One of California’s wealthiest and safest cities descended into chaos over the Independence Day weekend after a social media-fueled “teen takeover” led to more than 400 arrests, an officer being struck by a mortar firework, and the looting of a grocery store. Authorities in California were forced to shut down businesses from Newport Pier to Pacific Coast Highway due to non-residents wreaking havoc on July 4th.Hundreds of people reportedly swarmed police officers and threw debris at them before fighting each other.Newport Beach… pic.twitter.com/fWjZZpzgaU— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) July 5, 2026 According to Newport Beach city officials, thousands of unruly juveniles and young adults gathered near the Newport Pier on July 4. As the crowd grew, fireworks were launched into the crowd and at police officers. An officer was struck by a mortar, roadways were blocked, emergency vehicles were delayed, and a nearby grocery store was looted. Last night, a rapidly growing crowd near Newport Pier threatened public safety after social media posts drew thousands to the area. Thanks to months of planning, 350+ officers responded quickly to restore order. Thank you to all of our local and regional first responders. pic.twitter.com/O7rcfsDeny— City of Newport Beach (@newportbeachgov) July 5, 2026 Police made 402 arrests over the weekend, including roughly 200 people who refused lawful dispersal orders. The total was a dramatic increase from approximately 60 arrests made during the same holiday weekend last year. So-called teen takeovers have become increasingly common in Southern California in recent years. Organized primarily through social media, the gatherings often draw hundreds—or even thousands—of teenagers and young adults to beaches, malls, or entertainment districts, overwhelming local police and, in some cases, escalating into violence or vandalism. In a statement to the Daily Signal, Newport Beach Mayor Lauren Kleiman said the city had anticipated large Independence Day crowds and had already taken additional precautions following similar issues in recent years. “I am proud of the way our Newport Beach Police Department handled and diffused a bad situation induced by inciting posts on social media that could have escalated into one with tragic outcomes,” she said. “Saturday’s examples of disrespect and destruction in our city were scary, saddening, and totally unacceptable.” “For many years, Newport has seen more than its fair share of overzealous young people partying over the 4th of July and spring break,” Kleiman added. “But, after witnessing last year’s lawlessness trend, the Council did not hesitate to take immediate action.” These actions included stricter penalties, additional police resources, partnerships with outside agencies, and the city’s “Not-in-Newport” public awareness campaign. However, Kleiman said despite the city’s preparations ahead of the holiday weekend, it was “no match” for the juveniles who incited chaos. “All of these efforts were no match for these anarchic youth who had no respect for the hundreds of law enforcement officers from 17 agencies. Today we turn our focus to how to prevent this type of incident in the future and protecting our beautiful city,” she said. Newport Beach is not the only California city dealing with the trend. In mid-June, Long Beach experienced a similar incident when more than 200 minors gathered, resulting in fights and five teens being cited for violating curfew. #BREAKING: Over 200 "teens" swarmed a Long Beach CA neighborhood during a "teen takeover" and then began BEATING EACH OTHER IN THE STREETS AND TRIED TO ROB PEOPLE!!!…ZERO ARRESTS!!!It took officers 3 HOURS to clear the streets, hours the police chief says were stolen from… pic.twitter.com/ls7UJmvf8m— Matt Van Swol (@mattvanswol) June 13, 2026 Long Beach Police Chief Wally Hebeish stressed the strain that “teen takeovers” have on first responders. “Large-scale disturbances like this deplete our resources and divert our officers from addressing other safety concerns in Long Beach, including emergency responses. We will maintain an enhanced presence throughout the weekend, and any form of violent behavior or law violations will not be tolerated,” he said. As cities across Southern California grapple with increasingly disruptive youth riots, experts are asking what’s driving the trend, and whether it can be stopped. Steve Smith, an expert at the Pacific Research Institute with over 20 years of experience in domestic and international policing and investigation, says teens and young adults often seek validation online through attention-grabbing posts. The posts may showcase their appearance, experiences, or risky behaviors in an attempt to generate online views and reactions. “The transformation has been from fun group activities to antisocial ones,” Smith told the Daily Signal. “A flash mob dance at a mall is fun. A drunken mob at the beach might not be fun, especially for a bystander, but it’s going to generate a lot of clicks and likes.”

