A Philadelphia officer answered a gun call on June 27. The car he’d stopped shifted into reverse, plowed into two marked cruisers, and threw him onto the hood, into the windshield, and over the roof before speeding off. He survived. In Greenwood, South Carolina, an officer died in May when a driver fleeing a stop crossed the center line and hit the officer’s cruiser head-on. Neither officer pulled a trigger. Both cases are part of the same pattern: A driver decided a stop sign, a red light, or a lawful command didn’t apply to him, and someone paid the price for that decision in blood. I spent three years working in private security and executive protection before I ever touched a securities license, and I held a California EMT card I earned in 1993 riding in the back of ambulances. I’ve watched people make split-second calls with real consequences. Whatever else you think about a given encounter, the safest, simplest choice  is also the one nobody wants to talk about: Stop when you’re told to stop. That’s worth remembering when the vehicle in question belongs to someone an officer shot rather than someone who hit an officer. Three fatal encounters this year have dominated the news: Ren ée Good, shot by an ICE agent in Minneapolis in January; Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, shot by an ICE agent in Houston on July 7; and Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero, shot by an ICE agent in Biddeford, Maine, on July 13. All three are now under federal investigation, and serious questions remain open in each one, including whether the agents’ accounts match the video recordings. I’m not going to pretend those investigations are finished. But one fact isn’t in dispute, because federal officials confirmed it themselves: None of the three was the person federal agents were actually there to arrest that day. Every one of these deaths happened during an encounter with someone who was never supposed to be the point of the operation in the first place. If the Department of Homeland Security’s account holds up in each case—meaning the agents reasonably believed a vehicle was being used to threaten them with death or serious injury—then the deadly-force standard was met and the shootings were lawful. That’s a real “if,” and the investigations exist precisely to test it. But set the legal question aside for a moment and look at the sequence of events DHS itself describes: An agent approaches a vehicle, gives a command, and the vehicle moves toward or past him instead of stopping. Whatever else remains contested, that part of the timeline is not complicated. A driver who stops the car when told to stop does not get shot for driving away from federal agents. It’s the one variable that was entirely within each driver’s control, right up until it wasn’t. Here’s the actual rule, not the cable-news version. The Department of Justice’s use-of-force policy and decades of case law under Graham v. Connor set a narrow standard: Deadly force against a vehicle is justified only when the officer reasonably believes the car itself is being used to threaten death or serious injury, and only when there’s no safer alternative. Officers aren’t supposed to fire at a moving vehicle just to stop an escape. There’s no special “car exception” that lets agents open up on every fleeing sedan. It’s the same objective-reasonableness test that governs every other use of force, applied to a driver who has chosen, or is accused of choosing, a weapon that happens to also be a mode of transportation. That standard already ties officers’ hands tighter than most people think. It’s also why DHS’s move this week to pause most ICE vehicle stops following the Maine and Houston shootings made sense on its face, and why the reversal happened so fast. President Trump overturned the pause less than 24 hours after it was announced, calling traffic stops “one of ICE’s most important and effective Crime Fighting tools” and directing agents to get back to work. Whichever way that policy fight ultimately lands—and reasonable people land on both sides of it—it doesn’t touch the point that actually matters here. Camera deployment, stop policy, training curricula—none of that changes the one thing every driver in these encounters could have controlled from the start. The FBI’s Law Enforcement Officers Killed and Assaulted data for 2025 shows agencies reported over 90,000 officer assaults last year, a rate of 13.8 per 100 officers, the highest in a decade. Vehicles remain the leading cause of accidental line-of-duty deaths. Those numbers are so high because, in far too many cases, somebody decided the rules didn’t apply to them that day. Legislatures write the deadly-force statutes and the use-of-force policies. Agents don’t invent the Graham v. Connor standard, and they don’t get to rewrite it on the fly during a stop. They inherit a legal framework, drilled into them at the academy, and they live or die by how precisely they apply it under conditions nobody writing the policy will ever face themselves. If an agent’s account of a given stop turns out to be wrong, the investigation should say so, and accountability should follow. That’s what the process is for. What shouldn’t get lost in the meantime is the simplest fact common to all three cases: A driver who stops when a federal agent tells him to stop does not end up in a morgue over an operation meant for somebody else. Compliance isn’t submission to tyranny. It’s the one move available to everybody in these encounters that reliably keeps them alive long enough for the rest of the process—courts, investigations, and lawful appeals— to work the way it’s supposed to. We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of the Daily Signal.

