President Donald Trump slammed Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) on Tuesday after the Senate minority leader tried to blame Trump for the Texas floods. “I saw a Palestinian senator, his name is Schumer, he’s a great Palestinian,” Trump said in a White House cabinet meeting. “He’s become a Palestinian. He’s abandoned the Jews. But I saw him say, ‘It’s Trump’s fault. Yeah, yeah, that’s right, it’s Trump’s fault.'” .@POTUS slams @SenSchumer for blaming him for the horrific Texas flooding: "I actually saw that stupid guy try to blame it on me… but his career is limited because I hear AOC is going to beat him." pic.twitter.com/fFStWivf0J — Rapid Response 47 (@RapidResponse47) July 8, 2025 Trump compared Schumer’s remarks to Jon Lovitz’s Saturday Night Live character Tommy Flanagan, the pathological liar. “I actually saw that stupid guy try to blame it on me,” Trump said. “And I said, ‘Man, that’s a tough one to take.’ But his career is limited, because I hear AOC is going to beat him, and she’s no bargain either, by the way.” Schumer and other high-profile Democrats have suggested Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) might have exacerbated the crisis by reducing staff and funding from federal weather agencies. In a letter, Schumer called for an investigation into the National Weather Service on Monday to determine if staffing shortages “contributed to the massive loss of life and property.” He cited a New York Times report that said certain Texas forecasting and coordination positions were vacant. “NYT further reports that the vacancy rate at many NWS offices nationwide has roughly doubled since President Trump returned to office — due in part to a wave of early retirements encouraged by the administration and a freeze on hiring,” Schumer’s letter said. However, meteorologists have stated that cuts by the federal government did not impact flood warnings or responses, as The Daily Wire previously reported. “There is little evidence that any of the recent cuts to NOAA/NWS negatively impacted services for this event, regardless of what may be being said on social media,” Alan Gerard, a former director of the Analysis and Understanding Branch in the National Severe Storms Laboratory at NOAA, said. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt also criticized Schumer and “members of the media” for blaming Trump for the floods. “Blaming President Trump for these floods is a depraved lie, and it serves no purpose during this time of national mourning,” Leavitt said. More than 100 people have died in the Texas flash floods, including 28 children.

An impostor is using an artificial intelligence voice changer to impersonate Secretary of State Marco Rubio and contact foreign and domestic officials, according to a July 3 State Department cable obtained by the Washington Post. Authorities have not identified the individual behind the attempts, but claim that he was probably trying to gain access to information or accounts. So far he has contacted at least five officials, “including three foreign ministers, a U.S. governor, and a U.S. member of Congress.” It is unknown if they responded to the AI generated messages. The impersonator first used a fake email address to create a Signal account. Signal is a secure encrypted messaging app that is widely used by government officials. Then, he used the phone numbers associated with the officials’ accounts to contact them. “The actor left voicemails on Signal for at least two targeted individuals and in one instance, sent a text message inviting the individual to communicate on Signal,” according to the cable. He also impersonated other State Department personnel using email. The FBI had warned government officials in May about an “ongoing malicious text and voice messaging campaign” targeting them and their contacts with voice generated messages in an attempt to gain funds or information. “If you receive a message claiming to be from a senior U.S. official, do not assume it is authentic,” they said. That month, someone breached the phone of White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles and impersonated her in numerous calls to high ranking officials. The State Department says they will “carry out a thorough investigation and continue to implement safeguards to prevent this from happening in the future.” Hany Farid, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley who specializes in analyzing deepfakes, told the Washington Post that phishing schemes targeting government officials do not require sophisticated knowledge and are often successful because officials can be careless about data security. The rise of AI has made classic phishing schemes much easier. Using an AI voice generator, all you need is 15-20 seconds of audio to “clone” someone’s voice and record them saying whatever text you specify. New AI-assisted cybersecurity schemes are popping up all over. In June Canadian agencies warned citizens of similar AI phishing schemes targeting government officials and CEOs. Ukraine also issued a warning that Russian intelligence agents were impersonating its Security Service to recruit civilians for sabotage missions. Over 50% of phishing emails are now generated by AI, according to a recent study by Barracuda and researchers from Columbia University and the University of Chicago.

