David Brooks has always fancied himself a kind of moral chiropractor for middle-class souls: Half preacher, half therapist, all smug.. His latest column, “How to Replace Christian Nationalism,” is another exercise in half-hidden disdain — a sermon for readers who think the average American is a barbarian with a Bible. The only people terrified of faith in public life are the atheists who’d rather live in a nation where everything is tolerated and nothing is sacred. Brooks begins with a borrowed profundity: “a person’s way of being human reveals their belief.” The quote, from Czech priest Tomas Halík, sounds like revelation until you realize it’s relativism in robes. It shifts faith from what is true to how one feels — perfect for those who prefer their Christianity soft, shapeless, and devoid of substance. The Christianity Brooks praises is so sanitized that even the Devil could subscribe to it without breaking a sweat. He paints “Christian nationalists” as feral fanatics praying for Armageddon, then bows before a globalist gospel so thin it couldn’t save a soul from sunburn. Defending your country and your culture is obedience in action, not idolatry. The same Bible Brooks claims to revere commands nations to uphold order, protect the innocent, and honor their inheritance. When Christ said, “Render unto Caesar,” He didn’t say, “Render Caesar meaningless.” Yet Brooks’s Christianity knows no borders — geographical, ethical, or doctrinal. He derides “Christian nationalism” as “particular rather than universal,” as though affection for one’s homeland were the mark of the unwashed. But Christ Himself wept for Jerusalem, not for some abstract human family. Brooks confuses universal love with global indifference. His “pilgrim” metaphor — everyone stumbling together toward some vague horizon — is poetic nonsense. Without truth, pilgrimage is just wandering. The columnist claims that MAGA Christians have made the nation “stagnant, callous, and backward.” They are, he suggests, a people trapped in “trenches.” Yet it was these same Americans — plumbers, truckers, mothers of five — who filled churches during COVID while coastal elites locked theirs. It is these “deplorables” who still say grace before dinner, still fly the flag, still believe humans are born male or female. Of course, Brooks doesn’t care. Why would he? These are the very people he and his cocktail-circuit friends ridicule between brunch and dinner parties, where “understanding America” is a parlor game. He writes as if Christianity must choose between mercy and might, as though a believer cannot both love his neighbor and defend his nation. That is a false dichotomy — a spiritual safe space for those who can’t face reality. The early church was both humble and defiant; the apostles prayed, but they also preached in public squares knowing it could cost them their lives. Brooks’s Christianity would have told them to sit down and “dialogue.” What he calls a “culture war,” others call resistance. For decades, the Left has worked to remove faith from every corner of public life — rebranding prayer as propaganda and conviction as hate. It captured the schools, rewrote the movies, politicized medicine, and called the result “progress.” And now Brooks, ever the apologist for not-so-polite society, blames those who refuse to bow. His solution? Less Scripture, more sentiment. In short, a Christianity that offends no one and saves no one. There’s a dark humor in Brooks quoting St. Augustine to defend pluralism. The City of God wasn’t a love letter to diversity, but a warning that when faith loses its backbone, civilization follows. Augustine wrote in an age when Rome, drowning in vice, mistook decay for enlightenment. The “delight of pluralism,” as Brooks calls it, is the same indulgence that consumed empires before ours. A nation cannot be both everything and something. When a country tries to please all gods, it forgets the one that really matters. His parting jab — that MAGA has made America “frightened” — is pure projection. The only people terrified of faith in public life are the atheists who’d rather live in a nation where everything is tolerated and nothing is sacred. Christian conservatives are awake. They’ve seen what happens when both faith and nation forget who they are. Chaos follows, confusion reigns, and churches become “cozy” cafes. Brooks’s “better Christianity” asks believers to trade their armor for a yoga mat and a few scented candles. He preaches humility as passivity, and self-forgetting as civic amnesia. But this is nonsense dressed as nuance. The prophets Brooks name-drops — Halík, Williams, Havel — spoke truth to tyrants, not in the safety of faculty lounges but under regimes that jailed and silenced dissenters. They embodied defiance. The courage that once