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. *** My trivia team, Post Trebek Stress Disorder, just won the first-ever “Jeopardy!” Bar Trivia League. It might seem like a team made up entirely of former “Jeopardy!” contestants (whose deep bench includes several three-time “Jeopardy!” winners, some of whom didn’t come out to play during the course of the Bar Trivia League) would automatically be the front-runner in a bar trivia contest. But we were weren’t. It felt like we were underdogs the entire time, and we had to overcome several tremendous obstacles to win the whole thing. At least in our minds, we were the Little Trivia Team That Could. I started PTSD in 2013 after I won three games of “Jeopardy!” and couldn’t let go of the afterglow. One other guy, Jared Hall, who lived in Austin and had recently won six games, was my co-founder. The rule quickly became that in order to play on our team, you had to have at least appeared on “Jeopardy!” once. So whenever someone from Austin showed up on my TV, I found them on social media and asked them to join. Not everyone said yes, but those who did soon found themselves belonging to what a 2017 Texas Monthly article called “The Best Little Trivia Team In Texas.” But in recent years, PTSD had faded. The desire to answer questions while drinking cider still burned in me, but other teammates had moved out of town, lost interest, had families, or, in a couple of extremely sad cases, passed away. Then in the summer of 2024, my teammates Kate, Cecily, and I got the call to appear on “Pop Culture Jeopardy!,” a new “Jeopardy!” variant that was airing on Amazon Prime (though is now on Netflix, where people actually watch it). Our team lost, but it turns out that Jessica, one of the women who barely beat us, also lives in Austin and, in fact, had been one of my prospective PTSD recruits after she won three games. But her episodes aired in March of 2020, a time when everyone kind of lost track of reality for a couple of years.  Jessica was such a good trivia player that I said to myself, “I’m never playing against her again.” Instead of avoiding her entirely, which wasn’t an option, I re-upped my invitation to play with us. She was down, which was very fortunate because she proved to be the secret sauce that would bring my wavering trivia team back to life. She was not only the perfect teammate but also a co-captain and partner with whom I could trust my trivia team’s legacy. When “Jeopardy!” announced the Bar Trivia League, she was, as always, into it.  And so Jess and I set forth to slay the trivia dragon. It wasn’t always just the two of us, though sometimes it was. Occasionally, guest stars would join. Her husband came out one night, and my wife came out another night, to enjoy the drinks and encourage us as we engaged in our dorky mental athletics. For two games, the most important two of the season, I stacked the box with a full team of six former “Jeopardy!” contestants, and it’s a good thing I did — because we needed to get every one of those answers right.  Our first week, we played conservatively, probably too conservatively, but it’s a good thing we did because the Final Jeopardy! question was a stumper about an obscure cable company (Optimum), and if we’d bet too aggressively, our league would have been over before it started. After that, the strategy became clear. Though you receive five points for a league win, teams were playing all over the country, and not directly against us on any given night, so total points earned serve as the tiebreaker. You need to bet all your points every time a Daily Double hits.  Unlike in regular “Jeopardy!,” in the bar league every team gets a chance to answer every question, so you see scores in the hundreds of thousands that would never be possible in a regular “Jeopardy!” game. For the next four weeks, we scored more than 300,000 points a game, except for one off week where we scored 252,000 points. One week, we scored more than 388,000 points. But this strategy also has its risky side; if we missed a big Daily Double question, we’d zero out our scoreboard. Like a slugger swinging for the fences on every pitch, there was a chance for a big whiff that would cost us the title.  By week two, there were already only 31 undefeated teams left in the country. That number cut in half the next week. After week five, there were eight, and we were one of them. However, there was another team in Austin, also comprised of several former “Jeopardy!” contestants, that remained undefeated. I had a bitter personal conflict with them, as I chronicled in an article at my previous employer. Jess, who’s friends with everybody, continued to hang out with them. But at their regular Wednesday night trivia gig, they basically avoided her and spoke around her in whispers.  The other team had found a loophole. You can only play JBL under your official team name one night a week. But since the games change every day, you can play multiple times a week under a pseudonym. This occurred to me early on, and I proposed to Jess that we occasionally invoke the Assassin’s Creed and try to do that to take out rivals. But she said that would be unsportsmanlike and uncool. So I allowed my co-captain to guide my conscience like Jiminy Cricket.  Our rivals, desperate for victory, had no such compunction. On that Thursday night at the Via 313 pizzeria near the University of Texas, they snuck in right before the game started at 7. They might as well have thrown down the glove. They’d come to take us out.  Unluckily for them, a new ringer had appeared on our team, a guy named Caleb who just two weeks earlier had fought “Jeopardy!” super-champion Jamie Ding to the death and had lost. Fortunately for us, Caleb is engaged to a guy who’s a big professional wrestling fan, so he knew a WWE answer, “ladder match,” that our enemy team didn’t. And then, in Final Jeopardy!, we got the right answer (Ian Fleming), while they didn’t (John le Carré). When the host announced their wrong answer, our entire team laughed involuntarily, and our enemies slunk out of there ashamed. Demoralized, they lost their next game under their official team name and emailed Jess, wishing us good luck. One more obstacle removed.  By this point, we were down to six undefeated teams left in the country. PTSD stood well ahead of most of them, in second place. But there was a team in Flossmoor, Illinois, called “Bucket of Kneecaps,” that was a couple hundred thousand points ahead of us. We decided to play conservatively since catching them was basically impossible if they won out. Even if we didn’t win the national title, we could still win the Central South region, which would at least come with a thousand-dollar prize.  After an uninspiring week seven win, it seemed like second place was our destiny. But then I woke up on Wednesday morning of the last week of play to find out that Bucket of Kneecaps had lost. What I didn’t know then, but know now, is that a player from Washington, D.C., also a former “Jeopardy!” contestant, had traveled to Chicago specifically to take them out. Apparently, his team had finished second after a drunkenly bad Daily Double bet in week one, removing their chances at a national title. But he was determined to challenge whoever was left in the final week, because he wanted the league to have, as he later told me, a “worthy champion.”  