Woke is Dead: How Common Sense Triumphed in an Age of Total Madness By Piers Morgan Harper Collins, 310 pages, $22 The estimable Piers Morgan’s new book, Woke is Dead, generously repays the reading time, containing as it does wit, wisdom, and humor. (Perhaps I should say humour in respect to Britain’s best controversialist.) A year and change ago, sensible Americanos who had had enough of the insanity demanded, in the immortal words of Roberto Duran, “No mas, no mas.” I extend this praise even though I believe woke is anything but dead. Wounded perhaps by our recent spasm of common sense — a virtue that is anything but common — but not dead by a long shot. It will take more than a new president and a handful of well-aimed executive orders to root woke out of its littorals in academe (where the rubber meets the sky), the legacy media, the entertainment industry, and a dismaying chunk of corporate America. These cultural transmission belts, all dominated by the madcap left, will not give up easily. Promising trends are afoot now, but it’s still too soon to sing, “Ding-dong the wicked witch is dead.” Especially dismaying is that the woke tragedy has not been a bottom-up but a top-down phenomena. The more years one has sat directly on one’s backside at university, the more strings of degrees behind one’s name, the more likely one is to believe that a six-foot tall person with an X and Y chromosome, a five-o’clock shadow at three-o’clock, and an Adam’s apple the size of a real apple, can become a she just by declaring himself to be one. More confirmation, if more were needed, that George Orwell was spot on when he said: “Some ideas are so stupid only intellectuals believe them.” No fool like an “educated” fool. Woke is Dead is a tour-de-insanity of our recent political and cultural history, most of which informed TAS readers are already familiar with. But as Morgan unspools them in all their daffy details, we’re reminded of how far down the rabbit-hole we had fallen before the much-needed pushback began a year or so ago. Consider. In Woke World, we were joylessly hectored, from high atop Mount Virtue, to believe, or at least to pretend to believe, that: The U.S. is a racist hell-hole where white Americans oppress black Americans and should be engaged full-time in mea culpas. Donald Trump is the head racist and Al Sharpton (dial 1-800-HUSTLE) is a civil rights leader; Criminals, even those with rap sheets longer than a Fidel Castro speech, are victims who should be helped rather than hindered in any way, and police officers are criminals; There are many sexes and even more pronouns. People can move freely from one to another at their whim. And it’s right and proper that men should be allowed to compete in women’s sports and lurk in women’s intimate spaces, displaying their male tool-kits and enjoying the view; Earth will fry unless we turn the planet over to the tender mercies of Al Gore, AOC, and the delusions of various enviro-nutters like Gerda Thundermug; The world would be better off if cleansed of all traces of religion (except Islam, of course) and of traditional masculinity, re-defined as toxic masculinity; Enforceable borders are so 20th Century; Alice, call your office. Wonderland was a lot like this. The outrageous brain infarcts and others were, and in some precincts still are, enforced with a rigid cancellation system that would have made the Stasi proud. At the height of woke cancel culture, anyone bold enough to state the bloody obvious, that Dr. Rachel Levine is an ugly guy in a dress, risked a visit from a grim-faced delegation of red-guards from the HR department. (To this day many HR departments function as political officers, enforcers of the orthodoxies of the left progressive enterprise.) A year and change ago, sensible Americanos who had had enough of the insanity demanded, in the immortal words of Roberto Duran, “No mas, no mas.”  Morgan calls Donald Trump’s election in 2024 both a cause and an effect of this return to common sense. “In a world where the scourge of wokeism rendered so many people weak-willed, work-shy, lacking in the resilience, resolve, and perseverance required to navigate life’s travails, and totally devoid of basic common sense, Trump has all those qualities in abundance.” (The desirable qualities, not the weak-willed etc.) In short order Trump closed our borders and started shipping out the worst of the millions of gate-crashers that the previous administration invited in, made it official government policy that there are only two sexes, put pressure on cities and states to treat criminals like criminals, backed away from the Democrats’ suicidal energy policies, and began the battle