Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders is promoting a significant expansion of federal estate taxes that would dramatically increase the government’s claim on family wealth passed between generations, raising constitutional concerns about property rights and the impact on family-owned businesses. The Estate Tax Proposal Speaking at the Martin Luther King Jr. Day event in Columbia, South Carolina on January 21, Sanders outlined his vision for higher estate taxes targeting wealthy Americans. The Vermont senator argued against allowing families to transfer substantial wealth to their children, characterizing inherited wealth as unjustified regardless of how it was earned. His proposal represents one of the most aggressive estate tax expansions discussed by presidential candidates, fundamentally challenging the American principle that parents should determine how their life’s work benefits their children. Constitutional and Economic Concerns The proposal raises serious questions about property rights guaranteed under the Constitution. American families have traditionally enjoyed the freedom to pass wealth to their children without excessive government interference. Estate taxes already claim up to forty percent of assets above certain thresholds, forcing many family farms and small businesses to sell assets just to pay tax bills. Sanders’s plan would expand this burden significantly, potentially destroying multigenerational family enterprises that represent decades of hard work, risk-taking, and sacrifice by parents hoping to provide for their children’s futures. The Broader Implications This proposal reflects a fundamental disagreement about American values. Conservative principles hold that families, not government bureaucrats, should decide how to use wealth they have legally earned and already paid taxes on during their lifetimes. The characterization of inheritance as illegitimate ignores the reality that most wealthy families created their success through innovation, hard work, and job creation. Double-taxing estates discourages savings and investment while expanding government power over private family decisions. Americans who believe in limited government and individual liberty should carefully consider whether empowering Washington to confiscate family wealth aligns with constitutional principles of property rights and economic freedom that built this nation’s prosperity. Sources Jacobin: Bernie Against the Billionaires

Chicago’s Loop district descended into chaos as social media-fueled teen mobs overwhelmed police, leaving one dead and exposing how liberal officials’ soft-on-crime rhetoric has emboldened lawless youth takeovers that terrorize law-abiding residents and businesses. Social Media Fuels Downtown Disorder Hundreds of teenagers converged on Chicago’s Roosevelt and Canal intersection Saturday evening, March 23, 2024, after social media posts promoted an unsupervised gathering. The crowd overwhelmed the South Loop area near transit hubs, banks, and retail establishments around 7 p.m. What began as a meetup rapidly escalated into violence when gunfire erupted at approximately 8:06 p.m. in a BMO Harris Bank parking lot. A 17-year-old boy was fatally shot in the chest and neck, while a 15-year-old sustained leg wounds. Police immediately detained the gunman and recovered the firearm as chaos unfolded across multiple blocks. Mass Arrests Follow Deadly Shooting Commander David Harris of the Central/1st District ordered mass detentions via radio, announcing “Anybody that’s on the street, they’re going to jail.” Dozens of juveniles were arrested, with formal charges filed against 12 individuals—eight juveniles and one adult. Charges included disorderly conduct for teens aged 14-17, assault, and reckless conduct. Adult Sybrina Collins, 18, faced resisting arrest charges. Three additional juveniles received curfew citations. The aggressive enforcement marked a shift from previous lenient approaches that critics argue allowed these gatherings to proliferate. This incident mirrored a July 30, 2023 takeover at the same location where 400 youths looted stores, resulting in 40 arrests and three firearms seized. Political Enablement of Youth Violence Mayor Brandon Johnson previously criticized use of the term “mob action” to describe similar teen takeovers, downplaying the severity of coordinated youth violence. This soft rhetoric stands in stark contrast to the reality facing South