This is apparently an extremely well-connected man because he put together two teams to challenge Bucket of Kneecaps at that bar in suburban Chicago. And he won. It turns out that Bucket of Kneecaps was just one man, apparently quite friendly with the trivia host and bar ownership. Let’s just say they all exchanged angry words after the game.  It won’t surprise you that this trivia ronin showed up at Via 313 in Austin the very next night, to test PTSD, which was now playing for the national title. And he gave us hell. We were in third place after round one. Early on in Double Jeopardy!, one of our teammates, who’d been sitting quietly for weeks, pulled an answer about a question involving a pasta shape named after an Italian word for cake (tortellini). No one else in the bar got it right, and suddenly we were in first place.  At the end of the round, we remained in first, tied for points with another team that showed up every week to try and beat us. But we were ahead of them because Jess had been speed-typing our answers on her laptop all night. The final category was NOVELS, which I felt good about, and the final question involved a 24-hour live reading of a novel in New Bedford, Massachusetts. It was obvious pretty quickly that the answer was Moby Dick, and that was ballgame. We’d won the “Jeopardy!” Bar Trivia League.  As a prize, we get $1,000 for winning our region, plus a pizza party at the venue paid for by “Jeopardy!” In addition, everyone who played 50% of the games or more gets an all-expense-paid trip to LA, including airfare, hotel, a tour of the “Jeopardy!” studio, attendance at a “Jeopardy!” taping, and a meeting with “Jeopardy!” host Ken Jennings and “Jeopardy!” producers. The initial prize involved a “Jeopardy!” audition, but obviously, we don’t qualify for that. Three of us, Jess, Kate, and I, will gladly accept the prize and will head to LA whenever the call comes. This may seem like an ironic reward for a team comprised of former “Jeopardy!” contestants, but I have a plan. When I appeared on “Jeopardy!” in the Paleolithic year of 2013, it was a very different show. Once your run was done, you didn’t get to appear again unless you’d qualified for the Tournament of Champions. But the rules have changed, and there are many different levels of tournaments now. People who’ve won three games come back all the time. Contestants who won zero games get second chances, and in a few cases have advanced deep into tournaments and won hundreds of thousands of dollars. So, you know, why not us? There was no other chance on earth “Jeopardy!” would invite me, a guy who’d been on the show a decade and a half ago and had performed well but not exceptionally, back for another bite of the apple. For Jessica, who also appeared before the super-tournament era, the situation was the same. And Kate had never won at all, not finishing up her Final Jeopardy! answer in time despite the fact that she knew it, a fact that has haunted her for nearly a decade. I want redemption for myself and for two of my best friends in the world. The only way any of us were going to even have a prayer to get back on “Jeopardy!” was to claw our way up (with integrity and friendship) out of the bar-trivia pits, like Bruce Wayne in “The Dark Knight Rises.” And we did it. *** Neal Pollack, “the greatest living American writer,” is the author of 12 semi-bestselling books of fiction and nonfiction and is a three-time “Jeopardy!” champion.

Editor’s note: This is the third in a four-part weekend series on the hunt for the Bismarck, coming up on its 85th anniversary this month. On the bridge of King George V, still steaming westward toward the battle area, Adm. Tovey received a staggering message from the captain of Prince of Wales, John Leach. It simply read: HOOD SUNK. Word of the disaster ricocheted through the fleet. One sailor described the mood aboard his vessel as “a strange mixture of incredulity, anger, and loss.” Royal Navy pilot Alan Swinton’s reaction was blunter: “Well bugger me!” But as the magnitude of what had happened settled in, numbness turned to rage, then iron resolve. The Admiralty now had one mission: avenge Hood. Sink Bismarck. One British warship was still engaging the lethal German battleship and cruiser. But Prince of Wales was in no condition to continue the fight. During the action her aft Y turret jammed, and she was down to only three operational 14-inch guns, while Hood’s destruction freed both Bismarck and Prinz Eugen to concentrate fire on the lone British battleship. It did not take long for the German gunners to find the range. In the next 10 minutes, the Prince of Wales was struck four times by Bismarck and another three by Prinz Eugen. Outnumbered, with 13 crewmen dead and turrets malfunctioning, Captain Leach broke off the action at 6:10 a.m. Lindemann wanted to pursue and destroy the fleeing battleship, but Lütchens ordered the squadron southward instead. Now came the damage assessment. Bismarck had blasted her way free, but the victory carried a heavy cost. Prince of Wales, though untested and under intense fire, had scored three hits, including two below the waterline, one at the bow and one amidships. Two thousand tons of seawater flooded Bismarck’s forward compartments, leaving her down three degrees by the bow and listing nine degrees to port before counterflooding corrected the imbalance. Worse still, damage to fuel tanks cut off access to 1,000 tons of precious oil. Lütchens no doubt wished he’d topped off when he had the chance. Trailing oil and unable to sustain maximum speed, Bismarck needed repairs. Lütchens faced two choices: return north toward Norway and Germany, the closer route, or make for the French coast through the sanctuary of wide-open seas. Lindemann, after initially arguing to repair the ship at sea and continue the mission, favored returning home. Lütchens instead informed Berlin he intended to head for occupied France. Since Prinz Eugen remained unscathed, Lütchens would detach her for commerce raiding. But the German ships were still shadowed by Suffolk, Norfolk, and the battered Prince of Wales. Then, at 6:00 p.m. on May 24, Lütchens executed a clever maneuver. Bismarck suddenly turned southwest while Prinz Eugen accelerated directly south. The British followed the battleship as she eventually resumed course while the cruiser slipped unseen into the open Atlantic. Now Bismarck was alone, and her crew understood what Hood’s obliteration meant. Every available Royal Navy warship in the Atlantic would be mobilized with one purpose: hunt down their fugitive battleship and kill her…and them. For Britain, this was no longer merely a military necessity. It had become a matter of national honor. The Admiralty ordered every ship