Parents, educators and community leaders recently attended a Fairfax County School Board meeting in Virginia to ask questions about an alleged coerced abortion case involving two Hispanic minors at Centreville High School. Centreville High School has a minority enrollment of 69%, and 32% of its students are economically disadvantaged. For pregnancy matters, the school’s policy states that students are encouraged to discuss their concerns with their parents. The whistleblower at the school, Zenaida Perez, is an English as a Second Language (ESL) Teacher and is originally from Cuba. She immigrated to the United States in 1990 and holds a master’s degree in ESL. Perez claims that, beginning in 2022, she discovered a social worker was arranging and paying for minor girls to obtain abortions without parental knowledge or consent, which is required in the state of Virginia. She reportedly brought her concerns to school administrators seven times. But instead of district officials addressing these allegations, Perez says she experienced bullying from administrators and attempts from the school to undermine her integrity by falsely accusing her of handing out pregnancy tests to students. The allegations are deeply troubling given both of the girls involved were underage. Perez says that one student, who was five months pregnant and wanting to keep her baby, said she felt like she “had no choice.” The other girl told Perez she was terrified because her legal guardians did not know about her abortion. Worried parents in attendance at the school board meeting questioned whether these were isolated incidents or part of a broader pattern of overriding parental rights and disregarding state law. Most Americans support parental consent for abortion as they recognize that life-and-death decisions should not be made without parental guidance. In Troxel v. Granville, the United States Supreme Court affirmed the fundamental rights of “parents in the care, custody, and control of their children,” and 36 states require parental involvement in abortion-related decisions for minors. Despite the guarantee of parental rights, Virginia is attempting to strip them from the abortion equation by passing House Joint Resolution 1, a constitutional amendment that enshrines intentionally broad “reproductive freedom” as a right in the state constitution. The Centreville High School case also underscores over a half-century of abuse by so-called “reproductive health care” advocates targeting minority communities for abortion. Sadly, abortion peddlers know impoverished minority girls are abortion-vulnerable due to the broader inequalities they face, like racial prejudice, economic disparities, and access to authentic health care. They are also unlikely to resist coercion, especially when it comes from authority figures like school officials. Their struggles are not just statistics to me, because I lived them. I grew up in the middle of the same kind of hardship after my mother’s attempted abortion with me. She had come to the U.S. from Honduras, already struggling to raise seven children she couldn’t provide for, trapped in an abusive home. She too believed she had no other choice. She did defy coercion from her abortion physician in the end, but this kind of resistance is rare. Victims are often threatened, manipulated, and face real barriers like lack of money, absence of support, or fear for their safety. I am thankful that the Governor Glenn Youngkin has directed the state police to open a criminal investigation into the case. Parental rights should not be usurped, and school employees have no right to hide secret abortions from parents. Children need protection and parental guidance, especially when faced with an unplanned pregnancy, not forced secrecy by adults attempting to usurp fundamental rights of parents to make decisions regarding the wellbeing of their children. Girls from marginalized communities, including Hispanic girls from Centreville High School, deserve better than betrayal from people they should trust and cover-ups by school bureaucrats. * * * Sarah Zagorski is the Senior Director of Public Relations and Communication at Americans United for Life. The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent warned that the U.S. could be on the hook for a staggering $1 trillion in tariff refunds if the Supreme Court sides against President Trump’s trade agenda — a decision that could cripple the Treasury and kneecap America’s economic leverage. At the heart of the legal battle is the Trump administration’s broad use of tariffs under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), particularly the so-called “reciprocal tariffs” that have imposed sweeping levies on imports. Two lower courts have declared the tariffs unconstitutional, contending they overstepped executive authority and amounted to taxation without congressional approval. Bessent made it clear: If the Supreme Court rules against the administration, the U.S. government will be forced to refund as much as $1 trillion to importers, a move he called “terrible” for the Treasury and the economy, the New York Post reported. “We’d have to do it,” Bessent told NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday. “But it would be terrible.” According to court filings, the administration has already collected tens of billions in tariff revenue since Trump’s “Liberation Day” in April, with $30 billion in July alone, a 242% spike year-over-year. The total potentially owed could reach up to $1 trillion if the Supreme Court delays action. Bessent did not mince words about the dangers of reversing the tariffs. “Unwinding them could cause significant disruption,” he said, emphasizing that economic benefits such as record stock market highs, increased capital expenditures, and strong GDP growth are largely due to the Trump tariff strategy. Solicitor General D. John Sauer echoed Bessent, writing: “With tariffs, we are a rich nation; without tariffs, we are a poor nation… The economic consequences would be ruinous.” Bessent was pressed repeatedly on “Meet the Press” on whether the administration would honor the court’s ruling if the tariffs were struck down. “I mean, there’s no ‘be prepared,’” he said. “If the court says it, we’d have to do it.” He cautioned that such a refund would not only harm the nation financially but also undermine the U.S. negotiating position globally, slow the progress made on rebalancing trade, and potentially reverse the economic momentum Trump has established. Bessent dismissed complaints from corporations like John Deere and Nike, who blame the tariffs for profit losses and layoffs, calling them cherry-picked examples. He emphasized that Treasury is hearing a “record amount” of positive feedback from companies that support the tariffs. Bessent rejected claims from Goldman Sachs and The New York Times that consumers are bearing the brunt, insisting that many foreign manufacturers are “eating the tariffs,” and that American economic strength is a direct result of the policy. “This isn’t about the dollars,” Bessent said. “This is about balance. The dollars are an after amount.” Bessent and President Trump see the court battle not just as a legal fight, but as a referendum on America’s right to defend its economic sovereignty.

