The man who opened fire at a Rhode Island ice rink during a high school hockey game Monday night, killing two family members and injuring three others before turning the gun on himself, identified as transgender and had multiple family disputes regarding his gender identity. Robert Dorgan, 56, also went by the name Roberta, Pawtucket Police Chief Tina Goncalves confirmed in a news conference Monday night. Police described the shooting at Dennis M. Lynch Arena in Pawtucket, R.I., as stemming from a family dispute. Dorgan allegedly opened fire during a hockey game between Coventry and Blackstone Valley Schools. Court documents show that his transgender identity played a key role in multiple family disputes, WPRI News reported. In early 2020, Dorgan reported to the North Providence Police that he had undergone gender-reassignment surgery and that his father-in-law demanded he leave his home for that reason. Dorgan’s then-wife Ronda Dorgan filed for divorce at around the same time. Under grounds for divorce, she initially wrote, “gender reassignment surgery, narcissistic + personality disorder traits.” Someone later crossed out those reasons and wrote “irreconcilable differences which have caused the immediate breakdown of the marriage.” The court finalized the divorce in June 2021. Dorgan told police that his father-in-law, who shares the same last name, threatened to “have him murdered by an Asian street gang if he did not move out of the residence,” the court documents state. Dorgan told police that his father-in-law used a derogatory term for people who identify as transgender. Other Trans Shooters The shooting comes less than a week after an 18-year-old man who identified as a woman shot and killed six people at a school in British Columbia, Canada. Jesse Van Rootselaar first killed his mother, 39, and his 11-year-old stepbrother at their family home in the remote community of Tumbler Ridge, before targeting Tumbler Ridge Secondary School Tuesday. While Van Rootselaar’s motive remains unclear, this shooting comes after a string of violence and threats from perpetrators who identified as transgender or supported transgenderism. In September, Utah Gov. Spencer Cox confirmed reports that 22-year-old Tyler Robinson, who has been charged with Charlie Kirk’s murder, was living with a boyfriend who identifies as transgender. Robinson reportedly confessed to his boyfriend that he committed the murder. 1?Tyler RobinsonThe man who allegedly shot and killed Charlie Kirk was dating a man who identifies as a woman, and he started to support "trans rights" in recent years, his mother told authorities.This is the latest in a line of violence, however.?2/15 pic.twitter.com/WQuuHKKxMd— Tyler O'Neil (@Tyler2ONeil) September 20, 2025 Authorities reportedly confirmed that 23-year-old Robin Westman, a male born Robert Westman, opened fire at Annunciation Church in Minneapolis in August, killing two children and injuring 17 others. Audrey Elizabeth Hale, 28, reportedly identified as male. She shot and killed three children and three adults on March 27, 2023, at The Covenant School, a Presbyterian school in Nashville, Tennessee. Police fatally shot her during the attack. According to a court document obtained by The Daily Signal, the man who tried to assassinate Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh in June 2022 identifies as a woman. Nicholas Roske, who was 29 when he pleaded guilty in April, identifies as Sophie Roske in a court document. On May 7, 2019, then-16-year-old Maya “Alec” McKinney and her 19-year-old fellow student, Devon Erickson, opened fire at STEM School Highlands Ranch in Highlands Ranch, Colorado, killing one and injuring eight. Both have been sentenced to life in prison. McKinney, a female, identifies as male. In June 2024, a judge sentenced Jason Lee Willie, a man who identifies as a woman and goes by Alexia, to one year in prison after he pleaded guilty to threatening to injure people across state lines. Willie, a resident of Nashville, Illinois, confessed to threatening to rape girls in girls’ restrooms, carry out mass shootings at schools, and bomb churches. The post Man Whose Trans Identity Apparently Led to Divorce Shoots Family at RI Ice Rink appeared first on The Daily Signal.

