A longtime Democrat senator’s bid to become governor of Colorado ended on Tuesday in another embarrassing defeat for the Democratic establishment.  Colorado Attorney General Philip Weiser upset Senator Michael Bennet to earn the Democratic nomination to replace outgoing Governor Jared Polis. With about 90% of the vote in by Wednesday morning, Weiser had 56% to Bennet’s 44%. “We did it! Thank you to all who believed in this movement, donated, knocked on doors, hosted events, & voted! Tonight it’s clear the future of CO doesn’t belong to out-of-state billionaires or corporations; it belongs to us. I promise to be a Governor for all of us,” Weiser’s campaign posted on X. “Thank you!” Bennet, who has been in the Senate since 2009, had the backing of Colorado Senator John Hickenlooper and three of the state’s congressional representatives. He also had a significant financial edge over Weiser.  Both candidates made attacking President Donald Trump a focal point of their campaigns. In his concession speech, Bennet continued to attack Trump.  “Donald Trump has made matters so much worse. He is trying to convince Americans to hate each other just to serve his own selfish purposes,” he said. “Donald Trump, as I’ve said during the course of the campaign, is the worst president in American history.” Weiser, who sued the Trump administration over 60 times during his time as state attorney general, says on his campaign page that he will “defend reproductive rights,” ensure “access to gender-affirming care,” and combat climate change.  The Democrat is expected to win in November as Colorado has not elected a Republican governor in decades. Former Vice President Kamala Harris also defeated Trump in the state by over 10 points in 2024.  Colorado’s primaries also featured an upset with far-Left Democratic socialist Melat Kiros defeating longtime incumbent Rep. Diana DeGette (D-CO) for the nomination in Colorado’s 1st congressional district. Kiros ran on a platform of abolishing ICE, jacking up corporate tax rates, and transitioning away from traditional policing.  Hickenlooper, Bennet’s fellow Democrat senator, also performed poorly, but managed to fend off a leftist challenger by just 10 points. The Colorado results come just one week after a number of Democratic socialists won in New York despite opposition from more traditional Democrats, causing panic in the party.

Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson is under fire for choosing to stay quiet on politics, with multiple celebrities publicly disparaging him for his choices. “Star Trek” star George Takei commented on The Rock’s stance in a Threads post, writing, “Silence is complicity.”  “So disappointing to find out he is such a coward,” Wil Wheaton chimed in, but appears to have deleted the post afterward. It all started in 2024 when the actor told Fox News that he regrets endorsing Joe Biden in 2020.  “Am I happy with the state of America right now? Well, that answer is no,” Johnson said at the time, The Daily Wire previously reported. “Do I believe we’re going to get better? I believe in that. I’m an optimistic guy.” “The endorsement that I made years ago with Biden was one that I thought was the best decision for me at that time,” he added. “And I thought back then … ‘Hey, I’m in this position where I have some influence,’ … and I felt like that then that it’s my job to exercise my influence and share with [people] this is who I’m going to endorse. Am I going to do that again this year? That answer is no.” Johnson is currently promoting the upcoming live-action remake of “Moana” and mentioned in an interview with Esquire that he doesn’t regret that decision.  “What I have learned through experience is that I need to keep — need, not want — the main thing. And the main thing for me, the thing that in the morning I swing my legs out of bed and I run towards, is creating. It’s art. It’s storytelling. I’ve learned I’m going to keep my politics to myself.” He added, “There are moments when, hey, there’s nothing we can’t talk about. If I’m wrong, I’ll tell you I’m wrong. Or if I feel like I got a leg up and this is the right way to go, I’ll share it with you. Politics is omnipresent and it’s forever. I don’t like it. I hate it at times. I hate the slinging. I hate all the bullsh*t that comes with it.” The Rock previously said he considers himself a centrist and had not made any public endorsements prior to endorsing Biden in 2020.

