Erika Kirk was scheduled to appear at a Turning Point USA event at the University of Georgia on Tuesday night, but was forced to stay home after receiving what organizers described as “very serious threats.” Vice President JD Vance still moved forward with his planned appearance and delivered remarks to students at the event, which proceeded as scheduled with TPUSA leader Andrew Kolvet taking Kirk’s place. Vance addressed Erika Kirk’s absence at the start, saying he had been concerned the event might be canceled. He said he spoke with the Secret Service and ultimately told Kirk to “do what she needs to do for herself and her family.” NEWS: Erika Kirk had to skip tonight’s TPUSA event due to threats, @AndrewKolvet says. He’s interviewing Vice President Vance in her place. pic.twitter.com/IxJgycjexU — Mary Margaret Olohan (@MaryMargOlohan) April 14, 2026 It’s not clear why Kirk stepped back following threats made in her direction, while Vance — who operates under some of the most extensive security protection in the world — was still able to take the stage. Erika Kirk posted on X during the event, saying that “after all our family has been through, I take my security team’s recommendations extremely seriously.” I was so looking forward to tonight’s event at the @universityofga with our Vice President @JDVance, but after all our family has been through, I take my security team’s recommendations extremely seriously. Thank you to our amazing Georgia chapter for your support. God bless you… https://t.co/f2rBre9ArJ — Erika Kirk (@MrsErikaKirk) April 14, 2026 The suspect charged in the assassination of Erika Kirk’s late husband, TPUSA founder Charlie Kirk’s, remains in custody and faces multiple charges, including aggravated murder, with prosecutors seeking the death penalty. Charlie Kirk was assassinated in 2025 while speaking at a campus event. Since then, Erika Kirk has taken on a more public role leading the organization and continuing its work nationwide. Newsy remarks from VP Vance: – People attacking Erika Kirk instead of those harming the US are part of the problem, not the solution. – He called Kash Patel about the attacks on @Savsays on the way down here and Patel promised to investigate the left wing groups involved – He… pic.twitter.com/ef8Q6WRsqw — Mary Margaret Olohan (@MaryMargOlohan) April 14, 2026 Her decision to step back comes as she has also been at the center of a growing controversy involving commentator Candace Owens, who recently announced an “investigative series” targeting Kirk titled “Bride of Charlie.” The series has sparked backlash across the conservative movement. Daily Wire editor emeritus Ben Shapiro blasted Owens in a recent video, calling Owens an “evil, twisted human being” and accusing her of profiting off Charlie Kirk’s assassination by promoting conspiracy theories and targeting his widow. Shapiro urged Erika Kirk to “sue the living hell” out of Owens over the project. Vance delivered an emotional defense of Erika Kirk, describing the grief she’s endured since her husband’s assassination and blasting critics who have questioned her. Vance reflected on the raw, unpredictable nature of grief — saying Kirk has been navigating overwhelming emotions while also trying to preserve Charlie Kirk’s legacy and care for her children, who may grow up without lasting memories of their father. He said the attacks against her have been “one of the most disgraceful things” he’s seen in public life, before sharing a deeply personal moment he witnessed alongside his wife after Charlie Kirk’s death. .@VP: “The people telling you that Erika wasn’t grieving her husband are full of shit.” pic.twitter.com/7qpQUZi80y — Mary Margaret Olohan (@MaryMargOlohan) April 14, 2026 “I was there with her, I was holding her hand, my wife was hugging her while we loaded Charlie’s body onto Air Force Two and said the Lord’s Prayer,” Vance said. “The people telling you that Erika wasn’t grieving her husband are full of sh*t.” Owens has used her platform in recent months to push a range of claims about the killing of Charlie Kirk, including allegations implicating various figures and institutions — claims that have drawn widespread criticism. The University of Georgia event was part of a broader campus tour by Turning Point USA aimed at engaging college students nationwide.

Video shared on Tuesday shows the moment an Oklahoma high school principal rushed and tackled an armed former student, preventing what authorities say could have been a school shooting. The security footage, obtained by NBC affiliate KFOR, captures Principal Kirk Moore of Pauls Valley High School confronting the suspect roughly one week before the video was made public. The video appears to show someone else opening the door, allowing the former student into the building. The suspect then walks into the lobby, briefly hiding behind a vending machine before stepping into view. Just as he approached an office door, the door opened, and Moore barreled toward him. WATCH: ***JUST IN: VIDEO SHOWS MOMENTS HERO PRINCIPAL TACKLES GUNMAN*** We have obtained security video from last week’s shooting at Pauls Valley High School, showing the moments principal Kirk Moore jumped on top of a gunman as he attempted to shoot multiple students. @kfor pic.twitter.com/MXZzsAeJJL — Spencer Humphrey (@SHumphreyTV) April 14, 2026 Moore ducked his head and shoulders as he ran, hitting the suspect in the chest with his full weight and tackling him onto a nearby bench, pinning him there. Moore was shot in the leg at some point during the scuffle. Another man, identified later as Moore’s assistant principal, ran out of the same office seconds later. Assessing the situation, he quickly knocked the handgun away from the suspect, then picked it up and secured it inside the office. The two men restrain the suspect — identified as former student Victor Lee Hawkins, 20, until law enforcement arrives and takes him into custody. Moore released a lengthy statement after the shooting, thanking local law enforcement and first responders for their support and the community for their prayers and well-wishes. “Pauls Valley schools are safe communities unaccustomed to the type of threat we witnessed on Tuesday. Nevertheless, like so many educators around the country, we prepare for these events through training and careful assessments of threats,” Moore said. “I am grateful that my instincts and training, as well as God’s hand, were available to come to me on Tuesday.”  

