While the Iranian government is shooting protesters in the streets by the thousands, where is the hue and cry among our college protesting class? Where is it? Why have they gone so silent? According to reports coming out of Iran, thousands, perhaps even tens of thousands of Iranians are being killed in the streets by the Iranian regime. The Iranian people are now rising up against the Ayatollah-led regime, their mullah rulers, who have been leading them down a primrose path to both economic and despotic hell for the past 47 years. Hundreds of thousands of people, apparently overnight, were still in the streets in Iran, braving actual bullets. For all the people who pat themselves on the back for their bravery online, what actual bravery looks like is walking into the streets, arm in arm, standing up against people with machine guns who are firing live ammunition at you in order to achieve freedom for your people. A bombshell new report from CBS News suggests the Iranian government has murdered somewhere between 12,000 and 20,000 protesters since the ongoing national revolt began. Meanwhile, there are apparently zero protests on college campuses in favor of the protesters. I have yet to see a major movement of congressional Democrats getting together in solidarity with the Iranian people. The media coverage until the last couple of days has been scant on what is now a weeks-long, ongoing protest revolt against the regime, which is happening because the Iranian regime is absolutely weak in economic terms. The rial is now trading at a fraction of a penny. The Iranian economy is running at low ebb because of the maximum sanctions that were placed against the regime by the Trump administration. It is also because of the overwhelming military successes that Israel has experienced since October 7 in cutting off the terror arms of the Iranian regime and of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) in places ranging from Iran to Syria to Yemen to Iran itself. That obviously includes the 12-day war that happened last year, in which Iran proved to be a military paper tiger, unable to prevent the Israelis from flying sorties in broad daylight over Tehran and culminating in the American strike against Fordow, the nuclear facility in Iran. There’s also a lack of water and power in Iran. The mullahs, who promised an Islamic utopia, simply delivered an Islamist hell, and the people of Iran are sick of it. They are tired of it. This is not the first protest movement in Iran. In 2009, there was a major protest movement that Barack Obama not only ignored, but undercut by negotiating with the Iranian regime, calling them “moderates,” and then trying to bring them into the fold of nations, which, as it turns out, was a horrifyingly bad idea that allowed them to strengthen themselves at the expense of America’s actual allies in the region. Then, of course, he signed the 2015 JCPOA, which was designed to allow Iran and the mullahs a pathway to a nuclear bomb. The Trump administration came in, reversed the polarity, and put the pressure on the Iranian regime. Then Joe Biden came in, took his foot off the pedal, and started to talk again about a revived JCPOA. By October of 2023, the Iranians were helping to spur the October 7 terror attacks in a seven-front terror war against Israel that ended, ironically, with Iran’s forces being absolutely devastated. So now people are out in the streets, literally by the millions. And Iran is doing what Iran does best —they turn off the internet for the last several days, no information getting in, no information getting out, and they shoot people in the streets. At this point, we are talking about a minimum of at least 3000 people who have been murdered on the streets of Iran. The number is probably significantly higher. We have seen pictures emerging of stacks of body bags. We’ve seen videos emerging of Iranian Revolutionary Guard forces and members of Iranian militias mowing people down. President Trump is taking a strong position, telling Iranians to keep protesting, take over the institutions, save the names of the killers and abusers. If the Iranian regime were deposed, that would be a sea change in geopolitics. Iran is a large-scale supplier of oil to China and a large-scale supplier of Shahid drones to Russia. Iran is the chief sponsor of global terrorism on planet Earth, having spread its terror tentacles not only throughout the Middle East, but also into Europe and into Latin America. If the Iranian regime were to change, that would weaken Hezbollah in Lebanon. You might see an actual decent government with the capacity to destroy Hezbollah. You might see the possibility of an actual, broad Abraham Accord-like agreement between Iran and Israel. I’m going to say it for the 100th time: This does not mean that the United States ought to put hundreds of thousands of troops on the ground in Iran to topple the regime. No one is talking about that. What we are talking about is a risk-reward calculation, whereby targeted American action could have a disproportionate effect on the future not only of the Middle East, but on geopolitics as a whole. Imagine if the Houthis stopped harassing shipping in the Red Sea anymore because their sponsor state, Iran, was gone. Imagine if the Chinese had to be a little bit more careful about their playing around with anti-American forces in the Middle East, because the mullahs weren’t there to help them out. Imagine if the Russians did not have a gigantic supply of weaponry coming in from Iran. A lot of people on the horseshoe theory Right are mirroring Ben Rhodes’ and Barack Obama’s foreign policy; many of them are simply dismissing a lot of the numbers coming out of Iran. You might notice that these are the same people perfectly willing to trust Hamas’s numbers in the Gaza Strip. The same people who, in specious fashion, were labeling Israel’s targeted action in the Gaza Strip a genocide, have now gone extraordinarily silent when it comes to Iran literally mowing down protesters in the streets. That’s pretty incredible stuff from our human rights-loving friends. The silence of the Left in the face of the brutality of the Iranian regime toward an innocent citizenry is staggeringly hypocritical and vile.