Daily Wire White House Correspondent Mary Margaret Olohan on Wednesday pressed Vice President JD Vance to weigh in on the Supreme Court’s ruling upholding birthright citizenship and whether he’s upset with conservative Justice Amy Coney Barrett. In a landmark ruling authored by Chief Justice John Roberts, the Supreme Court held that children born in the United States to parents unlawfully or temporarily present are “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States and are citizens at birth under the Fourteenth Amendment’s Citizenship Clause. Coney Barrett, a Trump appointee, joined Roberts in the decision, which dealt a blow to the Trump administration’s immigration agenda and drew strong backlash from conservatives. “Some conservatives are angry with Justice Amy Coney Barrett. Are you one of them?” Olohan asked Vance after he delivered remarks to troops in Virginia Beach.  “Well, look, do I think she made a mistake in the ruling? I do. I don’t know how anybody can say that if a person who is an illegal alien, or a person, for example, who’s pregnant and comes to the United States on a vacation, they have a baby, and all of a sudden their entire family gets the benefits of American citizenship,” Vance said.  “I don’t think that’s what the framers of the 14th Amendment had in mind. I don’t think it’s the right case, but look, it was 5-4. Sometimes the Supreme Court makes mistakes, we’re going to try to correct that mistake, but nobody’s perfect, including the Supreme Court,” Vance added.  The Daily Wire also asked the Vice President about speculation — and a bogus NPR report — claiming Justice Samuel Alito will soon retire from the bench. “I don’t know, you know, Justice Alito is such an amazing guy, and I think the Supreme Court, he would be irreplaceable, but of course, if he retired, that’s up to him, and we would try to do the best job we could at finding a proper replacement,” Vance told The Daily Wire.  Vance also responded to The Daily Wire’s question about why Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez hopes that the vice president leads the 2028 Republican ticket. “I don’t think much about 2028, as you know,” Vance said to Olohan. “My attitude is, let’s do a good job now, let’s continue to try to make some wins for the American people. We can worry about the future when the future comes, but we got an important midterm election here. We got to keep the people in Congress who’ve been fighting for our troops and our veterans.” “That’s what I’m focused on,” he said. Credit: CSPAN

Rep. Mike Lawler (R-NY) didn’t mince words after a screaming match on Capitol Hill Tuesday — branding Democratic Reps. Jamie Raskin and Pramila Jayapal “f*cking a**holes” in the hallway outside a House Judiciary hearing on sanctuary cities, and doubling down that the pair deserved every syllable of it. The New York Republican’s fury erupted after Jayapal and Raskin used their opening statements to gripe about sitting through a “fourth” hearing on sanctuary policies — moments before grieving mother Jessica Gorman was set to testify about her daughter Sheridan, murdered in Chicago by an illegal immigrant. “We’re sorry for your loss, but …” is how Lawler summed up the Democrats’ posture in an interview with TMZ afterward. “There’s no ‘but.’ Sanctuary policies are the reason their daughter is dead.” The shouting match itself was pure cable-news chaos. When Lawler pressed his colleagues on whether they felt the same outrage over Sheridan Gorman and Laken Riley that they’ve expressed for other victims, Raskin snapped back that he did feel the outrage — only for Lawler to fire back that he didn’t, “because if you did, you would not support sanctuary jurisdiction.” Raskin’s response? “You don’t belong in this committee. You should get the hell out of here.” Lawler wasn’t backing down. “You’re a disgrace,” he shot back, prompting Raskin to lecture him that he didn’t “understand the rules of the committee” or “the Constitution.” Lawler said afterward, “Jamie Raskin and Pramila Jayapal are f*cking a**holes. Their conduct in that hearing was disgraceful. I’m introducing my constituents. They lost their daughter. I’m telling their story. And the tragedy that they’ve had to endure because my colleagues refuse, refuse to cooperate when it comes to enforcing our immigration laws, holding criminals accountable.” He pointed out the Democrats’ irritation at rehashing sanctuary-city policy said everything about their priorities. He noted Jayapal had opened by complaining this was the committee’s fourth hearing on the subject — a gripe Lawler said rang hollow given the body count. “These folks shut down the Department of Homeland Security for 118 days,” Lawler told TMZ, blasting his colleagues for refusing “to fund ICE, refused to fund Customs and Border Patrol” during that stretch. “They refused to enforce federal law.” He saved particular scorn for New York Gov. Kathy Hochul: You have the governor of New York — a complete a**hole, who decides that she’s going to ban the ability of state and local police from cooperating with federal law enforcement on the issue of immigration   enforcement and specifically honoring detainer requests and specifically turning over people who are in New York’s jails for committing crimes under state law; refusing to cooperate and turn them over to federal immigration officials. So I don’t want to hear anything from any of them.  They are so full of s***, it’s not even funny. And you guys may well think this is like a joke. I have a constituent who is dead because of these policies and because they refuse to listen. They had the gall to come in there. They showed up late to begin with, but then they had the gall to dismiss why these Angel families are here? Lawler also turned the tables on Democrats over the recent deaths of Alex Pretti and Renee Good in Minnesota — invoking the case to argue his colleagues’ selective outrage was the real scandal. “You had two people that should be alive,” Lawler said, arguing local police were “prohibited from engaging in crowd control and traffic control by the feckless politicians that refused to enforce the law.” His point: the same hands-off approach Democrats defend in immigration enforcement created chaos on the ground in Minnesota too. “When you refuse to address the fundamental flaws in policy that result in the deaths of innocent Americans, then yes, there is a fundamental problem,” Lawler said. “And that’s what they deserve.”