About 100 U.S. troops have landed in Nigeria to aid the African nation in its fight against radical Islamic terrorism.  The troops will focus on training and advising the local army, according to a statement from the Nigerian military on Monday.   Another 100 U.S. troops are expected to arrive in Nigeria soon as the two countries work to combat the threat Islamist groups pose to the nation’s Christian communities.   More than 50,000 Christians are estimated have been killed in Nigeria since 2009, and about 7,000 in the first half of 2025 alone, most at the hands of either the terror group Boko Haram or Muslim Fulani militants.    President Donald Trump has drawn attention to the killings since returning to the White House, and designated Nigeria a “Country of Particular Concern” over the slaughter of Christians.   In October, Trump tasked a handful of members of Congress, including Rep. Riley Moore, “to immediately look into” the situation in Nigeria and report back to him.   “Working with the administration, we are making steps in the right direction to address this persecution,” Moore said during an interview on Fox News last week.   JUST IN: The U.S. is sending 200 troops to Nigeria to train its military to fight Islamist militants, according to the Wall Street Journal.During an appearance on Fox, @RepRileyMoore says sources on the ground have told him that the situation in Nigeria is a "bloodbath.""As… pic.twitter.com/lCmBwwj9N9— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) February 10, 2026 The U.S. and Nigeria have signed a “security cooperation roadmap,” according to Moore, who is advocating for each state within Nigeria to have a police force to protect its residents.   Boko Haram and the Islamic State have historically carried out many of the attacks on Christians, but more recently, ethnic Fulani militias have also begun attacking Christian communities in the African nation.  The Nigerian government has acknowledged that it needs U.S. support to combat the violence inside the country.   The post US Troops Begin to Arrive in Nigeria appeared first on The Daily Signal.

Civil rights leader Jesse Jackson, a Baptist minister raised in the segregated South who became a close associate of Martin Luther King Jr and twice ran for the Democratic presidential nomination, has died at age 84, his family said in a statement on Tuesday. “Our father was a servant leader – not only to our family, but to the oppressed, the voiceless, and the overlooked around the world,” the Jackson family said. Jackson, an inspirational orator and long-time Chicagoan, was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in 2017. He advocated for the rights of Black Americans and other marginalized communities dating back to the turbulent civil rights movement of the 1960s spearheaded by his mentor King, a Baptist minister and towering social activist. Jackson weathered a spate of controversies but remained America’s preeminent civil rights figure for decades. He ran for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1984 and 1988, attracting Black voters and many white liberals in mounting unexpectedly strong campaigns but fell short of becoming the first Black major party White House nominee. Ultimately, he never held elective office. Jackson founded the Chicago-based civil rights groups Operation PUSH and the National Rainbow Coalition and served as Democratic President Bill Clinton’s special envoy to Africa in the 1990s. Jackson also was instrumental in securing the release of a number of Americans and others held overseas in places including Syria, Cuba, Iraq and Serbia. Jackson pursued his political ambitions in the 1980s. In 1984, Jackson won 3.3 million votes in Democratic nominating contests, about 18% of those cast, and finished third behind eventual nominee Walter Mondale and Gary Hart in the race for the right to face Republican incumbent Ronald Reagan. His candidacy lost momentum after it became public that Jackson had privately called Jewish people “Hymies” and New York “Hymietown.” In 1988, Jackson came in a close second in the Democratic race to face Republican George H.W. Bush. Jackson gave eventual Democratic nominee Michael Dukakis a run for his money, winning 11 state primaries and caucuses, including several in the South, and amassing 6.8 million votes in nominating contests, or 29%. Jackson announced in 2017 at age 76 that he had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, a movement disorder marked by trembling, stiffness and poor balance and coordination, after experiencing symptoms for three years. Born on Oct. 8, 1941, in Greenville, South Carolina, his mother was a 16-year-old high school student and his father was a 33-year-old married man who lived next door. His mother later married another man who adopted Jackson. He grew up amid the Jim Crow era in the United States, the often brutally enforced web of racist laws and practices born in the South to subjugate Black Americans. Jackson earned a football scholarship at the University of Illinois, but transferred to a historically Black college because he said he experienced discrimination. He began his civil rights activism while a student at North Carolina Agricultural & Technical College, and was arrested when he sought to enter a “whites-only” public library in South Carolina. He attended Chicago Theological Seminary and was ordained a Baptist minister in 1968 despite failing to graduate.  