We now know that the Biden administration was literally partnering with abortion activists to track and imprison pro-lifers. When I see President Trump and Pope Leo going at it, I think to myself, if we’re going to talk about presidents who are legitimately attacking Catholics, we should really be talking about Barack Obama, who went after the Little Sisters of the Poor and decided that he was going to mainstream every sin he could find. We should talk about Joe Biden, who apparently was using the DOJ to go after pro-lifers, which is insane. According to Daily Wire reporting, President Biden’s administration relied on information gathered from radical pro-abortion groups to track, prosecute, and snoop on peaceful pro-life protesters who were later arrested by the FBI. A DOJ report titled “The Biden Administration’s Weaponization of the FACE Act” examined more than 700,000 records. The FACE Act is a bill that was designed to prevent people from obstructing entry to abortion clinics. The FACE Act also said that you weren’t allowed to invade churches during services. That came up in the context of Don Lemon and his friends invading and disturbing a church service in order to protest ICE. The dossiers that the DOJ examined contained information about pro-life activists who had not yet been charged with any federal crimes, but were deemed threats by abortion groups because of their activism. We’ve seen this kind of pattern emerge in all of the reporting from the Biden administration, over and over and over. They were using left-wing cutout groups to do their dirty work, whether it was the Biden administration State Department contracting out to other services to promote boycotts of right-wing news outlets, or whether it was the Biden administration outsourcing its investigative pursuits to anti-life, pro-choice organizations to target pro-lifers. The Biden administration liked to do such things. According to the Daily Wire reporting, the weaponization can be traced to former Attorney General Merrick Garland’s resurrection of the National Task Force on Violence Against Reproductive Health Care Providers the month after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June 2022. That task force was operating out of the department’s civil rights division under the direction of Sanjay Patel, who was reportedly fired on Monday. Patel was on texting terms with the National Abortion Federation security team and was regularly communicating with the Planned Parenthood Federation of America and the Feminist Majority Foundation, according to the DOJ. Members of the Biden DOJ were coordinating openly with various abortion groups and leaders in the abortion movement. This was all part of these non-governmental organizations working hand-in-glove with the federal government under Joe Biden. Daily Wire reporting looked into the sentences that were sought by the Biden DOJ against pro-life activists, and what they found is that the Biden DOJ asked for a longer, average sentence for pro-life defendants compared to pro-abortion defendants. Actual sentences shook out to an average of 14 months for pro-life defendants, versus three months for pro-choice defendants. This is astonishing. It demonstrates the full-scale animus that the Biden administration had for the pro-life movement. This is nothing new. If you go back to the Clinton administration, the attempt to target political adversaries using the DOJ is perfectly obvious. I’ve said over and over that the Left likes to say that Donald Trump broke all the rules, that he’s the one who killed the American political system. The reality is that the American political system was already dead, and Trump stumbled upon it. Barack Obama used the IRS to go after pro-life groups, conservative groups, and Tea Party groups. Joe Biden’s DOJ targeted pro-lifers. There’s nothing new here. Democrats have been doing this for a very, very long time. Imagine the scandal if, for example, the Trump administration were coordinating with pro-life groups to go after abortion advocates. Can you imagine the scandal? Can you imagine the front page coverage? One of the questions here is how people who were involved in this were allowed to stay at the DOJ for so long. Sanjay Patel was still working for the DOJ all the way until Monday, which is crazy and demonstrates the truth of President Trump’s statement that there is, in fact, a deep state. There are lifelong appointees of various administrations who are still working inside the current administration — working against the president’s priorities. That’s very real. It just goes to show you that the attempt to cleanse the administration of holdovers is an ongoing pursuit. The Democratic Party is perfectly willing to use the auspices of government to go after religious people. They’ve been doing it over and over and over again. It’s one of the reasons I said to my family that we ought to leave California. My great fear is that states like California will effectively quasi-criminalize religious practice by essentially saying that any 501C3 that receives tax-exempt status from the state government must buy into the left-wing social agenda. If the Democrats were able to take over the Supreme Court, they would get away with that. They would be able to use anti-discrimination law as a guise for cracking down on First Amendment religiously protected activity. That is the direction that Democrats would love to move. And if left to their own devices, they absolutely would be able to do it. If the Democrats had won in 2024, Kamala Harris would have attempted to stack the Supreme Court and state governments everywhere would be pursuing anti-religious activity just like this. The Biden administration was, in my opinion, the worst administration in modern American history, worse even than Obama — because Obama didn’t say the quiet part out loud. Biden said the quiet part out loud.