carried them through communism wouldn’t last a week in the coliseum of modern progressivism. Today, they’d be canceled before finishing their first sentence — accused of intolerance, privilege, or worse. The saints Brooks invokes would have been silenced by the very society he flatters. Real Christianity doesn’t need to be “replaced.” It needs to be revived. Not by chasing pluralistic delight but by returning to biblical discipline. Not by melting into moral relativism but by standing firm, unashamed and unapologetic. The problem isn’t too much faith in politics, but too little faith in public. So let Brooks have his spineless syncretism, his pilgrim’s path paved with platitudes. The rest of us will keep our armor on. While he’s busy redefining belief, real Christians are still feeding the poor, raising families, and fighting for a country built on Christian values. America doesn’t need a new Christianity; it needs to rekindle the one that made it the greatest nation ever built. Brooks calls that “nationalism.” But most Americans call it belief in something greater than themselves. And they don’t mind being unfashionable for it. READ MORE from John Mac Ghlionn: Church Attendance Is No Longer Optional How Scott Galloway Dumbed Down Jordan Peterson — and Cashed In How the BBC Tried to Burn Trump — and Barbecued Itself Instead

As the Trump administration contemplates high risk land operations against Latin America’s drug cartels , it’s calling on Bolivia’s newly elected government to reveal its “secrets” of Iran’s “penetration of the Western Hemisphere” through military agreements forged with Bolivia and Venezuela that made them hubs of Iranian influence. Hundreds or possibly thousands of Hezbollah fighters directed and supported by a robust Iranian regional network could pose a significant threat to U.S. forces in Venezuela. In pointed remarks to the media while attending the swearing in of Bolivia’s new president Rodrigo Paz last week, U.S. deputy secretary of state for the Western Hemisphere Cristopher Landau spoke of the “grave threat” presented by the “alarming” alignment between Bolivia and Iran over the past twenty years, in a marked departure from previous U.S. administrations, which tended to ignore the threats.  I don’t yet know if the new government of Bolivia understands exactly the situation its inherited concerning relations between the past governments with Iran. But I suppose that this will be a matter of great mutual interest not only for the U.S. and Bolivia but for Argentina, Chile, Paraguay, and other neighboring countries concerned about, let’s say, military equipment that may be getting made or distributed in Bolivia. In the course of covering Latin America for various news organizations during the past twenty years, I’ve closely followed Iran’s growing encroachments in the region and can provide some previews as to what Bolivia’s secret Iranian files may contain. Leftist narco president Evo Morales followed Venezuela’s lead in opening relations with Iran soon after taking office in 2005. There were a series of coordinated high level visits and official exchanges between the three governments in subsequent years, when agreements involving defense and security cooperation were negotiated through secret talks at the highest levels. According to Venezuelan ex spy chief, General Cristopher Figueres, who accompanied Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez on a trip to Teheran, discussions with the ayatollahs were so sensitive that they were held in the most insulated lower floors of underground command bunkers. The former head of Venezuela’s intelligence service SEBIN says that they discussed the appointment of Tarek El Aissami, a Venezuelan far left militant designated by the U.S. Treasury Dept as an operative for Hezbollah to the top post of security minister as well as the deployment of IRGC Qods officers to advise Venezuela’s armed forces. Joint military industrial projects between the IRGC and Venezuela’s defense contractor CAVIM include production of a version of Iran’s Mohajer-6 strike drone; the Mariscal Don Jose De Sucre-100 armed with missiles and operating ranges extending well into the Caribbean. Venezuelan air force chief, general Pedro Juliac, became de facto “head of Iranian operations” in Venezuela and ambassador to Teheran, acquiring more advanced Shahed kamikaze drones which concern U.S. war officials drawing up plans for land operations in Venezuela. U.S. and Argentinian intelligence agencies believe that Iran is also building drones in Bolivia, as part of secret military agreements negotiated under former presidents Evo Morales and Luis Arce. A “cell” of senior Bolivian generals and IRGC officers manage projects supervised from Iran’s embassy which has become the largest diplomatic