On Wednesday, Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp announced a firearms manufacturer will leave the state of Virginia over new “anti-gun legislation” and relocate to Georgia, bringing a $22 million investment and employing hundreds of residents. “Georgia attracts job creators from all over the country and world because we work with them, not against them,” Kemp said. “Our state’s pro-business approach, skilled workforce, and enduring support for constitutional freedoms make us an ideal home for manufacturers like Rideout Arsenal, and we look forward to their success here in the No. 1 state for business.” Rideout Arsenal, the firearms designer and manufacturer launching the new facility, has announced it will be opening its doors in the south Georgia town of Thomasville. “Today we welcome Rideout Arsenal to Thomasville. This includes new highly skilled jobs, new partnerships, new careers, and new momentum for our community,” Thomasville Mayor Scott Chastain said. “Most importantly, we welcome the Rideout family to our community.” The new facility will be located within the Plantation Oak Industrial Park, with additional buildings planned throughout the next several years. The company’s founders said the decision to locate in Georgia was made partly as a response to recent legislation in Virginia that could affect the business. “This relocation was not something we originally planned to pursue. The reality is that recent anti-gun legislation in Virginia created a significant uncertainty for our company and ultimately forced us to look for a state where we could continue operating, investing, and growing with confidence,” Travis Rideout, co-founder of Rideout Arsenal, said. “We are excited to bring new jobs and manufacturing investment to Thomas County and are grateful for the warm welcome we have already received.” The move comes after Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger enacted a slew of gun control measures into law, which blocked the sale of certain “assault weapons” in the commonwealth and imposed a ban on magazines capable of holding more than 15 rounds. Spanberger claimed the legislation would make Virginians safer. “Firearms designed to inflict maximum casualties do not belong on our streets,” she said in a statement. Spanberger, Kemp, and Rideout Arsenal did not respond to the Daily Signal’s request for comment.

U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro of the District of Columbia launched an investigation into alleged politicized “debanking” of conservative and other disfavored groups by the nation’s largest banks, the Wall Street Journal reported. Among the banks being scrutinized are JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, and Wells Fargo, the Journal reported. In August, President Donald Trump signed an executive order directing federal bank regulators to investigate whether financial institutions engaged in “politicized or unlawful debanking.” The order directed regulators to take appropriate measures, including fines or making referrals to the Justice Department. Fox News reported last August that, according to an unnamed bank executive, pressure from regulators to cancel political adversaries was “very, very real.” Trump stated, “The banks discriminate against conservatives, they discriminate against religion, because they’re afraid of the radical left.” Trump has said JP Morgan Chase blocked his account after his first term. In May 2022, three weeks after the National Committee for Religious Freedom opened an account, JPMorgan Chase closed it, according to the committee’s head Sam Brownback, a former Kansas governor. JPMorgan has said it had nothing to do with political or religious views and said the decision was made because, under federal laws, it needed more information about donors and recipients. In December, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency released a preliminary report that found early evidence of debanking by the nine largest banks. The OCC report found that affected industries included oil and gas, coal, firearms manufacturers, and the adult entertainment business. The findings also said banks considered issues such as fighting climate change and racial inequality when deciding business partners. For their part, various banks have asserted they don’t close accounts for political or religious reasons. Banks have blamed their decisions not to work with certain industries on regulatory pressure, the Journal reported. The Journal, citing sources, said that regulators had not made referrals to the Justice Department yet and said Pirro initiated the investigations on her own. Specifically, Pirro’s office is investigating whether the banks might have violated laws that include the Financial Institutions Reform, Recovery, and Enforcement Act of 1989, a law traditionally used to prosecute bank-related fraud, the paper said. A JPMorganChase spokesperson told The Daily Signal in February 2023, “I can tell you confidently we have never [closed], and would never close, an account due to one’s political or religious affiliation. Full stop.”  In January 2025, at the World Economic Forum, Trump brought up the issue to Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan in response to his question. “You’ve done a fantastic job, but I hope you start opening your bank to conservatives, because many conservatives complain that the banks are not allowing them to do business within the bank, and that included a place called Bank of America,” Trump told Moynihan. “They don’t take conservative business. … I hope you’re going to open your banks to conservatives because what you’re doing is wrong.” In March 2025, Bank of America spokesman Bill Halldin said the bank supported legislation from Sen. Tim Scott, R-S.C., the Financial Integrity and Regulation Management (FIRM) Act, to scrap regulations that could force debanking.  “Given our client base of 70 million and opening 12 million new accounts last year alone, it’s clear that we are focused on being a bank that serves everyone, regardless of political viewpoints,” Halldin told The Daily Signal. “We are required to follow extensive government regulations that sometimes result in requirements to exit relationships. We never close accounts for political reasons and don’t have a political litmus test.”

