For years, women and girls in California who wanted to work out or relax at the spa have been forced to confront male genitalia. One lawmaker wants to change that. Assemblywoman Leticia Castillo on Tuesday introduced a bill that would require facilities, including gyms and spas, to provide “sex-separated” bathrooms and locker rooms for men and women. Castillo says the bill is a common-sense measure that protects California women — and helps combat the state’s embrace of radical transgender ideology. “Parents across California are asking for clarity and commonsense protections in intimate spaces where females deserve privacy and safety,” Castillo told The Daily Wire. “This measure simply requires that bathrooms, locker rooms, and changing areas in businesses be separated by sex, while still allowing single-occupancy gender-neutral options. Protecting civil rights and protecting females are not mutually exclusive, and this bill makes sure we do both.”  The legislation would require “sex-separated intimate spaces, except where a gender neutral facility is a single occupancy.” These intimate spaces include bathrooms, showers, changing rooms, locker rooms, dressing rooms, and “any other area in which an individual would have a reasonable expectation of privacy from the opposite sex.” The proposal is backed by Erin Friday, the president of Our Duty USA, an advocacy organization dedicated to raising awareness about the dangers of transgender ideology. “We need California to return to reality. It really shouldn’t be that hard to return to sex-based intimate spaces, because it was a foolish and dangerous idea to permit males to believe their way into the female category,” Friday told The Daily Wire. “You don’t need to be a genius to figure out the predictable outcome will be demented males terrorizing females. The legislation cites reports of incidents that have rocked California gyms and private spaces. One incident took place in July 2021 at WiSpa in Los Angeles, where a registered sex offender named Darren Merager was accused of exposing his penis while on the woman’s side of the spa. He was later found not guilty of indecent exposure.  Using female pronouns, the lawyer who represented Merager told The Daily Wire that California law allowed people to use facilities in line with how they identified.  “Ms. Merager was put through a years-long process. Multiple felony criminal charges were lodged against her. Ultimately, she was prosecuted for doing what California law expressly allowed her to do: use facilities consistent with her gender identity. The jury soundly rejected this prosecution and found her not guilty on all counts,” lawyer Elliott Tiomkin told The Daily Wire.  Another incident involved a woman named Gracie Hutson, who said she witnessed a male masturbating inside the locker room of a San Francisco Planet Fitness. She shared a video on TikTok from inside the location showing the shadows of a person inside a stall appearing to engage in the act. That person was banned from Planet Fitness and had his membership canceled, according to an email viewed by The Daily Wire. Hutson told The Daily Wire she was in “shock” when she noticed what was happening in the locker room. She said the man claimed to be transgender and wasn’t even “trying to play the part” of a woman. “There’s way too much leeway for predators to go into these environments and do things like masturbate in the bathroom,” she told The Daily Wire. “I felt my space was violated, and I know many other women feel that the locker rooms and restrooms, places that are supposed to be safe, places for women, are no longer safe.” In another case, a woman named Tish Hyman said she lost her membership at Gold’s Gym after saying that she was harassed by a transgender-identifying male in the locker room.  “In recent years, male individuals who have adopted nonbinary or transgender identities have been in women’s intimate spaces where female individuals of all ages are in various states of undress,” a copy of Castillo’s legislation shared with The Daily Wire says. “Some male individuals have also been naked with their male genitals exposed.” Other patrons of San Francisco-area YMCA locations also told The Daily Wire that men have invaded their locker rooms.  “I felt violated. Nobody cared. I have never been in a domestic violence situation, but at that moment I felt the pain a woman must feel when violated — tears, shaking, loud, in disbelief, begging to be heard,” said Presidio YMCA member Nuchine Nobari. “I could tell from the ‘surprise’ look on the front desk staff member that he, too, was shocked.”  Susan Pete, a member of the Stonestown YMCA, said that a Muslim mother and daughter quit the gym after being exposed to a naked man in the shower.  “A Muslim mother was in the shower with her autistic daughter when the man appeared completely naked right outside the showers,” she told The Daily Wire. “The daughter became extremely distressed and was wailing, really screaming, loudly in the shower. The grandmother needed to bring clothes so they could dress in the shower, but she was terrified of walking past the naked guy because of her religious beliefs.” Leftist groups in California, like the ACLU, argue that businesses like gyms and spas are not legally allowed to keep men out of women’s spaces if they identify as female under the state’s civil rights laws. Guidance from Democrat attorney general Rob Bonta says that entities cannot deny access to bathrooms based on so-called gender identity. California Democrats have resisted even the most moderate restrictions of transgender ideology. Last year, lawmakers on the California Senate Public Safety Committee shot down a bill that would have kept male sex criminals out of female prisons.