In the city of Brunswick, residents such as Semona Holmes are sharing the concerns that come with living close to a dangerous Superfund site. The EPA has designated a former pesticide plant as a “contaminated former industrial site.” According to the Georgia Recorder, the site has raised concerns for contamination, whether it be the locality’s air, soil, or water. The site will now come under the scrutiny of Georgia’s first-ever “Superfund research center.” Six universities are collaborating on the center, which will operate with $15 million in funding from the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences over a period of five years. Georgia’s Emory University and Georgia Tech will join Texas Tech University, among others, in analyzing the locality’s four hazardous Superfund sites. The concentration of sites is a rarity across the state. The Daily Signal reached out to the EPA for comment regarding Brunswick’s Superfund sites, to which a spokesperson said regarding the Terry Creek Dredge Spoils/Hercules Outfall Superfund Site, “Toxaphene, a chlorinated pesticide, is the main contaminant of concern at this site. The remedial action to backfill the old outfall ditch and construct a new, concrete-lined conveyance structure is complete. The next step is the remedial investigation of the dredge spoils at Terry and Dupree Creeks.” The spokesperson continued, “The conveyance channel provides protection against rising sea levels and storm surges. EPA used rip rap to armor the banks of the former ditch along Dupree Creek, a process known as coastal hardening. Remaining sediments in the Outfall Ditch are covered with 2 to 8 feet of clean fill. Regular inspections will ensure that erosion and other issues are promptly resolved.” Further, the collaboration will analyze the site that Holmes lives near. Holmes has shared her concerns over the toxicity that the pesticide plant has brought to Brunswick, telling the Georgia Recorder, “Everything from that chemical plant has flowed into our community.” She continued, “If you can imagine this entire area here completely flooded … the flooding would be—we would have like a river on our street.” The flooding once got to the point where, following a hurricane, her neighbor canoed down the street. The Superfund site is located nearly a half mile from Holmes’ house. For Holmes, the concern goes beyond the flooding; it extends into the possibility of what the floodwater may be contaminated with. That’s what the research center will help determine. The center has two primary objectives, according to Emory professor Noah Scovronick, the Georgia Recorder reports. The first is “to understand the health effects of past chemical exposures, and the other is to try and reduce people’s future exposures.” To accomplish these objectives, researchers will analyze correlations between the hazardous materials at the former industrial sites, as well as potential health effects, and execute environmental sampling to determine where people could have been susceptible to these contaminants. Further, scientists will need to model the effects of severe weather such as rising tides and powerful storms. Scovronick continued to explain that the locality’s increase in extreme weather could emit further contaminants into the locality’s surroundings. Contamination into the community’s atmosphere could look like rising tides and powerful storms flooding the Superfund sites, scattering the chemicals into the nearby environment. For sites that have hazardous materials contained in structures, flooding could rupture these measures that are meant to protect people from contaminants. For now, residents like Holmes await the researchers’ answer to the question: What contaminants has her family already been exposed to?

What do John Tyler, James Monroe, and Thomas Jefferson have in common? They are the three Virginia Governors who have gone on to become president. Just a couple of years from now, the United States could sleepwalk into adding a fourth name to the list: Gov. Abigail Spanberger. Spanberger is a choice beloved by the Left—a moderate in front of the cameras but effectively a democratic socialist—often more liberal than AOC, when voting in Congress. Leading up to last November’s election, Spanberger presented herself as a mother and former law enforcement officer who cared deeply about affordability, the economy, and public education. The question on every Virginian’s lips after November’s election was: How would Spanberger actually govern in practice? Would she govern for all Virginians, or would she remain a radical wrapped in moderate’s clothing? That’s a question the Virginia Institute for Public Policy has been working to answer. Partnering with a dozen conservative organizations across the Commonwealth, we presented “Power of the Pen,” a wide-ranging book of recommendations to the governor for the veto session. In “Power of the Pen,” we offer recommendations on which bills should be signed, which vetoed, and which amended. We try to be collegiate, asking her to take mainly actions which a moderate could reasonably take. In 2025, we gave the Republican Governor Glenn Youngkin the same test, perhaps even a little tougher. Gov. Youngkin scored 86.2%. When Gov. Spanberger scored 32.5% this year, it was bad. It’s not the kind of result you’d expect of a moderate, with the Governor scoring 0% on energy and 0% on the Second Amendment. Even