is eternal. Kudos to the American people for beginning to realign political, legal, and social mores with the truth. We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal. The post Is This the End of Transgender Hysteria? appeared first on The Daily Signal.