If you know anything about cults, then you know that, inevitably, their denial of reality catches up with them in spectacular fashion. Heaven’s Gate started out innocently enough back in the 1970s. The hippies were convinced that they’d eventually ascend on board an alien UFO and transform into immortal beings with godlike powers. Members eagerly signed up because, after all, there wasn’t a whole lot of downside risk involved. In the worst-case scenario, if the “prophecy” was wrong, your life would continue as normal. Maybe you’d have to leave your family for a bit, but otherwise, no big deal. In the best-case scenario, you become omnipotent. Seemed like a win-win. Fast-forward a few decades, and Heaven’s Gate changed the terms of the bargain a little bit. By the 90s, in order to get the godlike powers, you needed to take your own life. So it was a slight revision in the contractual arrangement. But a lot of Heaven’s Gate members went along with it anyway. They had bought into the nonsense they’d been fed. They were in too deep. They had sunk costs. They weren’t about to turn back at the last minute, as the Hale-Bopp Comet approached. So they took the drugs, died, and that was that. The cult of Heaven’s Gate was no more. At the risk of sounding a note of optimism, we’re now seeing a very similar trend play out in the Democrat Party. After years of denying reality — as it concerns everything from human biology to DEI to Donald Trump — the seams are starting to come loose for the Left-wing political movement in this country. It’s evident, from one news story to another, that reality is finally hitting these people in the face. And they aren’t taking it well. Consider, for example, this piece of video footage from the shooting of Renee Good. Most people missed this moment, which isn’t surprising, because there’s so much footage of the shooting online. But Laura Powell noticed a very revealing comment from Good’s lesbian friend, right after the shooting. Listen: I missed this clip before. After Renee Wood’s death, someone—apparently her partner, Becca—screaming: “Why did you have real bullets?” How could she not know law enforcement uses real bullets??pic.twitter.com/JqiBcP0mDV — Laura Powell (@LauraPowellEsq) January 13, 2026 Credit: @LauraPowellEsq/X.com She shouts, “Why did you have real bullets?” She genuinely cannot understand why federal law enforcement officers would load their weapons with actual ammunition. You will not find a clearer window into the state of mind of these open-borders agitators. They truly believe that they’re playing a game. It’s all role-playing to them — from the “dispatchers” we talked about yesterday in the anti-ICE Signal chats, to the “legal monitors” who are currently running around Minneapolis to “document ICE” and prevent them from “abducting” random brown people. They desperately want to escape their uninteresting and depressing lives and reimagine themselves as French Resistance fighters circa 1942. All of their friends and social networks and schools and employers have indulged this delusion. So they naturally expected that the federal government would do so, as well. They seriously expect that, when they drive their cars directly into law enforcement, officers will simply “take the hit” and get run over, in order to keep the fantasy alive. If you were a Democrat political strategist — and you weren’t ideological, you simply wanted your party to win — this would be a major, existential concern. We’re not talking about one or two lone wolves or bad actors here. We’re talking about a critical mass of Democrat voters who are deranged. They support attacking federal law enforcement, assassinating a conservative podcaster, taking shots at the president of the United States, mowing down an insurance executive, and gloating over the cancer-stricken body of a cartoonist who dared to say something negative about a demographic that’s sacred to them. These are symptoms of a political movement that has lost touch with reality, and now, like all cults, they’re losing touch with human decency as well. They are nearing their moment of ultimate self-destruction. That became even clearer yesterday, during oral arguments at the Supreme Court for two cases: Little v. Hecox and West Virginia v. BPJ. For background, “Hecox” refers to a man who wanted to join the women’s track and cross-country teams at Boise State University