mission in Bolivia, occupying a six floor building in a walled in compound that takes up an entire city block of the capital, La Paz. Argentine intelligence officials have told The American Spectator that Qods also operates a clandestine base at an Iranian built hospital in the city of El Alto close to Bolivia’s main airport. Hundreds of Bolivian identity documents have been distributed to Iranian agents to facilitate their movement throughout the hemisphere, according to these sources. Senior U.S. intelligence officials testifying at a Senate hearing last month estimate that Venezuelan passports handed out to arrivals from the Middle East, many of them Lebanese, could number 10,000. I reported on Iran’s growing South American presence back in 2011, in a full page article for The Wall Street Journal, leading off on a visit to Bolivia by Iranian Defense minister Ahmad Vahidi, accused of masterminding the 1992 Hezbollah truck bombing of the AMIA Jewish community center in Buenos Aires which killed 85 people. Vahidi presided together with Morales over the inauguration of a special military staff college for officers from leftist aligned Latin American countries financed by the IRGC. According to U.S. diplomatic officials, a group of Iranians ran electronic surveillance and eavesdropping operations for Morales from his presidential offices, alternating with a Cuban intelligence team. At a time when little official attention was paid to Iran’s growing intimacy with Latin American regimes which even then Senator Marco Rubio dismissed as “PR,” I reported that Iran was recruiting local engineers to work computer security for its nuclear program while trying to acquire high grade uranium from Venezuela and Bolivia. The CIA was keenly aware of Iran’s activities but the Bush administration wanted countermeasures to remain low key. The State Department created a special unit to monitor Iran’s moves in the hemisphere but Obama shut it down when it got in the way of his appeasement policies towards Teheran and Havana. Iranian encroachments have grown virtually unchecked due as much to willing collaboration from leftist Latin governments as the neglect of successive U.S. administrations. Venezuelan national guard general Marco Ferreira who tried warning the Pentagon about Iran’s growing influence during the early 2000s, tells The American Spectator that he got a cold reception from the Defense Intelligence Agency, whose officers expressed little interest in the matter and questioned his credibility. An Iranian Boeing 707 cargo jet chartered under a Venezuelan airline company crisscrossed Latin America for years, until its gun running antecedents in the Middle East were reported and it was grounded in Argentina under a U.S. court order in 2022. The pilot and other personnel on board were identified as Qods officers but Argentina’s leftist president Fernandez at the time released them back to Venezuela before they could be questioned by the FBI which was blocked from inspecting the aircraft until conservative president Javier Milei took office a year later. Opening Bolivia’s top secret files on Iran, as proposed by Mr Landau, could seriously expose Iran’s network in Latin America, revealing its corrupt inner workings that may allow the U.S. and its allies to catch undercover Qods officers , Hezbollah operatives and their local agents red handed. Counter-terrorism experts from several U.S. security agencies recently told the U.S. Senate that Hezbollah increasingly relies on revenues from its Latin American drug operations integrated with Venezuela’s Cartel de Soles for “badly needed cash infusions” following recent setbacks in Lebanon and Syria. “Hezbollah’s presence in Venezuela has expanded dramatically,” according to former Pentagon official Marshall Billingslea. Gen. Figueres told the British newspaper The Sun that there are about 1000 members of Hezbollah on Margarita island, which has become a center of Islamic activism, about 400 around the Venezuelan army base in Maracay outside Caracas and some 200 at the port of Valencia, a harbor for drug boats. Hundreds or possibly thousands of Hezbollah fighters directed and supported by a robust Iranian regional network could pose a significant threat to U.S. forces in Venezuela, destabilize a democratic government replacing Maduro, and possibly conduct terrorist attacks in third countries including the U.S. Bolivia may be the first domino to fall in Latin America’s Iranian aligned block of narco states and the U.S. will be “in very close touch with the country’s new authorities,” according to Mr Landau. “I think that we are going to see some very surprising things regarding Iranian penetration in the region,” he said. READ MORE from Martin Arostegui: The Soros Footprint in Latin America Election in Bolivia Might Give US an Important Ally On the Frontlines of the War That Will Change Europe