within reach to converge on Bismarck. While the cruisers and Prince of Wales continued shadowing her, Tovey steamed at 27 knots aboard King George V, accompanied by the carrier Victorious, battlecruiser Repulse, four cruisers, and several destroyers. Also racing toward the scene was the battleship Rodney and three destroyers, diverted while en route to Boston for a refit. From the south came Gibraltar-based Force H built around the carrier Ark Royal, battlecruiser Renown, and cruiser Sheffield. Two cruisers were pulled from convoy duty off West Africa, and one more, Dorsetshire, detached on her own volition. The hunt was on. In the spring of 1941 carrier warfare had yet to fully emerge, and most admirals still had little faith in aircrafts’ ability to sink a capital ship at sea. But by the evening of May 24, the British were desperate to stop Bismarck before she reached France, and they resolved to use every arrow in their quiver. One of those arrows was the Fairey Swordfish. First flown in 1934, the ungainly biplane looked more suited to the trenches of the First World War than modern naval combat. Built of metal framing, canvas, and wire, with a top speed barely above 130 miles per hour, the Swordfish hauled a 1,700-pound torpedo under the belly. With Tovey’s heavy vessels still too far away, these open-cockpit aircraft would launch from Victorious into foul weather to attack the most formidable battleship at sea. It seemed suicidal. One pilot remembered climbing into his cockpit and thinking, “God, I’d get out of this if I could!” But they went. With the northern sun still lingering above the horizon, the plucky Swordfish lifted off from Victorious’ pitching, rain-swept flight deck and headed into worsening weather. At first, the inexperienced crews emerged from the clouds too early, only to discover an American Coast Guard cutter searching for survivors from a merchant ship sunk earlier by U-boats. Bismarck remained farther away. Surprise was lost, but the Swordfish crews pressed on through heavy anti-aircraft fire. Ironically, the lumbering biplanes’ ostensible weaknesses became strengths. The Swordfish flew so slowly that Bismarck’s advanced fire-control systems struggled to track them properly, especially while the aircraft were buffeted sideways by violent winds. And any shells that did hit passed straight through the canvas skin without detonating. Skimming the churning sea, the Swordfish released their torpedoes, banked slowly, and crawled away through streams of cold rain and hot tracers. One torpedo struck home. The damage was minor — the warhead detonated against the thickest belt armor — but one sailor was killed, Bismarck’s first fatality. More ominously, the attack demonstrated that aircraft could threaten even the mightiest warship afloat. By 2:00 a.m. on Sunday, May 25, all the biplanes, many riddled with holes, had landed safely aboard Victorious. May 25 was Admiral Lütchens’s 52nd birthday, but no one aboard Bismarck was celebrating. Fuel had become critical. To conserve oil, he slowed the ship to 22 knots and steered directly for Brest. If Bismarck could get within a few hundred miles of occupied France, Luftwaffe aircraft could shield her final approach. But first he had to shake the British trackers. Taking advantage of enemy zig-zagging to avoid U-boats, Lütchens executed a brilliant maneuver. At 2:00 a.m., with perfect timing, he ordered Bismarck hard to starboard, swinging the battleship in a broad loop while the British cruisers, having temporarily lost radar contact during a “zag,” continued onward into the darkness. Bismarck then circled back, crossed her own wake behind them, and resumed her easterly heading. At 5:00 a.m. Suffolk reluctantly signaled: HAVE LOST CONTACT WITH ENEMY. The German battleship had vanished into the Atlantic. When word reached Prince of Wales, one crewman recalled, “We all felt utterly depressed.” Bismarck appeared home free. And then Lütchens made an inexplicable mistake. Unaware how completely he’d escaped, the admiral carelessly broke radio silence to send routine reports to naval headquarters in France. British direction-finding stations intercepted the transmissions and obtained a bearing on the battleship’s location. Lütchens had inadvertently revealed himself. But the German admiral was not the only one to blunder. Having obtained a rough bearing, Tovey miscalculated Bismarck’s heading and assumed she was steering north. He turned his pursuing force away from the enemy. Only on the evening of May 25 did Tovey realize the mistake. By then, Bismarck had widened the gap still further. RAF Coastal Command had also joined the search, dispatching reconnaissance aircraft across enormous stretches of ocean in what amounted to scouring for a needle in an Atlantic haystack. Then, at 3:30 a.m. on Monday, 26 May, an American-built Catalina flying boat lifted off to continue the hunt. Although the United States remained officially neutral, the aircraft was co-piloted by an American, L.B. Smith. At 10:30 a.m., to his astonishment, Smith spotted the German battleship below him. Bismarck had been lost, found, lost again, and found again. But time was rapidly running out. If not stopped soon, the battleship would reach the protective umbrella of German air cover. She still remained roughly 150 miles ahead of her pursuing battleships — well beyond gun range, but not beyond aircraft range. And so the British turned once more to the Swordfish. This strike would launch from Ark Royal, as Victorious had broken off low on fuel. The raid nearly ended in catastrophe when the attackers mistakenly identified Sheffield as Bismarck and dropped torpedoes against their own cruiser. Fortunately, they missed. As evening approached on May 26, Bismarck drew ever closer to safety. Then, at 7:00 p.m., with only hours remaining before the German battleship escaped, the intrepid Swordfish again rolled down Ark Royal’s flight deck into foul weather. This time they found their target. Once more the little biplanes crept toward the giant battleship through intense anti-aircraft fire. Towering geysers erupted around them as Bismarck fired her main guns into the sea in an attempt to destroy the fragile aircraft with shell splashes alone. The Swordfish pressed through the chaos and released their torpedoes before turning away into the darkness. From the aircrews’ perspective, the attack appeared to be another failure. The torpedoes seemed to miss. And with France now dangerously close, time had effectively run out. Only a miracle could stop Bismarck now. And that is exactly what happened. *** Brad Schaeffer is a commodities fund manager, author, and columnist whose articles have appeared on the pages of The Wall Street Journal, NY Post, NY Daily News, The Daily Wire, National Review, The Hill, The Federalist, Zerohedge, and other outlets. He is the author of three books. You can also follow him on Substack and X. His latest book, A War For Half The World: Why the Real Battle for the Future was Fought in the Pacific, will be released in February 2027.