in Idaho. Meanwhile, BPJ is a 15-year-old high school student — also a male — who’s taking cross-sex hormones and other sterilizing medications, who wants to join the girls’ sports teams at school. Both Hecox and BPJ were banned from joining the girls’ teams because of laws passed by their respective states, which prevent males from competing against females. In a moment, we’ll talk in some detail about the legal issues that are involved here. But really, this was the highlight. More than three years after my film “What is a Woman?,” the lead attorney for one of the trans-identifying athletes was asked a very basic, fundamental question by Justice Alito. He wanted to know what it means to be a man or a woman, a boy or a girl. He wanted the attorney — a very highly educated individual, who went to Harvard several times — to provide some definition of biological sex, so that we can distinguish between men and women. This is, and always will be, the fatal question for transgender ideology. It’s a question they simply cannot answer. The entire movement hinges on the notion that a man is someone who says he’s a man, and a woman is someone who says she’s a woman. There is no definition they can offer that isn’t circular and therefore meaningless. That’s why the attorney decided to punt on the question. Listen: “What is a woman?” comes to the Supreme Court. ALITO: “What is that definition, for equal protection purposes? What does it mean to be a boy or a girl, or a man or a woman?” HARNETT: “…We do not have a definition for the court.”pic.twitter.com/QjXg5cQ2Zc — Colin Wright (@SwipeWright) January 13, 2026 Credit: @SwipeWright/X.com Here’s the exact transcript, just to be clear about what was said: Justice Alito asks, “What does it mean to be a boy or a girl, or a man or a woman?” And then, after some stammering, the response from the Harvard-educated lawyer before the Supreme Court is: “We do not have a definition for the court.” This is the answer that the Left’s attorney gave, in a case that’s supposedly about how trans-identifying individuals are being discriminated against on the basis of their biological sex. They can’t even define the words they’re supposed to be arguing about. This is yet another Hindenburg moment for the modern Left. It was just over a year ago that the ACLU admitted, before the Supreme Court, that there’s no evidence that butchering and sterilizing children actually prevents suicides. (In fact, as you’d expect, there’s a lot of evidence to the contrary). And now, when asked point-blank to define the concept of biological sex, the attorney for the trans-identifying plaintiff says simply, “Pass.” In a casual debate among friends, this would be embarrassing enough. It’s a concession that you’ve lost. But in an oral argument before the Supreme Court, it’s something else entirely. The lawyer is saying that one of the most fundamental concepts in all of human biology — the distinction between sexes — is null and void. The entire concept of “biological sex” has no meaning. And if that’s the case — if we’re really supposed to disregard a category that’s easily definable, and pretend we can’t define it at all — then *nothing* is real anymore. If chromosomes and human biology suddenly mean nothing at all, then who’s to say that ICE isn’t the Gestapo, or that Charlie Kirk wasn’t a Nazi, or that Scott Adams wasn’t a racist who had it coming? As long as we’re making everything up, there are no boundaries. The delusions can run rampant. And that’s exactly what’s happening for Democrats, at a large scale. Take, for example, this moment that took place outside the Supreme Court yesterday. The Daily Wire interviewed a Left-wing activist. Here’s how it went: The Supreme Court heard oral arguments on transgender athlete bans. I interviewed trans activists on the steps of the high court. One rallygoer wasn’t sure “why we split up sports” at all. “I’m pretty sure a woman could play basketball as well as a man if she practiced.” pic.twitter.com/FowP8MhrBr — Brecca Stoll (@breccastoll) January 13, 2026 Credit: @breccastoll/X.com The woman states, “I’m pretty sure a woman could play basketball as well as a man if she practiced.” This is the mainstream view of the average Leftist in 2026. Yesterday, NPR ran a whole segment about “studies” that supposedly showed that men don’t have a biological advantage over women in sports. You have to wonder