Secretary of War Pete Hegseth has directed Army Secretary Dan Driscoll to remove Colonel Dave Butler from his role as chief of Army public affairs and senior advisor, the latest in a series of leadership changes at the Pentagon tied to ongoing efforts to reshape senior military ranks. On Thursday, Hegseth ordered Driscoll to remove Butler from his post even though Driscoll had resisted the move for months because of Butler’s role in Army transformation efforts and communications leadership. The order came just before Driscoll was to leave for Geneva to assume leadership of the U.S. delegation in ongoing talks on the Ukraine war. In a statement sent to The Washington Post, Driscoll thanked Butler for his service: “We greatly appreciate Col. Dave Butler’s lifetime of service in America’s Army and to our nation,” adding that Butler has been “an integral part of the Army’s transformation efforts” and wishing him success in his upcoming retirement after 28 years in uniform. Butler had also served as the head of public affairs for the Joint Chiefs of Staff when General Mark Milley was chairman, a tenure that placed him in a leadership circle viewed critically by the Trump-aligned Pentagon team. Milley’s tenure became a flash point in the Trump era. As chairman of the Joint Chiefs during the previous administration, he drew public criticism from Trump allies after reportedly reassuring Chinese military officials during the 2020 transition that the U.S. would not attack, a development Trump himself called “an act so egregious that, in times gone by, the punishment would have been DEATH.” The Pentagon later revoked Milley’s personal security detail and his security clearance, and multiple Pentagon investigations were ordered into his conduct. Those actions by Hegseth — stripping Milley’s security detail and opening a formal inquiry — were widely covered in Pentagon reporting at the time and stem from long-running tension between Milley and Trump-aligned political leadership over the general’s calls with foreign counterparts and public statements about civilian control. Butler’s association with Milley and his role as a senior communications officer under him have not been publicly cited by the Department of War as the official reason for his removal; however, the timing and the ongoing pattern of personnel changes at the Pentagon suggest internal disagreements over leadership philosophy and messaging are at work. Since taking office, Hegseth has been reshaping senior roles across the Department of Defense. Fox News has reported that multiple senior officers, including four-star leaders across service branches, have been replaced, retired, or moved out of key positions amid what the War Department describes as a refocusing of leadership toward mission priorities. Butler’s removal is especially notable because his name appeared on promotion lists for two consecutive years for his first star, but Hegseth has delayed approvals for several officers selected by the Army board, in part over concerns about those choices. Butler volunteered to withdraw his own name from the list to help clear the logjam. The directive to remove Butler comes as the Pentagon continues to balance internal leadership changes with ongoing international commitments, and will likely draw scrutiny from lawmakers and military observers watching how the department manages personnel decisions amid fragile peace talks in both Europe and the Middle East that require a united front by American military command.