It’s another milestone in the onward march of the bots — country music’s top song in the U.S. last week was Walk My Walk. Billboard’s number one song on its “Country Digital Song Sales” chart is by a band called Breaking Rust, and, according to Billboard, Breaking Rust, itself, was created by artificial intelligence (AI). [R]ecent technological advances in music … have gotten us ready for that moment when you genuinely can’t discern whether a piece has been generated by a human or a machine. The future has arrived — and this is only the beginning. “In just the past few months, at least six AI or AI-assisted artists have debuted on various Billboard rankings,” wrote Billboard just last week. “That figure could be higher, as it’s become increasingly difficult to tell who or what is powered by AI — and to what extent.” Many of these charting projects, whose music spans every genre from gospel to rock to country, also arrive with anonymous or mysterious origins. Look at Breaking Rust’s social media pages and you’ll find nothing to indicate there’s a human being even involved in the music-making portion of the band’s songs. What is present though is an AI-generated chisel-jawed cowboy and video clips featuring “plain folk” moseying away from the camera. To say the various songs are similar would deny reality. They are essentially the same — right down to the bland, rather vacuous lyrics. “Breaking Rust, an AI-powered country act, debuted at No. 9 on the Emerging Artists chart (dated Nov. 1),” the music publication said. “The project, credited to songwriter Aubierre Rivaldo Taylor, has generated 1.6 million official U.S. streams.” Being a country music fan (and from Texas), the song sounds like a lot of country songs. It’s certainly catchy and one can “visualize” people singing along while line-dancing to its rhythm. But that’s not really the point, is it? The significance is that there are thousands of country-western performers and composers out there, some famous, many obscure, that are losing to AI in the free market, which is causing some pain. The Moment Matters for Music This is the first time an AI-created country track has topped a Billboard country sales chart, a symbolic turning point for genre purists and AI policy watchers alike. Critics argue the songs feel formulaic and create blurred authorship, while others see lower barriers for new creators using Agentic-AI tools. Both views now collide in the charts. Streaming services are still crafting AI policies to prevent feeds from being overwhelmed and to manage disclosure. Industry groups are pushing for “guardrails” around “training data” and likeness. Country outlets note that the Country Digital Song Sales crown can be reached with a few thousand purchases in a given week, but the symbolic impact of a No. 1 still matters. The story here is what the story has been since AI first peeked over the horizon to announce its intent to storm popular culture, and that’s this: There’s nothing anyone can do to stop it. Nothing. AI is coming, and it’s coming for all of us. But I also believe it is neither as serious a threat as James Cameron made it out to be in Terminator, nor do I think it can replace the soul (or whatever that indefinable spark is) that makes us quintessentially human. Computers do nothing but reproduce in varying arrangements the data that has been uploaded into its memory, and there is something about the human spirit that can never be taught — inspiration, the muse, the heart — that comes from within. Much of our popular culture today is soulless, generic, corporatized, and lacking in inspiration — perhaps that is why AI is such a real threat – it perpetuates these qualities. Several country-western stars and corporate executives within the music industry have spoken out against AI, fearing the tech could replace songwriters and wreck the middle-class of the music industry. “I would struggle to think something that couldn’t feel could really write a song, to make somebody else feel,” musician Riley Green told Fox News Digital of the threat of AI in music at the ACM Awards. Mitch Glazier, chairman and CEO of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), said they are prioritizing removing artificially created music that infringes on an artist’s name or likeness. “When you’re an artist, you spend your whole life grappling with what you want to put out to the world, how you want to express your ideas, what is your art,” he said of artists’ fears. “And a lot of times it’s very personal, and it reflects your lived experience. He continued, “It’s your genius.