why these people aren’t outside the headquarters of the NBA and the NFL right now, demanding that every team sign a female athlete, just like they have female referees now. It’s not like the NBA and the NFL are right-wing institutions. They’ll be receptive to whatever the activists have to say. And it wouldn’t be hard to make the change, either. You can just incorporate the WNBA into the NBA overnight. How many games do you think they’d win? Maybe the better question is: How many fatalities would there be before the police had to shut down the entire league? In fairness to the Left-wing side of the argument, the ACLU made a slightly different case before the Supreme Court. This is a section from the ACLU’s brief, which was flagged by Kristen Waggoner, at ADF Legal. “The medical understanding of biological sex encompasses several biological attributes, including chromosomes, genes, gonads, hormone levels, internal and external genitalia, and other secondary sex characteristics. Transgender women may possess some of these biological attributes typical of women. … The Act’s definition [of biological sex] excludes the key criterion (circulating testosterone levels) that would have allowed certain transgender women to play on women’s teams.” So the ACLU is taking issue with Idaho’s definition of biological sex, which includes three criteria: “reproductive anatomy, genetic makeup, or normal endogenously produced testosterone levels.” According to the ACLU, anatomy and genetics aren’t the “key criterion.” The really important metric, in their view, is the level of testosterone in your system. This is another way of arguing that “sex” has no real meaning because anyone can change it at any time. All you need to do is take some hormones, and you’ll change sex. At the moment, it doesn’t look like the Supreme Court is going to side with the ACLU on this. The laws banning men from competing against women — laws that never should have been necessary in the first place, in a sane society — will likely be upheld. That means that, contrary to what the ACLU is arguing, these bans don’t violate the 14th Amendment or Title 9. Alas, there is no constitutional right for men to pummel women in every available sport. Who would’ve thought? Just to give you an idea of how absurd these arguments have been, at the lower court level, an appeals court in San Francisco ruled that the laws amounted to sex discrimination because, “athletes on girls’ and women’s teams – but not on boys’ and men’s teams – are subject to invasive sex verification procedures to implement the law.” In other words, the schools were checking to make sure that no males were trying to sneak onto the girls’ team. But they weren’t checking to ensure that females didn’t try to sneak onto the men’s team. And in the eyes of a federal appeals court in San Francisco, that amounted to unconstitutional sex discrimination. But really, it’s common sense. Obviously, you don’t have to check to see if girls are sneaking their way onto the boys’ teams, because the girls would have no reason to do so. They’d get absolutely demolished if they tried, and no team would want to pick them. Even if you pretend that the female athlete could somehow pass as a male — which has never happened in human history — the fact that they’d get completely smoked on the field would be a pretty big clue. Separately, there is a line of argument from the Left and the ACLU that, if a particular male trans-identifying athlete can demonstrate that he, specifically, has no biological advantage over women, then he should be able to play with women, even though he’s a male. In other words, if a boy has been chemically castrated from a young age and destroyed his muscles and bone growth, to the point that he can prove he’s as weak as the average female athlete, then he should be allowed onto the girls’ team. That’s called an “as-applied” challenge to the Idaho law. This is how far the trans movement has sunk, by the way. They’re trying to argue, in court, that they should be considered females if they do enough irreversible damage to their bodies. According to this argument, a female is nothing but a severely diminished male. That brings us to this clip of Ketanji Brown Jackson, where she brings up “as-applied” challenges, as only Ketanji Brown Jackson can. See if you can decipher whatever this is: ? BREAKING: DEI Justice Ketanji Jackson is