Republicans are condemning as “lawfare” the efforts of Democrat New Orleans officials to arrest Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill amid a dispute about a new law’s interpretation.   “Targeting a sitting attorney general for carrying out her official duties is a dangerous attempt to weaponize the legal system against elected officials with whom they disagree,” Adam Piper, executive director of the Republican Attorneys General Association, told the Daily Signal. The Louisiana Supreme Court on Friday blocked the arrest warrant, which Piper called “liberal lawfare.”  “The idea that a grand jury would be used to investigate a sitting attorney general for issuing a legal opinion and warning public officials about the law is as outrageous as it is dangerous,” he said. “If this is allowed to stand, no attorney general will be free to provide candid legal guidance without fear of politically motivated retaliation.” “This is nothing short of a political witch hunt against [Murrill] who was merely trying to uphold the law in accordance with the oath she took,” Gov. Jeff Landry, a Republican, posted on X Friday. I would like to thank the Louisiana Supreme Court for halting this circus. Leaking information to the press, arresting other members of the press, the disclosure of confidential information by the special prosecutor, ex parte communication to influence grand jury members, are…— Governor Jeff Landry (@LAGovJeffLandry) July 3, 2026 How City Officials Justify Trying to Arrest an AG  The case centers on eight letters that Murrill sent to New Orleans Mayor Helena Moreno, New Orleans Parish District Attorney Jason Williams, retired Judge Calvin Johnson, and five of the seven members of the City Council on May 13.  In the letters, Murrill accused the city officials of instituting a usurper, a person who pretends to be a public officer without the authority of an election. The state’s usurper statutes criminalize such action, and Murrill warned that the city officials who supported the usurper would risk losing their offices.  This dispute traces back to Act 15, a law Landry signed on April 30.  The act eliminated the Criminal District Clerk of Court days before Calvin Duncan, a black man exonerated from a 1981 murder he did not commit, could take office on May 4. The law assigned the criminal clerk’s duties to the Civil District Clerk of Court.   The act formed part of a package of bills aimed at bringing the number of Orleans Parish judicial offices more in line with the other parishes of Louisiana. (Louisiana refers to counties as parishes.)  The New Orleans City Council moved on May 11 to interpret the law as merging two existing positions into a new office, requiring an interim appointment and a special election. Murrill disputed the interpretation and directed the city officials not to remove the civil clerk, Chelsey Richard Napoleon, from her office.  A grand jury indicted Murrill on 16 felony counts of malfeasance and public intimidation for sending the letters. Malfeasance involves a public official failing to do her lawful duty or performing a lawful duty in an unlawful manner. Public intimidation involves the use of “violence, force, extortionate threats, or true threats” with the intent of influencing a public officer’s conduct.  Murrill has contested the charges, and Landry defended her, calling the indictment a “political witch hunt” against her.  “What we are witnessing is a sham investigation that threatens to turn routine legal advice into a basis for criminal inquiry,” Piper said. The Louisiana Supreme Court Acts  The Louisiana Supreme Court issued a stay of proceedings Friday, recalling the pending arrest warrant.  The 5-2 per curiam decision pointed out “disturbing defects” in the process leading to the indictment. The high court ruled that the Orleans Parish Criminal District Court had failed to follow the Louisiana Code of Criminal Procedure to administer a grand jury in the public eye. The court reportedly arrested and removed reporters from the proceedings.   The high court also found the involvement of special prosecutor Laurie White improper. White had previously served as Duncan’s attorney, and the attorney general’s office is representing White in a sexual harassment lawsuit brought against White.  “The likely conflicts of interest precluding her involvement in this matter, if accurately stated, should have been obvious,” the high court ruled.  “This indictment appears to turn the law on its head and flows from what appear to be extraordinary procedural defects and improprieties,” the justices stated. Murrill “argues that she was merely performing her constitutional duty to defend the state’s law and that her legal interpretation of that law was correct.”  The high court found that Murrill “suffers irreparable harm” from the indictment and that “it is in the public interest to immediately stay” the proceedings against her.  Prosecutors sought to resurrect the arrest warrant, anyway, but the state’s Supreme Court again blocked the attempt.   Another WIN – Louisiana Supreme Court BLOCKS New Orleans special prosecutor’s refusal to remove the arrest warrant. She is ORDERED to comply. pic.twitter.com/oxltKdXTVo— Attorney General Liz Murrill (@AGLizMurrill) July 4, 2026 “What is happening to Attorney General Liz Murrill should be a much bigger national story,” Piper told the Daily Signal. “The same voices that claim to be ‘saving democracy’ when Republicans criticize prosecutors are now defending a defective, unlawful, and politically motivated prosecution against a Republican attorney general. That double standard is exactly why so many Americans are losing faith in the credibility and impartiality of our justice system.” Neither Moreno, nor Williams, nor the City Council members responded to the Daily Signal’s request for comment by publication time. 

As part of the cases handed down by the U.S. Supreme Court this term, the six conservative justices delivered a win for women’s sports last week. While the cases came out of West Virginia and Idaho, the high court’s majority sent a message that reverberated in 25 states, including Ohio. In the combined cases of Little v. Hecox and West Virginia v. B.P.J., Justice Brett Kavanaugh, writing for the majority opinion, answered “yes” when it comes to the question of whether schools may determine eligibility for women’s and girls sports “based on biological sex.” Justice Clarence Thomas, in his concurrence, wrote that a “man does not have a legal right to compete against women just because he believes he is a woman,” noting that “men and boys with gender dysphoria are not women and girls, even if they believe that they are.” Ohio is among the states that passed legislation recently to protect women and girls from having to compete against boys and men on their sports teams. In 2024, HB 68 went into effect after the state Legislature overrode a veto from Republican Gov. Mike DeWine in December 2023 that protected minors from transgender procedures. The Save Women’s Sports Act was included in HB 68. Dave Yost, Ohio’s former attorney general and current vice president of strategic research and innovation for Alliance Defending Freedom, told the Daily Signal that “this is great news for all of the states that have moved to protect women’s sports.” Delving deeper into the court’s decision, Yost spoke of “a straight line for legal commonsense reasoning,” adding, “there’s no other way to read sex in the law other than to mean boy or girl, male or female, and anything else is just not reasonable, as the court said.” The high court has handed down other wins related to young people experiencing gender dysphoria. Last June, it handed down its decision in United States v. Skrmetti, which upheld state laws protecting minors from transgender procedures. Yost referenced the Skrmetti case when speaking with the Daily Signal and agreed that “they’re definitely related.” With the two cases handed down last week, combined with last year’s Skrmetti case, Yost proclaimed that “the Supreme Court legalized biology.” Yost expects to see more cases at the state and federal levels dealing with transgender questions. In Ohio, liberal groups, such as the American Civil Liberties Union, are trying to argue the issue based on a state constitutional provision passed in 2011, the Health Care Freedom amendment. “There’s no equal protection problem there,” Yost offered, noting that the amendment passed in opposition to Obamacare. “They’re just arguing this novel thing.” A footnote in last week’s court decisions pointed to how states are allowed to segregate between boys and girls. However, the court did not decide whether they must do so. In some states, females are not yet protected from competing against males. “Girls are entitled to protections whether they’re in red states or blue states,” Yost said, adding that states that dismiss the concerns of female athletes are committing an “injustice that needs to be remedied.”