An LGBT rights attorney has been charged in a federal indictment with lying during a judicial inquiry into whether he and others engaged in “judge shopping” in order to challenge Alabama’s ban on gender-affirming medical care for transgender youth. Carl Charles, an attorney at Lambda Legal, was charged in an indictment unsealed on Monday in federal court in Montgomery, Alabama, months after a judge took the rare step of sanctioning him and referring him for a criminal investigation. It marks a rare instance of charges being brought related to a widespread practice among both liberal and conservative litigants to steer cases challenging government policies to ideologically sympathetic judges. Federal prosecutors secured the indictment amid a broader push by the U.S. Department of Justice under President Donald Trump to investigate providers of medical gender-affirming care for transgender youth. Charles, who worked in the Justice Department during the tenure of Democratic President Joe Biden, pleaded not guilty on Monday to making a false statement before a court. Lambda Legal, in a statement, said it stood behind Charles and called the indictment “an outrageous act of governmental overreach.” Charles’ lawyers did not respond to requests for comment. Charles was one of three lawyers sanctioned in February by U.S. District Judge Liles Burke after pursuing legal challenges to Republican-led Alabama’s ban on the use of puberty-blocking drugs and hormones to treat gender dysphoria in transgender minors. Burke, a Trump appointee, said the lawyers tried to “game the system” by dropping two cases they filed in 2022 when they were assigned to him and then mounting a new legal challenge in a different federal district court in Alabama. A 2024 report by a three-judge panel that investigated whether the three lawyers engaged in misconduct by attempting to circumvent procedures designed to have cases randomly assigned to a judge found they did so because they viewed Burke as a “bad draw.” The new case was reassigned to Burke, who, despite their concerns, blocked the law’s enforcement, though an appeals court later reinstated it. The indictment alleges that during the judicial inquiry, Charles falsely testified that he had not called a judge’s chambers in April 2022 about the assignment of the lawsuit with which he was involved. According to Burke’s ruling, Charles later amended his answers to state he actually called a judge’s clerk. He apologized for his earlier response. (Reporting by Nate Raymond in Boston, Editing by Alexia Garamfalvi and Matthew Lewis)

The Italian journalist under fire online for a controversial #MeToo and Black Lives Matter question at the Venice Film Festival is now defending herself. Federica Polidoro sat down with “After the Hunt” stars Julia Roberts, Andrew Garfield, and Ayo Edebiri for an interview to promote the project. One moment from the conversation, posted to the ArtsLifeTV YouTube channel, has gone viral, with critics accusing Polidoro of being “racist” for directing one of her questions specifically to Roberts and Garfield, who are white, while being accused of excluding Edebiri, who is black. “Now that the #MeToo era and the Black Lives Matters are done, what do we have to expect in Hollywood and what we lost, we lost something with the politically correct era?” she asked. Despite the question not being directed at her, Edebiri jumped in to answer it. “I know that that’s not for me, and I don’t know if it’s purposeful that it’s not for me, but I just am curious,” the star of “The Bear” said. She went on, “I don’t think it’s done. I don’t think it’s done at all,” as Roberts chimed in with her agreement. Edebiri went on: “I think maybe hashtags might not be used as much, but I do think that there’s work being done by activists, by people, every day, that’s beautiful, important work that’s not finished, that’s really, really, really active for a reason, because this world is really charged. And that work isn’t finished at all. Maybe if there’s not, like, mainstream coverage in the way that there might have been, daily headlines in the way that it might have been eight or so years ago, but I don’t think it means that the work is done. That’s what I would say.” Garfield chimed in, agreeing that the Black Lives Matter and #MeToo movements “are still absolutely alive, as you say, just maybe not as labeled or covered or magnified as much.” The exchange triggered widespread backlash online, with many commenters accusing Poidoro of asking an insensitive question while being dismissive of the only black actor participating in the interview. Following the resulting backlash, Polidoro took to Instagram to defend herself in a lengthy post.   View this post on Instagram   A post shared by Federica Polidoro ? Film Journalist & Theorist (@federica__polidoro) “I am not aware of any protocol that dictates the order in which questions must be asked in an interview,” the journalist wrote in part. “Censoring or delegitimizing questions considered ‘uncomfortable’ does not fall within the practice of democracy.” “To those who unjustly accuse me of racism, I would like to clarify that in my work I have interviewed people of every background and ethnicity, and my own family is multi-ethnic, matriarchal, and feminist, with a significant history of immigration,” she continued.  “I have collaborated for over 20 years with numerous national and international publications of all political orientations, always approaching my work with openness and professional rigor. In my view, the real racists are those who see racism everywhere and seek to muzzle journalism, limiting freedom of analysis, critical thinking and the plurality of perspectives.” “After the Hunt” is a psychological thriller about a college professor (Roberts) whose student (Edebiri) makes an accusation against one of her colleagues (Garfield). The film’s tagline is, “Not everything is supposed to make you uncomfortable.”

