For the past month, the Trump administration has been “quietly working” on a newly devised peace plan between Russia and Ukraine that forces both sides to make concessions, a senior U.S. official told The Daily Wire on Thursday. Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff has spearheaded the latest effort to bring the war to an end, and President Donald Trump has given his support for the plan, according to the U.S. official. “Special Envoy Witkoff has been quietly working on this plan for a month, receiving input from both the Ukrainians and the Russians on what terms are acceptable to them to end the war,” the official said. Axios first reported on the plan on Tuesday, writing that the administration hopes to bring Russia and Ukraine to an agreement on a 28-point deal that was inspired by Trump’s 20-point Gaza peace proposal. Trump successfully got Israel and Hamas to agree to parts of his 20-point plan last month, but that ceasefire remains fragile. Witkoff has reportedly discussed the plan extensively with Russian envoy Kirill Dmitriev. The Russian diplomat told Axios that he, Witkoff, and other Trump officials were in Miami for three days in late October. Dmitriev was optimistic about the talks, saying, “We feel the Russian position is really being heard.” Right now, DailyWire+ annual memberships are fifty percent off during our Black Friday sale. Join now at dailywire.com/blackfriday. Axios reported on Wednesday that the new Trump plan to end the war would require major concessions from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Ukraine would be asked to cede additional territory to Russian dictator Vladimir Putin in exchange for U.S. security guarantees that would protect Ukraine and Europe from further Russian aggression, according to Axios, which cited “a U.S. official with direct knowledge.” The Trump administration pushed back on the claim that Ukraine would be getting the raw end of the deal. A senior U.S. official told The Daily Wire that the peace plan would require both Russia and Ukraine to make concessions. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on Wednesday that “durable peace will require both sides to agree to difficult but necessary concessions.” Rubio added that the administration is continuing “to develop a list of potential ideas for ending this war based on input from both sides of this conflict.” The Daily Wire also reached out to the State Department for comment. The war is nearing the four-year mark, and President Trump has so far been unable to move Putin toward a peace deal since coming back into office in January. Trump’s summit with Putin in August promised progress on a peace plan, but yielded no significant results. Trump has grown increasingly frustrated with Putin and imposed additional sanctions on Russian oil companies. A Treasury Department spokesman told The Daily Wire on Wednesday, “Russian oil is now selling at multi-year lows, starving Putin’s war machine.” The war, which broke out while former President Joe Biden was in office, has claimed hundreds of thousands of lives, according to estimates. Russia has recently ramped up its attacks on Ukraine, targeting cities with drone and missile strikes. “President Trump has been clear since day one that he wants the war between Russia [and] Ukraine to end, and he has grown frustrated with both sides for their refusal to commit to a peace agreement,” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement shared with The Daily Wire. “Nevertheless, the President and his team never gives up, and the United States has been working on a detailed and acceptable plan for both sides to stop the killing and create a durable, lasting peace.”

