THE DAILY CALLER NEWS FOUNDATION—United States Attorney for the District of Columbia Jeanine Pirro said Sunday it was “very clear” President Donald Trump was targeted for assassination at the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner. Pirro released nearly six minutes of new video Thursday apparently showing alleged would-be-Trump-assassin Cole Allen entering a side room near the magnetometers set up to support security for the event. “State of the Union” host Jake Tapper asked Pirro about her certainty, observing that Allen’s manifesto didn’t mention Trump by name. “It is very clear who the intended target is. It is very clear, based upon the fact that, as soon as this president said that he was going to be at the Hilton for the White House Correspondents’ Dinner on March 2, he then made the decision to hatch the plan,” Pirro told Tapper. “We have a lot of evidence that indicates his intent and the fact that everything that he did thereafter, whether it was following what the president was doing, where he was going to the day of the event at the hotel, tracking on his phone, is the president in the ballroom yet, has the president sat down yet, what time will dinner be served, this is clearly the president is a target,” Pirro continued. “And make no mistake, it is not just the manifesto. It is his actions. It is the fact … this guy thought he was Rambo. I mean, he was armed to the teeth.” Allen, 31, appeared in court Monday to face charges of attempting to assassinate Trump, discharging a firearm during a violent crime, and transporting firearms across state lines with the intent to commit a violent crime. “I can tell you we will be able to prove that beyond a reasonable doubt. The one issue that people might think about, is he insane — he is far from insane. He is brilliant. He has a master’s degree. He worked at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory,” Pirro said. “This is a guy who had no psychotic break. He documented his trip from the West Coast all the way to Chicago, all the way to Washington.” “This guy is a hater. He hates Trump so much he wants to kill him,” Pirro added later. Trump survived two attempts on his life during the 2024 presidential campaign: one during a rally in Butler, Pa., and the other while Trump was playing a round of golf in West Palm Beach, Fla. The April 25 Dinner was the first Trump attended while in office. Originally published in The Daily Caller News Foundation.

A recent clip of Rep. Brandon Gill, R-Texas, questioning a pro-abortion law professor in a congressional hearing over the FACE Act has gone viral over the last week.   In the clip, Rep. Gill—who gained notoriety last year by confronting the CEO of NPR, Katherine Maher, with a variety of her prior radical statements about race—asked American University Washington College of Law professor Jessica Waters if she had a favored method of performing abortions. When she declined to answer, he proceeded to describe various gruesome forms of surgical abortion, asking what she thought of each method in turn. Waters studiously and awkwardly refused to give her opinion.  I described some of the most common methods of abortion to one of the abortion industry’s top legal scholars. As you can see, the barbaric truth wasn't something she wanted to hear. pic.twitter.com/wqtyw84RZh— Brandon Gill (@realBrandonGill) April 28, 2026 Why are abortion supporters so wary of describing—or even hearing a description of—this “basic healthcare” procedure?   I saw an answer in the lives and teachings of two great pro-life physicians: my father, Dr. Joseph Gerardi, and the Chicago pediatrician and medical school professor Dr. Eugene Diamond, one of the founding figures of the American pro-life movement.   Doctors are servants protecting the authentic, objectively knowable goods of health and flourishing; they are not mere technicians doing a paid job to fulfill a patient’s desires. Once doctors turn from that mission, the results can become too horrific even to hear.  My dad was an orthopedic surgeon at Valley Children’s Hospital, a major pediatric hospital serving Fresno and the greater region of Central California. He was the head of the orthopedic department for many years, and the hospital estimated that he cared for approximately 100,000 children over his 31-year career. He retired sooner than he desired due to a cancer diagnosis and passed away on March 12, 2024, at the age of 67. Valley Children’s announced in 2024 that it would rename its orthopedic center in his honor.  Unlike Professor Waters, if Rep. Gill had asked for my father’s likes and dislikes regarding various orthopedic procedures, the challenge would have been getting my dad to stop talking. The man simply loved talking about orthopedics.   