… It’s the essence of who you are. So, to have that taken from you is a very personal and objectionable act … that is not the art that the artist is … agreeing to make and that reflects who they are.” As Congress debates legislation aimed at protecting creators’ image and visual likeness, last year hundreds of the world’s biggest musicians signed a letter asking tech firms to not develop AI tools to replace human creators. Obviously, a product like “Walk My Walk” is clearly attainable. Still, could AI ever come up with “Stand by Your Man” by Tammy Wynette or “Ring of Fire” by Johnny Cash? These melodies are celebrated for their storytelling and emotional depth, interpreted and delivered in the way only these artists could — so as to capture the ethos of the American psyche. In a Newsweek article about Breaking Rust, Jason Palamara, an assistant professor of Music Technology at Indiana University seems distinctly unimpressed. “Despite the ‘stomp, clap, hey’ rhythms and acoustic-y sound, this song is heavily laden with some very techy production techniques. It was pretty obviously the product of AI.” Still, significant proportions of U.S. music consumers don’t seem to mind. Breaking Rust already has 2 million monthly Spotify listeners. Arguably, one could say that recent technological advances in music — the widespread use of AutoTune on vocals, the domination of the algorithm in deciding what music we even get to listen to — have gotten us ready for that moment when you genuinely can’t discern whether a piece has been generated by a human or a machine, a point which, I suspect, we are not far from now, if it isn’t upon us already. It seems that the time has come for artists to lean into the things that genuinely make them human: original voices, unexpected chord variations, unusual rhythm structures — in other words — the things which caused us to fall in love with music to begin with. READ MORE from F. Andrew Wolf Jr.: From Orwell to Brussels: The EU’s ‘Ministry of Truth’ Arrives America’s Trade Deficits Are Not Innocuous The Fabric of America… ‘Liberty and Justice for All’  

from ZeeeMedia: TRUTH LIVES on at https://sgtreport.tv/

by Nick Gilbertson, Breitbart: President Donald Trump said Friday he will ask Attorney General Pam Bondi to investigate ties between disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein and former President Bill Clinton, former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, Democrat megadonor Reid Hoffman, and major financial institutions. Trump announced his forthcoming action in a Truth Social post on Friday morning, […]

A 5-year-old girl's father tragically drowned Friday

one of the grand conundrums

The return of the political trifecta Democrats enjoyed during the 2020-21 General Assembly sessions—now bolstered with a 64-36 majority in the House of Delegates—leaves the question of how to deal with Virginia’s energy issues entirely in their hands.  Only if the Democrats suffer a significant division within their own ranks will the Republican legislators cast votes in committee or on the chamber floor that decide any issue. And with 64 votes in the House (meaning Democrats will also have at least two-thirds of committee seats), it would have to be a deep Democrat split for Republicans to matter.  Most of the new Democrat members, including those who ousted sitting incumbent Republicans, expressed commitment to the Virginia Clean Economy Act (VCEA) and its goal of ending the use of coal, natural gas, and oil. Many in Northern Virginia are also eager to slow down the growth of the data center industry, which is driving up electricity demand across the state.  Democrat Gov.-elect Abigail Spanberger has been short on details about efforts to limit data center development and remained vague, according to the anti-hydrocarbon advocacy outlet Inside Climate News. As was the case with the pro-solar Clean Virginia rallies, supporters of maintaining the VCEA mandates and target dates used their interviews to build a defensive line against any in their own caucus who might waver.   Inside Climate News didn’t quote anyone from the Republican side or anyone else advocating changes to the VCEA. The state’s dominant electricity supplier, Dominion Energy Virginia, passed on issuing a long statement but indicated it still maintains that new natural gas plants are needed—and soon, despite the VCEA’s roadblocks. Dominion was busy this year bolstering its own defensive lines, but with money. It spent at least $16 million on campaign donations in this two-year election cycle, most given to Democrats. House Speaker Don Scott and his political action committee received $2.15 million, which quickly went out to various Democrat House races.  The State Corporation Commission will soon decide on Dominion’s pending application to build the first post-VCEA natural gas generation plant, a 944-megawatt plant that will only run to provide power on peak demand, to be constructed in Chesterfield County. The VCEA did grant the SCC authority to approve new natural gas plants if reliability is under threat.  