A massive crowd of pro-Palestinian activists targeted a prominent Orthodox Jewish synagogue in Manhattan on Wednesday night, blocking Jews from entering and chanting “Death to the IDF” and “From New York to Gaza, globalize the intifada.” “Another woman shouted, ‘F*cking Jewish pricks,’ while others called the Jewish demonstrators ‘rapists,’ ‘racists,’ and ‘pedophiles,’” The Times of Israel reported. The 95-year-old rabbi who is the leader of the synagogue, Rabbi Arthur Schneier, is a Holocaust survivor who witnessed his synagogue being burned in Vienna on the night of the Nazis’ Kristallnacht in 1938. He and his mother (his father died when he was six) fled to Hungary, where he was only saved from being murdered by the Nazis by the intervention of the Swiss Consul General. “Many of his family members were murdered, including his grandfather, a prominent rabbi who died in Auschwitz,” the United Nations has noted. Right now, DailyWire+ annual memberships are fifty percent off during our Black Friday sale. Join now at dailywire.com/blackfriday. The synagogue was hosting an event organized by Nefesh B’Nefesh, which provides assistance to Jews who want to immigrate to Israel. One activist yelled to the crowd, “It is our duty to make them think twice before holding these events. We need to make them scared. We need to make them scared. We need to make them scared.” On October 8, 2023, the very next day after the horrific and brutal Hamas massacre of more than 1,200 people in Israel, pro-Palestinian activists celebrated the attack in New York City. They chanted, “Resistance is justified,” “Globalize the intifada,” “Smash the settler Zionist state,” and “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” “Among the pro-Palestinian side, the mood was celebratory and spiteful,” The Times of Israel noted. “Demonstrators chanted ‘700,’ apparently referring to the confirmed number of Israeli fatalities in the attack so far, and held up the number seven on their hands while making throat-slitting gestures. Others flashed victory signs with their hands while shouting insults. One man held up a picture of an Israeli hostage on his phone and waved it at the Israeli crowd. Another was seen brandishing an image of a swastika. Some taunted the Israelis while tearing up and stomping on an Israeli flag, or danced with a Palestinian flag.”

Tucker Carlson shocked nearly everyone last week when he implied that Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a pastor and one of the most revered heroes of World War II, had to abandon Christianity in order to turn on Adolf Hitler. Bonhoeffer attempted to assassinate the Nazi leader and was murdered by the Third Reich in 1945. Bonhoeffer’s actions are almost universally regarded as heroic — but not to Carlson, who declared recently that Bonhoeffer had simply “decided … Christianity is not enough, we have to kill the guy.” Carlson held Bonhoeffer up as a warning to conservatives who criticize antisemitism on the Right, saying, “once you start calling people Nazis, we really have no choice but to start shooting them,” Carlson said. So much sloppy thinking, so little time.  Carlson is right that falsely labeling someone a “Nazi” or a “fascist” today paints a target on that person. It was reckless, for example, for California Governor Gavin Newsom to call White House advisor Stephen Miller a fascist, prompting leftists in Miller’s neighborhood to dox him, plastering telephone poles and lampposts with Miller’s home address. But what does any of this have to do with Dietrich Bonhoeffer? He wasn’t sloppily using “Nazi” as a slur against his political opponents, the literal Nazis. Nobody was falsely claiming that the ordinary enforcement of just laws amounted to genocidal terror. Genocidal terror was written into the laws of a regime which had seized power in a crisis, suspended the constitution, outlawed all opposition, and stripped Jews of citizenship.  Literal Nazis, who called themselves “Nazis,” were filling concentration camps with non-violent political dissidents, and preparing a war openly designed to conquer, enslave, and exterminate the peoples of neighboring nations. The Nazi blueprint for obtaining “Lebensraum” in Poland and the Soviet Union, Generalplan Ost, envisioned wiping out some 80 million Slavs by either direct murder or slow starvation, to be replaced by German colonists.  Carlson’s absurd criticism of Bonhoeffer is rooted in a fundamental misrepresentation of Christianity and its teachings. Despite Jesus’ words about turning the other cheek on a personal level, Christianity was never rigidly pacifist. By the time of St. Augustine, the Church had developed the “Just War” doctrine, narrowly defining occasions when military action by the state was morally good and right. That teaching is widely accepted by most Christian churches, and codified by the Roman Catholic Church in its Catechism. Catholic teaching holds that a Just War is one in which “the damage inflicted by the aggressor on the nation or community of nations must be lasting, grave, and certain,” and “all other means of putting an end to it must have been shown to be impractical or ineffective.” There also “must be serious prospects of success” and “the use of arms must not produce evils and disorders graver than the evil to be eliminated.” The language above refers to the actions of the state, not individual citizens. On the surface, it seems only to apply to decisions by nations such as Great Britain and France, whose declarations of war on Germany were obviously just.  But the Just War analysis doesn’t only apply to states. As I explained in my recent book, “No Second Amendment, No First”, during the Reformation and Counter-Reformation religious persecution by intolerant monarchs drove thinkers in both the Jesuit and the Calvinist traditions to ask if those conditions could justify a civil war, a rebellion against a tyrant. Most of them answered “Yes,” and Christian political thinking began for the first time to countenance the overthrow of evil governments by their people. The men who removed King Charles I, and rebelled against French monarchs during the Wars of Religion, cited such arguments.  So would later rebels, right here in America. Our own Declaration of Independence is actually an eloquent argument that the misgovernment of the 13 colonies by the British parliament and crown amounted to tyranny, and met the Just War requirements, making armed resistance not just permissible but obligatory. The anti-Nazi resistance to which Dietrich Bonhoeffer belonged was steeped in this same tradition, and saw its efforts to overthrow a wicked tyranny in wartime as perfectly compatible with the broad Christian tradition. Their actions had nothing in common with the violence fostered by irresponsible leftist zealots in our non-tyrannical country in peacetime, which enjoys free elections and a free press. For the real story of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, treat yourself by streaming the recent, powerful biopic about the man, or reading Eric Metaxas’s magisterial book on his inspiring life. And remember to always take with a grain of salt anything claimed by a certain former bow-tie-wearing war hawk with a maniacal laugh. * * * John Zmirak is author of many books, including the biography of anti-Nazi exile Wilhelm Röpke, and the recent No Second Amendment, No First. The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire. Right now, DailyWire+ annual memberships are 50% off during our Black Friday sale. Join now at dailywire.com/blackfriday.

