Nine defendants in the anti-ICE Prairieland Detention Center riot last Independence Day in Texas were convicted in federal court on Friday. The defendants were convicted on a range of charges including rioting, “providing material support to terrorists,” “conspiracy to use and carry an explosive,” and “using and carrying an explosive” in the North Texas Antifa Cell attack that left a local police officer shot in the neck. In a statement, FBI Dallas Special Agent in Charge R. Joseph Rothrock described the incident as a “coordinated attack” on the facility where illegal immigrants were being held before deportation from the United States. Two individuals were also convicted of “conspiracy to conceal documents.” According to the Department of Justice, Benjamin Song was considered the attack’s “leader,” who gave out firearms and recruited people for the effort. Song was convicted of attempted murder of federal officers for the “unlawful attempt to kill with malice aforethought the Alvarado Police Officer” and for unlawful discharging of a firearm in “the attempted murder of two correctional officers and an Alvarado Police Officer,” as he was the one who shot the officer in the neck. Song successfully fled the scene but was arrested on July 15, 2025, while law enforcement arrested most of the other individuals involved “shortly after,” the DOJ said. Song could face up to life behind bars, with a minimum of 20 years, according to a Department of Justice press release. Seven of the individuals could get 10-60 years in prison, and Daniel Rolando Sanchez Estrada could be sentenced to up to 40 years in prison. “These guilty verdicts and convictions rightly reflect the vicious, armed attack that these Antifa cell members planned and executed against law enforcement and detention center officers on the night of July 4 last year,” U.S. Attorney Ryan Raybould said in a statement. “Their terrorist acts, attempted murder, vandalism, and explosives launched at a detention facility were a far cry from some peaceful protest or First Amendment expression. Because of the prompt action of first responders that night and tenacious work of our law enforcement partners in tandem with the prosecutors in my office, sixteen people have been brought to justice for these violent acts and their attempts to conceal them. We will continue in this mission to hold others accountable who perpetrate such violence and fund these ANTIFA groups in the Northern District of Texas.” Notably, the attackers used “monikers” in group chats to plan the riot. The attackers also used fireworks and committed acts of vandalism, including spray-painting “F*ck You Pigs” on a building.

The following is an edited transcript excerpt from The Michael Knowles Show. * * * For years, American elites have told us a simple story about religion and reason: religious people are the crazy ones. They are irrational, superstitious, emotionally needy, clinging to old myths in an age of science and sophistication. The serious people, we are told, are the secular people. The smart people have moved on. The enlightened people know better. Faith is for the weak, the backward, the unthinking. Religion is a crutch. Orthodoxy is neurosis. Church is for the people who cannot handle reality. It is one of the most enduring prejudices in modern public life. And it is one of the most revealing. Because when you look at the actual data, the picture is not merely more complicated than the stereotype. It is, in a very important way, the opposite of the stereotype. According to survey data from the Pew American Trends Panel, the least crazy people in the country are conservative Christians who go to church weekly. The craziest people in the country are liberals who do not go to church. That is not the story we have been told for the last hundred years. It is certainly not the story we were told during the New Atheist moment, when public intellectuals and their admirers assured us that religion was the great enemy of reason, sanity, and civilization. But the numbers point in another direction. Asked whether a doctor or health care provider had ever told them they had a mental health condition, the highest rates came from liberals with no religious attendance. The lowest rates came from conservatives who attended weekly religious services. One can quibble around the edges. One can offer caveats, and there are caveats. But one cannot escape the central fact: the people most committed to regular religious practice appear, by this measure, to be the least crazy, and the people most detached from religion appear to be the most crazy. That does not prove every theological claim. It does not mean every churchgoer is mentally well or every secular