If you wanted to assure the American public that a rising political star wasn’t a communist, you probably wouldn’t turn to an avowed socialist for his “expert” analysis. But that’s what PolitiFact just did for Zohran Mamdani, who won the Democratic primary for mayor of New York City in a bombshell upset last month. After his win, critics immediately raised the alarm that Mamdani would bring communism to the Big Apple. The self-described democratic socialist has proposed radical policies like government-run grocery stores, rent freezes, and converting housing from private to public. President Donald Trump called Mamdani a “100% Communist Lunatic,” and New York Rep. Elise Stefanik and a number of conservative commentators branded him a communist as well. So, PolitiFact geared up to defend him. Two days after Mamdani’s victory, PolitiFact published a “fact check” stating that claims he is a communist are “false.” To support its claims, PolitiFact interviewed Geoffrey Kurtz, a political science professor who has taught for 18 years at the Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York. “The idea that Mamdani is a communist is an absurd slander,” Kurtz told the outlet. But Kurtz isn’t just a professor. He was a socialist activist in college and remains a socialist today. Kurtz was involved with the campus chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America while earning his bachelor’s at New College of Florida, according to the school’s student newspaper. The campus chapter’s pamphlets reportedly addressed members as “dear radicals.” Kurtz continued to be involved with the organization after he graduated college, when he was an editor of the Democratic Socialists of America’s Religion and Socialism Blog. The professor has also written multiple times about being a “religious socialist.” The authors of the PolitiFact “fact check” did not respond to a request for comment. In the end, PolitiFact concluded that Mamdani’s platform is “not akin to communism, a system in which the government controls the means of production and takes over private businesses.” “We rate this statement False,” PolitiFact stated. Hilariously though, PolitiFact failed to acknowledge Mamdani’s own social media posts talking about workers seizing the “means of production,” a key Marxist concept. “If we want everyone to be full participants in the economy, we need worker ownership of the means of production,” Mamdani posted on X in 2020. On Thursday, PolitiFact added an editor’s note saying the White House had alerted them to Mamdani’s old posts. The outlet said it re-interviewed several experts, but still decided Mamdani still isn’t a communist. “We found the significance of [Mamdani’s] comment inconclusive and not reflective of his 2025 mayoral platform, so our rating remains unchanged,” the editor’s note reads. Go figure. “I had the impression that Mamdani intended that phrase as lighthearted hyperbole. I see no reason to assume that the phrase conveys anything precise about what he thinks,” Kurtz, the socialist professor, told PolitiFact when they interviewed him again. Hyperbole, huh? Well, as Xi Van Fleet — a survivor of Mao’s Cultural Revolution in Communist China — wrote for The Daily Wire last week, there’s nothing lighthearted about Mamdani’s political platform. “The danger of Communism is not that it comes all at once, but that it creeps in gradually, wrapped in words like ‘justice’ and ‘equity,'” Van Fleet wrote. “But behind the slogans lies a brutal reality: misery, scarcity, and repression.”