Loop residents and business owners who endure repeated disruptions. Alderman Brian Hopkins reported another incident on November 22, 2025, near the State and Randolph intersection following a Christmas tree lighting, claiming 300 juveniles rioted with five shot and officers injured by mace and stun guns. Police did not confirm Hopkins’ casualty figures, highlighting the disconnect between political narratives and street-level chaos. The pattern reveals how liberal city leadership prioritizes optics over public safety, refusing to acknowledge the organized nature of these social media-driven attacks. Eroding Safety and Economic Stability These recurring teen takeovers impose substantial costs on Chicago’s downtown corridor. Businesses face temporary closures, property damage, and lost revenue while policing expenses skyrocket. The South Loop’s high-traffic location near transit makes it vulnerable to flash mob gatherings that can materialize within hours of social media posts. Security firms like Titan Security now monitor and predict these events, reflecting the normalization of chaos that should outrage every taxpayer. Tourism and economic development suffer as the Loop’s reputation deteriorates. Families of victims bear the ultimate cost—a 17-year-old lost his life while city officials debate terminology rather than implementing effective deterrents that protect constitutional rights to public safety and commerce. Pattern of Failed Progressive Policies Chicago’s inability to prevent these takeovers stems from years of progressive policies that prioritize social narratives over law enforcement. The post-COVID era saw flash mobs and youth unrest evolve into organized disruptions, yet city leadership resists labeling them appropriately or implementing meaningful consequences. Proactive youth programs and outreach workers prove ineffective when overwhelmed by hundreds of unsupervised teens emboldened by prior leniency. The February 2024 “Trend Teen Meetup” at 150 West Roosevelt and subsequent incidents demonstrate a predictable cycle: social media promotion, mass gatherings, violence, minimal accountability, and repetition. Law-abiding Chicagoans deserve leadership that prioritizes their safety over political correctness, enforces existing laws without apology, and holds perpetrators accountable regardless of age when they commit violent crimes that destroy communities. Sources: Chicago: Large teen gathering in South Loop, arrests, two shot – CWB Chicago Chicago police swarm downtown after reported shooting following tree lighting – Fox 32 Chicago

Not many people live to be 100. It’s hard to imagine that many years on Earth, but if you make it that long, it’s truly a blessing. In the early 1980s, NBC broadcaster Willard Scott began recognizing centenarians on the Today Show. The segment eventually became sponsored by Smucker’s and featured the birthday boys and girls on a jelly jar. The Today Show family recently celebrated a very special 100th birthday of their own. Film and Book critic Gene Shalit, who spent more than 40 years on Today, turned 100 on March 25, 2026. View this post on Instagram A post shared by TODAY (@todayshow) Al Roker Shared a Special Message for Gene on His 100th Birthday. Al Roker shared a sweet message about Gene Shalit on his birthday. He called Gene a “legend” who created so many memorable moments on Today. Al recalled Sofia Loren becoming so captivated by Gene’s iconic moustache and hair that she just had to run her hands through it. He also spoke of Gene’s amazing sense of humor and ability to get people to talk and laugh during interviews like no one else ever could. “Happy Birthday to TODAY Show legend Gene Shalit, who turns 100 years old today! Shalit, who started at TODAY in 1969, spent 41 years at the show, the longest anyone has been on one television program in TV history,” an Instagram post reads. “Happy Birthday, Gene!” The birthday greetings for Gene Shalit poured in. “Happy 100th Birthday Gene. Can’t believe you’re still going strong,” a fan wrote. “Happy Centennial Birthday Gene Shalit. Gene Loves Critically Praised Great Movies To Review For,” another person shared. “God Bless you Gene and Happy Birthday! Always loved when he was on. His interview with Carol Channing is priceless,” a sweet comment reads. Happy Birthday, Gene. May this be your most blessed year yet. This story’s featured image is by NBC NewsWire/NBCU Photo Bank/NBCUniversal via Getty Images.