person is mentally unwell. It does not justify cruelty toward people who struggle. But it does demolish a civilizational assumption that has shaped elite culture for generations. What we were told, over and over again, is that religious people are crazy. They are illogical. They are irrational. They believe in “sky daddy” and other cartoon versions of religion invented by people who have no intention of grappling with what believers actually believe. The secularists do not want to deal with the substance of faith, because that would require argument. It is easier to sneer. Easier to reduce millennia of theology, metaphysics, and moral reasoning to a punchline. Easier to dismiss the churchgoing neighbor as simple-minded than to answer him. And yet the data say the opposite. The religious people are the sanest people. The irreligious people are the craziest people. That reversal matters for reasons beyond partisanship. It suggests that faith and reason do not stand in opposition after all. In fact, the Christian tradition has always insisted on precisely the opposite. The Gospel of Saint John begins not with sentimentality, not with anti-rational emotionalism, but with a profound metaphysical claim: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” The Word, the Logos, is not merely speech. It is divine logic, divine reason, the intelligible order of reality itself. That is why Christianity, properly understood, has never been a rebellion against reason. It has been a fulfillment of reason. Faith and reason go together. God is not the negation of logic. God is the source of logic. Orthodoxy is not a retreat from reality, it is an attempt to live in right relation to reality. And perhaps that helps explain why the most orthodox believers are often the least crazy. A serious religious life imposes moral structure. It disciplines desire. It situates suffering within a larger frame of meaning. It teaches that man is not the measure of all things and that appetite is not destiny. It offers ritual, continuity, accountability, community, repentance, forgiveness, obligation, inheritance, transcendence. In a lonely, fragmented, hyper-individualistic culture, those are not small things. They are stabilizing things. By contrast, a secular culture that severs itself from transcendence does not become neutral. It does not become merely rational. It often becomes disordered. If there is no higher truth, then the self becomes sovereign. If the self becomes sovereign, then every desire demands validation. If every desire demands validation, then limits feel like oppression. And if there are no limits, no sacred order, no given nature, no created purpose, then the person is left not liberated but untethered. That is not sanity. That is confusion with better branding. None of this means Christians should gloat. It is fine to dunk on the libs a little, but only if it is a loving dunk, one intended to bring them over rather than merely humiliate them. The deeper point here is not mockery. It is vindication. A great many people fell away from religion because they thought religion was for stupid people, for weak people, for crazy people. They assumed smart people had outgrown God. They assumed sanity belonged to the secular. That just is not true. Actually, the opposite appears to be true. The people most rooted in orthodox belief and weekly worship are often the least crazy people in the country. And the people who have spent decades mocking them from the commanding heights of culture are, by this measure at least, faring much worse. The choir does need preaching sometimes. But this argument is not only for the choir. It is for the many people who have absorbed the modern prejudice against religion without ever seriously examining it. It is for those who have been told that faith is irrational, that church is for fools, that belief is a form of neurosis. The data do not merely complicate that prejudice. They shatter it. Maybe the real madness is not believing in God. Maybe the real madness is building a culture on the assumption that man can remain sane after cutting himself off from truth, order, and the divine logic of the universe.

WASHINGTON—Planes have been grounded at all three Washington, D.C.-area airports after a strong chemical smell forced workers to evacuate the region’s air traffic control center. Flights were abruptly grounded at Reagan National, Dulles, and Baltimore-Washington International Airports late Friday, and inbound flights were diverted, causing major delays at one of the nation’s largest air travel hubs. It is unclear what caused the smell, or how long the airports will remain locked down. Flights were also grounded at Richmond International Airport.

