A House Republican cast aspersions at Democrats’ motives for downplaying the threat of radical Islamic terrorism even after recent attacks. A Senegalese immigrant wearing a “Property of Allah” sweatshirt and an undershirt with the Iranian flag shot 16 people at a bar near Austin, Texas, last week, killing three. In New York City on Saturday, two men who authorities believe to have been inspired by ISIS threw homemade explosives at a crowd of “anti-Muslim” protesters. When asked about her concern about radical Islamic terror attacks, Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., told The Daily Signal that she is “concerned about the war in Iran.” New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani addressed the New York City attack with remarks focused on “anti-Muslim bigotry.” “In his faith, blasphemy of Islam is worthy of death,” Rep. Randy Fine, R-Fla., told The Daily Signal of Mamdani. “That’s what he believes. They’re unwilling to blast people in their own religion, Mamdani agrees with the terrorist. He would tell you they had it coming because they would criticize Islam.” Instead of calling out the two attackers in his initial social media post, Mamdani took aim at Jake Lang, the social media influencer responsible for organizing the Saturday demonstration. “Many Democrats have made it clear that their priorities are fighting America,” Fine continued. “These people aren’t America last—they’re America haters.” “How many Americans are going to have to get Allahu Akbar’d before we do something about it?” he asked. The Daily Signal reached out to Jayapal and Mamdani for comment on Fine’s remarks, but they did not respond by publication time. Victoria Coates, a national security expert at The Heritage Foundation, echoed Fine’s remarks. She told The Daily Signal that Democrats continue to “downplay” the threat of “radical Islamic terrorism because they care more about their woke progressive agenda than about the safety of the American people.” She criticized Democrats for refusing to fund the Department of Homeland Security, which is experiencing a partial government shutdown. “In their narrative, the terrorists who are trying to kill us are actually the victims of the systemic racism on the Right,” Coates added. “Their ideology has blinded them to this growing danger, and they won’t even fund DHS to protect Americans from it.” Previously, Rep. Keith Self, R-Texas, told The Daily Signal that elected officials need to take seriously the threat posed by “radical Islamic terrorists.” “We’ve got a lot of terrorists in our country,” Self said in response to the Austin shooting. “We know we have we know they’re here. These guys that get a wild hair, they’re dangerous, and they kill people.” On Monday, federal agents announced that they intercepted possible messages from the Iranian regime to pro-Iranian rebels who reside in the U.S. Mamdani’s remarks after the attempted terror attack in New York City and Jayapal’s comments after the Austin shooting were not isolated incidents of Democrats “downplaying” terrorism. Jayapal joined Reps. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn.; Sarah McBride, D-Del., Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., and 49 other Democrats last week in voting against a House resolution to brand Iran a state sponsor of terrorism. International human rights groups have accused the Iran regime of requiring full body coverings and genital mutilation surgeries on women, carrying out the mass execution of protesters, funding terrorist organizations like Hamas. The Daily Signal reached out to each of the Democrats who voted against the resolution, and none responded by publication time. They do not appear to have made any public statements or issued press releases explaining their opposition to the resolution. Congressional Democrats have attacked the new congressional Sharia Free America Caucus—which has increased its membership from 35 to nearly 50 members since the Austin shooting—as a “cynical political ploy.” The post ‘AMERICA HATERS’: Republican Slams Democrats For Unwillingness to Criticize Islam Amid New York, Texas Terror Attacks appeared first on The Daily Signal.

An upcoming referendum on whether to allow the Democrat majority in the Virginia legislature to redraw congressional maps may not be the end of the matter.  Voters in the commonwealth on April 21 will consider a state constitutional amendment to temporarily suspend the state’s bipartisan redistricting commission until after the 2030 Census, allowing for partisan gerrymandering ahead of the 2026 midterm elections.  The Democrat-controlled legislature is poised to approve a map that would shift the state from six Democrats and five Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives to 10 Democrats and one Republican.  Four members of Congress from Virginia are challenging the redrawn maps.  But their challenge could be an uphill climb, since courts often give wide latitude to legislators on redistricting, said Daniel Ortiz, a professor at the University of Virginia School of Law.  “The U.S. Supreme Court in the not-too-distant past has turned down challenges from Democrats in Texas and Republicans in California over partisan gerrymandering,” Ortiz told The Daily Signal.  Unlike the Texas and California cases, where challengers cited federal law, the Virginia cases focus on state laws, Ortiz noted. That likely means the Virginia Supreme Court will have the final say.  The Virginia Supreme Court allowed the referendum to proceed earlier this month but declined to rule on the legality of the proposed maps until after the election.  This overturned a lower court ruling in a case brought by the Republican National Committee and two Virginia Republican members of Congress, Reps. Ben Cline and Morgan Griffith, who sought to halt the referendum.  A Tazewell County Circuit Court judge ruled in January that the state legislature did not follow the law when it approved the referendum during a special session. The court’s injunction on the referendum was overturned, but the state’s high court could still decide the case on the merits. In a separate case, U.S. Reps. John McGuire and Rob Wittman filed a challenge in the Richmond City Circuit Court alleging the ballot question, which states the new map seeks to “restore fairness,” is deceptive and constitutes viewpoint discrimination.  “The Supreme Court will weigh in one way or another,” Ortiz said. “All the challenges are based on state laws, so it will likely stop there. That’s not to say a talented lawyer won’t try to argue that the map violates federal law, given the high stakes.” The post Why the Real Fight Over Virginia’s Partisan Map to Reshape Congress May Come After Referendum appeared first on The Daily Signal.