'I just think he's fat'

Movies & TV Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen Netflix’s Horror Series Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen Really Should Have Just Been a Movie The ten-hour series would have been far more tense were it whittled down to two. By Lacy Baugher Milas | Published on March 26, 2026 Credit: Netflix Comment 0 Share New Share Credit: Netflix One of the more popular (and, honestly, downright annoying) trends in prestige television in recent years is the idea that certain series aren’t really even TV shows at all, they’re secretly 10-hour movies. This idea of pseudo-novelistic television imagines series as though each installment is but one chapter in an ongoing narrative, frequently jettisoning traditional or self-contained episodic structures in favor of a single, drawn-out story. The pace is often excruciatingly slow, episodes tend to end in cliffhangers, and it’s usually fairly difficult to distinguish one specific installment from any other, at least until you get to the finale, and the presumed payoff to all these hours of screentime investment.  The problem is that investment rarely pays off the way you think it will. (Or at least, seldom in such a way that makes the destination feel worth the often ponderous journey.) Even some of the best examples of this particular trend—big-name prestige shows like Westworld or True Detective—often struggled to justify the idea that sacrificing basic storytelling now somehow meant better storytelling later if only viewers would just stick it out till the end. And, let’s be honest, if Jonathan Nolan can’t fully pull the ten-hour movie idea off with Westworld, Netflix’s bluntly titled horror series Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen is definitely not going to manage it. (And, spoiler alert: It doesn’t.) A lot of people are undoubtedly going to tune in to this show because of the involvement of The Duffer Brothers, the infamous minds behind the streamer’s megahit Stranger Things. But the Duffers are only executive producers here; the series technically hails from creator Haley Z. Boston, and the vibes could not be more different. Darker, gorier, and a lot less funny, Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen lacks much of the heart that helped the Duffers’ signature hit paper over some of its more egregious narrative flaws. Yes, this series is atmospheric and creepy, with a couple of surprising twists and genuine jump scares. But it is also often mind-numbingly dull, consistently poorly paced, and populated by cipher-like characters, many of whom are motivated by little beyond the plot needs of any given scene. The basics of the story are fairly simple, at least initially. Rachel Harkin (Camila Morrone) and Nicky Cunningham (Adam DiMarco) are getting married in five days. The series opens as the pair are roadtripping to his family’s sprawling cottage in the woods, where they’re planning to celebrate with a small, intimate ceremony featuring their nearest and dearest, without all the bullshit excess that tends to go hand in hand with nuptials. Unfortunately, Rachel can’t shake the feeling that (you guessed it!) something bad is going to happen, an anxiety that’s exacerbated by several strange run-ins on their way to the Cunningham compound and one that meeting Nicky’s bizarre family for the first time doesn’t help disappate. (The show doesn’t really address how these two have gotten this close to the altar without Rachel ever having so much as seemingly speaking to her would-be in-laws. But let’s go with it!) As the clock ticks down toward the pair’s “I dos”—a fact you’ll always be aware of as it is regularly painted onscreen in bright blood-red lettering—tensions steadily rise as Rachel must decide not only whether she and Nicky belong together, but what it truly means to commit to someone until death do you part. Star Camila Morrone is luminous throughout—she’s a shockingly beautiful crier—and does her best with what is a fairly thinly written role. She and DiMarco certainly look adorable together, but the chemistry between Rachel and Nicky has a sort of damp squib quality to it, and it can sometimes be difficult to tell whether they’re actually in love with one another or simply attracted to the idea of having a permanent partner in their lives. (This is perhaps the most realistic thing about this entire series, but the story’s central emotional question is ultimately subsumed by more overtly life-or-death stakes.) Superstitious and paranoid, Rachel has her own share of family trauma: Her mother died young, and she doesn’t have much of a relationship with her absentee father. Lacking any real bond in her life that models healthy relationship roles, Rachel is initially overwhelmed by Nicky’s family of complete freaks, who are all the kind of weird that’s so off-putting, it’s difficult to understand why anyone would stay at their house for the weekend, let alone yoke the rest of their lives to theirs. There’s Portia (Gus Birney), Nicky’s sister, who insists she can commune with the dead and likes to tell bedtime stories