The Trump administration revised a grant program to treat frozen embryos created through in vitro fertilization as human children deserving to be born to a loving family. The Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Population Affairs issued a notice of funding opportunity on Wednesday seeking grant recipients who will prioritize the best interests of unborn human children in the embryo adoption process.  The Embryo Adoption and Awareness notice of funding opportunity was first created in 2002 to raise awareness of the problem of IVF creating more embryos than a couple is willing or able to parent, then freezing the embryos indefinitely. The federal embryo adoption grant program was expanded in 2008 to offer services that help facilitate embryo adoption and donation for the purpose of family formation Currently more than 1 million embryos created through IVF are frozen in storage. IVF procedures typically create 4-6 embryos in each egg retrieval cycle but the number can be up to 20 or more, according to adoption agency Embryo Connections. While previous administrations have prioritized the desires of adults in the embryo adoption program, the Trump-era HHS has shifted the grant opportunity toward a child-centric framework, urging recipients to consider what is in the best interest of the child, a senior HHS official told The Daily Signal.  Embryo adoption should “serve the needs of a child already in existence, offering that child the opportunity for life within a stable and loving family,” the funding notice says.  Trump made a campaign promise to make IVF accessible to all prospective parents, calling himself the “father of IVF,” sparking criticism from pro-lifers who say the procedure relies on the destruction of embryos. However, the pro-life movement may warmly receive this program due to its child-first adoption framework, as well as its prohibitions on using grant funding for embryo destruction or new embryo creation. The Trump administration has made a number of moves to expand IVF, but this is the first time it is addressing the procedure’s downfalls. Heritage Foundation family policy expert Emma Waters praised the revision for “reframing embryo adoption not as a treatment for infertility, but as an act of charity toward a child already in existence who is in need of a loving home.”  “The uncomfortable truth is that our loose approach to IVF has left millions of human embryos in indefinite storage, many of whom are destined to be discarded,” she told The Daily Signal.  The revised notice says that grant funds cannot be used for the “donation of human embryos to embryo-destructive research,” and that “no grant funds will be used to pay for, subsidize, promote, or otherwise support discarding or destroying human embryos.” HHS also prohibits grantees from using the funds to create “new human embryos.” The revised grant program expects awardees to promote open and identified donation practices in order to “protect the child’s right to know their biological origins and medical history.”  It also requires grantees to “center the rights and long-term wellbeing of the child in all program design and service delivery.” This includes the requirement that embryo adoption agencies conduct background checks, home visits, and other assessments before allowing a family to adopt an embryo.  Waters said the NOFO gets the response to the frozen embryo crisis right by “requiring best-interest-of-the-child assessments and the same adoption-level standards we expect anywhere else, including home studies, background checks, reference checks, and post-placement supervision by a qualified caseworker.” Neel Upadhye, founder of nonprofit Frozen Orphans, which draws attention to the embryos left behind through IVF, said the program is a “meaningful step toward ensuring families know embryo adoption is a real, viable path to parenthood.” “We’re encouraged to see federal support for both the public education and infrastructure that makes these adoptions possible, and we hope it opens doors for the thousands of families and children who could benefit,” he told The Daily Signal. While the Biden administration awarded grants to three secular embryo adoption agencies who match embryos with same-sex couples, the Trump administration is looking to put faith-based organizations back at the center of embryo adoption. The revised notice says that “faith-based organizations have been integral partners in this program since its founding and have historically been among its primary grant recipients.”

Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s video from Daily Signal Senior Contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to see more of his videos. Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for the Daily Signal.  We talk about an Iran war, but as I speak on June 9, we haven’t had a real kinetic back-and-forth bombing campaign or anything since around April 8. So we had 38 days of bombing, and then we’ve had 60 days of negotiations.  So there isn’t really an Iran war right now.  We have a War Powers Act. The Left is all upset and trying to stop the war, but there is no war right now. It’s a waiting game. And what is the waiting game?   The waiting game is that Iran feels that by giving a concession on Monday and taking it back on Tuesday and letting Hezbollah attack Israel and then telling Israel not to reply and then sending a little boat out in the strait, it can delay, delay, advance, retreat, and Donald Trump will allow this because he has got a deadline too.  Their deadline is they’re losing $400 million a day in economic productivity and probably, I don’t know, $2 billion or $3 billion in revenue.   Donald Trump’s problem is now that we’re less than five months until the midterms and inflation is moderate. It’s not as high as the Biden years, but it’s bothering people, and the gas price is high.  And because the gas price is high, people feel they can raise prices commensurately because they think we’re in a hyperinflation.   I’ve been talking to a lot of contractors lately. They’re not getting work right now, even though the fundamentals of the economy are sound. But people are so paranoid here in California about paying $6.50 a gallon for gasoline, they feel everything will go up.  And so they’re holding off on a lot of their construction projects.   What is Iran doing then? It’s hitting Kuwait. Why does it hit Kuwait? I suppose it has the largest Shia population in the Gulf, and it wants to stir up restive opposition to the royal family. It hits the UAE because it hates the UAE.  It’s the most liberal, progressive, and pro-Western and anti-Iranian of all of the Gulf nations. It wants to show the Arab world that if you, like the UAE, have a detente with Israel, you’re going to suffer.   It hit Israel. Why did it hit Israel? It hit Israel during this so-called peace because it wants to widen the reported gulf or anger between [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu and Trump and turn public opinion toward Iran a little bit.  So what is—how does it all divide? Who gives in first?   Donald Trump is kind of mystifying people because he’s a Jacksonian. He believes in tough deterrence. So throughout this so-called peace of now 60 days, Iran has had a lot of provocations. They’ve broken the peace. They’ve, as I said, tried to mine the harbor.  They’ve tried to attack U.S. ships. They’ve attacked our allies. And we have sometimes done a little bit of retaliation, but why don’t we just unload on them?   As I said earlier, why don’t we give them a list of targets and say, these are going to be hit if you don’t concede to surrender your enriched uranium, get out] of the strait and let it be open, stop the subsidies to these terrorist appendages, and surrender your missile arsenal or what’s left of it?  Why doesn’t he do that? I have a feeling he doesn’t do that because he has intelligence that we don’t have, because we don’t have any boots on the ground or embedded reporting that Iran is in much worse shape than we think, and that there are civilians in the Iranian government—the president, some members of the parliament—that are sending signals that they’re not part of the Revolutionary Guard or the theocracy and they feel the people are getting more and more restive, and Trump is looking at them as a transitional government.  Now, the problem with that is we have no idea if those rumors are accurate. They’re kind of based on the fact that we’re getting information.  On the first day when we took out [Ayatollah Ali] Khamenei and some of the henchmen of the theocracy, there were other civilian elected moderates in the general building or vicinity that we deliberately spared on the idea that we want to work with moderates.  But we don’t know whether the moderates are playing good cop and the theocracy and the Revolutionary Guard play bad cop. And how that would work would be something along the lines of, well, the Revolutionary Guard got out of hand again, but they don’t represent the people. They don’t represent us. We want real peace.  Tick, tick, tick, tick, tick—the days go on.   So at some point it seems to me that we’re going to have to take the bull by the horns and resolve it. And the way you would resolve it is one of two things. You would either, as I said earlier, give a deadline and say these are the nonnegotiable four items that have to be met on your part.  If you don’t do it, we’re going to completely preclude your ability to wage war. You’re going to have no missiles. You’re going to have no dual-use bridges.   You’re going to have nothing that could be used in a military sense, and it’s going to be a week or two of hard war against you.  Or we could continue to negotiate and not say a word, but every single time they send one missile into Kuwait, one boat into the strait to mine it, one barrage of missiles against ships in the Gulf, one missile against Israel, we do 10.  We do 10 bombings. And we tell them that every single time you show any military aggression or hit any of our assets or our allies, we’re going to reply in kind. And I think if it is true what rumors suggest—that they are starting to crumble economically and the people are getting a little bit excited that there might be a change—and Donald Trump does not want to precipitate military action to either stymie the growing resistance or take out targets that might be useful for a post-theocratic Iran, that’s fine and good, but he is running out of time too.  And because we’ve got to get this economy—all the fundamentals of the economy are good. The jobs reports are good. The stock market is good. Foreign investment is good. Job creation—everything is good except inflation and gas prices.   So if he can pivot and assure the world that the strait will be open and Iran is militarily defeated or has submitted, we can—  But it has to be very soon because now we’re down to five months.   We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of the Daily Signal.

