A growing push to legalize marijuana in conservative Indiana is setting up a clash among Republican leaders, with Gov. Mike Braun signaling openness to change while Sen. Jim Banks is urging him to hold the line. The Hoosier State remains one of the few states that largely bans marijuana in all forms, but pressure is mounting as surrounding states have moved to legalize the drug in some capacity. “I’m kind of agnostic on that issue,” Braun said last month, according to WFYI. “But when you’ve got four states surrounding you, you’re probably going to have to address it.” Braun has directed state agencies to meet with pro-medical marijuana groups, Marijuana Moment reported on Monday, as his administration weighs whether to revisit the state’s longstanding ban. Marijuana is now legal for recreational use in 24 states, while 40 states allow it for medicinal purposes, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. Braun on Tuesday pointed to recent federal movement on the issue, noting the Trump administration’s decision to reschedule marijuana could make changes at the state level “more likely.” He stressed, however, that any shift in policy should be guided by “what makes sense” and include input from law enforcement. “You’re going to need to ask the legislators and the leaders in those two chambers to see what they’re thinking, because I’m clear in terms of where I’m at,” Braun said Tuesday, according to the Indiana Capital Chronicle. “You’ve got to take what’s evolved over time.” Banks, meanwhile, is warning that even limited legalization could carry serious consequences. In a letter to Braun on Tuesday, exclusively obtained by The Daily Wire, the Indiana Republican argued that legalizing marijuana would put public safety at risk. “Even in states that limit recreational use, addicts are accessing medical marijuana cards—and medical use itself can lead to use disorders,” Banks wrote. “Making marijuana legal does not make it safe, and it does not reduce usage.” Banks urged Braun to “prioritize public safety and the well-being of Hoosiers—especially those under the age of 18—and maintain the state’s prohibitions on marijuana use.” The senator said he frequently hears from constituents who want stricter controls, not looser ones. “They tell me about how their children’s lives were ruined by addiction; how they treat the consequences of cannabis disorder in hospitals every day; and how schools are struggling to stop students from smuggling marijuana onto campus using vape pens,” Banks wrote. Efforts to loosen Indiana’s marijuana laws have repeatedly stalled in the state legislature, according to 21 Alive News. At the federal level, officials from the Trump administration have framed recent changes as an opportunity to expand research and better understand the drug’s effects. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said last week that the “rescheduling action allows for research on the safety and efficacy of this substance, ultimately providing patients with better care and doctors with more reliable information.” “The Department of Justice is delivering on President Trump’s promise to expand Americans’ access to medical treatment options,” he added. The Daily Wire reached out to Gov. Braun’s office for comment on the letter.

A federal grand jury has indicted two of the suspects involved in the assault on a Turning Point USA reporter at an anti-ICE protest earlier this month.  The incident revolved around Savanah Hernandez, a TPUSA reporter who was allegedly attacked by the Ostroushko family while filming the protest in Minneapolis outside of a local ICE field office, as The Daily Wire previously reported. Federal sources told Fox News the individuals were indicted Tuesday, but their names have not yet been released. The indictments are expected to be unsealed Wednesday. Three individuals were arrested at the time, including Chris Ostroushko, his daughter Paige, and Paige’s boyfriend, Lorenzo Garcia, 20, the Hennepin County Sheriff’s Office told the Daily Caller.  Hernandez caught several of the attacks on video, where she could clearly be seen being harassed and shoved by the protesters. In one of the videos, Chris could be seen pushing Hernandez to the ground. I’m waking up with a headache and stiff neck this morning due to how violently anti-ICE activist, Chris Ostroushko, shoved me down yesterday. A second angle shows that he had to be held back by 5 men as he continued to charge at me. I didn’t speak a word to him all day yet he… pic.twitter.com/LjDx1GMLnF — Savanah Hernandez (@Savsays) April 12, 2026 Another video shows the Ostroushko family discussing the attack beforehand, in which Chris can be heard telling his daughter to “Blow the whistle right in her f*cking ear.” “I’m scared to report, Laura,” Hernandez told Fox News’ Laura Ingraham at the time. “This is my job. It’s what I’ve been doing for the last six years.” “I can’t even interview people properly on the street because I get brutally assaulted and pushed to the ground by a 250-pound man for simply going and reporting on anti-ICE activities,” she added. Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Harmeet Dhillon confirmed days after the incident that the Department of Justice and FBI would investigate. Just two weeks later, the indictments followed. Hernandez praised the indictments in an X post: “Cannot express how grateful I am at how swiftly the DOJ and FBI handled this. They’ve been doing an incredible job for the American people lately and I could not be more appreciative.”

