Sarah Trone Garriott has a Harvard Divinity degree, a Lutheran ordination, and a history of calling Christianity a threat. Now she wants to be your Congresswoman. Garriott, who is currently serving in the Iowa State Senate and running to flip Iowa’s Third Congressional District blue, made remarks in 2023 that should follow her to every campaign stop, debate stage, and Iowa church pew between now and November. Speaking about religious conservatives, she described them as “uncomfortable” — as something that “feels very threatening” — and linked Christianity itself to “political violence.” Not radical Islam. Not jihadist ideology. Christianity. She said this as an ordained minister of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. Three years later, with Holy Week upon us and a string of Islamic terror attacks fresh in the national memory, Garriott’s remarks deserve to be exhumed, examined, and explained. Not because they were gaffes — they weren’t. They deserve attention because they are a window into exactly what the modern religious Left believes: that the greatest threat to civil society is not the ideology responsible for over 60,800 terror attacks in the last half-century, but the people filling church pews on Palm Sunday. During Holy Week, as Christian communities are still burying their dead from coordinated massacres in Nigeria, this inversion of morality is morally obscene. Christianity is the most persecuted religion in the world, so it was unfortunately not a complete shock that on Palm Sunday, while progressive politicians were busy casting aspersions on churchgoing Christians, coordinated attacks devastated Christian communities across central and northern Nigeria in what survivors are calling the Palm Sunday Massacres. Entire congregations were targeted. Families were slaughtered on one of the holiest days of the liturgical calendar. Christianity is not causing violence, Reverend Garriott; it is absorbing it.  This is not an anomaly. It is an escalating pattern that cowardly politicians refuse to name. In March of 2026 alone, there were four confirmed Islamist terror attacks on Western soil, with at least four additional major plots thwarted before they reached fruition. As we approach the 25th anniversary of the September 11 terror attacks, the trend driving mass-casualty violence is not Christian nationalism — it’s the jihadist radicalism that’s been methodically seeping into this country for decades: Over 60,800 Islamic terror attacks were carried out globally in the last fifty years. The comparable figure for attacks attributed to Christian or Jewish extremism amounts to a few hundred. These are not remotely equivalent threats, and any elected official who pretends otherwise is either ignorant or dishonest.  So what, precisely, does threaten these power-hungry clerics? It is not the Sermon on the Mount. It is not the notion that He is the way, the truth, and the life (John 14:6). What threatens them is the downstream consequence of a populace that actually lives by those words. Christians grounded in Scripture are harder to manipulate, less dependent on the government as their provider, and far less likely to hand power to pseudo-believers whose lives represent the antithesis of everything Christ commands. This dynamic was on full display just this week when Daily Wire host Isabel Brown was publicly castigated for the radical act of suggesting marriage and children are worth pursuing — a principle so foundational it runs from Genesis through the Pauline epistles. Garriott herself has voted against protecting women’s sports from biological males and against banning gender-transition procedures for minors. That is the true threat they fear — not violence, not extremism, but a people too grounded in faith to go along with these cultural lies. Certainly, there are wolves in the pulpit. There are leaders who have abandoned orthodoxy, twisted Scripture for popularity and applause, and led congregations into confusion rather than conviction. That apostasy is real and genuinely threatening to the Church and her faithful. But the solution to bad theology is not to hand political power to the theologians perpetrating it. In a world where America is still called the “Great Satan” by those who mean it literally, and where our cultural foundations are being eroded daily, authentic Christians are not the problem. They are the last best hope of restoring the Christian values upon which this republic was built. Sarah Trone Garriott is a wolf in pearls — ordained, Harvard-educated, interfaith-credentialed, and deeply hostile to the faith she claims to represent. A minister who thinks Christianity is an imminent threat is not a pastor; she is a politician in a collar. Don’t let her do to Iowa’s Third District what Judas did in the garden — betray it with a kiss, wearing the vestments of a friend.