about monsters that may or may not live in the woods. Jules (Jeff Wilbusch) is Nicky’s rude doctor brother, who has spent his life haunted by a childhood run-in with a murderer he still refers to as the Sorry Man. Cunningham matriarch Victoria (a delightfully weird but woefully underused Jennifer Jason Leigh) appears to have some mental health issues of her own, as well as some fairly dated ideas about the rules of family life. And dad Boris (Ted Levine) is obsessed with taxidermizing the family wolfhounds and arranging them as guards around the house. The concept of marrying into this family is disturbing enough on its own, and that’s before you add in all the eerie coincidences, uncomfortable surprises, and vaguely supernatural threats that Rachel is forced to confront on her way to the altar.  As you can probably guess from its title, Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen is not a particularly subtle show. The plot is pretty much spelled out for you before you ever see a single minute of it, and it’s fairly obvious going in that whatever the “Something Very Bad” is, it won’t be revealed until well into the series’ eight-hour runtime. The question then becomes: Is any of this worth it? Unfortunately, the answer is: not really. At least, not in the story’s current format.  The thing is, there’s a genuinely entertaining premise here, buried under a pile of red herrings and exposition, and if Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen were a movie, it would probably work quite well. The entire process of planning a wedding is often a horror story in the best of circumstances. (When you think about it, it’s a bit shocking that more films don’t take advantage of the effectiveness of this near-universal nightmare setting.) A tightly plotted two-and-a-half-hour movie (heck, even a four-episode limited series!) would probably be a lot of fun to watch, if only because it would likely force Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen to pick a lane—or at least find a better balance—between the more supernatural-themed aspects of its story and the family drama that dogs Rachel and Nicky’s walk down the aisle. As it stands, there are huge chunks in the middle of the series that you, as a viewer, will almost immediately choose to forget, rather than try to make sense out of how precisely any of the events in them managed to happen, let alone are connected to the rest of the story. (A massive family group therapy session—led by Rachel, no less!—is but one of several.) To its credit, Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen is atmospherically and artfully rendered. Decorative boughs that look like nothing so much as dead trees frame the altar. Soft showers of snow sparkle in various lights, appearing magical and foreboding by turns. The series’s most grisly elements are rendered delicately and with obvious deliberation, from rotting animal carcasses to elegantly spread pools of blood. And a claustrophobic sense of foreboding hangs over everything, leaving you with nothing so much as a pervasive sense that, yes, something very bad really is going to happen. If only the final reveal was truly worth the journey.[end-mark] The post Netflix’s Horror Series <i>Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen</i> Really Should Have Just Been a Movie appeared first on Reactor.

News The X-Files Himesh Patel to Star in Ryan Coogler’s X-Files Alongside Danielle Deadwyler Will this show be great? I want to believe By Vanessa Armstrong | Published on March 26, 2026 Image: Ian Watson/HBO Max Comment 0 Share New Share Image: Ian Watson/HBO Max Ryan Coogler’s X-Files is picking up steam, and I’m nothing but excited for it. Today, Variety reported that Himesh Patel (Station Eleven, Tenet, The Franchise) has joined the show and will lead with the previously announced Danielle Deadwyler (Station Eleven). (Yes, that’s two actors from HBO’s Station Eleven! I’m okay with that.) We don’t have many details on the specifics of Coogler’s X-Files yet, though we do have this logline: “Two highly decorated but vastly different FBI agents (Deadwyler, Patel) form an unlikely bond when they are assigned to a long-shuttered division devoted to cases involving unexplained phenomena.” Variety is also reporting that Patel and Deadwyler will be playing completely new characters, not new versions of Mulder and Scully, played in the original series by David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson. There’s no news yet on whether Duchovny or Anderson will make an appearance in the new show. Coogler is writing, directing, and executive producing the series. Jennifer Yale (Legion, Outlander, The Copenhagen Test) will serve as showrunner and executive producer. The original show’s creator, Chris Carter, is on board as an executive producer. Will this show be amazing? I want to believe. No news yet on when the show will make its way to Hulu, though I do know I’ll be watching it as soon as I’m able to. [end-mark] The post Himesh Patel to Star in Ryan Coogler’s <i>X-Files</i> Alongside Danielle Deadwyler appeared first on Reactor.