New York City’s democratic socialist Mayor Zohran Mamdani just tapped a new immigration officer to his administration who previously advocated to “abolish ICE” and has cozied up to radical figures and organizations. Mamdani announced on Tuesday that he had appointed Faiza Ali as the commissioner of the Mayor’s Office of Immigrant Affairs. The NYC mayor said he made the choice “at a time when immigrant New Yorkers face escalating attacks and uncertainty,” adding that “this administration will not equivocate.” “I am the proud daughter of immigrant parents from Pakistan who came to New York City with courage, an unshakable belief in possibility, and the determination to build a future here. This city gave us opportunity, stability, and the chance to put down roots, just as it has for generations of immigrants before us,” Ali said in a statement following her appointment. “As Commissioner, I am committed to building a city that ensures every New Yorker, regardless of when they arrived or where they were born, can live, work, and raise families with dignity,” Ali added. In a 2019 X post, Ali called to “abolish ICE” in response to President Donald Trump’s immigration policies and his efforts to “weaponize fear and institutionalize white supremacy.” Ali was arrested during a protest in 2018, where she also called for ICE’s demise. “Made it back home to Brooklyn from D.C. after being arrested Thurs afternoon alongside 633 women protesting family separation & demanding we #abolishICE,” Ali wrote in an Instagram post at the time. “We will not be silent while 45 & his collaborators commit human rights abuses. We will keep showing up. #WomenDisobey,” the post concluded. In 2014, Ali advocated for 11 million “undocumented” immigrants to receive American citizenship, according to an X post. She was also arrested during a 2017 protest outside of Trump Tower, according to the New York Post. During the incident, she was cuffed alongside Linda Sarsour, who has in the past faced criticism for espousing antisemitic views and praising terrorists like Rasmea Odeh, who was involved in a 1969 bombing in Jerusalem that killed two and injured nine. Odeh was also stripped of United States citizenship over her ties to terrorist attacks. Ali worked for the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) as its director of community affairs in New York. CAIR has been accused of having ties to Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood. The State of Texas recently designated CAIR as a terrorist organization and sued the group. Florida also took similar action against CAIR with a terror designation. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton alleged that a CAIR-Texas founding board member was convicted in 2008 of funneling $12.4 million to Hamas through the Holy Land Foundation, with CAIR named as an unindicted co-conspirator in the case. CAIR dismissed the lawsuit, calling it “defamatory and unconstitutional.” Ali also served on the staff of the New York City Council in 2014, was the advocacy and civic engagement director for the Arab American Association of New York, and co-founded the Muslim Democratic Club of New York, according to the mayor’s office. She also served as the director of advocacy at the Arab American Association of New York and an organizer with Brooklyn Congregations United. Mamdani’s office didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio spoke at the Munich Security Conference in Germany on Saturday. It was attended by a wide variety of politicos, both from the Trump administration and from the Democratic side of the aisle. He was the adult in the room. Marco Rubio is the most well-spoken member of the Trump administration. And when it comes to foreign policy, it’s not even close. He gave a truly tremendous speech about the relationship between America and Europe. If you recall, last year, Vice President JD Vance also went to Europe. In Davos, he proceeded to give a speech blistering the Europeans: some parts for good reasons, some parts that weren’t so great. His speech appeared to draw the hackles of a bunch of Europeans because it was basically saying, “Guys, you seem to be on your own. America is drawing back.” That is not what Rubio said. What Rubio said is that we have strong bonds, centuries-long bonds with the many European countries, and we also are going to have common interests with those countries, but we need strong allies to stand up for themselves. He attempted to draw out a definition of what it meant to be in consonance with Europe in a way that Vance, in some ways, failed to advance. Rubio received a standing ovation for this, which is a good thing because his defense of the Trump administration policy was quite muscular over at the Munich Security Conference. Rubio suggested that the United States and Europe have a great history of cooperation: Together we rebuilt a shattered continent in the wake of two devastating world wars. When we found ourselves divided once again by the Iron Curtain, the free West linked arms with the courageous dissidents struggling against tyranny in the East to defeat Soviet communism. We have fought against each other, then reconciled, then fought, then reconciled again. And we have bled and died side by side on battlefields from Kapyong to Kandahar. Rubio