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. I’d like to comment recently on the politicking of Barack Obama. He’s been in the news recently, speaking at the Jesse Jackson funeral. What he did there, I’ll get to in a second, but he had a habit of talking down to black Americans as if they were naive, stupid, lacked his sophistication. Do you remember most poignantly when he told supporters of Kamala Harris, don’t dare, you don’t know what’s good for you. Don’t dare vote for basically a white racist like Trump when you could empower a black woman. That didn’t go over very well, but he has a long history of that. Before I continue, though, the Democrats have a long history of using the venue of the funeral memorial service to hijack it and use it for political purposes. In 2002, they did that with the late Sen. Paul Wellstone, and what should have been a memorial service turned into a four-hour campaign harangue. It was sort of the same way when Barack Obama went to the funeral of John McCain. He was asked to speak, and there’s no secret that John McCain and Donald Trump were not friends. Donald Trump felt that he had endorsed John McCain in 2008. John McCain had not turned the favor by explicitly telling the country that he would not vote for his own party’s nominee in 2016. John McCain, remember, had been a lifetime supporter of private medicine, and when Obamacare came on the scene, he was a vehement opponent. And when Donald Trump then was president, he had the votes to repeal Obamacare and bring in a free-market alternative. John McCain inexplicably, in a late-night vote, flipped and decided to cast the deciding vote to crush that effort. And we have Obamacare today thanks to John McCain. He was never forgiven. Trump then said some things, and that all surfaced at the McCain funeral where Barack Obama sort of, without mentioning Trump, but it was very overt, the reference. He said that unlike people who are brash and think they’re tough and crude, basically, John McCain was tough, but he didn’t have to emphasize it. The next occasion came in 2020 for Barack Obama. That was at John Lewis’ funeral, and like the Wellstone funeral and the McCain funeral, once again, it was occasion to hijack the purpose, that is to honor the dead, and instead to use it for political purposes. So once Barack Obama came to the podium, he had an agenda. And he was going to attack Donald Trump. And the way he did it was he said, we are suffering from racism and voter suppression. We don’t need voter IDs. We need a national holiday for balloting. We need to let prisoners vote, and we have too much Jim Crow racism in the country. Therefore, we’ve got to get rid of the Jim Crow racist filibuster footnote. He used it very ineffectively, but he used it in 2006 to deny the nomination of Justice [Samuel] Alito to the Supreme Court. And then he said that we have racist gerrymandering. That’s kind of ironic to see who’s been gerrymandering lately. And he has fully endorsed the efforts of Illinois, of Massachusetts, of Virginia, of California to ensure that Republicans don’t have House representation commensurate with their popular vote in their states. In that long sermon, people were kind of startled. They thought, “Wow, this is a campaign. Is this a campaign advertisement, or is this an occasion for Obama to get relevance again after being out of office?” I would drop it there, but he did it again. He just went to the funeral of Jesse Jackson. I should add another footnote here that Jesse Jackson and Barack Obama were not close friends. Jesse Jackson said that he had been the trailblazer, the first African American presidential candidate that had a real chance to win. There had been others, but he felt that he was the most viable and that broke the barrier. And Obama was the beneficiary of that. He got so angry that in 2008 he got tired of Barack Obama, he thought, talking down to African Americans. So he said in a hot mic in the Fox Chicago studio, “I’d like to cut his” off, a vulgar reference to Obama’s testicles. But anyway, Obama was asked to speak. Now, I would say in another footnote, all of these speeches at these funerals that Obama presents are basically about himself. He always relates anecdotes, not about necessarily just about the politician in question, but about his interaction with him. But in this particular Jesse Jackson speech, he went after division in the country using government. These are all sins he purportedly thinks that Donald Trump has committed—disunity, racism, valuing some people over others, and using the government to pursue enemies. This was very, very rich. Very rich. Barack Obama, remember when he was president, he used the government to do what? Surveil Associated Press reporters, politicized the IRS to make sure they went after conservative groups and denied them tax-free status before his reelection effort. And remember most egregiously of all: He had at one point James Clapper, John Brennan, and James Comey in the Oval Office with him during the transition after Trump had been elected. And he basically said to them, your intelligence assessments from national intelligence, FBI, CIA are flawed because I’m not getting the results I want. I want Russian collusion. Collusion. Now go back and give me Russian collusion and Donald Trump. So, what I’m getting at is that once again, Barack Obama hijacked a funeral, but more importantly, it’s really disturbing to see this former president who, when he was president, not only used government, but he also divided the country. All of his speeches had one thing in common at these three funerals: unity, unity, unity. But it was Barack Obama who said that Henry Louis