Voters believe that energy prices have risen faster than is justified and are stressing their household budgets. The perception was widespread and captured in polling. Democrats across Virginia made it a major talking point and promised to fix things somehow. Few if any Republicans were pushing back by showing how the Virginia Clean Economy Act itself is contributing to those higher costs, with far more expensive mandates still to come. The VCEA’s impact is easy to track down to the penny.   In fairness, there was a much more robust debate on energy policy in the New Jersey race for governor, with the Republican candidate focused on challenging the Democrats’ demand for weather-dependent solar and wind power. The offshore wind projects there are far more controversial than Dominion’s. Yet the result on Nov. 4 was the same, a thrashing of that Republican.   New Jersey and Virginia are in the same regional transmission organization, PJM Interconnection. The refusal to add reliable generation in either state weakens the grid in both. A return to energy sanity in either state helps both.  About two weeks before the election, Dominion published and sent to the State Corporation Commission an update on its long-range planning document, called an integrated resource plan. For the first time, it was a 20-year plan and thus included the 2045 deadline for full compliance with the Virginia Clean Economy Act.   Dominion offered planning scenarios based on the massive demand increase created by the data centers. All the options assumed it would build the solar and wind generation demanded by VCEA. But one scenario assumed it could also build additional natural gas plants going forward and keep them all open after 2045 despite the VCEA. Another scenario assumed all those plants would have to close come 2045.  The plan with full VCEA compliance and an end to hydrocarbons was the most expensive, largely because Dominion rejected the claim that solar, wind, and batteries can carry the load. It asserted the only choice to meet demand without hydrocarbons is a massive buildup of nuclear power, more than three times the power of its current fleet of reactors. The plan that retired all the natural gas and coal plants also relied more heavily on batteries than current law requires.   The utility then projected pricing on the options.   When the VCEA passed in 2020, the residential price of 1,000 kilowatt hours of electricity was $116.18. As of Oct. 1, that had reached $159.57, a $43.39 or 37% increase in five years. The plan that complies with VCEA mandates except the mandate to retire hydrocarbons would add about another $100 in cost for each 1,000 kWh of power by 2035, reaching about $256, a 120% over 15 years.  Go with the plan that fully retires the hydrocarbons, replacing them with the more massive nuclear and battery option, and that price would reach just under $290 for 1,000 kWh, a 150% increase in the 15 years since passage of the VCEA. Adding further wrinkles and perhaps more cost uncertainty, Dominion would remain a major energy importer in every option put through the model.   As dramatic as those price increase projections are, the SCC staff has another model it uses and under its pricing model, the plan that retained the hydrocarbons past 2045 could reach $309 per 1,000 kWh by 2035. Using that model, the more expensive scenario that retired the hydrocarbons and built all the nuclear plants instead would reach a cost of $354 per 1,000 kWh by 2035. That triples the $116 cost from just five and a half years ago.  Dominion did not produce a model of how it might meet Virginia’s energy needs if the Virginia Clean Economy Act were just repealed, or what that might cost going forward. Only with a model on that basis can Virginians really see a test of the Democrat claims that the VCEA route is the cheapest route.   Such a model may never be produced by the utility again, as one of the first acts of the new Democrat majority will be to further wed the integrated resource plan to the VCEA’s various mandates and demand accounting for a “social cost of carbon” to make hydrocarbon fuels look more expensive compared to solar.  There is no grass growing under their feet. The bill doing both those things and more was discussed two days after the election in the Commission on Electric Utility Regulation, which is likely to bless it before January. It is a bill that outgoing Gov. Glenn Youngkin vetoed, but Spanberger is very likely to sign. It will be the first of many. The post With Democrats in Control, Virginians Can Expect Higher Energy Prices appeared first on The Daily Signal.