NASA is preparing to launch the Artemis II mission on Wednesday evening, marking the first crewed flight to travel around the Moon in more than 50 years.  The mission is set to lift off from the Kennedy Space Center at 6:24 p.m. ET. Four astronauts aboard the Orion spacecraft will embark on a 10-day journey around the Moon and back, traveling as far as 252,000 miles from Earth, farther than any humans have gone since the Apollo 13 mission in 1970.   “Artemis II waits on the pad, ready to carry astronauts potentially farther than any humans have traveled in more than half a century. The next era of exploration begins,” NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said ahead of the mission.  Tomorrow, we launch. At sunset tonight, Artemis II waits on the pad, ready to carry astronauts potentially farther than any humans have traveled in more than half a century. The next era of exploration begins. pic.twitter.com/vdABkjRrnf — NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman (@NASAAdmin) April 1, 2026 The crew is led by Commander Reid Wiseman, a former Navy test pilot, joined by pilot Victor Glover, mission specialist Christina Koch, and Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen.  “Nothing but gratitude for the men and women of this great nation. It is time to fly,” Wiseman said in a social media post.    Nothing but gratitude for the men and women of this great nation. It is time to fly. pic.twitter.com/n1TGuNt7s9 — Reid Wiseman (@astro_reid) March 31, 2026 In the final hours before blast off, the launch crew began standard preparations, including cooling the rocket’s plumbing and engine systems and loading propellants into the Space Launch System, which will carry Orion into space.  The countdown, which began Monday, entered a scheduled hold on Wednesday morning for final system checks.  “Engineers perform final configuration checks, review system health, and ensure all launch criteria are met. It’s also a window for resolving any minor issues without impacting the overall timeline,” NASA said in an update. “These holds are standard in complex missions like Artemis II, providing flexibility and confidence as we prepare to send astronauts on a journey around the Moon.” NASA’s Artemis program aims to return astronauts to the Moon and establish a long-term human presence. A follow-up mission, scheduled for 2027, will test lunar landing systems developed by SpaceX and Blue Origin, with a goal of landing astronauts as early as 2028.

In a textbook example of judicial activism, a federal judge in Boston has blocked the Trump administration’s attempt to restore order to the U.S. immigration system. On Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Allison Burroughs — an appointee of Barack Obama — issued a ruling that prevents the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) from terminating the legal status of hundreds of thousands of migrants who entered the country under a controversial Biden-era program. The ruling is a significant blow to the Trump administration’s efforts to dismantle the “CBP One” app system. Launched in 2023 under then-Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, the app allowed nearly one million noncitizens from countries like Venezuela, Cuba, and Haiti to schedule appointments at ports of entry and receive “humanitarian parole.” This status allowed them to live and work in the U.S. indefinitely while awaiting asylum hearings that are often scheduled years into the future. In April 2025, fulfilling a core campaign promise to secure the border and initiate mass deportations, the Trump administration notified approximately 900,000 CBP One users via email that their parole had been terminated. “Please depart the United States immediately,” the notice read. Burroughs sided with a class-action lawsuit led by the Venezuelan Association of Massachusetts and represented by the liberal legal group Democracy Forward. She ruled that the blanket revocation was “not in accordance with law,” arguing that DHS failed to provide individualized records proving that the “purposes of parole” had been served for each migrant before revoking their status. The Department of Homeland Security responded with a blistering statement, accusing Burroughs of overstepping her bounds. “We disagree with this blatant judicial activism undermining the president’s Article II authority to determine who remains in this country,” a DHS spokesperson said. “The Biden administration abused the parole authority … to allow millions of illegal aliens into the U.S., which further fueled the worst border crisis in U.S. history.” The spokesperson emphasized that the administration remains committed to its self-deportation initiatives, including the “CBP Home App,” which offers migrants $2,600 and a flight home to avoid arrest. For those following Judge Burroughs’ career, Tuesday’s ruling came as little surprise. She has a long history of high-profile clashes with the Trump administration’s agenda. In 2017, she was among the first judges to block Trump’s initial travel ban. Most notably, in 2019, she ruled in favor of Harvard University’s race-conscious admissions program — a decision that was later famously overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court, which found the university’s use of race to be unconstitutional. More recently, in 2025, she struck down the administration’s attempt to freeze federal funding for the Ivy League institution. With nearly a million parolees now allowed to remain in the country due to a single district court order, the administration is expected to appeal the decision to the First Circuit immediately.