Matt Walsh and Michael Knowles spoke Tuesday night at the University of Idaho as part of Turning Point USA’s college tour. The Daily Wire hosts railed against rising political violence from the Left, including the gunman who attempted to assassinate President Trump last Saturday at the White House Correspondents’ dinner. “The worst thing about left-wing radicals is, yeah, they’re violent, they’re evil, they’re soulless, and they’re such corny dorks too,” Walsh said. “That’s the one thing you take from this guy, the latest attempted assassin. You look at his manifesto, and it’s, yeah, it’s all the mainstream Democrat talking points, but it’s just so, so lame.” Asked to weigh in on the news that former FBI Director James Comey had been indicted a second time for making threats against President Donald Trump, Knowles said the move was “a very good start.” “I want Hassan Piker arrested. I want all of the elected officials, the Democrats, the media figures who have called for violence against conservatives. I want them to be prosecuted. I want them to know that will not stand in America,” Knowles told the packed auditorium. “We’ve got a great start with this administration, and we need a lot more of it.” The event, hosted by the University of Idaho’s TPUSA Chapter, is one of five college campuses that Turning Point USA visited in April to honor the legacy of its founder, Charlie Kirk, who was assassinated at Utah Valley University last September. Throughout the night, members of the audience stepped up to question Walsh and Knowles. One, a transgender-identifying activist, accused Walsh of misrepresenting a graph that shows what percentage of mass shooters are transgender. “Well, first of all, I think, as someone who believes that women have penises, you’re not one to lecture people for lying,” Walsh said. “Now I think the real fundamental issue here is that transgenderism itself is a lie. It’s a falsehood.” The debate then turned to gender ideology and children. Walsh laid out what behavior he believes constitutes child grooming. “When I have used the word groomer to refer to leftists, I have done it in specific cases where they are having drag queens perform for children, or where children themselves are dressing up like drag queens and performing for adults, or where children are being chemically castrated and sexually mutilated,” Walsh said. The activist pushed back. “I mean, quite literally, I’ve watched drag shows at like, old folks homes and stuff like that,” the student said.  “Now you’re grooming granny, too?” Walsh joked. “Why? Why have drag queens around kids at all? Why do that?” The discussion moved to the looming November midterms. Walsh conceded some foreign policy divisions within the Republican Party, but encouraged students to use their voice to oppose any policy disagreements, regardless of who’s in the White House. “You should speak up, because we’re Americans, and that’s what we do. I’ve criticized the Trump administration where I think they deserve it, but this defeatism, this doomerism you get from some on the right, where they say, ‘Well, you know, we shouldn’t even have voted for Trump. What was the point?’ It’s like, well, okay, so we have President Kamala Harris. Do we need to explain why that would be worse than what we currently have?” He also hailed the Trump administration for what he described as “America First” victories. “We did shut down the border, and for years and years and years, that was the banner that we marched under as conservatives shut down the border, shut down the border, shut down the border. And it’s like, we do it, and then we immediately move on. That doesn’t really matter. Let’s find something else to complain about, Walsh said. “Because conservatives can never be happy,” Knowles interjected. “It’s like, one of the most charming things about us.”