DEFENDING men in women’s sports with an utter word salad at the Supreme Court “Is treating someone transgender, but does not have, because of the medical interventions and the things that have been done, who does not have, uh, the… pic.twitter.com/QTkpru6EqO — Eric Daugherty (@EricLDaugh) January 13, 2026 Credit: @EricLDaugh/X.com “Is treating someone transgender, but does not have, because of the medical interventions and the things that have been done, who does not have, uh, the same, uh, threat to physical competition and safety and all the reasons the state puts forward – that’s actually a different class, says this individual. So you’re not treating the class the same. And how do you respond to that?” And then the lawyer doesn’t respond to it, because he has no idea what she’s talking about. It’s total gibberish. Ketanji Brown Jackson is the perfect illustration of black woman privilege. There is no group in the country more privileged than black women. The most mediocre among them — black women who can barely read or speak — are elevated to the most prestigious positions purely, solely, because they are black women. Ketanji Brown Jackson is not qualified to be a high school principal, let alone a Supreme Court Justice. And yet here she is. And for what it’s worth, this wasn’t the only word salad from Jackson during yesterday’s arguments. Here’s another moment where she stumbled a bit, as she tried to define what a woman is: Listen to how ridiculous Ketanji Brown Jackson sounds when she tries to discuss what a woman is. She embarrasses herself in every oral argument. pic.twitter.com/2K0jmVHCBl — Clay Travis (@ClayTravis) January 13, 2026 Credit: @ClayTravis/X.com Putting aside the nonsense at the beginning of that clip, which no one in the courtroom could comprehend — She’s outraged that we’re limiting our definition of girls to girls who were “assigned” female at birth. First of all, anyone using the phrase “sex assigned at birth” is someone who should never be taken seriously, at all, for any reason. Doctors don’t “assign” your sex, any more than they “assign” your height or your weight. It can’t be overemphasized that, just 15 years ago, no one on the planet would’ve been confused about this. These are all terms that were invented yesterday, for all practical purposes. And now we have Supreme Court justices parroting the lingo, as if it’s all completely logical and well-settled science, even though it makes no logical sense. (Some of the conservative justices did it, too, by the way, including Amy Coney Barrett, the supposedly conservative female justice on the bench. She kept referring to “trans boys” and “trans girls.”) If you’re not in the throes of the reality-distortion field of the Left, then you immediately notice how these people stammer on, nonsensically, whenever they’re talking about basic concepts. You realize, right away, that they’re full of it. At the same time, they really think they’re onto something. They think they’re winning the argument. But they’re not winning the argument. And with every high-profile meltdown like this, from Minnesota to Washington, that becomes obvious to more and more people. Yesterday at the Supreme Court, The Daily Wire’s team noticed that the pro-reality side far outnumbered the trans activists — although, true to form, the trans activists were much more obnoxious. Watch: Not what I was expecting, but the number of people at the Supreme Court here to save women’s sports far outnumbers the trans — though the trans side is definitely louder. Massive showing. pic.twitter.com/BcsN5LabvJ — Brent Scher (@BrentScher) January 13, 2026 Credit: @BrentScher/X.com You have to keep images like this in mind, especially as we head into a very important election season. Cults do not last forever. Eventually, they burn themselves out. Reality hits hard. And then the cultists — the ones who are still alive and functional, anyway — will resume their normal lives. They’ll forget all about how they pretended they were members of the French Resistance in downtown Minneapolis, and how men can transform instantly to women, and how it’s totally normal to drive your car into a federal law enforcement officer. They’ll become normal, just as quickly as they went insane. Keep in mind, it was just a decade ago that CNN, of all places, was running puff pieces for ICE. They were bragging about getting “exclusive access” to