said we definitely need strong allies, that it can’t just be the United States picking up the check for everybody else. You can’t build gigantic welfare states on the back of American taxpayers. You need to be strong, because strong alliances require strong allies, and those strong allies are capable of providing deterrence against, for example, a wayward Russia. “We do not want our allies to be weak, because that makes us weaker,” he said. “We want allies who can defend themselves so that no adversary will ever be tempted to test our collective strength. This is why we do not want our allies to be shackled by guilt and shame. We want allies who are proud of their culture and of their heritage, who understand that we are heirs to the same great and noble civilization, and who, together with us, are willing and able to defend it. Rubio noted problems that the continent has brought upon itself, ranging from subjecting itself to the Green Revolution,, to the mass migration that it brought upon itself largely through a bizarre sort of blood-guilt, the idea that Europe, because it had destroyed so much of the world during World War II, somehow owed it to the rest of the world to open its borders and bring everyone in. In the key section of his speech, he talked about the values that are supposed to bring together the United States and Europe. The fundamental question we must answer at the outset is what exactly are we defending, because armies do not fight for abstractions. Armies fight for a people; armies fight for a nation. Armies fight for a way of life. And that is what we are defending: a great civilization that has every reason to be proud of its history, confident of its future, and aims to always be the master of its own economic and political destiny. What are the ideas that unite that civilization? He said, “Armies don’t fight for abstractions.” I beg to differ a little; armies do fight for abstractions. Armies have fought for communism; there are armies that fight for Islamic fundamentalism; there are armies that are fought for Catholicism and for Protestantism. There are armies all over the world that fight for ideas. The question is, what are the ideas of Western civilization that are worth upholding and preserving? Because if you don’t know what it is you are defending, it is very difficult to fight for it. The truth is that Europe itself is a bit of an idea. There are times when members of the European continent have been fighting each other tooth and nail in bloody, centuries-long wars. What exactly is the concept of Europe? What is the common ideological heritage that actually counts between America and Europe? If you’re going to talk about Europe as a holistic concept, you have to define your terms. If you’re going through the history of Europe all the way back to the Roman Empire, what you’d see is that the Roman Empire was its own civilization. It considered the outlying areas to be barbarians. The word barbarian comes from a Latin root, which means people who speak gibberish. At that time, it applied to the Germans. The Germans were the barbarians. Now they are considered part of European civilization. After the fall of the Roman Empire, what rose in its wake was Christendom, which was basically the idea of Catholic dominance of the European continent. That grew over the course of the Carolingian Empire and over the course of the subsequent centuries, up until the Protestant Reformation.  The Protestant Reformation ushered in an era of religious warfare that lasted well over 100 years, and ended with the Peace of Westphalia when the medieval concept of Christendom was replaced by the modern system of nation-states. There was a new concept of Europe that was formed in the aftermath. The question is always in opposition to what? Whenever you are defining a civilization, civilizations have an internal definition, and then they have a definition with regard to others. The reality is that the Roman Empire was not only defined as that which was under the sway of Rome, but also in opposition to other empires and armies, German armies, Assyrian armies, Persian armies, or whatever the case may have been. Christendom was largely forged in opposition to Islam in the aftermath of the fall of the Roman Empire, because Islam was actually a dire threat to Europe and had spread deep into Europe, all the way into France, after the Peace of Westphalia. About a century later, we saw the rise of the Enlightenment, and then the West became identified with these Enlightenment ideas, a history of Christianity that bled over into a sort of secularized version of many of the key values of Christianity, but with a critical eye toward the idea that religion could answer all questions, and therefore a sort of Aristotelian approach towards science that looked at evidence first. You got the separation of church and state in many of these countries. You got the rise of the scientific revolution, the rise of the industrial Revolution, the rise of free economies, and all the rest. And then the West tore itself apart, enduring two world wars. We saw a West redefined in opposition to Soviet communism and in the aftermath of Soviet communism. So what is the West? What are these values that we hold dear? It is not just a matter of “common