When the Oscar-winning documentary “No Other Land” captivated Hollywood with its portrayal of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, The Daily Wire sent me to the West Bank to see the story up close. The film, which won the 2025 Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature, follows Palestinian activist Basel Adra and portrays the residents of Masafer Yatta as victims of what the filmmakers describe as forced displacement by Israel. During his Oscar acceptance speech, Adra accused Israel of carrying out ethnic cleansing. Basel Adra and Yuval Abraham (Photo by Monica Schipper/Getty Images) “‘No Other Land’ reflects the harsh reality that we have been enduring for decades and still resist as we call on the world to take serious actions to stop the injustice and to stop the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people,” Adra said. But is that true? I set out to Masafer Yatta in Judea and Samaria, also known as the West Bank, to investigate these claims, which went largely unchallenged on Hollywood’s biggest stage. In “No Other Lie,” I revisit the story told in Adra’s film by traveling to the same villages and speaking with Israeli officials, Arab residents, Jewish farmers, and policy experts. According to those interviewed, the history of the area — and the dispute over the land — is far more complex than the film suggests. WATCH ‘NO OTHER LIE’ NOW ON THE DAILY WIRE I spoke with Naomi Kahn, director of international affairs at the Israeli policy organization Regavim, who explained that the land featured in the documentary has a long and complicated history stretching back to the Ottoman Empire, when it was mostly uninhabited public land. According to Kahn, the area later became strategically important for the Israeli military after Israel signed a peace treaty in 1979 with Egypt and gave up the Sinai Peninsula, which had previously been used for military training exercises. “They looked for areas that were strategically important to hold on to, but also were empty and useless,” Kahn said. “And they identified this entire band of desert cliffs that were uninhabited.” Kahn said the area was eventually designated as an Israel Defense Forces training zone. She also addressed claims that Palestinians are unable to build homes in the area, saying construction is regulated through permits. “Everyone can build where it’s legal,” she said. “If you build without a permit, you can’t build.” She pointed to the territorial divisions established under the Oslo Accords, which gave the Palestinian Authority control over large portions of the West Bank in Areas A and B, while Area C remains under Israeli jurisdiction. “Almost 70% of the territory already under Palestinian Authority jurisdiction is empty,” Kahn claimed. “Instead of building there, they’re building here.” In “No Other Land,” one resident claims his family has lived in the Masafer Yatta area since the 1830s. But historical aerial imagery and findings from Israeli courts show that the hills of Masafer Yatta had no permanent villages for decades, with aerial photographs of the area dating back to 1945. The Israeli High Court case over the land dispute, which lasted over two decades, ultimately ruled that the petitioners failed to prove permanent residence in the area before it was designated a military firing zone in 1980. The ruling also noted that several of the residents involved in the case maintained permanent homes in the nearby Palestinian city of Yatta. As my crew and I traveled deeper into the desert terrain, we encountered foreign activists who had traveled to the area and who locals say often provoke confrontations between Jews and Arabs. “They come all the time when it’s nice outside,” local Jewish farmer Bezalel Talia said. “From England, from Australia, South Africa, America.” I met several activists who acknowledged traveling to the area from the United States and Europe. Residents told me they believe the presence of international activists armed with cameras is meant to artificially create incidents that can push a one-sided narrative in the media. (The Daily Wire/Yisroel Teitelbaum) “They’re not really fighting the fight that you know,” Talia said. “You have Arabs that only live here because the Palestinian government told them. So they live there in the cave and sometimes Europeans, Basel and his Oscar friends just [come] to have a nice picture, Like Instagram models.” U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee discussed the historical and biblical significance of Judea and Samaria. Huckabee said the region has been central to Jewish history for thousands of years, noting that Judea was the heart of the ancient Jewish kingdom and the seat of the Jewish capital under King David more than 3,000 years ago. “The consistency has always been that there has been a Jewish presence and a Jewish connection to the land, historically and biblically,” he said. When asked why such a small piece of land receives so much global attention, Huckabee argued that the focus is often less about geography and more about opposition to the existence of a Jewish state. “I don’t know that they care about the land,” Huckabee said. “They are offended that there is a Jewish tradition, that there is a Jewish people, and that there is a Jewish homeland.” I also visited the ancient Jewish city of Susya, where archaeological remains highlight the long history of Jewish life in the region. Standing inside a 1,600-year-old synagogue, Kahn said the site demonstrates the deep historical connection between Jews and Judea. “This is a synagogue, a Jewish place of worship, 1,600 years old,” Kahn said. “This is essentially proof positive of the Jewish presence in Judea for thousands of years.” U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee (The Daily Wire/Yisroel Teitelbaum) On the final day of filming, I traveled to Hebron — the first capital of King David more than 3,000 years ago — where tensions between Jewish and Palestinian communities remain high. There, I spoke with Yishai Fleischer, the international spokesperson for the Jewish community of Hebron, who addressed the frequent accusations of settler violence. “There is settler violence because if you push Jews around, they’re going to push back. This is the Middle East,” he said. “But it is far, far, far less than has been reported and is being touted as the truth; it’s not the truth.” A recent report by Regavim also challenged the widely reported narrative of widespread settler violence, arguing that the campaign accusing Jewish residents of escalating violence relies on misleading data and politically motivated sources. Analyzing 10 years of incident reports compiled by the United Nations’ Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, the report found that roughly 98% of the incidents categorized as “settler violence” did not involve Jewish civilians at all, but were instead clashes with Israeli security forces or other unrelated incidents. I also asked Caroline Glick, an advisor to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, about the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ decision to award “No Other Land” the Academy Award for Best Documentary. Glick said the film presents a misleading narrative about Israel. “This sort of giving the most prestigious awards in Hollywood to people who just created a completely fictitious narrative about something deeply important to billions of people throughout the world,” Glick said. The fight over Masafer Yatta is not only about land or law, but also about narrative. While “No Other Land” won Hollywood’s highest honor, “No Other Lie” asks whether the Academy will look more carefully at the stories it chooses to reward.