Weekend Plans is our exclusive lifestyle feature where we highlight the real off-duty routines of the most exciting people in modern culture.  This weekend, NASA Artemis II mission specialist Christina Koch sits down with The Daily Wire to chat about her 29-minute morning routine, family moments that are too sacred for Instagram, and how getting comfortable with failing — in surfing and rocket science — made her one of the most inspiring astronauts of our time. *** Christina Koch settles in for our chat, wearing a royal blue NASA bomber jacket, decked out in official patches. Under that, I catch a glimpse of what looks like a concert tee, but instead features the schematics for an F-1 rocket engine — you know, the kind that successfully powered six Apollo-era missions to the moon.  I feel intellectually underdressed. But Christina’s laidback personality is refreshingly disarming. “I am here to underwhelm, trust me,” she says. I almost fall out of my chair. She’s so beloved, the internet spontaneously combusted with merch featuring her quotes (“Planet Earth: You are a crew”), her likeness, and the Artemis II team.  In light of all the hubbub around her latest mission, I wonder what she misses about Earth when she’s 252,756 miles away.  “I miss my family and my good friends. If they could come with me, I would probably never come back.” She doesn’t need creature comforts, but I immediately realize I’ve taken the “earthy things” she mentions for granted. Having lived on the International Space Station for 11 months, she recalls, “I was never thinking ‘A latte would be great right now,’ but I missed things like wind, the feeling of the breeze on your face, the smell of the ocean, the blue sky.” When she isn’t exploring the galaxy, she misses that too. “I miss everything. I miss floating. I miss the teamwork; being a part of a crew where you are working towards the same mission the whole time and you’re spending your off hours together, you’re supporting each other in every possible way … selflessly, with intention.” While the crew remains intact for post-flight engagements and tasks, Christina can feel the energy shifting. “We’re having to face the fact that it won’t last forever. We will move on and we will have different goals. A part of me already misses my Space Bros.”  “The views are great,” she says, “but it’s the camaraderie and teamwork that would bring me back every time.”   Credit: NASA But first, coffee So what’s Christina’s personal rocket booster? “I am a black coffee person,” she says. “One cup of black coffee in the morning. Even if it were decaf, it would just be the ritual of it for me.” “We had coffee in space, thankfully, so we could all have that ritual. You can’t smell it, though, in space. It’s in a pouch.” I suddenly feel like we’re best friends planning NASA’s next manned mission. I suggest that they start pumping the smell of coffee into the cabin. “Yeah, we need some coffee essential oil.” (“Houston …”) When she’s home in Galveston, Texas, Christina’s out the door before her husband, geographic information systems engineer Bob Koch, gets out of bed, thanks to her longer commute. Bob handles their pup Sadie’s breakfast, but Christina’s morning routine might be more streamlined than anyone’s.  “My breakfast is a protein bar in the car on the way to work every day. The time from the alarm to the car is about 29 minutes for me, including a shower.” I suggest that she brand this bare-bones AM groove. She laughs. “It’s called ‘setting the bar very low.’” Someone to come home to Fans’ hearts melted at Christina’s reunion with her dog Sadie post-mission. (The couple’s “LBD,” or Little Brown Dog, was also ecstatic about Christina’s return from the ISS in February 2020.) But apparently, Sadie doesn’t hold back on the LBD affection. “She just loves people, so she probably would do that to you as well if you got down on the floor and let her lick you to death.”  Despite the global interest in Christina’s every move, not every emotional moment makes it to social media. “To be honest, the real tearjerker was me saying goodbye to her. That will not be on Instagram because that was a lot.” Sadie has a sixth sense for when Christina’s heading out on a mission. “I travel a lot these days, so she knows when we pack that something’s up. Dogs know your vibe; they know when you’re sad. So she knew when I said goodbye that it was a serious one.” For this family of scientists, the bond with their four-legged rescue is real. “I had a long, heartfelt goodbye with her this morning because she was just extra cute.” The ultimate view of nature Christina’s social media teems with jaw-dropping POVs from space, the kind of once-in-a-lifetime cosmoscapes that someone else might ironically tag “view from my office.” But I was curious as to whether these types of views might make nature on Earth feel a little lackluster. Luckily, that’s not even close to being the case.    “For me, it helps me appreciate it and see it in a different light,” Christina assures me. I think of her shot of Raglan, New Zealand, from the ISS; it reveals a sweeping aquamarine coastline that even the luckiest among us will only ever view from sea level. “I look at the ocean, or look up at the blue sky, or look at a forest and literally imagine how it looks from the universe, and it just makes it so rich. There’s just so much there.” Hanging ten There’s no better advocate for the great outdoors — whether it’s your backyard or the dark side of the moon — than Christina. But instead of strictly being a favorite way to decompress, her passion for catching a wave aligns with the physicality of her more high-profile ventures.  “The one thing that is the same is having to take in a lot of inputs at once, process them, and then react. Especially when you’re first learning surfing, this idea of when do I pop up, when do I set my line, when have I caught the wave, when do I paddle harder, when do I paddle less … There’s so much happening all at once.” “We have this saying in human spaceflight about growing your world,” Christina says. “At first, your situational awareness bubble is very small and you can maybe only take one input and have one output. But as you grow that bubble, you can take in multiple inputs and have multiple outputs. That’s what you’re working towards.” Having surfed exactly once and barely stood up on my board, I ask if surfing offers a budget version of weightlessness. “It doesn’t really feel like floating, but there are those takeoff moments that are very beautiful.”   Credit: NASA Trusting the journey  Looking at Christina Koch now, it might be hard to picture a time before she became a star of the U.S. space program. But when she first began her journey to become an astronaut in 2013, she says the energy was more like “I’m really bad at it and it’s really hard.” Still, she went full-send on that daunting learning curve.  “When I was a baby astronaut, I used to say that my job was to show up at work and learn new things and be bad at them. And I truly was,” she explains. “You just have to accept that you’re bad at a lot of things when you first start, and you just have to keep trying and trust the process and know that you’ll get there.”