immigration raids. An account called “Maze” just unearthed a video clip, which may now be restricted by X, but we found the clip: Credit: CNN via @mazemoore/X.com The clip is from early 2016, at the end of the Obama administration. The liberals at CNN were showing off the cool hardware that ICE uses on their immigration raids. It’s a perfect illustration of how fake and ephemeral all of this outrage is that we’re seeing right now. Leftists know that ICE isn’t suddenly targeting brown people because of the color of their skin or kidnapping anyone. The narrative is an obvious fabrication. It’s inauthentic. And for that reason, it’s not sustainable. Nor is it productive. Just last night, ABC News reported that: “For the first time in at least half a century, the U.S. experienced negative net migration in 2025.” They cite a study from Brookings, which states, “We estimate net flows of negative 295,000 to negative 10,000 for the year. Continued negative net migration for 2026 is also likely.” So for all the wailing and “ICE Watching” and domestic terrorism these people are engaging in, the Left is failing. Meanwhile, as important leftists scream into the void, millions of people — the majority of Americans — are thrilled by what they’re seeing. And with every viral meltdown from a Leftist agitator, and every word salad from the DEI justices on the Supreme Court, Team Sanity is finally making the comeback we’ve all been waiting for, and which this country has desperately needed for a very long time. * * * WATCH Matt Walsh’s groundbreaking documentary “What Is A Woman?” on DailyWire+.

A zone of low pressure is expected to organize by Thursday, aided by minimal wind shear

'I haven't heard that'

He allegedly threatened the driver after he refused to pull over.

'Monitor and interrupt ICE in our area'

'We have to be their fucking light right now!'

Free speech is dying in much of Europe and in the so-called “free world.” The United Kingdom recently announced its intentions to fine or even ban X, the social media platform, over deepfakes, a sign that things may get worse before they get better. Fox News reported on Monday that U.K “ministers confirmed a possible ban on Elon Musk’s social media platform X amid a widening probe and with the company potentially incurring hefty fines.” This move, according to Fox News, “follows the launch of a formal investigation by Ofcom, the U.K. communications regulator, into whether X breached its legal duties under the U.K.’s Online Safety Act and came after reports that the platform’s built-in AI chatbot, Grok, was used to generate and share sexualized deepfake images of women and children.” The U.K.’s Technology Secretary Liz Kendall said in the House of Commons Monday that the move against X and its “Grok” AI “is not, as some would claim, about restricting freedom of speech” and that a potential ban is all just about “upholding basic British values of decency and respect, and ensuring that the standards that we expect offline are upheld online.” Sorry, that’s a little tough to believe. The Wall Street Journal criticized the U.K.’s move against X in a recent editorial. While the Grok feature to “create AI smut is gross,” the Journal noted, that “…doesn’t mean British Prime Minister Keir Starmer is right to pick this fight, which smacks of selective censorship.” Musk insists that Grok prevents inappropriate underage images and that the only exception is the “adversarial hacking of Grok,” which would be fixed immediately. I not aware of any naked underage images generated by Grok. Literally zero.Obviously, Grok does not spontaneously generate images, it does so only according to user requests. When asked to generate images, it will refuse to produce anything illegal, as the operating principle… https://t.co/YBoqo7ZmEj— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 14, 2026 Other AI programs, the Journal explained, allow similar image changes and manipulation to Grok. It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that “Mr. Starmer is targeting X because Mr. Musk has taken an unflattering interest in Mr. Starmer’s leadership.” And the U.K. has certainly racked up a notorious record on speech in recent years as Musk has been eager to point out. Real fascism is arresting thousands of people for social media posts https://t.co/lfkQF8MHnk— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 12, 2026 