A convicted ISIS terrorist walked into a gun-free school zone and murdered a United States Army officer. This was a targeted attack on an educator of our future military service members. But Soros-backed Commonwealth’s Attorney Ramin Fatehi just stood at a microphone and blamed lawmakers for gun violence. Now, I sit on the Virginia House of Delegates Criminal Subcommittee of the Courts of Justice Committee. I have watched Fatehi advocate year after year for soft-on-crime policies that lead to tragedies just like this. The real question is why was Mohamed Bailor Jalloh, a felon convicted of supporting ISIS, in possession of a firearm, especially in a gun free school zone? And why was Jalloh released 5 years early on an 11-year prison stint? These are the failures of soft-on-crime politicians more interested in policing federal ICE agents that protect their own citizens. Screenshot: LiveNOW from FOX on YouTube That failure raises a larger question about what Virginia’s lawmakers are doing right now in Richmond. Strangling The Second Amendment The 2026 Virginia General Assembly session ends this week. When the gavel falls, Governor Abigail Spanberger will have on her desk a stack of gun bills unlike anything this Commonwealth has ever produced — not a single sweeping law, but a coordinated layering of restrictions designed to strangle the Second Amendment from every direction at once. Which gun you can buy. Where you can carry it. Whether the industry that makes it can survive being sued into submission. How you pass it on when you’re gone. No single bill tells the whole story. The story is the stack — and what that stack adds up to is the systematic dismantling of our Second Amendment rights in Virginia. Zocha_K. Getty Images. What They Banned Start with SB 749, the centerpiece. It criminalizes the import, sale, manufacture, purchase, and transfer of so-called “assault firearms” — semi-automatic centerfire rifles, pistols, and shotguns identified not by how they function, but by how they look. A folding stock. A pistol grip. A threaded barrel. Cosmetic features that have no bearing on rate of fire. The identical firearm with a wooden stock is legal. The one with a synthetic pistol grip is contraband after July 1. Firearms you already own before that date are grandfathered for possession — but you cannot sell them to another Virginian. You can sell to a dealer or transfer them out of state (but that’s a federal Class 5 Felony). And how does a family who wishes to move to Virginia with their firearms – are they not “importing” assault firearms? You can pass them by inheritance to family. Beyond that, your grandfathered rifle is a dead-end asset. The magazine provision is worse. SB 749 also bans the import, sale, transfer, or purchase of any magazine capable of holding more than 15 rounds. Possession of magazines you already own is not criminalized — but you cannot sell them or transfer them to any other Virginian under any circumstances. The only lawful exits for a grandfathered magazine are surrender to a federally licensed dealer or transfer out of state. Notably, while the bill creates an explicit inheritance exception for grandfathered firearms, it creates no parallel exception for grandfathered magazines. A son can inherit his father’s rifle under this bill. The 15+ round magazines that feed it are a different matter — there is no provision in the final enrolled text that permits passing them to an heir within Virginia. What you own today is frozen in place, and the law has made no arrangement for what happens to it when you are gone. Background check data tells you what Virginians think about this: adjusted NICS checks in February 2026 jumped 55 percent over February 2025 as gun owners raced to the counters before the deadline. Photo by Brian Blanco/Getty Images What They Banned You From Carrying The ban on future purchases was not enough. SB 727 — passed both chambers and headed to the Governor — prohibits carrying these same broadly defined “assault firearms” on any public street, road, alley, sidewalk, right-of-way, or park. The bill strips concealed handgun permit holders of any exemption, even though those permit holders have carried legally for years without incident. The practical effect in much of Virginia — in the rural Southwest, in the Shenandoah Valley, in communities where the nearest deputy might be thirty minutes away — is that the firearm most commonly chosen for home and