This Independence Day, countless Americans celebrated our country’s 250th anniversary in countless jubilatory ways, from grilling in the backyard, to going to fireworks shows, and even traveling to Mt. Vernon to pay respects to the Father of Our Country. But a certain socialist mayor of New York City took the occasion to deliver a speech in a tone that made it seem like he was turning in a homework assignment on a topic he hated. Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s speech before the July 4 festivities was an epic downer, a perfect example of aspirational leftist rhetoric masking a notable dearth of genuine patriotism. It’s not nearly as important as the content but the optics were bad too. Indian-Ugandan Muslim Zohran Mamdani broadcast speech patronizing the US ahead of Independence Day, celebrating its 250th birthday this July 4th.Mamdani specifically targeted America’s immense prosperity, ICE raids, and morals.Follow: @AFpost pic.twitter.com/P9IFWEeeZ8— AF Post (@AFpost) July 3, 2026 As a man once said, you’d find more cheer in a graveyard. You’d think Mamdani would get some extras who at least looked like they wanted to be there. Mamdani’s wife didn’t even show up, though it’s doubtful she would have brought up the energy level. She reportedly went on an “Islamic spiritual wellness” retreat in Spain rather than stay for the Independence Day events. It was a coincidence, I’m sure. So, this was a solemn, dour occasion in which even when Mamdani tried to squeeze out some praise for America, it was laced with straw men and passive-aggressive contempt. I’m not exaggerating, it really was terrible. “We are told that America is exceptional because we are richer, stronger, more powerful than everyone else,” he said at one point. “ … The truth, my friends is that America is exceptional because here, nothing is fixed into place.” Mamdani obviously doesn’t spend too much time with people who believe America is exceptional. Being rich and powerful are merely byproducts of America’s greatness. However, if you’ve gone through life believing that Howard Zinn’s “A People’s History of the United States” is true, then this is the kind of phony image of our self-conception you might come up with. Mamdani’s intent was clearly to draw a line between his false version of America’s past as greedy and rapacious compared to its assumedly more generous, borderless socialist future that he and his friends intend to usher in. We are supposed to believe that by handing the keys to our future over to the perpetually aggrieved we’ll finally not be a bad country. And that hope is the only thing that keeps them invested in the place they apparently call “home.” Mamdani continued to list in his speech a series of people who had escaped one oppression or another and ended up here in another land of oppressions that was maybe OK sometimes. How inspiring. The speech drew praise from some Democrat politicians and leftwing commentators, but it seems even Mamdani’s comms team knew that the vibe was off. He followed up with a slightly more upbeat X post, that nevertheless defined patriotism as “every act of righteous dissent — because loving our country means fighting for the best version of it.” The boys of Pointe du Hoc and the young men who suffered at Valley Forge are I guess a cut below on Mamdani’s patriotism scale because they simply fought for the America that was. I’ll counter that America was great when we were nothing but a collection of bankrupt states clinging to existence at the edge of the world in the shadow of the British empire. America may be a land of perpetual motion, but what makes it special is in part what’s fixed in place. “If all men are created equal, that is final,” Calvin Coolidge said at America’s 150th anniversary. “If they are endowed with inalienable rights, that is final. If governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, that is final. No advance, no progress can be made beyond these propositions.” Compare Calvin Coolidge on America’s 150th anniversary:“It is often asserted that the world has made a great deal of progress since 1776, that we have had new thoughts and new experiences which have given us a great advance over the people of that day, and that we may therefore… https://t.co/yTbh1DK6jm— Ron DeSantis (@RonDeSantis) July 3, 2026 From that hinge point of our country’s creation, millions upon millions of Americans helped build the most extraordinary country that has yet existed. Did everyone succeed, was every law just, did everything work perfectly? Obviously not. We live in America, not the Kingdom of Heaven. Down here among the fallen we’ve done quite a bit better than the rest in our 250 years. You wouldn’t think that listening to the mayor of New York. You’d think the American experience was no more than a series of miseries, until a wealthy Indian child of a Bollywood producer and anti-colonialist professor settled here after a brief stop in Uganda, set up shop a hot second ago, and began to set things right. Like so many others on the Left, his only fondness for America appears to be in what he hopes it will be, not what it is or has been. When in power they are “patriots,” when they aren’t it’s nothing but sour faces and complaints.