Actor Kevin Spacey says he is homeless and is living out of Airbnb rentals and hotels after a sexual abuse scandal destroyed his career. The 66-year-old Academy Award-winner detailed his struggles in a recent interview with The Telegraph, saying he lost his Maryland residence, where he had lived for 12 years, and is no longer a property owner. “I’m going where the work is,” Spacey told the outlet. “I literally have no home, that’s what I’m attempting to explain.” The actor has faced multiple sexual misconduct allegations, including a high-profile civil lawsuit from actor Anthony Rapp. A New York jury found him not liable in 2022. Spacey was also charged with nine counts of sexual assault involving four men, citing incidents between 2001 and 2013, but he was acquitted of all charges in 2023. Several other cases were dropped or dismissed.  Despite Spacey never being convicted, his career was destroyed, and he’s been complaining about financial struggles recently. Right now, DailyWire+ annual memberships are fifty percent off during our Black Friday sale. Join now at dailywire.com/blackfriday. “The costs over these last seven years have been astronomical,” the actor said. “I’ve had very little coming in and everything going out.” “You get through it. In weird ways, I feel I’m back to where I first started, which is I just went where the work was,” Spacey added. “Everything is in storage, and I hope at some point, if things continue to improve, that I’ll be able to decide where I want to settle down again.” The “American Beauty” actor said he just wants to return to acting and is hoping a major Hollywood player steps in to help him relaunch his career. “We are in touch with some extremely powerful people who want to put me back to work,” Spacey told The Telegraph. “And that will happen in its right time. But I will also say what I think the industry seems to be waiting for is to be given permission – by someone who is in some position of enormous respect and authority.” “So, my feeling is if Martin Scorsese or Quentin Tarantino call [manager] Evan [Lowenstein] tomorrow, it will be over,” he went on. “I will be incredibly honored and delighted when that level of talent picks up the phone.” Spacey received a lifetime achievement award at the Cannes Film Festival earlier this year. During his acceptance speech, he said he had “come out the other side of these last few challenging years not angry, not bitter, not resentful, but more present, more loving, more understanding and more forgiving than I ever have been in my life.”

'Our wages aren't going up fast enough'

'Medical professionals are attending to her care'

Time for some medicine, and this kind won’t go down easy

'I did what I was taught.'

'Get our house in order'