That staggering stat of speech-related arrests in the U.K comes from a freedom of information request from The Times, which reported in April that 12,183 people were arrested under section 127 of the Communications Act 2003 in 2023. So, about 30 arrests a day. The total arrests number was actually down slightly from 2022. Now, not all—or even most—of these arrests led to imprisonment. However, it’s clear that to even comment on what could be considered “controversial” (immigration or transgenderism) invites the possibility of arrest, even if the comments were made outside the country. One retired police officer was arrested for denouncing antisemitism. While he was being detained the officers pointed out that his bookshelves contained “very Brexit-y things.” Funny, because Brexit is the law of the land. Given that dubious record, it’s hard to take at face value that the Starmer government’s turn against X is only about photo manipulation or protecting women and children. So, let’s cut to the chase of what this is all about. The U.K.’s crackdown on X is not about protecting their people from deepfakes, and it’s certainly not about “democracy.” It’s about controlling speech. It’s about ensuring that the government’s established narrative about immigration and many other issues is ultimately controlled by the state. This is why they continue to mass import immigrants from countries with significant ties to terrorism, yet block immigration critics on the Right from entering the country. On Wednesday, Eva Vlaardingerbroek, a Dutch political commentator who warns about the dangers of unlimited immigration, announced on X that she had been prohibited from entering the U.K. She wasn’t even given the chance to appeal because her presence was not considered to be “conducive to the public good.” Just days earlier she had criticized Starmer on, you guessed it, X. Holy sh*t.I’ve been banned from traveling to the UK. They revoked my ETA. "Your presence in the UK is not considered to be conductive to the public good."3 days after posting this about Starmer. https://t.co/NqWBtaTkZe pic.twitter.com/lm5lZgL2i7— Eva Vlaardingerbroek (@EvaVlaar) January 14, 2026 “Keir Starmer wants to crack down on X under the pretence [sic] of ‘women’s safety’, whilst he’s the one allowing the ongoing rape and killing of British girls by migrant rape gangs. Evil, despicable man,” she wrote on Friday. She was referring to the Pakistani “groomer gang” scandal that has been downplayed by the U.K.’s Labour Party. The Trump administration has certainly taken note of the U.K.’s censorious turn. U.S. Under Secretary of State Sarah B. Rogers blasted the U.K.’s decision to block the entrance of immigration critics into their country. Countries have been banning and restricting visas on opaque, frivolous viewpoint bases for a long time — Lauren Southern was banned from the UK in ~2018 for blaspheming Allah as “gay” and “trans.”Media and commentators who were silent or approving of these decisions now fault… https://t.co/0CrMc5K3uP— Under Secretary of State Sarah B. Rogers (@UnderSecPD) January 14, 2026 Rogers has said in an interview with the U.K-based GB News that the U.S. is prepared to use its “full range of tools” against “authoritarian, closed societies where the Government bans [X].” That would potentially include the current government of the U.K. As I’ve written before, it is important to put pressure on allies looking to closely cooperate with the U.S. but appear to be going in the direction of our authoritarian rivals. Our “special relationship” with the U.K. and deep connection we have to Western, European nations won’t long survive if their speech policies become like Iran or China’s. Banning X, as China has, would be a serious abridgement of free speech and would be considered a serious shot at the U.S. The Trump administration’s National Security Strategy document published in December even mentioned that the U.S. “will oppose elite-driven, anti-democratic restrictions on core liberties in Europe, the Anglosphere, and the rest of the democratic world, especially among our allies.” Hopefully Starmer and company will see the light and back away from what would ultimately be a disastrous attempt to ban X. At the very least, President Donald Trump and his administration won’t stay quiet about it. The post The UK’s War on X and Free Speech appeared first on The Daily Signal.