the vast majority of the “good” actions taken by Gov. Spanberger were not taken out of political principle, but as part of internecine squabbles amongst Democrats. Collective bargaining, retail marijuana, an all-out assault on education choice—all vetoed because Democrats could not agree on how to introduce policies that would harm Virginia. There are three little words which should strike fear at the heart of every Virginian: “To be continued.” Nearly 450 bills, including all the worst excesses of the Democratic trifecta—such as massive sales tax increases and huge pay raises for public-sector workers—were “continued,” allowing them to be dealt with in 2027. The most politically unpopular decisions have been parked conveniently until after the all-important midterms. They can be brought back at any time. If there’s one thing we’ve learned from the 2026 General Assembly session, it’s that the biggest danger is more of a jigsaw than a single, terrible bill. The $15-per-hour (plus escalator) minimum wage will cost Virginians jobs. The new payroll tax for paid family and medical leave will make Virginians worse off, while simultaneously increasing business costs. Taxes on gasoline will rise. Every Virginian’s energy bill will skyrocket thanks to Virginia rejoining the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative. I’ve been around politics long enough to know that not everything is planned. Chaos and uncertainty reign supreme; power struggles and incompetence cause delay after delay. One of my first lessons when I was a legislator myself was that incompetence is far more common than conspiracy. In my view, arguments among Democrats are real: The Left is always blinded by competing versions of ideological purity. The delays to 2027 were not, in my opinion, planned. But that makes them even more dangerous: After the midterms, the Democrats will have a window of opportunity to do pretty much whatever they want. If they’ve enjoyed success at the federal level, they’ll feel emboldened at the state level. If they’ve lost, they’ll double down in Virginia. Every bill marked “continued”—and every gubernatorial veto caused by petty squabbles over wording—will be fair game at the General Assembly’s 2027 session. There is a storm coming in Virginia politics. If there’s one thing we’ve learned from 2026, it’s this: Gov. Spanberger will not be the one to stop the storm. She is not a moderate, and she never will be. But she would very much like Virginians, and all Americans, to believe that she is. That’s her only path to the presidency. We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of the Daily Signal.

Much of President Donald Trump’s address to the nation about Chinese election interference cited newly declassified documents, but at several points he made claims on matters already known before the release of the new material. Contrary to speculation ahead of the speech, Trump did not outright assert that Chinese interference in the 2020 election determined the outcome in favor of Joe Biden. Rather, at several times in his address, Trump focused on what the Chinese government was capable of or had attempted to do in its effort to influence U.S. elections. 1. ‘Chinese Government Wanted the U.S. President to Lose’ Trump said, “The Chinese government wanted the U.S. president to lose the next election,” referring to the 2020 election. A 2020 U.S. intelligence report appears to support that claim. “We assess that China prefers that President Trump – whom Beijing sees as unpredictable – does not win reelection,” an August 2020 report from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence said. “China has been expanding its influence efforts ahead of November 2020 to shape the policy environment in the United States, pressure political figures it views as opposed to China’s interests, and deflect and counter criticism of China.” 2. ‘Fought Like Hell’ What China wanted to accomplish and what China actually accomplished in previous elections might still be in dispute. Trump said that documents show China meddled in the 2018 midterm elections and then, in 2019, turned its attention to the 2020 election. Trump said, “Raw intelligence obtained by the FBI in 2020, yet buried by rogue bureaucrats, stated that China’s activities even included an attempt to manufacture illegal ballots for Joe Biden.” Trump also said, “They did not want — and they just didn’t want it. They fought like hell not to have it, Donald Trump to win, and for good reason.” This would seem to contradict a March 2021 joint report of the Justice Department and Department of Homeland Security, released during the early months of the Biden administration. According to the report, China considered trying to influence the presidential election but did not deploy an operation comparable to Russia’s meddling in 2016. It concluded that no evidence supported the claim that a foreign government manipulated any election results. However, Trump asserted several times that documents show entrenched federal employees, or the “deep state,” willingly suppressed information about Chinese election meddling from being presented to the president, Congress, and the public. 3. ‘220 Million U.S. Voter Files’ Trump asserted, “The People’s Republic of China carried out what is believed to be the largest compromise of election data in history, resulting in China’s illicit acquisition of 220 million U.S. voter files.” He cited newly declassified documents for his claim.  