Longtime NFL reporter Dianna Russini is stepping down from her senior position at The Athletic one week after Page Six published bombshell photos of her canoodling with New England Patriots head coach Mike Vrabel. Russini announced her resignation on Tuesday in a letter posted to X. “I have decided to step aside now — before my current contract expires on June 30,” she wrote. “I do so not because I accept the narrative that has been constructed around this episode, but because I refuse to lend it further oxygen or to let it define me or my career.” The veteran reporter defended her record, citing more than 15 years in sports journalism at NBC, ESPN, and The Athletic. “I have built a body of work I am proud of. I have broken stories, earned the trust of sources across the league and been guided by the highest standards of professional conduct. That record speaks for itself,” she wrote. Russini said The Athletic, which is owned by The New York Times, initially stood by her account of events that took place in March at a boutique hotel in Sedona, Arizona. However, she said subsequent media coverage fueled speculation she described as “unmoored from the facts.” “This media frenzy is hurtling forward without regard for the review process The Athletic is trying to complete,” she added. “It continues to escalate, fueled by repeated leaks, and I have no interest in submitting to a public inquiry that has already caused far more damage than I am willing to accept.” In a memo shared with The Athletic staff, Executive Editor Steven Ginsberg confirmed Russini’s resignation and said the outlet took the situation seriously from the start. “When this situation was brought to our attention last week, there were clear concerns, but we received a detailed explanation and it was our instinct to support and defend a colleague while we continued to review the matter,” Ginsberg wrote. “As additional information emerged, new questions were raised that became part of our investigation.” Page Six reported that Russini and Vrabel were spotted together at the Ambiente hotel on March 28. According to the outlet, they had breakfast, spent time by the pool, side-by-side in a hot tub, and were later photographed on a private rooftop area. The photos showed them holding hands and standing face-to-face, with the outlet also reporting they briefly danced together. Russini and Vrabel are both married. Russini has been married to Shake Shack executive Kevin Goldschmidt since 2020; the couple shares two sons. Vrabel has been married to his wife, Jen, since 1999, after the two met at Ohio State. They have two sons as well. In separate statements to Page Six, Russini and Vrabel both downplayed their interactions. Russini said the photos “don’t represent the group of six people who were hanging out during the day.” Vrabel described the situation as an “innocent interaction” and called the images “laughable.” Russini joined The Athletic in 2023 after a successful tenure at ESPN, where she covered the Tennessee Titans during Vrabel’s tenure as head coach. Vrabel is coming off a Super Bowl appearance in his first season as head coach of the Patriots.

The FBI nabbed an illegal immigrant gangbanger who was shot while trying to run over federal immigration agents as he attempted to evade arrest, the Department of Justice announced Tuesday. Carlos Ivan Mendoza Hernandez, 36, an 18th Street Gang member who was wanted for questioning related to a murder in El Salvador, is charged with assault on a federal officer with a deadly weapon after he allegedly tried to ram Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers with his car, court documents unsealed Tuesday allege. He was arrested Monday after his release from the hospital. The ICE officers pulled over Mendoza Hernandez in Patterson, California, last week. The Salvadoran national refused to get out of his vehicle despite the officers’ repeated requests to detain him, according to court documents. That led one of the agents to break a window on his car to force him out, the court documents show. Mendoza Hernandez then allegedly drove forward, hitting an agent with his car. He then reversed the car, colliding with a law enforcement vehicle parked behind him. He then accelerated forward toward two of the federal agents, court documents allege. One of the agents jumped out of the way as Mendoza Hernandez allegedly drove over the median and into opposing traffic before stopping on the side of the road. Agents responded by shooting Mendoza Hernandez, who was hit several times and transported to a hospital for treatment. At some point, Mendoza Hernandez’s car collided with another vehicle, hit a guardrail, and eventually came to a stop roughly 500 feet from where agents pulled him over, according to court documents. “Following their training, our officers fired defensive shots to protect themselves, their fellow agents, and the public,” Acting ICE Director Todd Lyons said at the time. ICE has faced an unprecedented level of violent attacks and threats since kicking off President Donald Trump’s mass deportation campaign. Trump’s first year in office was marked by a 3,300% increase in vehicular attacks against ICE, according to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). The Trump administration has attempted to take a more targeted approach at making immigration-related arrests following two fatal shootings of anti-ICE activists in Minneapolis. The shootings, which were carried out by federal immigration agents, sparked weeks of protests. In the wake of the two previous shootings, Trump replaced Kristi Noem with Markwayne Mullin as the new DHS secretary. He also demoted former Border Patrol sector chief Gregory Bovino, who was known for his aggressive roving patrols and has since retired.