Former President Barack Obama will headline a Democratic fundraiser next month on Martha’s Vineyard as party leaders ramp up preparations for an aggressive redistricting campaign ahead of the 2028 election, even as Democrats continue grappling with financial challenges at the national level. The August 31 fundraiser will benefit the National Democratic Redistricting Committee (NDRC), the party’s primary organization dedicated to congressional redistricting efforts. The event, hosted by former Attorney General Eric Holder, will feature “dinner and a discussion” with the former president, according to an invitation first obtained by Punchbowl News. The fundraiser will take place on the ritzy Massachusetts island long associated with affluent seasonal residents, celebrities, and Democratic political figures. The event comes as Democrats prepare for what party leaders expect will be a costly and contentious battle over congressional maps ahead of the 2028 election. Democratic officials have already signaled interest in pursuing new congressional maps in several blue states — including New York, Maryland, Virginia, Illinois, and potentially California — seeking to offset Republican gains achieved through recent redistricting efforts in states such as Texas. Many of those efforts would require expensive statewide referendum campaigns or constitutional amendments. In Virginia, for example, Democrats would need to finance a statewide campaign to amend the state’s redistricting process after a previous effort failed. Similar legal and political hurdles exist in several other Democratic-controlled states. Obama has remained deeply involved in Democratic redistricting efforts since leaving office. The NDRC was founded in 2017 by Holder, who served as attorney general throughout most of Obama’s presidency. Obama has repeatedly lent his fundraising power to the organization, including hosting one of his first post-presidency political fundraisers on its behalf. A 2023 fundraiser reportedly raised roughly $1.5 million for the group. The organization hosted a similar August fundraiser on Martha’s Vineyard in 2025, with Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and Obama both speaking. The former president publicly supported Democrat-backed congressional map redraws in California and Virginia in recent years. The renewed focus on redistricting follows Republicans’ successful push to redraw congressional maps in several states before the 2026 midterms. After President Donald Trump urged Texas Republicans to revisit the state’s congressional districts, GOP lawmakers approved a new map designed to create additional Republican-leaning seats. Republicans have also pursued new maps in Ohio, Florida, North Carolina, and Tennessee. Democrats have argued those moves created a Republican advantage heading into the 2026 elections and have increasingly shifted their attention toward reversing that advantage during the next redistricting cycle. “The race by Republicans to gerrymander is not over — and between potential redraws and the November election, the 2028 redistricting fight is already underway,” NDRC President John Bisognano said in a statement announcing the organization’s continued focus on future map battles. Martha’s Vineyard has long served as a destination for prominent Democratic politicians and wealthy donors. The island’s housing market ranks among the most expensive in the country. According to a January report in the Vineyard Gazette, the median home sale price on Martha’s Vineyard approached $1.7 million in 2025, while the average single-family home sold for approximately $2.6 million. Former President Obama himself has longstanding ties to Martha’s Vineyard, where he has vacationed frequently since leaving office. The former president previously stayed at Blue Heron Farm, a sprawling Chilmark estate that sold for $37 million last year. The NDRC has not publicly disclosed a fundraising target for the event, and organizers have not released ticket pricing or sponsorship levels.