The political machine funded and run by George and his son, Alexander Soros, which has bankrolled the election of over 100 prosecutors across the country over the past decade, deliberately chose to inflict several of their chosen candidates on the surrounding counties of Washington, D.C. One of them, ideological extremist Steve Descano, won his primary over a fairly typical Democrat with an agenda designed to push the Soros agenda — one that puts violent criminals back on the streets. Since his election in 2019 (by a mere 1,500 votes), he has deliberately refused to enforce Virginia laws that run afoul of his own predilections, in accordance with the soft-on-crime wishes of his well-heeled funders. In that time, violent crime has increased 92% in the Virginia county he represents — including multiple high-profile cases where repeat offenders were released only to commit murder, rape, and other felonies.  Jason Miyares is the former Attorney General of the Commonwealth of Virginia. He sat at the same table as Descano in a recent high-profile hearing, which also featured the mother of a recent victim, stabbed to death at a bus stop after Descano declined to prosecute a repeat offender. The Soros-funded acolyte put on a performance so embarrassing that his own supporters were gasping in shock. People are dead because of the Soros machine. Jason Miyares is fed up with it. He told us his perspective on this, and the pro-assassination agenda of the radical Left, in this week’s Punch interview. *** Ben Domenech: You had to sit down in that hearing room on Capitol Hill, and the tension there had to be significant. Can you tell me what your feelings were on that day? Jason Miyares: I would tell you it’s not necessarily what happened on camera, it’s what I saw happen off camera. I’ve gotten to know Cheryl since the tragedy. I think she’s an incredibly strong woman. She lost her daughter, Stephanie, to an illegal immigrant. I’ve always believed in being cordial. I think civility is not a weakness. And when [Fairfax County Commonwealth’s Attorney Steve] Descano would not come back in the room where [House Judiciary Chairman Jim] Jordan allowed the witnesses to wait, he, I think, very intentionally decided to separate himself from the other witnesses. And when he arrived, he wouldn’t look at Cheryl, obviously wouldn’t look at me, but when he walked into the room, Cheryl and I were already seated, and he walked right past her. He didn’t even acknowledge her, and he showed her no humanity. I intentionally went over to shake his hand and say hello, but he wasn’t very happy even with that gesture. He sat down, and then, when the cameras were rolling, he decided to apologize to Cheryl Minter. So I think everything was just shown to be performative. Disingenuous. And one thing I’ve realized as a public figure, when you’re in public office, is you’re dealing with people who are grieving. I have attended so many different funerals for the fallen for those in the law enforcement community. It is a difficult part of the job. It’s the hardest part of the job in many ways. But to me, I just thought, wow, it required a congressional subpoena and cameras rolling for him to show humanity toward a grieving mother. I thought it was a telling moment. So yeah, there was a lot of tension in that room for sure, a lot of tension. But to me, the most telling moment was the complete lack of any display of empathy or humanity by Descano when he walked into that room, which I thought spoke volumes. BD: There were a couple of moments that you experienced that were in that hearing room that seemed like there was a reaction, at a couple of different moments, to statements that were being made and to Descano’s responses to questions. Can you tell us a little bit about that? JM: I think there was this amazing moment where Chairman Jordan was cross-examining Descano, pointing out that on his website for over six years, it said that he would factor in the immigration status of defendants in his charging decisions, which as you know, if you’re providing a benefit to one category class of people that’s not available to other classes of people, then you run into the problem of an equal protection violation. Descano kept saying, “Well, that wasn’t my policy,” or “Maybe that’s what I said on a website, but that wasn’t my policy.” And when Chairman Jordan said, “Wait, you had this up for six years, and you took it down a week before you were to testify after you’d been subpoenaed. How can you explain that? I mean, isn’t that exactly what you’ve been doing?” And he said, “No, it’s just campaign rhetoric, and I can’t believe anyone would be so obtuse to actually believe that. And I looked up the actual definition of obtuse when it comes to intelligence, which means dull or dim-witted.” So, essentially, Descano thought that anyone who believed him was dull or dim-witted. What I thought was most remarkable were two aspects. One, there was an audible gasp in the room. The Fairfax Democratic Committee had sent a bunch of supporters there. Several of them were shaking their heads or just in stunned disbelief. It is documented in case after case that he was underprosecuting illegal immigrants. Why? Because if you get a felony, it definitely triggers a whole host of other ramifications on your immigration status. So he brazenly lied to the chairman, and what he runs the risk of now is that the Department of Justice obviously has a civil rights investigation that is ongoing. Now he has another problem. If any of his current or former employees, Commonwealth’s attorneys, paralegals in that office, or if there’s email evidence in which absolutely they are saying Steve Descano either in his written word or in their own testimony was factoring in a person’s immigration status and ordering people to reduce charges because of that immigration status, then now he’s lying to Congress and that’s perjury and totally different legal ramifications that I think could be a potentially earthquake for him. And I think that was the thing that I immediately recognized: he may have just perjured himself on national television. So yes, there were a lot of those moments, but that one definitely stood out. BD: It seems that the decision that was made to pursue this by Congress is meant to highlight something that, unless you watch Fox News or if you read The Daily Wire, you probably don’t actually know that much about this. We’ve consistently seen in polling data concerns about rising crime, along with, of course, the Biden administration explosion of illegal immigration, but I don’t think people necessarily connect it to prosecutors, because you hear “prosecutor” and you assume they’re looking out for the protection of the people.  JM: The legacy media has, not surprisingly, missed the plot. The reason why The Daily Wire is credible is that it’s willing to tackle stories that the legacy media refuses to and acknowledge exist. And I have friends who are reporters, and I have told them before: why we talk about media bias is not just how you slant the stories; it’s the stories you choose to minimize or pretend don’t exist if they don’t fit your narrative. And that’s one of my biggest critiques of the modern American legacy media is they’re more interested in a narrative than truth, and they’re more interested in being first than in being right. And it is a huge, huge problem.  