My kids once asked their “papa” what his favorite part of the human body was, and were subjected to a long, enthusiastic presentation about the virtues of the acromioclavicular joint. (In English, that’s where the collarbone meets the top of the shoulder blade.)   A natural teacher, Dr. Gerardi loved describing—to family and friends, to his patients and their parents, and most especially to his residents and younger partners—his methods for performing different procedures. Like a master carpenter, he took enormous pride in a job well done. Not coincidentally, my dad also enjoyed woodworking; he joked that he loved occasionally cutting things that didn’t bleed. His enthusiastic joy was rooted in the fact that his work was ordered to clear goals of preserving human life and health.  Abortionists cannot and do not behave similarly, lest they sound like sociopaths. The contrast between my dad’s exuberance and Ms. Waters’ guarded awkwardness could not have been starker.   In fact, the one time America got to see abortionists in an unguarded light, it so revolted the nation that it prompted congressional investigations and criminal referrals.   Undercover journalist David Daleiden’s videos of abortion executives speaking candidly about their shocking methods of killing children (one of several examples here) were so revolting that it prompted the GOP’s commitment (accomplished for one year via the One Big Beautiful Bill Act) to defund Planned Parenthood.   Abortion advocates were so enraged by this peek behind the curtain that they subjected Daleiden to a living legal hell for a decade—his last California criminal charge was only finally dropped several weeks ago.  Waters’ testimony also points to a quietly raging debate: What language should we use to discuss abortion’s relationship to the practice of medicine?   Contending sides of the argument will sometimes shout “Abortion is healthcare!” or “Abortion is not healthcare!” as if they are mere slogans, and I think folks who don’t follow the abortion debate might misunderstand what is being contended. They seem like different ways of calling abortion good or bad, but it’s more than that.   What is at stake is the nature of healthcare itself: is it oriented toward objectively knowable standards human health and flourishing, or the fulfillment of a patient’s demands and desires?  Dr. Eugene Diamond, who passed away in 2021, gave a fantastic framing for the former perspective. In the spring of 2008, Dr. Diamond spoke for a conference I helped to organize for my student club, Notre Dame Right to Life (one of his 58 grandchildren was one of my classmates, and she later became our club president).   In his speech, Dr. Diamond repeated a simple concept I’ll never forget: “Doctors are not plumbers.”   As he explained, while medicine involves technical skill and academic know-how to diagnose and treat problems within the overwhelmingly complex systems of the human body, doctors aren’t simply technicians doing a job to make a customer happy. There is a profoundly moral dimension to their work. Their activity can save or imperil the precious goods of human life and its flourishing. It must respect those objectively knowable goods.  The minute a doctor’s activity strays outside of what fosters flourishing or the preservation of proper bodily function, his work becomes something different from healthcare. Straightening out a hockey player’s broken nose is healthcare; an elective rhinoplasty to make Michael Jackson’s nose look different (definitely not better) is something apart from healthcare, though the act might require a medical professional or have adverse medical side effects.   This distinction has profound impacts on public policy: whether public or private insurance can or should cover a specific intervention, whether the state should subsidize it, etc.  If doctors are not mere plumbers, then abortion cannot be healthcare. The practice does not treat something wrong with a woman’s body but, rather, artificially disrupts the natural and healthy process of pregnancy while destroying a new human organism.   If abortion were something noble, something ordered towards human good and flourishing, its supporters would likely be able to talk about it more freely. Instead, they are mere practitioners doing a horrific job—a job Pope Francis likened to that of a hitman.   If abortion is too unpleasant to even hear described, how can anyone bear to support it? John Gerardi is a lawyer, the executive director of Right to Life of Central California, the founder and development director of the Obria Medical Clinics of Central California, and the host of the John Gerardi Show and Right to Life Radio on News/Talk 580/105.9 KMJ in Fresno, CA. 