The Supreme Court on Wednesday morning will hear arguments on President Donald Trump’s executive order limiting birthright citizenship. Trump will attend the hearing, making him the first president in history to sit in on a Supreme Court hearing. Beginning at 10:00 a.m. ET, the nine Supreme Court justices will hear arguments from Solicitor General John Sauer, who is defending Trump’s order, which would end the automatic grant of citizenship for anyone born on American soil, including the children of illegal immigrants. Among the groups challenging Trump’s order is the American Civil Liberties Union, whose legal director Cecillia Wang is arguing the case before the Supreme Court. The case centers on the Trump administration’s interpretation of the 14th Amendment, and the president’s attempt to clarify who qualifies as a person born in the United States and is “subject to the jurisdiction thereof.” The White House argues that the 14th Amendment “has always excluded from birthright citizenship persons who were born in the United States but not ‘subject to the jurisdiction thereof.'” Based on this understanding, Trump’s executive order states that a baby born to parents who were not American citizens or lawful permanent residents at the time of the birth should not automatically be granted citizenship. Trump’s order also states that a baby born to parents who were in the United States lawfully but only on a temporary tourist or student visa should not be granted citizenship. Trump’s birthright citizenship order was one of the many moves he made on his first day back in office last January to address illegal immigration. The president has argued that migrants often take advantage of birthright citizenship by giving birth to children on American soil after crossing the border illegally. The 14th Amendment, which was ratified just three years after the end of the Civil War, clarified that the children born to African slaves are American citizens. “Birthright Citizenship is not about rich people from China, and the rest of the World, who want their children, and hundreds of thousands more, FOR PAY, to ridiculously become citizens of the United States of America,” Trump said on Monday. “It is about the BABIES OF SLAVES!” The president’s order was never allowed to go into effect as it was blocked by federal courts around the country immediately after Trump signed it. Groups opposed to Trump’s interpretation of the 14th Amendment argue that birthright citizenship has always been understood to apply to anyone born in the United States.

WASHINGTON—A decade into his political career, Donald Trump is still finding precedents to break. Trump hinted to reporters earlier this week that he would attend Wednesday’s Supreme Court session, sitting in the gallery as the justices hear oral arguments surrounding his executive order banning birthright citizenship. “I’m going,” Trump said Tuesday. “I think so. I do believe.” No sitting president has ever attended oral arguments, though they are technically permitted to do so. Trump said he was going to attend oral arguments for October’s “Liberation Day” tariffs case, but later changed course. When the High Court ruled against Trump in that case in February, the president lashed out at the justices — particularly Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett, his appointees — calling them a “disgrace to our nation” and suggesting they were corrupted by foreign influences. Trump reiterated that criticism just days ago at a dinner with the National Republican Congressional Committee. “The Supreme Court, that’s right, of the United States cost our country — all they needed was a sentence — our country hundreds of billions of dollars, and they couldn’t care less,” Trump said. “They couldn’t care less.” “They sicken me because they’re bad for our country,” Trump said, once again singling out Gorsuch and Barrett. Whether or not this heated rhetoric means the president intends to actually attend the session remains to be seen. But Wednesday’s case, Trump v. Barbara, is at least as important to the president as the liberation day tariffs. Shortly after returning to office last year, the president signed an executive order barring the children of illegal immigrants or foreigners with temporary visas from receiving citizenship upon birth. The order, “Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship” was swiftly challenged in a number of lawsuits arguing the order violated the 14th Amendment, which affords citizenship to anyone born on U.S. soil regardless of their parents’ immigration status. That definition of the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of “birthright citizenship,” while commonly held, has come under scrutiny in recent years. The Claremont Institute, which filed an amicus brief in support of Trump’s order, has been at the forefront of the charge to rethink the automatic granting of birthright citizenship. “The notion that foreign nationals can secure American citizenship for their children merely by being present on U.S. soil — lawfully or unlawfully — has no basis in the text, history, or original understanding of the Fourteenth Amendment,” Claremont Institute president Ryan Williams said, saying Trump’s order promoted “a constitutional understanding of citizenship — one based on consent, allegiance, and a nation’s sovereign right to define its own political community.” Opponents say that ending birthright citizenship will be detrimental to around 150,000 children born to foreign parents on American soil every year. While Trump could become the first president to attend oral arguments, he is not the first executive to clash with the Supreme Court. In 1832, the Court handed down a landmark ruling on Native American rights in Worcester v. Georgia. Conventional wisdom held that President Andrew Jackson would have to intervene to ensure state governments obeyed the Court’s ruling. Faced with this prospect, Jackson — whom Trump idolizes and whose portrait has hung in the Oval Office during both of the president’s terms — famously, though likely apocryphally, said, “John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it.” Oral arguments begin at 10:00 a.m. ET.