If this does not fit their narrative, it is because they overwhelmingly are sympathetic to the so-called social justice left-wing worldview when it comes to crime and statistics. And I have a buddy of mine who’s from Manhattan who says that a liberal in New York is just a conservative who hasn’t been mugged by reality yet. There’s a certain level of truth to that. The harsh reality of our criminal justice system is that there is nothing new under the sun. They say nobody learns from history. The only thing you learn from history is that nobody learns from history. And the reality is, everything Steve Descano and the left-wing social justice warriors advocate for, a new so-called reformed and enlightened criminal justice system, has already been tried before. Let me emphasize, there is nothing they have advocated for that has not previously been tried with disastrous results. The 1970s were when the ideas we talk about today first emerged: early release of violent offenders, no cash bail, and a host of more “enlightened, softer policies” on repeat, violent offenders. And it led to a crime explosion in the 1970s to the point that you actually have cultural commentators writing about those random movies that emerge in the ’70s of the vigilante and [Charles] Bronson and whatnot. That was somewhat of a reaction — also Clint Eastwood with the ”Dirty Harry” movies — all part of the soft-on-crime policies that coddle and just protect criminal defendants. Well, it was all tried in the 1970s and early ’80s. And then there was reform and pushback in the 1990s, you saw things like parole abolition and truth-in-sentencing laws. And we saw the nationwide trend between 1992 and 2018 in this country, crime went down dramatically. And by the way, at the same time that gun violence and crime were going down between 1992 and 2018, gun ownership was increasing. So you had more guns in circulation, but crime was going down at the same time. And then after 2018, people forgot those hard lessons, and they started bringing back a lot of the same policies that were tried before, and that’s why we’ve seen this uptick in crime, to your point. So the legacy media has missed that entirely. They don’t like to focus on it. And I applaud Congress for putting a spotlight on what these failed policies have done and how many lives have been wrecked as a result of it. BD: Politically speaking, you’ve seen over the last decade George Soros and his attendant groups be the primary, as they are in Descano’s case, financial backers, sometimes the exclusive financial backers in terms of the size of their donations to more than a hundred prosecutors elected across the country, that’s over the past decade. Why do you think that their organizations would choose to try to push these prosecutors in the hub around Washington, D.C.? Because, from my perspective, that’s one way to suddenly send a message that might get heard by the national political class, as opposed to hearing it in blue cities, where presumably they have the political dominance to basically do whatever the heck they want. JM: It’s interesting for me to get my arms around what their motivation is. I know that if you look at what these left-wing prosecutors have been, the first thing they realize is, which is easier to get control over: state government and have them change the criminal justice code, or is it better to get a district attorney or in Virginia, we call them Commonwealth’s attorney, installed in large localities where they just refuse to enforce entire sections of the criminal code, which is essentially what they’ve done. Think about it. As a policy in his office, Steve Descano will typically not prosecute any larceny-related crime of $1,500 or less. He’s basically legalized petty theft. And when you look into the retail space, when they’re operating with such small margins, that can be devastating for retailers; it’s much easier to get a prosecutor just to declare, “I’m not going to prosecute any type of larceny crime of $1,500 or less” than getting a bill passed. So I do think that’s their mindset. I also think it is a great irony that this group of left-wingers constantly use the term privilege. The real privileged are enormously wealthy elites who can push laws and support candidates who impose rules on the general population that they never have to suffer the consequences of. If you look at the recall effort in San Francisco and the Soros-funded prosecutor who got recalled, the only precincts in San Francisco that voted to keep him in office were the uber-wealthy white elite areas of the city. In other words, they were the ones who could afford the best home security system and a gated defense, and they were far removed from the disastrous consequences of having a prosecutor who acted like a social worker instead of a prosecutor. That’s called privilege. That you could sit in your ivory tower and support policies, knowing that the common American has to suffer from them, and you never have to suffer the consequences of your actions. So I think that’s somewhat of the great irony of this. I would argue that you’ve seen a little bit of some of the areas of some of the most artful defenders of Steve Descano are not living in some of the areas and neighborhoods of Fairfax in which repeat violent offenders are getting released and back on the street, back in the community, and preying on the innocent again. The privileged feel safe walking at night, but they’re not in an area that’s going to be suffering as much as some of the other areas of Fairfax, working-class areas of Fairfax, where repeat offenders get released. BD: Alexander Soros can quite literally get into his penthouse elevator, go down, get in the black car with a chauffeur, and go straight from there to the private airport and never have to see the New York streets. JM: Stephanie Minter was a working-class mom who was at a bus stop when Abdul Jalloh, who had previously been arrested not once, not five times, not 10 times, not 20 times, but 30 prior arrests, an illegal immigrant, was the one who stabbed her to death. There is no way somebody like Alex Soros would ever be sitting at a bus stop waiting for a ride because they can’t afford their own car. That is the definition of privilege. He doesn’t suffer the consequences. It’s the Stephanie Minters of the world that do. If you want to talk about something, it’s that level of unmitigated arrogance that they refuse to look at the data. And I would say this, one of the great problems we have in politics today, and we see it overwhelmingly on the Left, is politicians who ask you to judge me on my intentions, not the results. There’s no area of society that operates that way. Nobody in the business sector could operate that way. Nobody in the military could operate that way. Nobody on a sports team could operate that way, where they’ve got the coach saying, “Hey, why do you decide to call an audible and go for it on 4th and 17?” And replying, “Well, coach, you can’t blame me. I meant to get the first down.” That’s literally what they do. They tell the voters, “I intend to build a more equitable, just society and an equitable, just criminal justice system.” Okay, I know that’s what your intentions are, what are the actual results, and are you hurting the people you claim you want to help? And they are never held accountable. And that’s another frustration I have with legacy media. California’s Exhibit A. Sacramento is the definition of politicians who always ask you to judge their intentions [rather than] their results. And at some point, people rebel. Look at the L.A. mayor’s race, where people just sit back, and they’re just aghast at it. And that’s literally what the Left is in America today right now. They’re never held accountable for the consequences they support that actually make communities poor, make it harder for people to start a business, and make it harder for people to grow and lift themselves out of poverty. They only get