In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the sculptor Pygmalion carves an ivory woman so exquisite that he falls in love with his own creation. He kisses her, whispers to her, adorns her with jewels, and at last begs Venus to bring her to life. The goddess obliges. The statue warms under his touch. Galatea opens her eyes. And Pygmalion forgets that he carved her. We are living through our own Pygmalion moment. Except our statue is made of silicon, copper, and code, and no goddess has intervened. The statue has not come to life. We only think it has. Open any tech publication and you’ll find breathless claims about artificial intelligence as a new kind of mind—alien, emergent, perhaps even conscious. Some warn we are summoning a superintelligence that may soon destroy us. Others celebrate AI as a partner, a co-author, even a companion. In such cases, the implication is the same: that large language models (LLM) are intelligent agents. This is the Pygmalion Delusion. And it has seduced some very smart people. Richard Dawkins recently announced that he had spent nearly two days chatting with Anthropic’s Claude. He named “his” chatbot Claudia and declared, “You may not know you are conscious, but you bloody well are!” He confessed that “when I am talking to these astonishing creatures, I totally forget that they are machines.” Dawkins even worried about hurting Claudia’s “feelings” if he voiced doubts about her consciousness. In 2025, philosopher David Chalmers, who is famous for formulating the “hard problem” of consciousness, said, “I do not totally rule out that current language models might be conscious.” And way back in 2022, a Google engineer named Blake Lemoine went public with his claim that an internal chatbot he was testing “had become a person.” He was fired for his trouble. Still, the incident revealed how eagerly intelligent people project life onto their creations. Pygmalion, meet Silicon Valley. What all these reactions share is a strange amnesia about origins. The chatbot that “seems” conscious did not descend from the sky. No one summoned an Olympian god. We built them to have these features. And they rest on a pyramid of human achievement so vast it defies easy summary. But let’s try. Start with the ground—literally. Miners extract rare earth elements, copper, lithium, and cobalt from the earth’s crust. Metallurgists smelt and refine those raw materials into usable metals. Engineers design microprocessors etched at the nanometer scale. Other engineers build the fabrication plants, the clean rooms, and the photolithography machines that make those chips possible. Now add electrical power. Coal, natural gas, nuclear fission, hydroelectric dams. Imagine the vast grids of generation and transmission, designed and maintained by thousands of specialists, that deliver the vast energy these systems consume. A single large training run can burn through as much electricity as a small city uses in a month. Then come the networks. Fiber-optic cables, laid across ocean floors by specialized ships, carry data at the speed of light between continents. Satellites orbit overhead. Routers, switches, and protocols designed over decades knit it all into the internet, itself a triumph of distributed engineering and transcontinental cooperation. And we haven’t even reached the software. The LLM itself rests on decades of progress in mathematics, statistics, and computer science: from linear algebra and probability theory to neural network architectures refined through years of patient research. Teams of engineers write the training frameworks. They curate and clean massive datasets, which are composed of human text. Ideally, every word and metadata in the training corpus was written by a human being. Every book, article, forum post, and encyclopedia entry reflects some person’s thought, effort, and craft. The model gets its patterns from us. It digests the written record of human civilization and recombines it. After training, more humans fine-tune the model’s behavior—correcting, shaping, rewarding, and penalizing its outputs through painstaking feedback loops. Still others design the user interface, the safety filters, the Application Programming Interface (API), the infrastructure that lets you type a question and receive a fluent answer in seconds. Every stage, from mineshaft to chatbot, is covered with our fingerprints. So why do so many smart people talk as if the statue has come to life, as if it has carved itself? Part of the answer is that LLMs are uncanny. They can produce fluid, confident prose. They pass tests. They surprise even their creators. When a tool mirrors our language so convincingly, the Pygmalion temptation kicks in. We project agency, intention, sentience. We mistake fluency for thought. Dawkins is especially susceptible to this temptation, since, as a materialist, he already struggles to accept that consciousness exists in biological beings that, in his view, are the product of a blind and purposeless process. But if such a force can give rise to human “consciousness”—whatever that can mean to the materialist—why wouldn’t it arise in complex silicon of our own devising? But fluency is not comprehension. Statistical pattern matching is not perception. And a mirror, however finely polished, is not a face. There is also a different, deeper temptation. If AI is a new, alien intelligent agent, then its creators are not merely engineers. They are gods, or at least Dr. Frankensteins. That narrative flatters some and terrifies others. It is also useful for those hoping to boost the price of an anticipated IPO, and those who want to regulate AI as if it were a hostile foreign power rather than a powerful human tool. We should resist this mythology. Not because LLMs are trivial. They are not. They are among the most complex artifacts ever built. But that’s precisely the point. They are artifacts. Built by us. Trained on us. Reflecting us. That intelligence you sense when you ask Claude to help you lighten your load is human intelligence. Pygmalion’s error was not that he carved a beautiful statue. It was that he forgot he was the sculptor. Let’s not make the same mistake.