PragerU CEO Marissa Streit has warned of the rise in “adultism” training that teaches children that their parents are the oppressors. Streit has stated that teachers are being instructed to teach about “adultism,” a Left-wing philosophy that teaches parents enforcing boundaries on their kids against underage sex, life-changing medical decisions, and opposite-gender clothing is a form of tyrannical “fascism.” In an interview with Fox News Digital, Streit warned that concepts such as adultism, along with DEI and Critical Race Theory, are all being repackaged as “ethnic studies curriculum.” She said at least 22 states are continuing to promote woke ideologies through this new label. “[Ethnic studies] teaches the teacher to tell the student that the term adultism is a negative thing,” Streit said. “When an adult is behaving like an adult by telling their child that the child should not dress a certain way or have sex at an early age or even request sex or gender changes … the parent is engaging in adultism.” Streit showcased the book “Lessons In Liberation: An Abolitionist Toolkit for Educators,” published by the worker-owned anarchist publishing company AK Press. The book’s information page mentions that it covers student organizing, radical sex education ideology, and anti-ICE immigration policies. Streit read a passage from the manual, which allegedly stated, “Adultism teaches us that adults have the power and the right to decide what young people’s boundaries should be.” Streit said that the controversies of teachers hiding medical procedures and pronouns from children are due to this rise in “adultism” teaching. She cited a recent resolution passed by the American Federation of Teachers stating that it will protect students from “forced outing” of a child’s gender ideology to parents as evidence for this. Streit then linked adultism to the Democratic Socialists of America’s plan to dismantle major U.S. institutions. “The ultimate goal is the DSA platform, and that is to radically transform America,” Streit said. She pointed to the DSA’s plan to abolish the Senate, the Electoral College, the Supreme Court, and other American institutions. “They have to break the bond between a child and the parent. They have to break the bond between a parent and the community,” Streit said. “By creating an entire chaotic environment, you create an environment of collective grievance where the individual feels helpless and hopeless … then a new form of government comes out and says, ‘Well, you can’t trust anybody else, so therefore put your trust in us.’ And that is always what socialists have done.” Workshops promoting adultism have reached the public’s attention and caused controversy in the past. John O’Connell High School in partnership with Teachers 4 Social Justice reportedly hosted a conference on “adult supremacy” during an “Ethnic Studies Everywhere” conference, the California Post reports. “Due to systemic power dynamics, inherently, the relationship between students and educators is an oppressive one. Oppressor (educator) & oppressed (student),” a presentation slide leaked to the internet declared.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers have descended on airports across the country, expanding enforcement operations to target illegal immigrants who overstayed their visas, according to The New York Times. Federal immigration officers have been seen arresting individuals at the check-in counters and boarding gates and are said to be operating at 15 airports, the outlet reported, citing documents and interviews with immigration attorneys. “This administration is working diligently to ensure that aliens in our country illegally can no longer fly unless it is out of our country to self-deport,” a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) spokesperson told The New York Times. The latest operation builds on a TSA-ICE partnership launched in May 2025 to arrest individuals with outstanding deportation orders at airports, The Times reported. It also comes as the Trump administration ramps up pressure on ICE to increase arrest numbers, agency sources have recently told The Daily Wire. Several recent airport arrests have gone viral on social media. ICE arrested Chantal Alejandra Morales Rojas on July 20 while she attempted to board a Southwest Airlines flight from Denver to Oakland, according to 9News. The incident was captured on video, appearing to show plainclothes officers intercepting her on the jetway before escorting her away. All the while, the woman behind the camera was repeatedly calling for “help” and crying out “ICE is here” and “f*ck ICE,” according to the video. A GoFundMe set up for Morales Rojas said she has a valid work permit and a pending asylum application, 9News reported. ICE said she entered the United States on October 20, 2024, and that her visa expired on January 4, 2025, according to the outlet. The agency added that having a pending case or work authorization doesn’t keep ICE from making an arrest. “A ‘work permit’ and/or a pending asylum case does NOT confer any type of legal status in the United States or prevent ICE from arresting or deporting an illegal alien from the country,” ICE said. An immigration judge has since granted bond to Morales Rojas, according to 9News. As a result of the Trump administration’s latest arrest effort, immigration lawyers say they are instructing their clients awaiting decisions on pending immigration applications to avoid travel. “Before, I was saying, ‘As long as you have an ID, you can travel domestically.’ Now I am turning around and saying, ‘If you are in the process of changing status, avoid any travel,'” Shannon Shepherd, an immigration lawyer who is vice chair for the Chicago chapter of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, told The Times.