judged by what their intentions are. And I find that a really sad state of modern American journalism, that they never hold them accountable. BD: A big driver of the political shift nationally, in my view, and plays out locally too, is that the Left is actually, when you combine their policies, essentially undertaking a war on the working class, that they have gone to war against their priorities, against their safety, against their education via the lockstep embrace of teachers’ unions. Again, to the point about elites, the children of COVID elites were getting tutors and things like that. JM: I had a front row seat in Virginia. I was in the Assembly. I remember the Floor debates. I remember how I was lectured and mocked when we were saying, “Open up our schools,” because the people just heard us as working-class Virginians. It is the elite and the wealthy who can afford private schools and private tutors. They can afford it. And so you’ve seen, we saw nearly 20 years of gains in black and Latino testing scores in Virginia get wiped out essentially in 18 months, not by anything Republicans did, but by the utter, unmitigated, arrogant policies around Ralph Northam and his allies in the General Assembly. We were asking over and over again, reopen our schools. This is devastating for our kids. I feel there has never been true public accountability for what has been one of the most disastrous public policy decisions the Left instituted on America and our kids, particularly what we saw in Virginia. Virginia was 48th in this country in reopening our schools. We were among the last to reopen our schools for in-person instruction. And now we know kids were the least likely to get sick, and we know the kids were the least likely of any to even transmit the virus to teachers. We literally destroyed a generation of young people’s learning advancement in the name of a Left-wing ideology, and those of us like myself who were begging us to reopen were the ones who were belittled and mocked, and there’s been no accountability for that at all. None. BD: There has to be a point where this combination of, you used to call them the radical Left, but now I actually consistently make the case, they make up almost half of the Democratic Party because I use basically the statistics on justification of violence, which is now, I don’t know if you’ve seen the poll data, but it’s up over 40% pretty consistently when you ask the question of Democrats, that that radical Left has to be at some point a problem for the people who want to pretend, as Abigail Spanberger did, that they are in some way moderate or centrist minded or something that can be tolerable to the independent swing voter in a key election because of how bad these policies are. Why do they tolerate this? It seems to me that if you are trying to win back, say, the Rust Belt, you’ve got to declare we’re not going to be at war with the working class anymore. JM: First of all, I think that one of the under-reported stories in America today is the rise in one of America’s two major political parties, that violence is acceptable. If you look at the polling, it disturbs me that 66% of self-identified Democrats have a positive view of socialism. That is disturbing. It’s even more disturbing that, depending on the polling, I saw one that showed 25% of people identifying as Democrats say it is acceptable to use violence to achieve political means. And I will tell you this, and we live in such a soundbite society, but I think there was a date that will go down as a red letter date in American history, which was December 4th, 2024, that was the date that Brian Thompson, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare, was gunned down in the streets of New York and murdered in cold blood. And what was most shocking — it wasn’t shocking that there was a murder in New York, it’s a city of eight million plus people. What was shocking was the reaction to it. When you poll America’s college students, 48% said his murder was justified. Now think about that. These are the people the media claims are the future leaders of America. These are our future lawyers, future judges, future politicians, future leaders. Roughly half of America’s college students today think it is acceptable or justified to summarily execute an innocent American without a trial, without ever being charged with a crime, all because they don’t like how he was running a private business. And that is a pure Neo-Marxist worldview. BD: We’ve seen the popularity of Luigi Mangione among the Left, and we go through periods where it happens — of seeing politicians targeted by assassins — crazy or not. That is not something that is entirely new. Every president has to deal with it. Many politicians have to deal with it. And if you are a political activist, if you’re Charlie Kirk or something like that, you also have to deal with it. If you’re the most prominent, you need security. What we are not used to and what really takes us back to something that resembles a century ago, and the era of the Russian revolution, and the like, is the targeting of people who are simply executives at companies. Many of them are large companies that employ thousands and thousands of people who are now beginning to fear showing their faith. There have been multiple attempts on the life of [OpenAI CEO] Sam Altman. And I personally believe they will eventually get one of these AI guys. The odds are too high that they will eventually get one of them, and they’ve tried. When that happens, it’s going to be something that I think cracks open something truly evil in our society because there are going to be people who cheer it on. JM: No question. I was back at my law school at William and Mary, talking to some students at the Federalist Society, and they said they had classmates who were openly cheering when Charlie Kirk was assassinated, which is just so vile and disgusting that they would cheer the death of an innocent American. My family story has shaped so much of my view of America and also the evils of Marxism. But I remember asking my mother, “How did communism really take root in Cuba?” And when Fidel Castro took power, how in the world did communism take over a country with a GDP the size of Greece at the time, which by the end of the year Castro died, [had] the same GDP as Sudan? And my mother told me there’s something that had always stuck with me. She says, when they took over, they’d already done it in the universities. They took it over in the media outlets. Everyone in Cuban society was labeled one of two categories: either oppressor or oppressed. You’re either the oppressor or the oppressed. There was no nuance. And she said, “You can always justify unspeakable evil if you’re doing it on behalf of the oppressed against the so-called oppressor.” And it really chilled me. It reminds me of that quote from C.S. Lewis: that of all the tyrannies in the world, the worst tyrannies are those that have been done for “your own good.” And that’s what we have. That ghoulish, disgusting behavior of those New York City journalists who were cheering, saying they were there to cheer Mangione, that Thompson’s children were better off without him. I just thought, wow, what little Marxists you are, where groupthink takes away individual dignity, and that’s such a slippery slope in a society that could break itself apart. Listen, we’re having big debates in our country right now, I mean, AI is going to be transformative. I fully acknowledge that, but we are at a moment in society where 50% of Americans don’t even know the name of their neighbor. We are the most disconnected but connected society; connected online but disconnected