In the final major debate of the Democratic primary for mayor of Washington, D.C., the candidates spent as much time accusing each other of corruption and Republican sympathies as they did defending their own visions for the city — a revealing display in a race where the Democratic nominee is all but certain to win in November. The hour-long forum, hosted by Fox 5 D.C., quickly became a combative showdown between Kenyan McDuffie and Janeese Lewis George, who repeatedly traded barbs over crime, campaign donations, and ties to President Donald Trump. Businessman Gary Goodweather was on stage as well, but drew less attention, often struggling to break into the sharper exchanges between the two council veterans. The clash over public safety was among the night’s most pointed moments. After moderators raised a recent violent brawl involving teenagers at a Chipotle in Navy Yard, Lewis George defended her opposition to the city’s youth curfew by arguing that enforcement could put minors in danger because of the federal law-enforcement presence in the district. “Using the curfew as a tool for our young people is dangerous,” Lewis George said. “It is dangerous because we have federal troops who are in our city, mass ICE agents who are in our city, and these are the people enforcing this law on our young people.” McDuffie seized on the opening to portray her as soft on crime. “What they need to do is treat these teen takeovers like the public safety emergency that they are,” he said. “Doing nothing is not an option.” He went further, directly blaming Lewis George for delaying action on the curfew. “The council had an opportunity to act just a few weeks ago, before the curfew expired, but they didn’t act, because Janeese Lewis George shut it down.”  Lewis George responded by accusing McDuffie of opportunism and trying to appeal to conservatives in a city that remains overwhelmingly Democratic. “Now that he is taking big Trump donor dollars and Republican dollars, he’s now using cheap political points from Republicans to score in this moment,” she said. “It’s disingenuous and disheartening.” That charge became a recurring theme throughout the night, with Lewis George repeatedly invoking what she described as McDuffie’s acceptance of donations from “Trump donor dollars,” while McDuffie countered by accusing her of facing campaign finance scrutiny. “There’s only one person on this stage who’s actively under investigation for violations of the campaign finance laws, and it’s Ms. Janice Lewis George,” McDuffie said. The debate also underscored just how far Left the race has moved in a city where Republicans are effectively noncompetitive. All three candidates said they would end cooperation between D.C. police and ICE. Asked whether they would direct the Metropolitan Police Department to work with U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro on enforcing the youth curfew, both Lewis George and Goodweather answered flatly: “No.” McDuffie likewise pledged to cut off cooperation with federal immigration enforcement, saying he would “sign an executive order to rescind ICE” from the city. Goodweather had perhaps the most unusual proposal of the evening, suggesting that Washington eventually construct “a fourth-generation air-cooled nuclear reactor on federal land in D.C.” as part of his energy plan, a remark that stood out in a debate otherwise dominated by housing, public safety, and mutual accusations. In a city where the Democratic primary will almost certainly decide the next mayor, Tuesday’s debate showed candidates not racing to the center, but competing to prove who is more liberal — and who can paint their Democratic rival as secretly aligned with the Right. The Washington, D.C., primary is on June 16.