A shadowy for-profit company and its nonprofit counterpart provide free services to at least 40 far-left prosecutors’ offices, raising questions about whether it’s working on behalf of taxpayers or of donors who have essentially bought government. The Wren Collective is a shadowy group that emerged from a Cold War-era initiative aimed at promoting Soviet films in the United States. Its current iteration — funded by a former Enron executive and host of other eftist megadonors — claims that America’s “system of policing and mass incarceration is deeply flawed and intractably racist.” The group has intervened on specific criminal cases, written policies that the district attorneys implement — such as eliminating cash bail — and strategized with at least one district attorney to mobilize activists to pressure judges who stood in the way. That’s according to new research from the Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund, which used public records laws to secure tens of thousands of communications between leftist prosecutors and Wren. Emails suggest that the collective gets funding from donors contingent on government offices agreeing to do the group’s bidding, even demanding proof that an office is following Wren’s recommendations in order to satisfy donors. Those same donors often bankrolled the district attorney’s election campaign. “Once in office, these donor-activist groups leverage their political relationships with prosecutors to embed The Wren Collective in their offices as the DAs’ lead policy and communications advisors,” the Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund said. “The Wren Collective, a single obscure consulting group, could only make policy for dozens of progressive prosecutors’ offices and nearly 50 million Americans if those district attorneys understood the group’s help was strongly suggested by their shared political donors and allies,” it added. “Wren’s fiduciary duty and client loyalty remained with their political and nonprofit donors — the same donors who got them ‘hired’ as unpaid policy and communications consultants to the elected prosecutors.” One donor is David Menschel, a Portland activist who has funded the campaigns of radical DAs across the country. Menschel was a top donor to Portland DA Mike Schmidt in 2020. After he won the election, Menschel connected Schmidt with Jessica Brand, a former public defender who runs the Wren Collective. Wren employee Amy Weber wrote to Schmidt: “We do this work without any billing or publicity. These policies will be yours.” It soon became apparent that Menschel would be funding Wren for its quasi-governmental work – with conditions. “I spoke to Dave, and all he needs is for us to give him a final scope of work,” Weber wrote. Another donor is oil heiress Stacy Schusterman. Schusterman donated $1.8 million to PACs supporting the election of José Garza in Austin, Texas. Brand then had Garza’s office speak directly with their shared funder about the work that Brand’s group could do inside government. Wren stands at the ready anytime soft-on-crime policies create a mess for prosecutors. When Loudoun County, Virginia’s prosecutor, Buta Biberaj, personally tried to jail the father of a girl who was raped by a “genderfluid” boy in the school bathroom — while the boy went on to sexually assault a second girl — Wren asked whether “you would like some communications support.” Wren went on to form a relationship with Biberaj’s office that included drafting “diversion” policies, which involved even lighter penalties for crime. George Soros has reshaped law enforcement in the United States by injecting huge sums of money into previously sleepy elections, with far-left candidates sometimes outspending their rivals tenfold, and still squeaking out only the narrowest victories. The strategy involves the idea that influence groups don’t have to convince legislatures to change laws if they can place prosecutors who will simply decline to enforce them. But this new breed of candidate has often never worked as a prosecutor, instead coming from activism circles that defend the rights of criminals. Once they’re in office, that support never goes away, the Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund report found. “The node of this donor-backed prosecutor influence operation is The Wren Collective LLC,” it wrote. “The substance of those policies – abolishing bail and releasing dangerous offenders, declining to prosecute narcotics, shoplifting, prostitution, and rioting while increasing prosecutions of law enforcement officers – have had serious consequences for public safety.” In San Antonio, Texas, the Wren Collective “developed and implemented prosecutorial policies” for DA Joe Gonzales, all without a public contract. Brand was Gonzales’s “shadow communications director and senior advisor–despite other holding those roles on the public payroll,” the report said. Even as the group