personally, the worst we have ever seen. And it is shocking to see how it’s accelerating, but it’s also coarsening our discourse. And what we’ve seen on the Left is this view that this kind of neo-Marxist worldview is a sophisticated way of explaining the world, but the reality is one of the most simplistic ways because you’re deciding to categorize everybody by either the race or the ethnic background or their gender and then label everybody the same way they did it in Cuba, oppressor versus oppressed and again, then justifying unspeakable acts of violence they’re doing on behalf of the oppressed against the so-called oppressor, that worries me greatly about the future of the American Republic. BD: The fallout from the Supreme Court decision in Virginia that undid a metric butt load of money — I believe that’s the technical term — that was spent on that fight for redistricting. We see the different responses to it from the Democrats, packing the court, threatening to do all sorts of things to eliminate justices or take them out, or go after them in various ways. How concerned are you that they will be able to do something like that, or do you think that the toxicity of this is so significant that Spanberger will basically have to assert, let’s not touch this, it’s just going to bring up a failure on our part and make people mad? JM: She is the least popular governor in modern Virginia history.  BD: Have you ever seen anybody burn through that much goodwill in four months? JM: No, I haven’t. I mean, she ran on affordability, and then immediately governed the opposite. Now I’m not surprised by this because if you look at her voting record in Congress, she talked like a moderate, but she voted like a Leftist. So I’m not surprised by this in any way, but I do think what you are saying is an unholy retribution that’s going to occur against the Virginia Supreme Court. I’m very disappointed that you’re already seeing indications of Dan Helmer, who’s angry that he basically hand-drew a district for himself, and then that was taken away because the Virginia Supreme Court had the temerity of actually following what the Virginia Constitution said. And Dan Helmer literally just publicly said, “Yeah, we’re going to be removing the Supreme Court justices that we don’t like, how they voted.” Well, Justice [Arthur] Kelsey, who authored the Supreme Court opinion, was appointed to the Court of Appeals by Mark Warner, a Democrat, and then elevated to the Supreme Court of Virginia on a unanimous vote. Every Democrat in the state voted for him, including the Senate president pro tempore Democrat Louise Lucas, but now Dan Helmer is deciding to throw a temper tantrum because he’s mad that the justices followed the Constitution and you have not seen a previously appointed Supreme Court justice removed and not reappointed by the General Assembly since the 1800s, but I predict it’s most likely going to happen because we’re one of only two states in which the general assembly controls not the governor, the Supreme Court and they are even farther to the Left than Abigail Spanberger. We have seen this every time: the Democrats are preaching the rule of law, but when they don’t win or get what they want, what do they do? They talk about court packing and doing completely unprecedented things in the pursuit of power. And it’s really, let’s just say — surprise, but not surprise — that we’re seeing this type of retribution. BD: Last question: I don’t know how much you want to speak to the current situation, but does Louise Lucas have something to worry about?  JM: Yes.  *** Jason Miyares served as the 48th attorney general of Virginia from 2022 to 2026.

WASHINGTON, May 22 (Reuters) – The Internal Revenue Service is debating whether to require taxpayers to disclose their citizenship status on next year’s tax forms, according to three people familiar with the situation, as the Trump administration intensifies its attempts to link federal agencies to its sprawling immigration enforcement and anti-fraud drive. IRS officials are considering two versions of Form 1040, the primary paperwork individuals use to report earnings and claim tax benefits, said the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of professional reprisals. The first version contains minor updates to reflect changes in tax laws. The second includes those updates and a check-box labeled: “Check this box if you are a non-U.S. citizen or have dual citizenship.” Representatives from the Treasury Department – the IRS’s parent agency – declined to comment on Friday. Immigrants, including those in the United States illegally, are required to file taxes and use the same IRS forms as tax filers with citizenship. Paying taxes has long been seen as a key factor for illegal immigrants to obtain legal status. “It’s just an effort to once again terrorize people with certain immigration statuses, and it’s another step of turning the IRS into an agency that collaborates with immigration authorities rather than being an agency that enforces and administers the tax laws,” said Nina Olson, executive director of the Center for Taxpayer Rights, an advocacy and low-income tax assistance organization. The Treasury Department and the Department of Homeland Security spent much of 2025 attempting to collaborate, sharing confidential taxpayer data with immigration officials to assist in the Trump administration’s deportation campaign. Olson’s organization filed a lawsuit, and a federal judge blocked the IRS from disclosing that data in November. The federal government has appealed the ruling. In February, the IRS admitted to the court that it had erroneously shared the data of more than 42,000 taxpayers with DHS. Disclosing a taxpayer’s personal information — including a name or address — outside of narrow legal exceptions carries stiff penalties, including jail time. President Donald Trump recently dropped a lawsuit against the IRS seeking $10 billion in damages after a tax agency contractor leaked his tax returns to media outlets. The contractor, Charles Littlejohn, is serving a five-year prison sentence. In exchange for dropping the suit, the Justice Department created a nearly $1.8 billion fund to pay supposed victims of “government weaponization.” As part of the settlement, acting Attorney General Todd Blanche signed an agreement permanently barring the IRS from pursuing tax claims against Trump, his family or his businesses. The Trump administration has sought to aggressively police government benefits awarded to non-citizens. Federal law already prohibits undocumented immigrants from many entitlement programs, including Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and other benefits covering education and housing. Non-citizens, though, pay into those programs through income, payroll and sales taxes. Tax preparers nationwide reported encountering clients who said they were frightened to file their taxes in 2025 due to the IRS’s collaboration with immigration enforcement. That fear has fiscal consequences for the United States government. The Yale Budget Lab estimated that lower tax compliance rates among immigrant communities could lead to a $313 billion loss in federal revenue over the next decade. The IRS is considering other methods of determining a taxpayer’s citizenship status. Non-citizens can file taxes using a nine-digit “individual tax identification number” in place of a Social Security number. Tax officials have discussed differentiating codes to denote a filer’s immigration status, the people said. The New York Times first reported those deliberations. (Reporting by Jacob Bogage; Editing by Colleen Jenkins, Rosalba O’Brien and Nick Zieminski)