When the Palisades Fire destroyed Spencer Pratt’s Los Angeles home last year, the former reality TV star began asking questions. How had the city allowed such a disaster to happen? Why had its basic systems failed so badly? The answers helped turn Pratt from a fire victim into an unlikely contender to become mayor of America’s second-largest city. In the months after the fire, Pratt became a harsh critic of City Hall, denouncing not only its incompetent response to the fires but also its seeming inability to deliver public safety or basic city services. What began as personal outrage has become a broader political message: Los Angeles is broken, its leaders have failed, and only an outsider can force accountability. On the fires, Pratt played a leading role in uncovering what went wrong. City officials had left nearby reservoirs empty for nearly a year. Hydrants ran dry. The firefighting response was haphazard and unprepared, despite warnings of extreme fire danger. Mayor Karen Bass was out of the country. And the Palisades Fire was not, it turned out, a new fire at all: firefighters had abandoned a smoldering brush fire a week earlier that later rekindled into an inferno. More absurdities came to light in the fire’s aftermath. Bass allegedly directed the watering down of an after-action report on the disaster — an accusation she denies. And despite repeated promises to cut red tape and fast-track rebuilding, Pratt and many other fire victims have been stuck in bureaucratic limbo. More than a year later, only a small fraction of the destroyed homes have been rebuilt. For Pratt, the fire was both a personal tragedy and his political origin story. In January, at an event marking the one-year anniversary of the fire, Pratt announced he would run for mayor to unseat Bass. It was a long shot. Pratt is best known as the villain in MTV’s 2000s-era show The Hills, but he is hardly a household name. He is a registered Republican in an overwhelmingly Democratic city. He has no political experience. He does, however, have a knack for tapping into Angelenos’ growing frustrations with city leadership. Pratt, who grew up in Los Angeles, has leaned hard into his status as a political outsider, using viral videos, unofficial AI campaign ads, and blunt attacks on City Hall to present himself as the avatar of a fed-up Los Angeles. It seems to be working. In recent weeks, Pratt has risen sharply in the polls — and, after a strong debate performance earlier this month, he is no longer a long-shot candidate. A new Emerson College/Inside California Politics poll shows Bass leading the June 2 primary with 30% support, followed by Pratt at 22% and City Councilmember Nithya Raman at 20%. Unless one candidate clears 50%, the top two advance to a November 3 runoff. More than Pratt himself, though, it is Los Angeles’s political class that has made his candidacy possible. By almost any measure, the city’s governance has become a slow-motion failure. L.A. is struggling with homelessness, public disorder, unaffordable housing, sluggish permitting, and post-fire recovery. The city cannot build enough housing, recruit enough police officers, or even manage to repave its streets. Neither of Pratt’s opponents can credibly separate themselves from L.A.’s obvious decline. Bass’s signature homelessness program, Inside Safe, was supposed to move people out of encampments and into permanent housing. Instead, the program has spent more than $300 million to place about 5,800 people into interim housing — mostly hotels and motels. Roughly 40% have returned to the streets. Only one in four participants has reached permanent housing, at a cost of over $200,000 per permanently housed person. Raman pitches herself as a Zohran Mamdani-like reform candidate: a member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) who pledges to fix the city’s chronic housing shortage. But Raman is not running from outside the system. As a city councilmember, she is part of the governing coalition that helped produce some of the city’s failed policies. Take homelessness, for example. Raman is chair of the City Council’s Housing and Homelessness Committee, which means she is “leading efforts towards improving the city’s response to homelessness citywide,” according to her own council office. That may give her experience, but it makes it somewhat difficult to run as the candidate best positioned to address the very crisis her committee oversees. Or take housing. As councilmember, Raman supported Measure ULA, the so-called “mansion tax” — a steep transfer tax on real estate sales above $5 million. The measure was sold to voters as a way to fund affordable housing. But the tax applies not only to mansions but also to apartment buildings, mixed-use projects, and redevelopment sites — the very projects that are needed to produce new housing. By almost all accounts, the policy has backfired. UCLA researchers have found that Measure ULA reduced multifamily housing production by at least 1,910 units per year, an 18% decline. More broadly, Los Angeles remains far behind its state housing targets, with builders pointing to high fees, slow approvals, and Measure ULA as reasons projects are not getting built. To Raman’s credit, she has tried to fix the problem. In January, she introduced a motion calling for changes to ULA, acknowledging that it produced “unintended consequences” that were undermining its goals. But that reform effort stalled. Pratt, for his part, has called for a “complete overhaul” of City Hall. He wants to eliminate encampments, crack down on open-air drug use, investigate homelessness nonprofits, rebuild the city’s emergency preparedness, and purge what he calls the corrupt political establishment. He has called for repealing Measure ULA and favors a treatment-first approach to homelessness, including mandatory drug rehabilitation. In the debate earlier this month, Pratt cast himself as the only candidate on stage who could credibly offer change. In a sense, Pratt’s rise is a strange inversion of the recent urban-socialist surge. Only a few months ago, the big-city story seemed to be the rise of democratic-socialist mayors: Zohran Mamdani in New York, Katie Wilson in Seattle, and perhaps Raman in Los Angeles. Instead, Los Angeles may be producing the opposite backlash. Pratt is unapologetically anti-socialist. “We’ve already been doing the socialist experiment pretty much for six plus years,” Pratt told CBS News this month, “and it’s failed here in Los Angeles.” If elected, Pratt would face significant structural obstacles. Los Angeles is not New York, where the mayor has broader control over city agencies. Power is fragmented among the mayor, a powerful city council, county government, independent agencies, public-sector unions, and regional authorities. Pratt has acknowledged this, noting that he would need allies on the council and promising to help defeat DSA-aligned city-council officials. But governing Los Angeles would also require staffing agencies, bargaining with unions, confronting council prerogatives, navigating state law, and navigating tough trade-offs. Is Spencer Pratt for real as a candidate for L.A.’s next mayor? The political conditions that have elevated him certainly are. A city that cannot rebuild after a fire, house its residents affordably, restore order in public spaces, or provide basic services should not be surprised when an outsider with a chip on his shoulder — and a message of change — becomes a viable option. *** Shawn Regan is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research. His affiliation is presented for identification only; all views expressed are his own and not those of his employer.