secretly worked for the DA, Brand presented herself to the media as an independent expert who sought to deflect blame from Gonzales when crime rose. When the police chief complained of an increase in homicides because criminals saw few consequences, Brand orchestrated a seemingly organic “op-ed from a community advocate” in response. Text messages show that in March 2020, Brand told the San Antonio DA’s office to drop a death penalty case, and offered to use a political action committee to pressure judges. “You could settle that death penalty case right now and no one would bat an eye,” she wrote. “Are the judges being any better? Or would it be helpful if some real justice pac volunteers started calling?” In 2022, when a police officer non-fatally shot a suspect who hit him with a car, Wren pushed to drop charges against the suspect and indict the officer instead. “We got an indictment on the officer,” Gonzales’ deputy texted Brand. “Thanks for the help.” Brand’s group even told Gonzales what to say about it, with the deputy reassuring her that he “stuck to the talking points.” When Gonzales faced a recall, Brand connected him with lawyers to fight it. Gonzales replied, “This was sent to my work email, and I do not always check my work emails as often as I do my personal.” He told her to communicate with him on his personal email “because my secretarial staff can see my emails.” The group wrote policies eliminating cash bail that were adopted by prosecutors in Virginia, Texas, and Florida; a policy that resulted in Portland not charging left-wing rioters; and a “Sex Work Policy” to “mitigate the many harms and abuses plaguing sex workers, who often also struggle with poverty, discrimination, and marginalization, by declining to prosecute.” It held weekly calls with since-recalled San Francisco DA Chesa Boudin. Yet the Wren Collective is shrouded in secrecy. The Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund said many prosecutors refused to turn over communications with the group under public records laws, with some demanding up to $14,000 and others producing responses that omitted communications that the law enforcement group knew existed. Wren’s nonprofit arm is structured as a “fiscally sponsored project” of a larger nonprofit: the shell of a group dedicated to pushing Soviet films in the United States before the fall of the Communist bloc. That intermediary serves as a black box, preventing its donors and its staff salaries from being directly disclosed. But the larger group, once known as the American-Soviet Film Initiative, has reported millions in funding from the foundations of Schusterman, George Soros, Mark Zuckerberg’s wife, Priscilla, and Cari Tuna, the wife of Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz. Another major funder is Arnold Ventures, the charity of former Enron executive John Arnold. Arnold Ventures’ former COO now works for Wren. Yet records show that even as billionaires wrote checks so the nonprofit could provide shadow government workers free of charge, which the Wren Collective used to gain easy access to offices, Brand would sometimes later ask DAs to pay an identically-named for-profit firm. One contract obtained by the law enforcement group showed that the money — $15,000 a month from the office of Los Angeles DA George Gascon — went to Wren Collective, LLC. The contract was awarded without competition. Wren may have pulled the same bait-and-switch on Minneapolis prosecutor Mary Moriarty. In May, the Department of Justice said it was investigating Moriarty for civil rights violations after saying that charging decisions would take into account a suspect’s “racial identity”. The following month, Moriarty asked the Board of Supervisors for approval to pay Wren $150,000 to counteract “misinformation.” Brand did not respond to The Daily Wire’s questions about the difference between the nonprofit and for-profit groups, how much she was paid, which prosecutors she had worked for, who funded the nonprofit, and whether providing donor-funded services to government offices posed ethical concerns. The group works hand-in-hand with a second group that steers Soros prosecutors after their election, Fair and Just Prosecution. FJP’s founding executive director, Miriam Krinsky, resigned last year, the day that The Daily Wire published documents showing her staff accused her of racism and said she hypocritically called the police on them. She was replaced by Aramis Ayala, a black former Orlando prosecutor who is married to a member of the Wren Collective’s board. Ayala was replaced as Orlando prosecutor by Monique Worrell, who gave confidential files to Wren so that the group could write a memo justifying not charging a teen with murder. The suspect was found in possession of a machine gun months later and sent to prison by federal prosecutors.

'We should all be worried'

'These are not the actions of a legitimate protest group'