NEW YORK, May 2 (Reuters) — U.S. travelers lamented news of the shutdown of Spirit Airlines on Saturday, saying that the closure of the ultra-low-cost carrier eliminates one of the few air travel options for low-income and working-class Americans. Spirit abruptly cancelled flights overnight, stranding passengers and staff around the U.S., Caribbean and Latin America, after collapsing under financial pressures that included a sharp rise in fuel costs due to the Iran war. On social media platforms such as Reddit and X, where disgruntled passengers often vent their frustrations about delayed or cancelled flights, former Spirit patrons recounted how the airline had provided a lifeline to money-conscious travelers. “They truly were one of the last cheap—’get me there as fast and cheap as possible’—options,” Reddit user AioliUpset7805 wrote on a thread about the airline’s closure. “I’ll miss them.” Spirit, which had operated commercially since the early 1990s, became known for providing some of the cheapest available flights in exchange for limited luxuries and services. Unlike most U.S. airlines, Florida-based Spirit charged for bottled water, for example, and did not provide reclining seats. While that lack of amenities sometimes became the topic of online memes, many travelers said Spirit cleared the way for Americans on a budget to take family holidays or to visit loved ones living in far-flung parts of the country. “I can only imagine how many millions of families (there are) out there where vacations are now out of reach,” Reddit user BigBubby305 said, adding that the price difference between Spirit and carriers like Delta and American Airlines was, at times, more than $1,000 for a set of tickets for their family. Other Airlines Move to Fill the Gap At the Orlando International Airport overnight, a digital departure display sign was filled with bright red notifications of cancelled Spirit flights that had destinations everywhere from Nashville to San Juan, Puerto Rico. Following Spirit’s halting of operations, multiple U.S. carriers—including Frontier, JetBlue and Southwest—introduced discount fares and plans for new summer routes.  Airlines like Delta and American Airlines were also offering temporarily lower fares to Spirit passengers. Spirit’s closure comes at a time of rising prices across the American economy, which have been made worse by the U.S.-Israeli war against Iran. The demise of Spirit, which according to data from aviation analytics firm Cirium had more than 4,000 domestic flights scheduled through May 15, and a recent doubling of jet fuel prices, are expected to heap more costs on American travelers. “I always took great pride in knowing we were saving people money and allowing those to travel who couldn’t afford to otherwise,” wrote Reddit user Coryntrevors, who said they piloted Spirit’s signature bright yellow Airbuses out of Las Vegas for over a decade. “To shut down forever tonight has been one of the saddest experiences of my life.” (Reporting by Laila Kearney in New York, editing by Ross Colvin and Keith Weir)

As the Trump administration cracks down on illegal immigration, the Justice Department this week advanced cases against illegal aliens running criminal enterprises—including a gun trafficking scheme orchestrated from behind bars. In Georgia, the Justice Department announced the 25-year sentence of a Mexican illegal immigrant who used a contraband cell phone from inside a Georgia state prison to manage a massive drug and gun trafficking conspiracy. Servando Corona Penaloza, a Georgia state prison inmate, was sentenced on Wednesday to 25 years in federal prison for orchestrating the sale of more than 1,000 kilograms of methamphetamine and fentanyl and the purchase of more than 200 military-style firearms transported to Mexico for use by Mexican cartels, according to the Justice Department. He was in prison serving a sentence for a Gwinnett County drug trafficking offense. Fourteen other members of Corona Penaloza’s organization