Bill Gates told a House committee Wednesday that convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein tried to leverage information about marital infidelity by the Microsoft founder against him. The billionaire told the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee that the infidelity was separate from his ties with Epstein, who was charged in 2019 with sex trafficking of minors. Gates added that he was not aware of any criminal activity by Epstein while they maintained a relationship. “I learned Epstein had become aware of sensitive information about my personal life, including the fact that I had been unfaithful in my marriage,” Gates said. “These affairs had nothing to do with my interactions with Epstein, but they were painful for my family.” This marked the committee’s 15th interview in its investigation of Epstein’s ties to powerful individuals and how the government handled its probe of Epstein. Epstein was known for spending time with leaders in the corporate and political world, including Presidents Bill Clinton and Donald Trump. While Gates’ interview with committee members was behind closed doors, and members were given one hour of question time, his written opening statement was made public. A full transcript of the interview will be released at a later date. Gates said he initially thought Epstein would be a financial supporter of charitable efforts by the Gates Foundation. He said he later “concluded Epstein would never deliver on his promises.” Gates said in his statement that it was a “grave error” to ever talk with Epstein. They first talked three years after Epstein’s 2008 conviction in Florida. Epstein pleaded guilty in 2008 to felony solicitation of prostitution, as well as procurement of minors to engage in prostitution. He was arrested again in 2019 on new sex trafficking charges. Epstein died in a New York prison cell in 2019, which investigators determined was a suicide. His business associate Ghislaine Maxwell was sentenced in 2022 for conspiring with Epstein to sexually exploit and abuse minor girls. “Epstein was working to use the information about my infidelities—in addition to the many lies he layered on top—to pressure me to reengage with him,” Gates said. “He was unsuccessful in this effort, but it shows some of the ways he tried to leverage his interactions with me to further his agenda.” Gates said in his opening remarks, “Even if he [Epstein] had delivered the new donors he promised, it would not have justified associating with him.” “I want to state very clearly: I never witnessed nor had any indication that Epstein was engaged in ongoing criminal conduct,” Gates said. He added, “I never went to his island, his ranch, or his Florida home. I have never victimized anyone.” Gates said Epstein sought to “build an image of legitimacy around himself, using connections to reputable and powerful people to deflect scrutiny and attempt to rehabilitate his reputation.” “I was so focused on the possibility of raising funds for global health that I allowed that goal to override my better judgment,” he said. “No one is accusing Bill Gates of any wrongdoing, and I certainly appreciate him coming in voluntarily,” House Oversight and Government Reform Chairman James Comer, R-Ky., told reporters before Gates appeared before the panel. Previously, the committee interviewed both Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton, but the Clintons only agreed to appear after initially trying to defy a subpoena and facing the threat of a bipartisan House vote holding them in contempt of Congress. In February, the committee conducted an interview with Maxwell, who is serving a 20-year prison sentence on charges of recruiting and grooming girls for Epstein. She invoked her Fifth Amendment right, but said she would only answer questions if given clemency. Her lawyer, David Oscar Markus, told the panel, “Both President Trump and President Clinton are innocent of any wrongdoing.” Former attorneys general Pam Bondi and William Barr talked to the committee about how the Justice Department handled the investigation. The committee has interviewed Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche has also talked to the panel, and will likely be back, Comer said. Comer said the committee would be asking noted attorney and former Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz to answer questions. Dershowitz helped Epstein secure his plea deal in 2008. Democrats on the committee have continuously talked about President Donald Trump, who knew Epstein.  “This is about the survivors of Epstein and Maxwell. This is about trying to figure out how the government failed, and this goes back to several administrations, several attorneys general,” Comer said. “This has definitely been a failure in justice. We’re trying to get the proof to the American people, and we’re trying to provide some type of justice for the survivors.”