This article is part of Upstream, The Daily Wire’s new home for culture and lifestyle. Real human insight and human stories — from our featured writers to you. *** Demi Moore just revealed her most horrifyingly skeletal look yet. But after the New York Post ran a headline about “Demi Moore’s toned arms,” the internet clapped back at the use of “toned” to describe the severely anatomical detail of her upper limbs.  It wasn’t “toned”; it was terrifying. A natural beauty now in her sixties, she had morphed into the evanescent incarnation of dark diet culture. And the media were all in. Thankfully, many onlookers pushed back.  Daily Wire host Isabelle Brown posted, “This is equally as damaging to women’s health conversations as normalizing morbid obesity is.”  Riley Gaines quipped, “Demi Moore actually looks like she’s on the brink of death … Girls, don’t believe the lie that this is what it looks like to be ‘toned.’”  “That is neither muscle nor healthy. It is phenomenally sad that she looks in the mirror and sees this as a win,” one Redditor posted.  As a society, we’re pretty cool about offering others a wide berth to live life in a variety of possible body shapes, delivering grace when it’s needed. But when does empathy become enabling? Is it kind to let an impending train wreck speed straight off the rails, or do we have a moral obligation to pull the emergency break?  Moore’s apparent emotional bedrock, Bruce Willis, has been suffering from dementia since 2022. No one would argue that she shouldn’t be afforded the room to grieve. But two things can be true at once, and 63-year-old Moore has previously admitted to punishing her body in the name of beauty. In 2025, Moore described her new “self-care” routine, telling People, “I have a greater appreciation for all that my body has been through that brought me to now … It doesn’t define my value or who I am.” She admitted to once doing “crazy things like biking from Malibu all the way to Paramount, which is about 26 miles. All because I placed so much value on what my outsides looked like.” In the same breath she said she was “so much more about my overall health and longevity” now. It was just a few months after she won her first major acting award: a Golden Globe for “The Substance,” which is about a black market anti-aging drug. As part of her acceptance speech, she recalled, “In those moments when we don’t think we’re smart enough or pretty enough or skinny enough or successful enough … I had a woman say to me, ‘Just know you will never be enough, but you can know the value of your worth if you just put down the measuring stick.’” Maybe Moore allegedly ditched the measuring stick, but it seems she doesn’t live up to her own beauty standard. Still, it’s not unreasonable to redirect the focus at medical professionals who continue to prescribe weight-loss drugs to vulnerable A-listers who are starving themselves and then convincing fans to follow suit. On the jury to select the Cannes festival’s Palme d’Or, Moore first made a red carpet splash in a sequinned and sculpted Jacquemus gown, followed by a fuchsia look by French cult favorite Matières Fécales (yep, that’s “fecal matter” in French, for anyone who’s been following along since the Met Gala). The pink reflected a rosy glow onto her porcelain skin as her mantis-like frame appeared to be propped up by an enormous bow of intentionally tattered fabric in a fashionable “state of decay.” Touché.  “Let’s say there were no such thing as GLP-1s. Let’s say we were just looking at that. You’d go, ‘Well, that is starvation, that’s an eating disorder, if she was not in a concentration camp,” Dr. Drew Pinsky suggested on “The Rubin Report.” “But now we have a drug that causes that … I don’t know where this is gonna stop. It’s gonna hurt a lot of people.” Despite the backlash, some think Demi Moore and other stars making notoriously waify waves in the industry (such as Ariana Grande, Kelly Osbourne, and Emma Stone) look good. After spending almost two decades in Hollywood, I’m confident that some of these stick-thin stars probably still think they could lose a few pounds. Flattering media certainly doesn’t help. OK! magazine fawning over Olivia Wilde’s emaciated “glow” helps no one. Never mind the constant flow of GLP-1 ads we’re being force-fed. Noom, which used to be about eating smart and exercising, pivoted to “forget it, just do this drug we’re selling.” Serena Williams loves talking about how she’s “healthier” on her own brand, Ro. And Wegovy launched a star-studded awards season campaign normalizing doing weight loss drugs, comparing dosing the GLP-1 pill to rescuing kittens in trees. Why wouldn’t you