News The End of Oak Street The End of Oak Street Trailer Asks: What If Suburbia Had Dinosaurs? Talk about a big move! By Vanessa Armstrong | Published on March 26, 2026 Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures Comment 0 Share New Share Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures It’s moving day! That could have been a rightly rejected logline for The End of Oak Street, a film starring  Anne Hathaway, Ewan McGregor, Maisy Stella, and Christian Convery as just regular folks living in suburbia who find their whole neighborhood has… moved somewhere (somewhen?) where there are dinosaurs, and probably other unexpected things. Here’s the official synopsis: After a mysterious cosmic event rips Oak Street from suburbia and transports their neighborhood to someplace unknown, the Platt family soon discovers that their very survival depends on them sticking together as they navigate their now unrecognizable surroundings. The trailer released today raises questions, as I’m sure it was meant to do. What time period is our protagonist family from? What’s up with the dinosaurs? Why is the dinosaur? Is there magic stuff happening? Or extraterrestrials? Or magical extraterrestrials? We don’t know the answers… yet! Here’s what we do know: The film is written and directed by David Robert Mitchell (It Follows, Under the Silver Lake) and produced by J.J. Abrams, Hannah Minghella, Jon Cohen, David Robert Mitchell, Matt Jackson, and Tommy Harper.  End of Oak Street premieres in theaters on August 14, 2026. Check out the trailer below. [end-mark] The post <i>The End of Oak Street</i> Trailer Asks: What If Suburbia Had Dinosaurs? appeared first on Reactor.

Recently declassified Russian intelligence memos—long buried until Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard’s releases—reveal that the Trump–Russia collusion narrative was never a sober counterintelligence inquiry. It was a frantic deflection straight out of the 1997 horror-thriller “I Know What You Did Last Summer.” The film is about four careless teenagers who commit a hit-and-run, dump the body in the ocean, swear secrecy, and drive off convinced the nightmare is over: “No one saw. It’s finished.” But unbeknownst to the killers, a lone fisherman standing on the shore in the dark was witness. In Washington’s version, the “teenagers” were the Clinton campaign, the DNC, and sympathetic Obama administration figures. The hit-and-run was Hillary Clinton’s homemade private email server, used for official State Department business containing classified material. It involved deleted emails, back-channel reassurances, the DNC’s thumb on the scale against Bernie Sanders, and lingering questions about the Clinton Foundation’s alleged involvement in pay-to-play. These struck at the heart of public trust. The Russians—eternal adversaries with sophisticated spying capabilities—played the lone fisherman on a foggy shore. They hacked, recorded, and filed detailed memos. Elements of the U.S. government, especially the FBI and DOJ, were intercepting them. By early 2016, those memos circulated among senior FBI and DOJ officials. They did not merely warn of Russian hacking. They exposed the Clinton team’s strategy to manufacture a Trump–Russia collusion narrative to deflect from its own scandals.  Through intercepted communications, the Russians were forcing evidence of the very criminal behavior the FBI was trying to bury back in the faces of senior officials. By documenting the deflection plan itself, they inadvertently incriminated the actions U.S. officials sought to conceal. At the highest levels, the FBI was determined to end the Clinton email investigation and quietly exonerate her before Election Day. Yet the Russian memos kept surfacing inconvenient truths: deletion plans, back-channel coordination, and the weaponization of Russia as a shield.  One January 2016 intercept reportedly showed Debbie Wasserman Schultz assuring allies the FBI lacked “persuasive evidence,” citing “timely deletion of relevant data.”  Another described pressure from the “attorney general’s orbit” (referring to Loretta Lynch, potentially under Obama’s direction) to ease or shut down the Clinton email and Clinton Foundation investigations to protect the Democratic nominee and Obama’s legacy. These memos were striking because real events tracked them with eerie precision. The Clinton team had used BleachBit to scrub the server even after a congressional subpoena for Benghazi emails.  