property defense can no longer lawfully accompany you beyond your front door. What They Did to the Industry SB 27 and HB 21 gut the federal Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act at the state level. They create a Virginia cause of action against firearms manufacturers, distributors, and retailers based on a vague “responsible conduct” standard. There is no clear definition of what responsible conduct requires — which is the point. Ambiguity is the weapon. The goal is not to compensate real victims. It is to make the cost of doing business in Virginia high enough that manufacturers and dealers either comply with whatever standard the next attorney general invents or exit the market entirely. You cannot exercise a right the industry has been sued out of existence. What They Did to Home Gunsmiths HB 40 makes building, importing, selling, transferring, or possessing an unserialized firearm, including pieces of an unassembled build, a Class 5 felony — punishable by up to ten years in prison. The bill reaches unfinished frames and receivers. Home gunsmithing has a tradition in this country as old as the Republic itself. Under HB 40, it would now be a felony in Virginia. The Layer They Almost Added Several additional bills survived crossover before stalling or being amended in the final days. A permit-to-purchase scheme would have required Virginians to obtain a government-issued license from the State Police before buying a handgun. Who knows what kind of barriers they could create in the name of “safety.” A vehicle storage bill would have criminalized a firearm left in a car under vague standards. A public carry ban on the House side mirrored SB 727 with even broader definitions. An age prohibition would have barred adults under 21 from purchasing handguns or assault firearms entirely. Some of these did not survive in their original form. Others will return. The direction of travel is not ambiguous. I’ve been here long enough to see them again and again from the relentless Left. Yasin Ozturk / Anadolu Agency via Getty Images What This Actually Is Consider the cumulative picture. You cannot purchase the most popular class of semi-automatic firearms in America after July 1. Magazines over 15 rounds are contraband — you can keep what you have, but can barely use what is now monetarily valueless. You cannot carry these firearms publicly even with a concealed handgun permit. The dealer who sells them faces open-ended civil liability under a standard no one can define. The manufacturer who builds them faces the same. Home building is a felony. It is a complete dismantling of the firearms industry. Death by a thousand tiny, deceitful infringements on our constitutional rights. At what point does regulation become intentionally burdensome to the detriment of an industry the controlling party despises? Take fossil fuels, for example. How many green energy policies can you put on a coal-fired power generation plant before it’s no longer economically feasible to continue operation? At what point does the layering of burden after burden, and infringement after infringement, become a weaponized strategy rather than a policy choice? House Minority Leader Terry Kilgore warned on the floor that banning firearms in common use among millions of law-abiding Americans invites a constitutional reckoning. He is right. Gun rights organizations have already promised litigation the moment Spanberger signs the bill into law. In the meantime, Virginians who did nothing wrong — they bought their rifles legally, they hold concealed handgun permits, they have never committed a crime in their lives — are watching their God-given constitutional rights be stripped away layer by layer by a majority that answers to Northern Virginia. That is the arithmetic of 2025’s election results. Governor Spanberger is expected to sign. When she does, every Virginian in every competitive district — every community that believed a Democratic majority in the House, Senate, and the Governor’s Mansion would exercise any restraint — should ask a simple question: Is this what you voted for? Sure, Democrats aren’t “coming for your guns.” They’re just making sure they are rendered completely useless under the law. * * * Del. Wren Williams represents Virginia’s 47th House District (Patrick County and surrounding area). He is an attorney and a member of the House Republican Caucus. The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.