For years, saying that men and women, and that boys and girls are different, has been viewed as an act of aggression in many of America’s most elite sectors. Yesterday, the Supreme Court treated it as what it is: the truth. In upholding West Virginia’s and Idaho’s laws barring males from female sports, the Court held that a state “may maintain women’s and girls’ sports for biological females.” The reasoning was almost startling in its obviousness — and a fact of nature and commonsense that would have been unquestioned even two decades ago. Given the inherent physical differences between the sexes, separate teams reduce injury and secure fair competition. This is not bigotry. It is biology, and it is, at its heart, justice. Justice Thomas, concurring, went to the root of the issue that the majority only gestured toward, and he did so contra the prevailing legal methods so fashionable today. The official positivist story is that judges exclude moral considerations from their rulings. The reality is that all judges operate from moral premises — inevitably so, often quietly, and in the background — and getting the morality right is no small matter. And Justice Thomas got it right. Sex, he wrote, is immutable and binary; men and boys with gender dysphoria are not women and girls, however sincerely they believe otherwise. That is as clear a declaration of human ontology and teleology as you will ever see in a Supreme Court ruling. That is the deeper victory here — a victory tethered to natural law. The Court did not merely side with the girls who watched a male claim their state shot put title. It sided, however modestly, with reality itself. When reason, nature, the common good, and the law converge, truth wins. That is moral sanity, and it has been in short supply. But a ruling that vindicates the meaning and reality of sex is also a fitting occasion to warn my own side against abusing it. For even as conservatives rightly celebrate the Court’s recognition that sex is real and weighty, a faction on the right has spent recent months committing the mirror-image error — treating sex as though it settles questions it has no business settling. The target has been Justice Amy Coney Barrett, and yesterday’s ruling on birthright citizenship is putting her gender in the crosshairs once again. Disagree with her jurisprudence on immigration and birthright citizenship all you want; that’s your prerogative. But discrediting her reasoning by appeal to her sex, or to her status as an adoptive mother — as some now do — is a category error. It is also textbook Bulverism, C.S. Lewis’s name for the trick of explaining why someone is wrong without first bothering to show that she is wrong: “you only think that because you’re a woman.” A legal argument is sound or unsound on its own terms. The sex of the one making it has no bearing on whether it tracks with the truth. The intellect’s apprehension of reality is not indexed by sex; the human mind, male or female, is equally capable of grasping what is. Truth answers to human nature’s fittedness to reality as such — not to truth qua sex. That sex carries real teleological weight for vocation and embodiment is entirely true, and entirely beside the point here. The adoptive-mother line some use to discredit her is even worse, because it isn’t even about her reasoning. It infers bias from biography. A judge’s conclusions stand or fall on her construction of the law — for good or for ill — not on the shape of her family. Attack the argument, or concede you haven’t got one. I’m no expert on the Constitution and immigration, and Justice Barrett may well be wrong. If she is, make the case from text and history — not from sex. And here is the irony the moment lays bare. The progressive who insists a male can be a female denies that sex means anything fixed at all. The populist who insists Barrett rules as she does because she is a woman insists that sex means everything — that it skews the very operations of the intellect. Both are failures of the same faulty anthropology. Both refuse to see the human person as he and she actually are: embodied, sexed, and therefore genuinely different in vocation and form; yet equally rational, equally answerable to reality, equally made in the image of the God who is Truth. To suggest otherwise is to deny the ontological and epistemological equality of men and women as image-bearers of God. The Court got the first half right today. Sex is real. It is given. It is not ours to redefine. The task now falling to conservatives is to hold the second half with the same conviction: that honoring the difference between men and women never requires pretending a woman cannot think or that her status as an adoptive mother necessarily colors her rulings. A movement that learns to say sex is real will have won an argument. A movement that also learns when sex is beside the point will have learned wisdom. *** Andrew T. Walker is associate professor of Christian Ethics and Public Theology at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and managing editor of WORLD Opinions. He is a fellow at The Ethics and Public Policy Center.