New reporting reveals an extraordinary isolation campaign by former President Joe Biden’s closest aides at the end of his term, with staffers screaming at reporters, changing his phone number, and blocking access from panicked Democrats trying to tell him the truth about his failing campaign. The revelation appears in the recently published book by a trio of legacy media reporters, titled “2024: How Trump Retook the White House and the Democrats Lost America,” written by Wall Street Journal reporter Josh Dawsey, New York Times White House correspondent Tyler Pager, and Washington Post reporter Isaac Arnsdorf. Pager, conducting research for the book, managed to obtain Biden’s cellphone number in March 2025. The former president quickly agreed to an interview despite his aides repeatedly turning down similar requests from Page for several months. Asked if he regretted dropping out of the presidential race, Biden said in a dispassionate tone, “No, not now. I don’t spend a lot of time on regrets.” He then ended the conversation to board an Amtrak train, Pager recalled for the Times. Pager’s brief discussion with Biden reportedly sparked panic among the former president’s top aides. “After the first call,” the authors report in the book, “furious Biden aides repeatedly called and texted [Pager].” “One screamed at me for calling the former president directly. Others texted furiously, trying to figure out how I had obtained Mr. Biden’s phone number,” Pager said. Although Biden himself initially seemed open to continuing to talk to Pager, the reporter’s calls began to go straight to voicemail. Within days, Pager’s calls were greeted with a message from Verizon: “The number you dialed has been changed, disconnected, or is no longer in service.” The Times reporter writes that this incident is reflective of the insularity of Team Biden throughout his doomed presidential campaign. Pager reports that instead of confronting Biden with the harsh reality after his disastrous debate performance, his inner circle restricted access to him, making it difficult for even longtime allies, such as Senator Chris Coons of Delaware, to connect with the president. On his way to a fundraiser after the debate, Biden asked his traveling aides aboard Air Force One what people were saying about his performance. Rather than providing an accurate assessment, they offered what witnesses described as a “sanitized version” of the situation. According to Pager, Biden’s aides never even allowed him to meet with campaign pollsters, instead presenting Biden with overly optimistic outlooks that alarmed campaign staff. Following the debate, campaign pollsters presented their findings to Biden’s advisers, and their conclusion was damning: all polling indicated that Biden had no path to victory, and voters were not convinced that he was up for the job. This assessment enraged Steve Ricchetti, counselor to the former president and chairman of Biden’s 2020 presidential campaign, who reportedly preferred a sanitized version of events. “Two days after the presentation, Geoff Garin, one of the pollsters, checked in with Mr. Ricchetti. Mr. Ricchetti lit into him and said the presentation was out of line,” Pager reported. “It was not their job to tell them there was no path to victory. The pollsters, Mr. Ricchetti said, were supposed to provide the path to win.” Rep. Pete Aguilar, a top House Democrat from California, confronted Ricchetti in a heated call, asking, “Do you realize how bad it is? Has anyone told the president how bad it is?” When Ricchetti insisted that many members of Congress still supported the president, Aguilar pushed back: “Steve, has anyone walked into the Oval and told him we could lose everything?” Ricchetti admitted no one had. According to The Times, the situation was so dire that reliable Democratic strongholds, including Virginia, Minnesota, and New Mexico, suddenly became competitive – a devastating development that Biden’s inner circle concealed from him. When former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) met privately with Biden at the White House during this crisis period, she grew frustrated by his insistence that polling showed no real change since the debate. At one point, Biden called his longtime adviser, Mike Donilon, to refute Pelosi’s claim that polls showed he would lose to Trump. Donilon got on the line and reportedly contradicted Pelosi’s assessment. Campaign adviser Adrienne Elrod was so concerned that Biden wasn’t getting an accurate assessment that she contacted “Morning Joe” hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski, knowing the president watched their show on MSNBC every morning. Days before Biden dropped out, Scarborough aired these concerns, saying, “The anger I hear are the people who are keeping him in a bubble.” Even when confronted directly by donors at a Hamptons fundraiser who challenged him on his debate performance, Biden dismissed concerns as “one bad night” and vowed to stay in the race. His closest aides brushed off the concerns as typical donor anxiety. The controversy over Biden’s isolation mirrors similar concerns that arose during his presidency, when critics frequently questioned whether his staff was shielding him from unscripted interactions with the press and public. Throughout his term, the White House faced persistent accusations that Biden’s handlers were deliberately limiting his exposure to mask cognitive decline – allegations his team consistently dismissed as partisan attacks despite mounting video evidence of verbal stumbles and confusion during public appearances.

The store sustained more than $25,000 in damages

'Disrespectful to the Italian American community'

The man allegedly claimed his laptop was the bomb

'A distraction from CTU’s poor record'

News Dune: Part Three Dune Messiah Is Just Dune: Part Three Now Maybe “Dun3” wasn’t clear enough. By Molly Templeton | Published on July 8, 2025 Credit: Warner Bros. Pictures Comment 0 Share New Share Credit: Warner Bros. Pictures Dune director Denis Villeneuve is making Dune Messiah. Even before Dune Part Two came out, the director was talking about the third novel in Frank Herbert’s series, saying it “would be the dream” to make a trilogy. Villeneuve told Empire, “Dune Messiah was written in reaction to the fact that people perceived Paul Atreides as a hero… which is not what he wanted to do. My adaptation [of Dune] is closer to his idea that it’s actually a warning.” And this is happening. It was confirmed last year. There’s casting news and everything. But don’t look for Dune Messiah on your local multiplex marquee. Nope: This is just Dune: Part Three. One can only assume that the studios behind this film thought it would be too confusing for audiences to endure a slight change in title structure after two films. Never mind that Dune Messiah is the second book in the series, and that it is not the third part of the first book. We must have simplicity! And numbers! (Yes, Wicked changed its Part Two to For Good but shhh.) Also, never mind that Villeneuve told Vanity Fair in September that the three movies don’t make a trilogy at all: It’s important that people understand that for me, it was really a diptych. It was really a pair of movies that will be the adaptation of the first book. That’s done and that’s finished. If I do a third one, which is in the writing process, it’s not like a trilogy. It’s strange to say that, but if I go back there, it’s to do something that feels different and has its own identity. In announcing this title, Variety also notes that Dune 3: Arrakis Drift Dune: Part Three will not be entirely shot with Imax cameras, as previously reported, but will have some sequences shot with Imax cameras. Just some very big sandworms. Not all of them. Dune: Part Three is expected to be in theaters December 16, 2026.[end-mark] The post <i>Dune Messiah</i> Is Just <i>Dune: Part Three</i> Now appeared first on Reactor.