Gates was endemic of police racism. Trayvon Martin was the son that I never had. He weighed in on Ferguson. Most importantly, he gave that awful speech where he said that the white working class were clingers, they stick to their guns and religion just because he lost the primary in 2008. And then we have, of course, this dichotomy where he is the man of the people, reemerging now to galvanize the Democrats and the progressives, and yet he’s building this German flak tower-type of library that’s ruined a park in Chicago. It’s going to cost eventually about a billion dollars. It’s one of the ugliest monoliths imaginable, but it’s a testament not so much to his presidency, but to his ego. This is a man, remember, who flies from one of his four mansions, either in Hawaii or Martha’s Vineyard, or Kalorama or Chicago, to lecture people about how they’re either, as he did in one of the funerals, greedy, the age of greed, or they’re too self-centered, or they’re not idealistic enough, or they’re not galvanized enough, and then he gets in a private jet after sometimes talking on other occasions about climate change. People who talk about climate change shouldn’t fly in private jets. They should not have seaside resorts when they tell us that the seas are going to inundate our coast. What I’m getting at is that we are in a situation now where the Democratic Party has moved radically to the left, and no institution is free of politicization. And we’re going to have politics 24/7, seven days a week. Funerals, speeches, any occasion, and we’re going to see Barack Obama in the center of it, and he’s going to try to convince us that his administration started the leftward move of the Democratic Party, and he’s going to be the one that sees it completed, as we saw during the Biden administration, when his operatives were really running the country. We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal. The post The Politicking of Barack Obama appeared first on The Daily Signal.

Some conservative members of Congress are concerned President Donald Trump is moving away from his promise to carry out the “largest deportation” in U.S. history, while others say they’ve been advocating for such a shift. White House deputy chief of staff James Blair encouraged Republican members this week to focus on the deportation of criminal illegal immigrants rather than mass deportation, ahead of the midterm elections, members confirmed to The Daily Signal. Blair’s message at the GOP Issue Retreat in Doral, Florida, was first reported by Axios. One conservative member pointed to recent polling from Cygnal showing that 73% of Americans believe illegally entering the United States is a crime. “The American people elected President Trump because they believed in his platform of mass deportations,” the lawmaker told The Daily Signal. “Americans are tired of illegals ripping off citizens and getting housing, welfare, medical insurance, and other taxpayer-funded benefits” The lawmaker said Republicans need to continue to stand for mass deportations. “We shouldn’t let the rhetoric of Leftist news and radical Democrats cause us to stray from our mission— we must remove any illegal alien that has entered our country,” the lawmaker said. “Illegal aliens are criminal aliens.” About 70% of deportations to date have been illegal immigrants with criminal records, according to the Department of Homeland Security. “Nobody is changing the Administration’s immigration enforcement agenda. President Trump’s highest priority has always been the deportation of illegal alien criminals who endanger American communities,” White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson told The Daily Signal in a statement. “Thanks to President Trump’s strong immigration enforcement policies, approximately 3 million illegals have left the United States, either through forced deportation or self-deportation, with zero illegals coming through the most secure border in U.S. History for nine straight months,” she added. During his campaign, Trump said, “We’re going to have the largest deportation in the history of our country.” A GOP congressional staffer told The Daily Signal the Republicans need to stay focused on bringing that promise to fruition. “It’s what we ran on in 2024,” the staff member said. “It’s what won us the trifecta, and for us to backtrack on what we’re supposed to be doing for America, is that the direction that we should be heading in, especially going into the midterms?” A senior administration official told The Daily Signal this comes in the wake of a “tone shift” at the Department of Homeland Security after Secretary Kristi Noem’s turbulent hearings before Congress. Shortly after the hearings, Trump chose Oklahoma Republican Sen. Markwayne Mullin to replace Noem as DHS secretary. However, many Republicans are on board with the realignment in focus on immigration. One GOP member told The Daily Signal that the shift makes sense and is in line with what many members have been advocating for. “The primary objective should be to remove proven/convicted dangerous and violent criminals,” the member stated. Rep. Ralph Norman, R-S.C., told The Daily Signal in a phone call that Trump’s focus has been on criminals all along, and the media has misconstrued his immigration agenda to imply he’s deporting innocent children and nurses. “Trump’s exactly right,” Norman said. “He’s taking criminals off the street. And I don’t know how many more deaths we have to have with Laken Riley and the others that have been publicized.” “Tim Walz ought to either resign before he leaves office or cover his head in shame everywhere he goes,” Norman said of the Minnesota governor, who strongly