Jackson became a lieutenant to civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr and sometimes traveled with him. On the day King was assassinated by a white man named James Earl Ray on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Jackson was just a floor below. Jackson infuriated some of King’s other associates when he told reporters he had cradled the dying King in his arms and was the last person to whom King spoke, an account they disputed. King, who headed the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, had installed the energetic Jackson in a leadership role to help create economic opportunities in Black communities. Jackson later broke with King’s successor at the SCLC, Ralph Abernathy, and set up his own civil rights organization in Chicago, Operation PUSH, in the early 1970s. In 1984, Jackson founded the National Rainbow Coalition, and the two organizations merged in 1996. He stepped down as the president of Rainbow-PUSH Coalition in 2023 after more than five decades of leadership and activism. He met his wife, Jacqueline Brown, during college. They married in 1962 and had five children. His son Jesse Jackson Jr. was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives but resigned and served prison time on a fraud conviction. Jackson also had a daughter out of wedlock in 1999 with a woman who worked at his civil rights groups, which became a scandal. Jackson was known for personal diplomacy. After he secured the 1984 release by Syria of U.S. naval aviator Robert Goodman Jr., President Ronald Reagan invited Jackson to the White House and expressed gratitude for the “mission of mercy.” Jackson met in 1990 with Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein to gain the release of hundreds of Americans and others after Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait. He won the 1984 release of dozens of Cuban and American prisoners from Cuban jails and the release of three U.S. airmen held in Serbia in 1999. He hosted a weekly show on CNN from 1992 to 2000, pressed corporations for Black economic empowerment, and received the highest U.S. civilian honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom from Clinton in 2000. Jackson continued his activism later in life, condemning the police killing of George Floyd and other Black Americans in 2020.  Reuters contributed to this report. The post Jesse Jackson, Civil Rights Leader, Dies at 84 appeared first on The Daily Signal.

FIRST ON THE DAILY SIGNAL—A coalition of 60 lawmakers filed an amicus brief supporting a lawsuit to limit the abortion pill after the Trump administration requested a pause to the case, The Daily Signal can first report. On Friday, 58 Republican representatives and senators, led by Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana and Rep. Chris Smith of New Jersey, filed the amicus brief in support of Louisiana’s effort to restore the in-person dispensing requirement on the abortion pill. amDownload Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill filed a lawsuit in 2025 challenging a Biden-era rule allowing abortion drugs to be dispensed to women through the mail without seeing a doctor first. A hearing for State of Louisiana v. Food and Drug Administration is scheduled for Feb. 24. Ahead of the hearing, President Donald Trump’s Department of Justice asked a federal court to pause Louisiana’s case against the Food and Drug Administration while the agency conducts a safety review into the abortion drug mifepristone. “I thank Attorney General Murrill for defending women and babies in Louisiana and across the country. Chemical abortion drugs kill innocent children and put mothers’ lives at risk,” said Cassidy, who chairs the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee. “Safeguards protecting against coercion, such as the in-person dispensing requirement, must be reinstated immediately.”  ‘Why Is It Taking So Long’? Senate Health Chair Urges Immediate FDA Action on Abortion PillThe Food and Drug Administration should “immediately” restore in-person dispensing requirements for the abortion pill, Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., told @TheElizMitchell. The senator… pic.twitter.com/F54LzanmJi— The Daily Signal (@DailySignal) January 14, 2026 Louisiana filed the lawsuit alongside resident Rosalie Markezich, who says her boyfriend coerced her into taking abortion pills, which he ordered from a doctor in California. While Louisiana law prohibits abortions in almost all cases, the lack of an in-person dispensing requirement on the drugs allowed him to obtain the drugs out of state through the mail. The GOP lawmakers argue that Biden violated federal law by removing the in-person dispensing requirement, and that these protections should be reinstated. When Congress passed the Comstock