Gavin Newscum. Remember him? Well, President Trump’s nickname for him just took on a whole new meaning. All was quiet on the West Coast front for Newscum — most of the news cycle diverted to Fauci pleading the Fifth like a little girl, the Democratic Socialists of America plotting their takeover of our motherland, or Mamdani’s contempt for 9/11 victims — but that changed Tuesday for the California governor, when his former paramour emerged with an explosive essay exposing the scandal. Ruby Rippey-Tourk, deputy campaign finance director under a younger Mayor Newsom and wife of Alex Tourk, his field director, is finally telling her side of the story: an extramarital affair lasting two years, with the now-governor of California. The takeaway? He is, indubitably and irrevocably, scum. Imagine this. You’re in a position of power. Your best friend labors over you, day and night; so does his wife. You spend every waking moment with both of them, watching them weather the storms of substance abuse, a first pregnancy, and the ordinary vicissitudes of life. And then you start sleeping with your best friend’s newly mothered wife. Behind his back. For two years straight. You send her spiraling into full-blown addiction, gut her marriage, and detonate a one-year-old’s entire world. That is what Gavin Newscum did to the Tourks. His friends. His subordinates. People whose entire livelihoods depended on him. Rippey describes her marriage to Tourk as steady yet electric. Romantic and refreshing. Mostly right, and when it wasn’t, her husband still viewed it through rose-colored glasses, always seeing the best in her, always showing up for his wife and their baby. Alex Tourk was as good a guy as it gets. He courted her by consistently showing up with mixtapes and matzo ball soup from her favorite deli, even when he figured he didn’t stand a chance. That same stalwartness carried into fatherhood and into his job, where he served Newsom as a reliable workhorse, there anytime, anyplace. It turns out he and his wife both spent long nights enthralled by the same man; they just did it in vastly different capacities. Newscum looked at this marriage between two hardworking people who trusted him, and made a conscious, cynical decision to break them both, one by one, from atop his City Hall tower. Ruby lays out the relationship in full – from how it started to how it ended. And though she’s clearly responsible for her own abhorrent choices, it’s hard to read her account without concluding that Newsom’s power is what propelled her destruction. She says it began in earnest in 2005, at a wedding in Napa Valley — one where she wore white (insane), became belligerent, and sent her husband home to their baby while she went back to an inn with the mayor. They passed out beside each other; she wet the bed. The crusade against common sense and decency was underway. But it’s what she says about the lead-up that strikes me. In 2004, Ruby had strung together a stretch of sobriety after her pregnancy. That lasted until she, her husband, and their boss sat down at a Mexican restaurant, and Newscum commented on her body. “You’ve lost all your pregnancy weight.” Cue the margaritas. From that moment on, she starts obsessing over what she wears, how she looks, second-guessing every glance he holds a beat too long. The drinks start flowing again, right on schedule. “We meet and we drink. There is sex, but it isn’t the point. The point is proximity — to power, to being chosen… It isn’t love. It isn’t romance. It’s intoxication. The text message is a hit.” She’s captivated by his power. He holds her in the palm of his mayoral hand. She’s relieved when he tells her it should stop. “You can’t be doing this to Alex,” he says, as if he’s the concerned friend stepping in to save the day, and not the governor-in-waiting who used his position to get her into this mess in the first place. “Maybe now it’s over,” she hopes, desperate to be rid of his chains and of the alcoholism their affair ignited. But it didn’t end. Over the course of the next few months, between the taxi rides home from one of Newscum’s penthouses or rooftop bars riddled with cigarettes, she turns to cocaine. Newscum does nothing to stop it. If anything, he fans the flames of her self-destruction, night after night, luring her back in, intoxicated, inebriated, incapacitated. He never tells her to get help. He never tells his friend. He casts himself as a passerby, a bystander to a mess he built. He’s the ruinous villain in their stories, but they’re merely a footnote in his. Ruby is the one who ends it, after checking