opposed Trump’s deportation push in his state. “It’s just a disaster with him, but the Trump administration is doing exactly what’s right.” Norman, a member of the conservative House Freedom Caucus, is currently running for governor of South Carolina. Norman said Trump is not deporting “the many hard-working people that are getting the crops into the process,” but rather, has always focused on criminals. “The good that’s been accomplished by this administration is like no other,” Norman said, “and I applaud him 100%.” Border czar Tom Homan told the Republican Main Street Caucus in a meeting last week that he was in “strong agreement” with it that “enforcement efforts should remain focused on the worst criminal offenders,” according to a letter from the caucus recapping the meeting. “Prioritizing the removal of individuals who pose the greatest threats to public safety ensures that federal resources are used effectively while protecting American families and communities,” the letter says. Oversight Project President Mike Howell, who is part of the “Mass Deportation Coalition,” said the answer to why Republicans are moving away from mass deportations can be found by following the money. “Big donors don’t like it. Special interests don’t like it,” he told The Daily Signal. “They like their cheap labor.” Politico reported that executives in the construction sector held meetings with the White House and Congress to discuss how mass deportations have harmed their industry. “It’s not about winning elections,” Howell said. “It’s about winning donations.” Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, said no one has told him to change his focus away from mass deportations, but if they do, he won’t comply. “The swamp would love the Trump administration to abandon its most popular and important promise to the American people, which is exactly why Senator Lee is shutting down their rumor mill,” Billy Gribbin, Lee’s communications director, told The Daily Signal. 1. Nobody has told me that2. I won’t comply if they do3. This story doesn’t add up4. No sane country ignores illegal immigration5. This country shouldn’t ignore it https://t.co/QpQuIT1tQ6— Mike Lee (@BasedMikeLee) March 11, 2026 The post GOP Lawmakers Split on Whether White House Should Shift Away From Mass Deportation Messaging appeared first on The Daily Signal.

The year is just getting started, but the 2026 Virginia legislative session has already been nothing short of mind-boggling. Democrats are shamelessly moving a bevy of far-left fantasy bills through the Legislature. HB 1245 provides taxpayer funding for transgender surgeries, HB 256 mandates “environmental justice” planning, SB 22 forces racial bias training on nurses, and HB 111 bans cleaning voter rolls. But among all the strange and terrible bills this session, one stands out as especially dangerous: the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact. Legislation to add Virginia to the bizarre NPV scheme will soon go to Gov. Abigail Spanberger. Despite many pleas from Virginia residents, Democrats in the Legislature forced SB 322 and HB 965 through. These bills would join the Commonwealth to an agreement among states that could force Virginia to give all its electoral votes to a candidate who loses there but wins in other states. It’s an attempt to manipulate the Electoral College and usurp Virginia voters. The NPV compact has a trigger, taking effect only if passed by states that control a majority of electoral votes. Virginia would become the 18th state to join, giving the compact 223 electoral votes— not far short of the 270 it needs. Should a few more states pass NPV legislation, only the Supreme Court could save the country from a presidential election debacle. How did we get to a point where states would join a compact to give their electoral votes to the national popular vote winner? While the Electoral College may seem controversial today, that wasn’t the case during the Constitutional Convention of 1787. The framers debated for months about how to elect the president, and the final product was accepted as a great compromise—one that gives voice to every state. Even opponents of the Constitution mostly agreed it was a fitting system for our nation of states. High population states get more votes, but every state has a real voice. The Electoral College reduces the threats of tyranny for both the majority and the minority. It does so by granting more electoral votes to larger states without allowing them to dominate and by forcing candidates to build broad coalitions to win, thus preventing regionalism. Alexander Hamilton summed up the value of the Electoral College perfectly in Federalist 68 when he said, “I venture somewhat further and hesitate not to affirm that if the manner of it be not perfect, it is at least excellent.” And he was right. The Electoral College, much like America itself, isn’t perfect. But no system or country made by humans can ever be. Just as America is the greatest country on earth despite its flaws, the same can be said about the Electoral College. While it may not be a perfect system, it is the perfect system for our country. America is celebrating her 250th Anniversary this Independence Day, an amazing milestone, but we should all remember that the Electoral College has been instrumental to the success of our nation across those many generations. It’s unlikely that America would have survived 250 years without the Electoral College, and I have no doubt that she cannot survive another 250 without it.  We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal. The post Will Virginia Democrats Disenfranchise American Voters? appeared first on The Daily Signal.