Then came the June 27, 2016, tarmac meeting in Phoenix, where Attorney General Loretta Lynch met privately with Bill Clinton days before Comey’s interview with Hillary. The optics screamed exactly the coordination the memos described. Two tracks—Clinton’s email probe and Russian interference—collided. The FBI received intelligence that the actors under scrutiny planned to weaponize the Russia narrative as a shield, even as the Bureau worked to limit and exonerate the original scandal. Declassified intelligence and DOJ watchdog findings show senior officials took steps to contain the Clinton email investigation (and reportedly the Foundation inquiry). Signals from the top favored caution and control. The investigations slowed as the election accelerated. These memos never leaked to the press. They circulated quietly inside a government confronting intelligence that pointed uncomfortably close to its own political core. As reports accumulated, they revealed deletion, coordination, deflection—and the dawning realization that their own actions were being documented by the very adversaries they would later blame. The actors at the center began to hear the fisherman’s warning: We know what you did last summer. Panic set in. The narrative had to flip—and fast. Suddenly the story became that Russia was attacking our democracy with Trump as the vehicle. The collusion narrative engulfed the conversation not as narrow counterintelligence, but as a sweeping moral indictment. This also explains one of 2016’s most revealing decisions: the FBI’s refusal to conduct its own forensic examination of the hacked DNC servers. The Bureau dared not get involved directly. Any real investigation risked forcing agents to confront or document the very evidence of the Clinton email scandal and deletions that senior officials were trying to bury and exonerate. It was safer to outsource everything to the DNC’s hired contractor, CrowdStrike. Yet every time the original vulnerabilities seemed buried, something resurfaced—another memo, another thread—pulling events back to the initial scandals. They were haunted by documentation. The more aggressively the issues were submerged through media, opposition research, and messaging, the more persistent the facts became. Like the fisherman’s warning, the evidence kept washing ashore. The full, declassified story—Russian intercepts, FBI decisions, tarmac meetings, deleted emails, and the deliberate reframing of one scandal into another—is laid out in detail in my new book, Clinton Hoax, Obama Coup: The Declassified Story of the Trump Russia Delusion. History records the Russia-collusion narrative as the dominant story of 2016. But beneath it lies a more unsettling truth: one crisis was reframed through another, and institutions meant to clarify events instead became entangled in the scandals they were supposed to investigate. The fisherman never left the shore. And the story never stayed buried. We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal. The post “We Know What You Did Last Summer”: How Russian Memos Exposed the Real 2016 Collusion appeared first on The Daily Signal.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations, which bills itself as America’s premier Muslim civil rights group, has designated the Sharia Free America Caucus an “anti-Muslim hate group,” in what one Muslim reformer calls the “American equivalent of a blasphemy law.” “Labeling a congressional caucus that represents millions of Americans a ‘hate group’ simply for addressing the threat of Sharia supremacism to Muslims and non-Muslims is not civil rights advocacy,” Dr. M. Zuhdi Jasser, founder of the American-Islamic Forum for Democracy, told The Daily Signal in a statement Wednesday. “It is the American equivalent of a blasphemy law — a tool to silence, stigmatize, and shut down legitimate constitutional debate.” While Jasser noted that some of the caucus members’ statements could have benefited from more clarity, he claimed that “CAIR isn’t interested in nuance. They want total dominance of the conversation—where any public challenge to theocratic Islamism is branded as hatred and any critic is driven from the public square, whether Muslim or non-Muslim.” “This is structurally