Act, it declared that abortion drugs are “nonmailable matter” by the United States Postal Service and private carriers, but the Biden administration illegally allowed abortion pills to be shipped across the country, the brief states. “This action contravenes federal laws passed by the elected representatives of the American people,” according to the brief. “It also contravenes state laws prohibiting abortion, such as Louisiana’s, even though ‘the authority to regulate abortion’ belongs to ‘the people and their elected representatives,’ not unelected bureaucrats.” The Biden FDA also did not properly consider the safety risk of the abortion pill when removing the in-person dispensing requirement, according to the lawmakers. A study from the Ethics and Public Policy Center found that 11% of women experience adverse health effects, such as sepsis, infection, hemorrhaging, within 45 days following a mifepristone abortion. EXCLUSIVE??: @DrMakaryFDA responded to a report saying he is delaying the review of the abortion pill.The FDA is currently in the “data acquisition phase” of the review," he told @DailySignal.“We do an ongoing review, but we’re also engaging in a robust study that can serve… pic.twitter.com/bhkTwXqvby— Elizabeth Troutman Mitchell (@TheElizMitchell) December 9, 2025 “The Biden FDA did not have a sufficient evidentiary basis to conclude that eliminating the in-person dispensing requirement was safe,” the brief says. “And because no in-person visit is required now, women cannot be meaningfully screened for serious contraindications for the use of this drug, such as ectopic pregnancy.” “It also increases the likelihood that some women are being coerced into taking these drugs against their will, as the heartbreaking story of Plaintiff Rosalie Markezich illustrates,” the brief continues. The amicus brief supports Murrill’s motion for preliminary relief and asks for a preliminary injunction ordering FDA to suspend or withdraw the 2023 Risk Evaluation and Mitigation Strategy while the case proceeds.   Mifepristone has become the most common abortion method, accounting for about 63% of all abortions, according to the Guttmacher Institute, Planned Parenthood’s research arm. However, this is likely an undercount, according to the pro-life Charlotte Lozier Institute, because this count does not include abortions outside the formal health care system or under shield laws. Shield laws allow abortionists to mail abortion drugs to women, including those in states that prohibit most abortions or impose gestational limits. Murrill previously told The Daily Signal she is hopeful the judge will reject the Trump administration’s request to pause her lawsuit seeking to reinstate regulations of the abortion pill. “I am certainly hopeful that he will not accept the Department of Justice’s position, because they haven’t given any concrete reason to believe they are actually moving forward,” she said. The entry of abortion pills into Louisiana is dangerous, illegal, unethical. We’ve seen the harms that have come to women from the kind of unrestricted flooding of these pills into our states, and we’ve had numerous cases show up in emergency rooms. Louisiana will always protect… https://t.co/G3gKHb6Obb— Attorney General Liz Murrill (@AGLizMurrill) January 30, 2026 At the time, a spokesperson for the Justice Department told The Daily Signal in a statement that the agency “remains committed to advancing President Trump’s pro-life agenda, including through dismissing criminal prosecutions and civil lawsuits against peaceful pro-life advocates targeted by the previous administration, and using the FACE Act to protect pro-life pregnancy centers.” “In this filing, the Department of Justice simply requested more time from the court for the FDA to complete its review of mifepristone REMS,” the spokesperson added. A Risk Evaluation and Mitigation Strategy, or REMS, is a protocol for the FDA to ensure safe usage of higher-risk drugs. “As the Supreme Court recognized in a unanimous ruling less than two years ago,” the spokesperson continued, “it is the role of the FDA—not the federal courts—to evaluate drug safety data and impose appropriate precautions.” The post EXCLUSIVE: 60 Lawmakers Support Lawsuit to Limit Abortion Pill After Trump Requested Pause appeared first on The Daily Signal.

Nearly 80% of the 2017 and 2018 Truman Scholars—a taxpayer-funded scholarship program— now have “a clear connection to liberal politics, such as working for Democratic members of Congress, advocating for progressive causes, or teaching classes with a liberal focus,” reports the College Fix. Jennifer Kabbany, editor-in-chief of The College Fix, joins Jack Fowler on this episode of “Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words” for an in-depth discussion on DEI programs, higher education challenges, and jaw-dropping campus stories. Subscribe to Victor Davis Hanson’s own YouTube channel to watch past episodes. We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal.  The post EXPOSED: Taxpayers Paying for Democrat Activists’ Grad School Tuition appeared first on The Daily Signal.