take it? Be a good person! “In a clinical setting, these changes from baseline are cause for alarm,” celeb nutritionist Jess Baker said of the hollow muscle wasting she sees in GLP-1 overusers. “They can indicate malnutrition, meaning the body isn’t getting enough of what it needs to function.” That 40% lean muscle loss you’ll likely experience is scientifically proven (this drug-induced weight loss is all-inclusive, y’all). Just focus on the fact that if you stop taking GLP-1s, you’ll likely rebound to your previous weight. Y’know, minus your blood sugar-regulating, critically structural muscle mass. Maybe you’ll get lucky and just go blind like some plaintiffs of the 3,000 active lawsuits against these weight loss drugs allegedly have. Frustratingly, celebrities will never come clean about the massive resources they have at their disposal to set the current standard of beauty, while the rest of us mill around the Walgreens clearance section like Children of the Corn. However this GLP-1 thing shakes out, we can almost guarantee there will be a pharmaceutical antidote we won’t be able to afford. But as a precursor to societal doom via hot girl pharma, maybe we could stop propping those who are dangerously overweight, or devastatingly thin, as a picture of health. We’ve walked way over the line on whether we should or shouldn’t talk about women’s bodies, and maybe it’s time we get honest about what’s healthy.  Evolutionary behavioral scientist Gad Saad offers a term for not speaking the truth on the chance it will hurt someone’s feelings: “forbidden knowledge.” Pretending that someone is well when she isn’t is not empowering; it’s dangerous.  Even if Demi Moore is going through a challenging chapter, is it empathetic for loved ones to let her destroy herself in the name of her own grief? Standing by as someone eats herself to death — or her body consumes its own muscle tissue to survive — is a suicidal mission in both directions. We can do so much better for each other. Let’s shine the spotlight on balanced health and real wellness, not disordered eating in disguise.

Jewish members of Congress and political candidates are facing an unprecedented barrage of direct and violent antisemitic threats that have drastically altered their day-to-day lives and personal security. Lawmakers from both parties say that the traditional era of veiled dog whistles has been replaced by a shocking level of hate speech delivered through official office lines, social media platforms, and direct mail. Lawmakers have shared graphic communications, Axios revealed. Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-NY) reportedly received a letter praising Adolf Hitler alongside a drawing depicting him being shot in the head. Rep. Greg Landsman (D-OH) said callers told his office that he “should just go die,” while Rep. Max Miller (R-OH) received voicemails warning that “a real holocaust will take effect” and threatening that Jewish lawmakers would be “shot dead every f*cking day.” The growing concern was punctuated by the recent arrest of John Kevin Lipinski near the home of Rep. Jared Moskowitz (D-FL). Authorities discovered an arsenal of weapons, tactical gear, and 3,000 rounds of ammunition, along with a hit list targeting Moskowitz, Jewish cemeteries, synagogues, and “bar mitzvah halls.” In response to the threat, Moskowitz now requires private security, metal detectors at indoor events, and police stationed outside his family home. Political figures across the spectrum warn that extreme rhetoric has broken into mainstream American politics, emanating from factions on both the far-right and the far-left. “Both ends of our parties are wackadoos who hate Jews,” Rep. Miller observed, while California state Sen. Scott Wiener (D), a hard-Left congressional candidate, acknowledged that “horrific” and “very violent” rhetoric has deeply infiltrated corners of the Left. On the Right, traditional conservative figures have faced criticism for failing to aggressively police antisemitism within their ranks. A political action committee supporting Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) drew intense condemnation after running an ad featuring a Jewish donor alongside a rainbow Star of David—an incident Rep. Seth Magaziner (D-RI) labeled “the most brazen example of an antisemitic political ad that I have seen in years.” Massie declined to denounce the ad, instead characterizing his race as a “referendum… on whether the Israeli lobby can buy a seat in Kentucky.” Additional incidents have heightened tensions on Capitol Hill. William Paul, the son of Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), engaged in an antisemitic