The lawyers arguing for men’s ability to compete in women’s sports have begun to realize they have a losing hand, and it’s making them desperate, according to a lawyer on the other side of the issue. “I think the other side is starting to recognize they’re on the losing side of this issue culturally, politically, in every way,” Matt Sharp, senior counsel at Alliance Defending Freedom, told The Daily Signal in an interview Tuesday. Sharp spoke after the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in two women’s sports cases—West Virginia v. P.B.J. and Little v. Hecox—where the American Civil Liberties Union, representing male athletes who claim to identify as women, is challenging the constitutionality of laws protecting women’s sports. The ADF lawyer said one particular argument demonstrated pro-transgender lawyers’ desperation. “They’re starting to make the case, ‘Well, we’re really only talking about boys that … have been on puberty blockers or hormones or something, so that there is no sports advantage,'” Sharp explained. (After a diagnosis of gender dysphoria—the painful and persistent condition of identifying with the gender of the opposite sex—some doctors prescribe experimental medical interventions. These include so-called puberty blockers—which are also used to chemically castrate sex offenders—cross-sex hormones, and surgeries to make a male body appear female or vice versa.) The ADF lawyer pointed out the “flaws with that argument.” “First and foremost, no amount of puberty blockers, no amount of hormones, no amount of surgery changes a man into a woman,” he argued. “Your sex is written into every single cell of your body.” “To properly understand sex, you have to understand like it is intrinsically rooted in our physiology, our biology, our genetics, and nothing changes that.” Sharp also claimed that studies show disparities in sports performance between boys and girls at young ages, such as 6 years old, long before puberty begins. “So, even science undermines their argument that puberty blockers or hormones takes away this athletic advantage, because it does not,” he said. “I think it’s a very disingenuous argument for them to be making at the 11th hour to try to narrow the case and say, ‘Well, we’re just talking about this particular male, or that particular male,'” Sharp argued. “At the end of the day, the state has an interest to say no male belongs in women’s sports, no matter how you identify, no matter what drugs or surgeries you’ve done, we are going to preserve the integrity of the women’s category.” The lawyer warned that “the moment you crack that door open and the one moment you allow one male to come in and say, ‘Well, he maybe doesn’t have as many athletic advantages,’ then does another male come along and say, ‘I’m not a good athlete, I ought to be on the girls’ team,’ and you end up with [men taking] the entire girls’ category.” Pro-Trans Attorney’s Argument Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett asked ACLU senior counsel Joshua Block why, under his theory, a boy who isn’t competitive on the boys’ team couldn’t just play on the girls’ team. “We don’t think the boys’ team is for better athletes and you have a back-up team for athletes that aren’t as good,” Block responded. “I think the purpose of the teams is to control for the variable of sex-based advantages so that talented women athletes have all the same opportunities as talented male athletes.” Yet Block insisted that the plaintiff in the West Virginia case, Becky Pepper-Jackson, who goes by the initials B.P.J., has erased any biological advantage through sex-rejecting medical procedures. “What has happened here is, by virtue of her [sic] medical care, B.P.J. has already controlled for those sex-based advantages,” the attorney argued. “So, she is completely in the position that she would have been if her birth-assigned sex were female.” Female Athlete Weighs In Sharp analyzed the cases alongside Selina Soule, a former high school sprinter and jumper who took the Connecticut Association of Schools to court because it forced her to compete against men. “I know firsthand what it’s like to be forced to compete against male athletes,” she told The Daily Signal. “I had to race against not one, but two of them throughout all four years of high school in the short sprint events.” “In the hundred-meter dash, the two of them would be at the finish line, chest-bumping each other while the rest of us girls were at the 80-meter mark,” Soule recalled. “So, it was just never a fair contest.” She remarked that many transgender activists seem to think that “all there is to being a woman is just, you know, lipstick, long hair, and a pair of high heels.” “It’s kind of offensive to us that they create themselves based off of a stereotype of women,” Soule added. The post Trans Activists ‘Starting to Recognize’ They’re ‘on the Losing Side’ of Women’s Sports, Lawyer Says appeared first on The Daily Signal.