The number would encompass almost all registered voters in the United States. In 2024, there were 234.5 million individuals registered to vote across the U.S., according to the Election Assistance Commission. He added, “That information includes names, addresses, phone numbers, political party preferences and other sensitive data that would be needed to register to vote and engage in other nefarious activities, which is exactly what was happening.” Some state voter information is readily accessible, while other information requires special access. Various states have different rules about who can access voter registration data, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. Some states only make it available to campaigns or researchers for a fee. Voter names are generally widely available. Public information is frequently used by political campaigns, and while clearly vulnerable to foreign access, that is not an entirely new development. 4. ‘Revocation of Their Licenses’ Trump noted that the broadcast networks ABC and NBC declined to cover the primetime address and said that “fraud like this should mean a revocation of their licenses.” “They use our public multi-billion dollar-in-value airways for absolutely no money. They pay nothing,” Trump said. “In a rare move, NBC and ABC fake news have both said that they would not cover this speech. They knew what it was about because of the fact that they don’t like the topic, because they know how corrupt our system is, and they don’t want to reveal it.” NBC and ABC are networks of local affiliate TV stations that carry their programming. Therefore, the networks themselves do not hold broadcast licenses with the Federal Communications Commission. Importantly, the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled in the cases of Red Lion Broadcasting Co. v. FCC (1969) and CBS v. FCC (1981) that there is not a First Amendment right to scarce public airwaves, recognizing the FCC’s authority to regulate broadcasters. However, even revoking the licenses of affiliate stations would involve a lengthy legal process with the FCC.

FIRST ON THE DAILY SIGNAL—Two private companies currently dominate more than 90% of the proxy advisory market, controlling significant influence over corporate America, and Rep. Ronny Jackson, R-Texas, is demanding answers.  In a letter obtained by the Daily Signal to acting Attorney General Todd Blanche and Andrew N. Ferguson, chairman of the Federal Trade Commission, Jackson points to specific examples of these companies advising with a leftist agenda in mind rather than investor returns.  “Two foreign-owned proxy advisory firms have used their 90% market share to impose radical diversity quotas and net-zero mandates on American companies,” Jackson told the Daily Signal.  “[Institutional Shareholder Services Inc.] and Glass Lewis have become socialist political activists, putting woke DEI and Green New Scam policies ahead of shareholder returns. Americans want capitalism, not corporate terrorism,” Jackson said.  DOJ FTC JACKSON LETTERDownload If an American holds stocks through a mutual fund, pension fund, or 401(k), Institutional Shareholder Services Inc. or Glass Lewis could be hired to analyze the shareholder proposals and recommend how votes should be cast.  This is not the first time ISS and Glass Lewis have been accused of imposing a leftist political agenda. On Dec. 11, 2025, President Donald Trump signed an executive order titled “Protecting American Investors From Foreign-Owned and Politically Motivated Proxy Advisors.”  The executive order directed federal agencies to review proxy-adviser regulations, examine potential antitrust concerns, and investigate whether the firms were advancing DEI and ESG activism. The president advised the agencies to take action if needed.  Now, Jackson is seeking an update on the investigation.  In the letter, Jackson writes that he is “concerned by Institutional Shareholder Services Inc. (ISS) and Glass, Lewis & Co., LLC (Glass Lewis) and their continued use of their more than 90 percent share of the proxy advisor market to conduct anticompetitive activities, imposing political agendas on American companies and colluding to oppose companies’ efforts to redomicile to the state of Texas.”  “Most recently, ISS and Glass Lewis each recommended that shareholders oppose ExxonMobil Corp.’s decision to move its legal domicile to Texas—the state where the company has been operationally headquartered since 1989.”  ExxonMobil shareholders just approved (71.3%) to leave New Jersey for Texas.Incorporated in NJ since 1882. After 144 years, it's over.One of the largest companies in the world had every option on the table. They didn't pick Delaware. They picked Texas.Glass Lewis said no.… https://t.co/O1noyZll5A— Leave Delaware (@LeaveDelaware) May 27, 2026 Jackson argues that Institutional Shareholder Services Inc. and Glass Lewis failed to disclose a potential conflict when recommending against ExxonMobil’s move to Texas. The firms are in a legal battle challenging the state of Texas and Attorney General Ken Paxton. They recently sued the state over a Senate bill requiring the proxy-adviser law.  Jackson also wants to review the FTC’s and the Justice Department’s efforts to examine potential violations of federal antitrust laws by Institutional Shareholder Services Inc. and Glass Lewis.