into rehab in 2006. She confesses to her husband (Gavin’s best friend) via email in 2007 that they’ve both been lying to him and stabbing him in the back. Alex leaves his wife and his job on Newsom’s campaign, both of which he’d spent years building, strengthening, and sacrificing for, with nothing left but a kid and an attorney’s bill. He rebuilds slowly, forever bewildered that the two people he trusted most could do this to him. Ruby retreats into isolation, regret, and ruin, staying silent when Gavin’s memoir hits shelves, claiming it was he who “came clean” to Alex. And Gavin cashes his memoir checks, having barely acknowledged the “crazed woman” who’d “fall asleep outside his bedroom,” before ascending, smooth as ever, to the governorship. There is no doubt that Ruby held a great deal of the responsibility for their affair, but what Newscum’s conduct reveals about him, across every stage of this, is the real story. He used his power to pull his best friend’s wife into bed while all three of them worked under the same City Hall roof. He lied to everyone close to him for years. He is, demonstrably, the type of man who will absolutely wreck a woman’s heart if given the chance — and he did. Then he looked at the devastation, shrugged, found a carbon copy of Ruby, and married her. Her name is Jennifer Siebel Newsom, now California’s “first partner.” Politicians aren’t exactly famous for being good people, and sure, everybody’s got skeletons. Trump’s got some. Clinton’s got a whole ossuary. But there’s a difference between garden-variety sleaze and this: years of lying to your best friend’s face while sleeping with his wife, watching her drown in it, then writing a memoir where you’re the hero of your own betrayal. He’s not Newscum because Trump said so. He’s Newscum because he earned it. And now this scumball wants America to give him a promotion.

Scholars have discovered two previously unknown sermons by St. Augustine of Hippo while translating an 11th-century manuscript from a German monastery, shedding new light on one of Christianity’s most influential theologians. University of Würzburg Latin scholar Christian Tornau discovered the sermons while translating a manuscript originally from Bad Doberan Abbey in Germany. The manuscript contained copies of six sermons attributed to Augustine. “Two of the six sermons are previously undiscovered writings by Augustine,” Professor Tornau said. Because forged works attributed to Augustine are common, Tornau and his colleagues initially suspected the sermons were inauthentic,  The New York Post reported.  After identifying Augustine’s trademark humor, references to his North African Christian tradition, and a distinctive style of prayer, however, Tornau and a panel of 20 Latin scholars concluded: “they are indeed authentic.”  Augustine, who was born in what is now Algeria, is regarded as one of Christianity’s most influential theologians. His writings, including Confessions and The City of God, helped shape medieval philosophy and Western thought.  The newly discovered sermons focus on the biblical account of King Saul and the Witch of Endor from the First Book of Samuel. In the story, Saul seeks guidance from God before a battle but instead turns to the Witch of Endor, asking her to summon the prophet Samuel, who foretells Saul’s death.  Tornau told Fox News Digital that Augustine’s interpretation of Saul’s repentance was the “most remarkable element” of the sermons. While many Christian scholars throughout history viewed Saul as an unrepentant villain, Augustine interpreted the story as suggesting Saul made peace with God before his death.   “In any event, it is indicative of Augustine’s [independence] of mind and his willingness to think everyone, even those who appear most evil, [is] capable of salvation through the grace of God,” Tornau said. “This combines intellectual honesty and episcopal humility in a remarkable and very Augustinian way.” The sermons also revisit one of the Bible’s longstanding theological questions. “The story [also] raises a theological question: ‘Why can a necromancer summon the spirit of a prophet?’” Tornau said. “This in turn opens up the theodicy problem: ‘how can an omnipotent God allow this or is he not really omnipotent?’” According to Tornau, Augustine explored whether the encounter was merely an illusion or whether God permitted it, using the account to examine the relationship between divine providence and evil.  Tornau is working with the publisher Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum (CSEL) to bring Augustine’s sermons to the public.