Democrats on Capitol Hill seethed Wednesday after the Supreme Court ruled that Louisiana violated the Constitution by drawing a majority-black congressional district predominantly on the basis of race. The court’s 6-3 decision is expected to reverberate across the country as Republicans and Democrats battle over redistricting ahead of the 2026 midterms. Writing for the majority, conservative Justice Samuel Alito said the Voting Rights Act does not allow states to draw race-based districts for the sole purpose of making minorities the majority voting bloc. The ruling is likely to benefit Republicans, potentially opening the door for GOP-led states to redraw maps that had been crafted to create minority-majority seats. Democrats, who have often relied on minority-majority districts, especially in deep red states, sounded off shortly after the ruling was handed down, with party leaders claiming it would weaken protections for black voters. “The Supreme Court just turned its back on one of the most sacred promises in American democracy — the promise that every voice counts,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) said. “The consequence is as clear as it is dangerous: fewer protections for voters, more power for politicians to draw maps that silence them, particularly voters historically disenfranchised.” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) went further, accusing Republicans of trying to tilt the political playing field. “Voter suppression is a way of life for Donald Trump and far-right extremists on the Supreme Court,” Jeffries said. “Republicans know they cannot win a free and fair election in November and so they are desperate to rig it. We will never let them succeed.” New York Democratic Rep. Yvette Clarke, chair of the Congressional Black Caucus, called the Supreme Court “rogue” and argued its decision “effectively signed the death certificate of the Voting Rights Act, undoing decades of Black progress.” “The legitimacy of the Supreme Court has been deeply undermined by this decision,” Clarke added. “At its best, the Court has worked to expand our fundamental rights, but this ruling reflects a malignant impulse to reshape American society.” Former President Barack Obama also condemned the court over the decision, saying it “serves as just one more example of how a majority of the current Court seems intent on abandoning its vital role in ensuring equal participation in our democracy and protecting the rights of minority groups against majority overreach.” In his opinion, Alito wrote that Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act is meant to prevent states from “intentionally [drawing] its districts to afford minority voters less opportunity because of their race.” While the ruling does not overturn Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, liberal Justice Elena Kagan wrote in her dissent that it is now a “dead letter.” The decision could lead to multiple states revisiting congressional maps that were designed to create majority-black or Hispanic districts. Some Republicans have already urged GOP-led states in the deep South to redraw those lines. The court’s ruling comes as Republicans and Democrats are already in the middle of a redistricting fight ahead of the 2026 midterms. Republican-dominated states like South Carolina and Tennessee — both of which contain minority-majority districts — could draw new maps before the midterm elections following the ruling.

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. *** When Buckingham Palace announced that King Charles and Queen Camilla would visit the United States to mark the 250th anniversary of American independence, I knew I had to call Mark Helprin. The bestselling author’s fifth novel, 2005’s “Freddy and Fredericka,” is a thinly veiled sendup of Charles and Princess Diana — who, in this case, must travel to America and recapture “the colonies” in order to be blessed by an immortal, magical falcon who selects the true kings of England. If you’ve never read one of Helprin’s novels, that summary is a pretty good glimpse into the experience: discursive and funny with a healthy shake of magical realism. “Freddy and Fredericka” is a darkly comic romp across the United States that finds our heroes falling in love with the country they were sent to recapture, urging Americans to “let everything in the nation flow through you” and to return to “your original principles … immaterial and bright, ever enduring.” It’s been more than a decade since I first read “Freddy and Fredericka,” and I’ve returned again and again to this book, essentially “Democracy In America” in novel form. So I was excited to ask Helprin how much Tocqueville was on his mind while he wrote the novel. “He wasn’t,” Helprin said, for one simple reason: He had never read Tocqueville. He was, however, in the process of reading “Democracy in America” in French, along with “The Wealth of Nations,” another classic he’s never gotten to. Shakespeare and Dante are in heavy rotation, however, as is fiction until the Lost Generation. Nothing after Fitzgerald and Hemingway holds