heritage.” It is not just a matter of “common language.” It is not “cultural inheritance” because there are similarities in culture, but also pretty significant differences in these cultures. To pretend that Europe doesn’t exist as a concept or as a civilization is silly. It has a shared Christian history that grew out of Christendom, but it also has an Enlightenment history, and it has shared values. And if those values wane, so too will the alliance between the old world and the new. Those values include the rule of law, freedom of speech, freedom of religion, property rights, democracy, and small republicanism. This is one reason among many why Russia has never quite ever entered the world of Europe, and has always sort of existed on the fringes of Europe. Integrating the Russian Empire into Europe has always been a failed experiment. All of this means Europe needs to uphold its own values. It means the United States needs to uphold its own values, and we all need to understand that a shared history, a shared experience, and a shared set of values are all necessary in order to have an increasingly powerful alliance. He concluded:  I am here today to leave it clear that America is charting the path for a new century of prosperity, and that once again we want to do it together with you, our cherished allies and our oldest friends. We want to do it together with you, with a Europe that is proud of its heritage and of its history; with a Europe that has the spirit of creation of liberty that sent ships out into uncharted seas and birthed our civilization; with a Europe that has the means to defend itself and the will to survive. We should be proud of what we achieved together in the last century, but now we must confront and embrace the opportunities of a new one – because yesterday is over, the future is inevitable, and our destiny together awaits. This is the right approach for the Trump administration to take. And Rubio did a phenomenal job of expounding it.

The White House says “the parties are pretty far apart” on reaching a deal to end the lapse in funding for the Department of Homeland Security. DHS is enduring a shutdown confined to its own department, which started on Friday after a continuing resolution expired. The debate moving forward centers on federal immigration enforcement tactics, even though ICE is still largely funded through the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” signed by President Donald Trump last year. “In terms of the written offer that was transmitted from the Democrats, the parties are still pretty far apart. The administration remains interested in good-faith conversations to end the Democrat shutdown before more Americans feel the impacts,” a White House official told The Daily Wire in a statement on background Tuesday. “But the administration also remains committed to carrying out the President’s promise to enforce federal immigration law,” the official added. Not only are Democrats and Republicans not seeing eye to eye on how to move forward, Congress is on recess this week, which means that agencies like TSA, FEMA, and the Coast Guard will be without funding for the time being – meaning those essential workers are at risk of going without a paycheck even if they show up to work. The exact details of the offers sent between Democrats and the White House have been largely private, as Democratic leadership went public with their original list of requests earlier this month, ranging from using judicial warrants for arrests to no longer permitting officers to wear masks while conducting operations. “This is why there must be a full, independent investigation of every incident that ICE has been involved in,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) posted to X on Friday in response to a Politico article headlined, “ICE says federal agents appear to have lied about confrontation that led to shooting.” “DHS and this administration cannot be trusted to carry out investigations on their own. And it’s why Democrats are fighting to rein in ICE,” he added. Meanwhile, Sen. Katie Britt (R-AL) blasted Democrats on the Senate floor on Friday, as a second continuing resolution was rejected to keep immigration talks going without risking the department’s funding. “We want to continue this conversation, but yet you’re penalizing a TSA agent. A TSA agent is gonna go without a paycheck. Why? So that you can posture politically. I’m over it. Everybody on that side of the aisle knows that ICE and CBP will continue to be funded,” the Republican said, The Daily Wire reported. In the fall, the government faced a 43-day shutdown that resulted in a high number of TSA agents calling out, as they were working without pay. “This one’s very different than the first. First, air traffic controllers are paid. They’ve been funded through the first appropriations bill a couple of weeks ago. That was the big linchpin concern for us in the first one,” President and CEO of Airlines for America, Chris Sununu, told The Daily Wire last week. There was a second brief government shutdown earlier this month that was averted as part of a deal to split DHS funding from the rest of the spending package, as the rest of the federal government except for DHS remains fully funded through the end of the fiscal year in September.