tirade against Rep. Mike Lawler (R-NY) at a Washington bar, blaming “you Jews” for political opposition to Massie and calling them “anti-American.” Meanwhile, Tucker Carlson has been normalizing conspiratorial anti-Zionist narratives that echo historical antisemitic tropes regarding hidden global manipulation. On the Left, anti-Israel rhetoric has frequently crossed into overt prejudice, occasionally protected by party establishment figures prioritizing electoral coalitions. In Texas, Democratic congressional primary frontrunner Maureen Galindo was exposed for posting rants about “Jews who own Hollywood” and the “synagogue of Satan.” Galindo openly campaigned on plans to introduce legislation to try any American official who has accepted Israeli funding for treason. Furthermore, mainstream Democratic leadership has faced backlash for embracing controversial figures. In Maine, the party establishment has rallied behind Senate candidate Graham Platner, despite disclosures regarding his Nazi tattoo and a history of antisemitic commentary. While Halie Soifer of the Jewish Democratic Council of America expressed “deep concern” over Platner, other prominent party strategists insisted the party would remain firmly on the “Platner train.” Prominent progressives, including California Democrat Rep. Ro Khanna, have similarly faced criticism for publicly defending and boosting controversial left-wing commentators accused of popularizing dangerous rhetoric. Ultimately, moderate lawmakers warn that the failure of both party establishments to forcefully excoriate their own internal extremists has allowed naked Jew-hatred to move from the fringes of American political life directly into the mainstream.

A California federal jury nixed billionaire Elon Musk’s lawsuit against OpenAI CEO Sam Altman on Monday, concluding that Musk filed his claims after the statute of limitations had expired. The jury returned its verdict after deliberating for just 90 minutes following a three-week trial in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers, who presided over the case, said that she agreed with the jury’s unanimous decision. “I’ve always said I would accept the jury’s verdict. I think there’s a substantial amount of evidence to support the jury’s finding,” Gonzalez Rogers said. Legal experts said the jury likely focused on whether Musk waited too long to file suit under California law. Vincent Joralemon, a senior fellow at UC Berkeley law school, told The New York Post that California imposes a three-year statute of limitations for breach of charitable trust claims and a two-year limit for unjust enrichment claims. “I’m guessing the jurors got into their room and said, ‘Does it seem like Musk knew about this in 2019?’ and everyone said ‘yes’ and then they go, ‘we’re done,'” he said. Musk brought the case in 2024, accusing Altman and OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman of betraying the organization’s original nonprofit mission by changing OpenAI to a profit-driven enterprise. OpenAI was founded in 2015 as a nonprofit focused on developing artificial intelligence in a manner that would benefit humanity. Musk, who helped launch the organization and donated roughly $38 million before ultimately leaving the board in 2018, said OpenAI’s leadership abandoned that principle for financial gain. The SpaceX founder asked for $150 billion in damages — and promised to appeal when the jury decided against him. “Regarding the OpenAI case, the judge & jury never actually ruled on the merits of the case, just on a calendar technicality,” Musk said in an X post on Monday. “There is no question to anyone following the case in detail that Altman & Brockman did in fact enrich themselves by stealing a charity,” he added. “The only question is WHEN they did it! I will be filing an appeal with the Ninth Circuit, because creating a precedent to loot charities is incredibly destructive to charitable giving in America.” Musk’s attorney Marc Toberoff also vowed to appeal the decision: “I have a one-word reaction: Appeal. This war is not over.” Toberoff argued that OpenAI improperly raised money as a publicly subsidized nonprofit before later restructuring into a for-profit operation “where the officers and directors of the charity enrich themselves to the tune of billions.” Elon Musk’s lawyer, Marc Toberoff, on today’s verdict in the OpenAI case: “I have a one-word reaction: Appeal. This war is not over. We firmly believe what happened with OpenAI was wrong on a very basic level that you can’t raise millions of dollars in a publicly subsidized… pic.twitter.com/D6x1Ja43mB — Sawyer Merritt (@SawyerMerritt) May 18, 2026