identical to how clerical regimes in Muslim-majority countries use anti-blasphemy laws to crush Muslim dissent against theocrats,” he argued. “CAIR has never stood with reform-minded, freethinking Muslims—the dissidents, the secularists, the liberal reformers, the faithful who reject theocracy from within the Muslim community.” Texas Republican Reps. Chip Roy and Keith Self launched the Sharia Free America Caucus in December, and it has since grown to include 59 members from 24 different states. CAIR announced the “hate group” designation last month, accusing the caucus of attempting to render the practice of the Islamic faith illegal. CAIR’s Attack “Congressmen Randy Fine, Chip Roy, Keith Self, and other members of this so-called caucus have appointed themselves as religious police with the power to tell Americans how to worship,” CAIR Research and Advocacy Director Corey Saylor said. CAIR cited quotes from caucus members that it characterized as “dehumanizing” to Muslims, including the claims from Self that “Islam intends to dominate the West” and “while Western civilization has evolved, Islam has not.” CAIR claims that the caucus’ bills to limit Sharia law would “effectively ban the practice of the world’s second largest religion in the United States.” CAIR compares the practice of sharia—Islamic rules for life—to Catholic canon law and Orthodox Jewish halacha. The Other ‘Hate Groups’ CAIR does not usually designate “hate groups,” but it has repeatedly partnered with the Southern Poverty Law Center in urging community foundations to stop funding organizations the SPLC brands “anti-Muslim hate groups.” Critics claim the SPLC puts mainstream conservative and Christian groups on a “hate map” alongside Ku Klux Klan chapters, suggesting that a similar hatred drives them. Neither CAIR nor the SPLC responded to The Daily Signal’s request for comment. A Terrorist Organization? “The fact that CAIR—an organization that multiple states have classified as a terrorist organization—has designated the Sharia Free America Caucus as a ‘hate group’ is absurd,” House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, R-La., told The Daily Signal. “Recent attacks in places like New York and Michigan are a reminder of the very real threat posed by violent ideologies and I’m glad my colleagues are looking at ways to prevent Sharia law and political Islam from taking hold in America,” he added. When approached for comment, Rep. Self responded, “We don’t care about the opinion of a designated terrorist organization.” Gov. Greg Abbott, R-Texas, designated CAIR as a foreign terrorist organization on Nov. 18, and Gov. Ron DeSantis, R-Fla., followed suit in December. CAIR sued, and a federal judge issued a temporary injunction blocking DeSantis’ executive order. A Vital Distinction Jasser, the Muslim reformer, told The Daily Signal that “there is a necessary and important distinction between personal pietistic Islamic practice—which deserves full constitutional protection—and many applications of Sharia that infringe on individual and human rights.” “This includes not only overt political Sharia imposed through local governance, but Sharia-based practices that strip individuals—women, religious minorities, apostates, dissenters—of their fundamental rights and dignities, whether in the home, the community, or the public square,” he added. The Caucus’ Distinction “Sharia is a political and legal system that seeks supremacy over the U.S. Constitution,” Rep. Self told The Daily Signal. “As Dr. Zuhdi Jasser has rightly said, the real threat is political Islam and Sharia supremacism, not the personal faith of peaceful Muslims.” “Our caucus is not banning ‘Islam,’” Self added. “We are simply insisting that America remains governed by one law—the Constitution—and that we reject any foreign legal system that demands to replace it. CAIR can call that ‘hate’ if they want. Americans call it common sense.” Rep. Brandon Gill, R-Texas, told The Daily Signal that the debate isn’t “about freedom of religion—this is about the threat of political Islam that is antithetical to America’s foundation.” He said that immigrants should “assimilate to our culture, not impose third world ideals into our society.” The post Sharia Free America Caucus Responds to CAIR Designating It an ‘Anti-Muslim Hate Group’ appeared first on The Daily Signal.