much interest for Helprin, which, he stresses, has everything to do with his personal taste and nothing to do with snobbery. There’s nothing about Helprin’s oeuvre or demeanor that would suggest he is anything other than well-read. But if yielding at Dos Passos for some reason stirs up doubts about Helprin’s literacy, the thousands of volumes that line the shelves of Helprin’s Charlottesville home should put them to rest. I once heard that Helprin has every paper he’s ever written, going back to his undergraduate career at Harvard, if not high school. I didn’t ask him about this because I didn’t want it to not be true. After our conversation, I’m certain it is. Helprin is everything you want him to be. Smartly dressed in a light check blazer, occasionally self-effacing and always captivating, he’s like a character from one of his novels — the latest of which, “Elegy In Blue,” hits shelves this week. All told, he’s written nine novels, three collections of short stories, and three children’s books illustrated by “Jumanji” author Chris Van Allsburg. In addition, Helprin maintains a steady stream of political commentary, weighing in on everything from copyright law to foreign policy from his regular spot in the Claremont Review of Books to the Wall Street Journal and beyond. Helprin’s fans, myself included, say he’s one of the greatest living American novelists. Helprin almost certainly wouldn’t say that about himself, which is likely why, despite a half-century in the public eye, he manages to fly somewhat under the radar. Helprin’s relative anonymity is especially ironic considering his downright cinematic backstory. His mother was an actress in the Golden Age of Hollywood who left the Silver Screen to join the Group Theatre, a famous Method acting collective. His father, an American commando who worked for Winston Churchill during the Second World War, later became the head of London Films. It was there, in an office in Mayfair, that the first seeds for “Freddy and Fredericka” were planted by the king and queen themselves. “Part of his job was, when the Queen and Prince Philip wanted to see a film, they would come in one Rolls Royce, no security or anything like that,” Helprin recalls. “He would greet them on the sidewalk and then escort them upstairs and into the screening room, where there was a buffet laid out with caviar and shrimp and everything, champagne, whatever.” “And they would sit down, and then he would introduce the film, tell them about how it was made, what the subject was, whatever screen the film,” he continues. “And then afterwards, he would take questions from them, if they had any, and then escort them down to the street and see them off and say, thank you very much for coming.” “They never thanked him, ever,” Helprin notes. Helprin never forgot that. Not as he did his graduate work, which kept him at Harvard before taking him to Oxford; not during his time in the Israel Defense Forces, a tour of duty he embarked on after he was asked — and declined — to move to Cairo and serve as the Middle East editor for the New York Times. Somewhere toward the end of his itinerant youth, he began a career as a writer. His first novel, “Refiner’s Fire,” was published in 1977. He achieved mainstream success with 1983’s “Winter’s Tale” and 1991’s “A Soldier Of The Great War.”   Photo by Mario Ruiz/Getty Images It was during a three-month book tour for the latter novel that the seeds planted by his family’s royal connection finally began to sprout. It was the ’90s, and Charles and Di were all over the news. Seeing a man and a woman washing dishes at a restaurant kitchen one night, one of his daughters asked if the scullions were the duke and duchess. Helprin saw an opportunity for “misapprehension,” which he calls “the funniest part of all humor.” “If you think about the royals in Britain, they have so much opportunity for that because they live in a completely different world,” Helprin says. “But there’s even greater opportunity if they’re here amongst the colonials incognito.” “Freddy and Fredericka” was a success in the United States. It was not published in Britain, where audiences were less receptive to Helprin’s take on the monarchy. Helprin has no regrets. “I mocked the royals because they’re mockable,” he says. “They’re insanely mockable. They’re freaks, right? And they live in a freakish world.” But Helprin appreciates that by separating their head of state and the head of government, the British monarchy “allows a really stable, decent government.” That attitude didn’t fly with “the loony Left” across the pond. At least one person in Great Britain received a copy, however. “Just by chance, I was invited to dinner that Prince Charles was supposed to attend in Washington, D.C.,” Helprin recalls. “And I said, ‘Well, you know what I better do? I better send Freddy and Fredericka to the palace,’ because, you know, to give them advance warning you don’t want to sandbag people.” “So I sent it to the palace,” he explains, “and then without any word whatsoever, I was just disinvited to the dinner.” Had he met Charles, Helprin says, he