On her Thursday night program, MSNBC’s Jen Psaki accused the Trump administration of wrongfully using the name of well-known Jeffrey Epstein victim Virginia Giuffre as a means to discredit the recent unveiling of Epstein e-mails. Many Democrats have held that pushing for a full-disclosure of information relating to the late sex offender could expose potential co-perpetrators and would bring justice to his many victims. But Psaki didn’t seem to care about what the late Giuffre had to say. She shamed the White House for naming her. The Briefing host claimed: “... Trump and the White House are already trying to discredit everything in this trove of documents. They're working overtime to do this. And they are trying to use the name of Epstein survivor to get away with it.” Here’s the background: the Epstein scandal was reignited on Wednesday when House Oversight Committee Democrats, in an attempt to shift attention away from the ending government shutdown, released three emails from Jeffrey Epstein’s estate that referenced Trump, in which victims’ names were redacted. In response, the Republican majority released over 20,000 documents and chastised the minority for deceptively redacting Giuffre’s name.     What was Psaki’s spin? Defending Democrats for giving victims’ their space and denouncing Republicans for calling foul: The Democrats on the committee redacted that victim's name, as they’ve tried to do with the names of all of Epstein survivors, in part to allow them to tell their own stories on their own terms if they want to. But within an hour of the release, the Republican majority on the House Oversight Committee promptly outed the victim as Virginia Giuffre, apparently doing so just so they could point to past statements of Giuffre's in which she said she had never seen Trump do anything wrong. So again, they're outing an Epstein survivor for political gain. Considering that Epstein died over six years ago, the argument that authorities and public officials still needed time to redact victims’ names has gotten old and unbelievable. But just because Trump wasn’t necessarily implicated by the newly uncovered documents didn’t mean he was trying to distort the truth. Republicans weren’t “outing” Giuffre since she was already publicly known to be a victim and spoke publicly about Trump. The deceased Giuffre had already recalled Trump not participating in any illicit activity relating to Epstein. The former Press Secretary then went after current post-holder Karoline Leavitt for mispronouncing Giuffre’s last name and for daring to defend her boss: “The reason Karoline Leavitt and House Republicans were invoking and have been invoking Virginia Giuffre’s name is not to help tell her story or to push for releasing more documents like her family wants, but to try to cover Trump's butt.” Democrats and the left-wing media clearly hoped the latest development in the ongoing saga would finally damn Trump. The full extent of what those new documents revealed wasn’t yet known. But considering that the Oversight Democrats hand-picked only a few (and intentionally edited them to make Trump look bad), it begged the question of how much ammunition they really had to begin with. And Psaki didn’t intend to stop psucking. The transcript is below. Click "expand" read: MSNBC’s The Briefing with Jen Psaki November 13, 2025 9:07:14 p.m. EST (…) JEN PSAKI: Now journalists have only had the documents the House Oversight Committee released for a little more than a day now. But Trump and the White House are already trying to discredit everything in this trove of documents. They're working overtime to do this. And they are trying to use the name of Epstein survivor to get away with it. Yesterday, the very first email that the Democrats on the House Oversight Committee released showed Epstein writing Ghislaine Maxwell to say that Trump was the, quote, “dog that hasn't barked,” and that a victim spent hours at Epstein's house with Trump. The Democrats on the committee redacted that victim's name, as they’ve tried to do with the names of all of Epstein survivors, in part to allow them to tell their own stories on their own terms if they want to. But within an hour of the release, the Republican majority on the House Oversight Committee promptly outed the victim as Virginia Giuffre, apparently doing so just so they could point to past statements of Giuffre's in which she said she had never seen Trump do anything wrong. So again, they're outing an Epstein survivor for political gain. And just to be clear, this was not a one off. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt promptly did the same in a press release, and then at the White House press briefing yesterday, Leavitt had the gall to again invoke Giuffre's name to defend Trump without even learning how to pronounce it. [Cuts to clip] WEIJIA JIANG [on 11/12/25]: Did the President ever spend hours at Jeffrey Epstein's house with a victim? PRESS SEC. KAROLINE LEAVITT [on 11/12/25]: These emails prove absolutely nothing other than the fact that President Trump did nothing wrong. [Transition] In this email you referred to with the name of a victim that was unredacted now and has since been reported on in this room, so I will go ahead and say it, Virginia Giuffre. [Cuts back to live] PSAKI: It's Virginia Giuffre — Giuffre. Sorry, that's just incredibly insulting. But here's what she went on to say. [Cuts to clip] LEAVITT [on 11/12/25]: Miss Guthrie maintained — and God rest her soul — that she maintained that there was nothing inappropriate she ever witnessed, that President Trump was always extremely professional and friendly to her. [Cuts back to live] PSAKI: Now, again, the reason Karoline Leavitt and House Republicans were invoking and have been invoking Virginia Giuffre’s name is not to help tell her story or to push for releasing more documents like her family wants, but to try to cover Trump's butt.