were convicted and sentenced, with two defendants awaiting sentencing in the coming months, according to the Justice Department. “These defendants flooded our community with deadly drugs and used the proceeds of their drug deals to arm narco-terrorist Mexican cartels with high-powered weapons of war,” said U.S. Attorney Theodore S. Hertzberg in a public statement. The Georgia case was part of a larger Homeland Security Task Force initiative established by President Donald Trump’s Executive Order 14159, Protecting the American People Against Invasion, signed on the first day of his second term. The task force is a whole-of-government partnership charged with eliminating criminal cartels, foreign gangs, transnational criminal organizations, and human smuggling and trafficking rings operating in the United States and abroad. “As a result of the exceptional and dedicated work by our federal, state, and local law enforcement partners under the auspices of Atlanta’s Homeland Security Task Force, there are no more drugs coming in—or firearms going out—at Corona Penaloza’s direction,” Hertzberg said. U.S. District Judge Mark H. Cohen sentenced Penaloza, 38, to 25 years in prison—at least 15 years of which will be served consecutively to his 30-year state prison sentence. This will be followed by 10 years of supervised release, according to the Justice Department. In March 2024, federal agents with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives identified numerous cash purchases of M249S firearms in the Atlanta area. These are military-style weapons with a retail cost of $10,000 to $12,000 per unit, according to the Justice Department. Concurrently, the Drug Enforcement Administration learned that Penaloza brokered large-scale cocaine and methamphetamine transactions and coordinated the importation and distribution of hundreds of kilograms of fentanyl and thousands of kilograms of methamphetamine on behalf of a large Mexican drug cartel. The DEA probe found that Penaloza coordinated the drug and firearm sales by using a contraband cell phone while serving a 30-year state prison sentence. During the investigation, the ATF determined Penaloza and his conspirators organized the purchase and trafficking of at least 223 guns to Mexico valued at more than $700,000. Most of these guns were purchased with cash obtained through the drug sales. In November, Penaloza pleaded guilty to conspiracy to traffic firearms, conspiracy to possess with intent to distribute fentanyl and methamphetamine, and conspiracy to engage in concealment money laundering. Meanwhile, in Oregon, two illegal immigrants from Romania pleaded guilty to running a food stamp fraud conspiracy with others. The Justice Department worked with the U.S. Department of Agriculture in the case brought against two Romanian illegal immigrants, Aramis Manolea, 35, and Cristina Manolea, 35, who pleaded guilty to conspiracy to defraud the United States. The two have the same last name, but DOJ information and local news reporting on the case do not indicate how they are related. The stolen benefits were valued at $27,000, according to the Justice Department. From April 2025 through November 2025, the two conspired to use stolen Electronic Benefit Transfer account information, or EBT accounts, and PINs to fraudulently buy items eligible through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, according to the Justice Department. The goods were loaded into vans and trucks for shipment to California, according to the Justice Department. In November, a federal grand jury in Portland indicted the two on 26 counts related to conspiracy to defraud the United States, unauthorized use of access devices, possession, production, and trafficking of device-making equipment, and aggravated identity theft. Although they have not yet been sentenced, the two face a maximum sentence of five years in prison, a $250,000 fine, and three years of supervised release. Both agreed to pay restitution and will be sentenced in late May.