would have “approached him as an American.” “We don’t believe that people are born with privilege, that, in other words, that privilege is legitimate, that they’re entitled to it, and we see them eye to eye,” Helprin adds. “That’s what America is about, and that there’s a very, very powerful force behind that, our history, our power, our ethos and the founding, which was, I think, divinely inspired.” “If I’m sitting across from the King of England,” Helprin says, “I don’t feel lesser in any way.” It’s a line that could have been spoken by most of Helprin’s protagonists. The typical Helprin hero is a kind of Aristotelian great-souled man with a Brooklyn accent. Most of Helprin’s novels take place in and around New York City, where Helprin was born and lived the first five years of his life, and a city that still captivates him and feels like home, despite the oppressive scale of “way too tall” buildings and the scourge of bike messengers zipping around with food, “because everybody has to have instant gratification.” Of all Helprin’s New York novels, “Winter’s Tale” stands alone. Set simultaneously at the turns of the 20th and 21st centuries, the novel has at least 100 characters, a lengthy subplot about rival 19th-century newspaper barons, a magical realist upstate New York town with its own magic language, and a flying white horse. That barely scratches the surface of what “Winter’s Tale” is about, and I’m not sure I could accurately describe it if I tried. The book has stuck with me, almost haunted me, for years. Whenever I’ve read another of Helprin’s books, I hope to find within it the key to understanding it. I never have. Helprin, it seems, is in the same boat. “I can’t explain it, but it possessed me day and night,” he says. “I would spend days in the New York Historical Society … and I’d walk the streets, looking at things and getting very, very obsessed and emotional about it.” “So in a sense, I’m not the one to explain it, because it seizes me as much as other people who report that it did the same to them,” Helprin adds. “I felt as if I was just a medium of something that was speaking through me.” To the extent that the book is about one thing, Helprin says, it’s about justice. Divine justice. “People say God works in mysterious ways. Well, they’re not necessarily mysterious,” he says — they just come “from the past.” “Who said that everything has to be made right in the timeline that we can perceive? Maybe it’s different, maybe from the divine perspective, the timeline is infinitely long, and the balances are affected and affect justice over a long period of time, so that after an injustice, maybe 20 years later, there’s some sort of a compromise,” Helprin adds. “If you look at the whole of humanity and the whole of the universe as being one construct, if you think that from the divine perspective, that’s what it is, because you see from very far away, and it’s as one thing actually, without time.”   Photo by John Mahler/Toronto Star via Getty Images We mortals, of course, cannot see as God sees. But this is what Helprin aims to do in his novels. More than that, it’s how he sees the world, day in and day out. “If you ask my wife, she would tell you, it’s very difficult to be married to me,” he says. “Very, very difficult.” To stay grounded while thinking these lofty thoughts, Helprin works. He has been an agricultural worker, a surveyor, a dishwasher, and a stevedore. “I spend so much time working, doing hard, physical, exhausting labor, that while I’m doing that often I think of things and think of what I’m going to do about the book, and when I get the chance to actually write the book, I’m so grateful for it because it’s different from, you know, spending hours on a tractor in the hot sun or getting rid of trees that fall,” he says. “So you come in from the heat and the dust and the dirt and the blood — if you work on a farm, you’re gonna have a lot of blood, and you’ll be lucky if you keep your fingers when you come in — then you have a refuge. And it’s a great privilege.” “It’s almost like — to return to where we started — almost like being a royal,” he adds. Helprin is on the cusp of turning 80, and while he says nothing to suggest that he wants to give up the punishing labor that’s driven so much of his life (and allowed him never to take a publisher’s advance), mortality is at least a little on his mind. “Elegy In Blue,” he notes, “is probably not going to be my last book, as I’m working on another one. But, who knows, I may not be able to finish the other one. I might die before I do.” Like his novels, Helprin feels neither outdated nor contemporary. He is a man out of time, a bridge between this century and the last who would likely feel equally at home in both. He speaks as he writes, and he lives like the characters he creates, a true American original. But, unsurprisingly, the anti-monarchist with Tory sensibilities does miss the world he grew up in. “I have to say, I do miss it, I really do,” he says. “When you’re going to be 80, then you’ll probably miss it, too. You know, that’s the way it is. And it’s okay.”