“Something so beautifully crafted deserves our respect and attention.” So said Carson Quinn when accepting his award for winning Constituting America’s “We the Future” competition, part of the organization’s effort to bring the U.S. Constitution into the classroom.  Constituting America offers a variety of awards to grade school, middle school, high school, and college students. The worthy winners exemplify understanding, knowledge, and creativity as they compete to show their grasp of the Constitution.  The organization’s goal for America’s 250th was to reach 250,000 students through all of their programs by July 4, 2026.  For its work, Constituting America was awarded an America’s 250th Innovation Prize from the Heritage Foundation.   A Student Who Gets It  In his inspirational speech “The Call for Freedom,” Quinn drove home the importance of understanding the Constitution, offering a detailed breakdown of each of its articles.  Quinn, a Master of Accounting student at Palm Beach Atlantic University, stated that Americans have no greater duty than to glorify God through hard work, dedication, and excellence that formed our country through our Founding Fathers. He argued that American freedom is something earned, something precious, something that should be treasured, and something worth fighting for.  “We must remember how we got that freedom in the first place,” Quinn declared. “And we see this in our Constitution, which is an embodiment of freedom. It’s an embodiment of freedom with so many different ideas ingrained into it, ideas brought about by exceedingly smart people. Individuals who pursued knowledge, individuals who pursued a better future, just like our Founding Fathers, who so dearly wanted to create a better life, not only for themselves, but for the world that is the country that we live in.”  Quinn was one of multiple winners and was specifically recognized for “Best Grad School Speech.” His dedication and commitment to American principles earned him the prize despite tough competition.  “Competition drives success,” Quinn said upon receiving the award. “This is a phrase that the greatest Americans live by, and it is true that their lives exemplify the intent and what it demands. It is this same mindset, one that calls for excellence, that rested in the minds of our Founding Fathers, who created and influenced our Constitution, the words that shaped our great union. Something so beautifully crafted deserves our respect and attention.”  Constituting America’s Innovation Award  Last fall, the Heritage Foundation awarded the second round of America’s 250th Innovation Prizes, totaling $250,000 in support of nonprofit projects that strengthen civic education, celebrate American history, and deepen public understanding of the Constitution and founding principles.   Among the five prize recipients was Constituting America. This organization, co-founded by actress Janine Turner, fills a critical gap in public education by bringing constitutional learning directly to students.   Constituting America offers various competitions but was specifically recognized by Heritage for its project “Celebrating America’s 250th Birthday in Our Nation’s Classrooms and Living Rooms.” This project includes its George Washington Speaking Initiative, “History Holds the Key” online study, and its docuseries “The Pursuit.”  This initiative aims to promote constitutional literacy by providing educational programming that connects students and adults to foundational documents like the U.S. Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.   Constituting America’s $50,000 award supports the organization’s efforts to combat civic ignorance and inspire a renewed appreciation for America’s founding principles through classroom curricula, public outreach, and storytelling tools that highlight constitutional governance and civic responsibility.   Additional Round Two winners of the America’s 250th Innovation Prize are: Harlan Institute Mountain States Policy Center Wedgwood Circle Moving Picture Institute Round One Winners: Creative Studio to Release Video Series for America’s 250th Anniversary  Faith Group Wins Innovation Prize for America’s 250th Celebration ‘A First of Its Kind’: Bestselling Author Crafts American Fable Collection Catholic Nonprofit Develops Resources to Inspire Patriotism Virginia Nonprofit Wins Prize to Create US History Documentaries for Nation’s 250th Anniversary