to end DEI, which is little more than discrimination against whites and Asians. (The only way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race. DEI is not a cure for discrimination. It’s just another form of it.) As Morgan phrases it: “It took a right-wing and white president to restore Martin Luther King’s aspiration of character over color.” Common sense once again has a fighting chance in the land of the free and the home of the brave. Fewer Americans, in the face of cosmic stupidity by the woke scolds, are going along with the gag. They’ve begun to say out loud what they’ve kept in for fear of the woke cancelling squads. There are many battles to come in the culture war. But at least, as Morgan lays it out in just 310 pages of straight-forward prose, the battle has been joined. Woke is Dead is a fine primer on the dreary period we’ve endured, the re-awakening, and an encouraging take on the road ahead. In the last decade we’ve undergone a cultural lobotomy. But, happily, this one is reversible. It will take time, courage, and persistence. Stay tuned. In due course we’ll see if we’re up to the mark. A word on Piers Morgan and the difficulty of assigning ideological labels to individuals these days. Morgan has always described himself as a liberal, even though he is always tearing forensic strips off of people, policies, and ideas that fly under the liberal label. He explains: “I’ve always considered myself to be a liberal because liberalism meant free speech, free markets, small government, a color-blind society, and a general but pragmatic aversion to war. Yes to all of that. But the woke-branded liberalism is the polar opposite.”  If this sounds a lot like conservatism to you, it does to me as well. Few people who describe themselves as liberals today would subscribe to any one or all of these. For those who have common sense friends or relations on their gift list, Woke is Dead would be a fine stocking stuffer. READ MORE from Larry Thornberry: Democrat Policies Are Crazy, but Crazy Still Sells (See NYC) RIP Mike Greenwell — a Good Ball Player and a Good Man Octogenarians Can Solve Murders Too    

Progressive Prejudice: Exposing the Devouring Mother By Leslie Corbly Bombadier Books, 320 pages, $18.99  There are books that inform — and there are books that awaken. Progressive Prejudice: Exposing the Devouring Mother by Leslie Corbly is the latter. It’s a clarion call to the sleeping church, a piercing trumpet in a nation lulled into moral amnesia. It’s not merely a book about politics, feminism, or abortion — it is a confrontation with the spiritual black hole that is pulling at modern America. (RELATED: The Slow Suffocation of Christian America) She writes as one who has walked through the valley of the shadow of death — literally. Corbly’s voice is that of a prophet raised from the ashes of the very ideology she exposes. She is not an armchair theologian or a distant commentator. She writes as one who has walked through the valley of the shadow of death — literally. As she recounts in her haunting introduction, “Leslie is half-aborted” were the first words she remembers learning about herself. That phrase alone captures the spiritual sickness of our age: a world that treats life not as sacred but as negotiable, children not as blessings but as burdens, womanhood not as a calling but as a weapon. Corbly’s testimony and analysis strike at the root of a rebellion as old as Eden — the desire to be as gods. She calls it the spirit of the “Devouring Mother”: the perversion of the nurturing feminine into something that consumes rather than protects. In this fallen order, a woman’s power, once meant to reflect the creative mercy of God, has been twisted into a destructive autonomy that claims the right to give and take life. The serpent’s whisper — “You shall be as gods” — has been repackaged as “My body, my choice.” (RELATED: God in the Age of Pronouns: Father, Mother, or Neither?) Which has continued its perversion so completely that the Hollywood “in” crowd now contains hordes of women subjecting their kids to chemical castration and medical mutilation in the name of the satanic ideology of transgenderism. (RELATED: The Bizarre Phenomenon of Celebrity Transgender Children Confronts Changing Attitudes) Throughout Progressive Prejudice, Corbly traces this satanic inversion from its roots in postmodern relativism to its poisonous fruit in abortion culture. She writes with righteous fire, arguing that when society allows one group — mothers — to decide the worth of another — children — it has already enthroned human pride over divine justice. In her words, “Supporting abortion is not justice. It is inequality. It is prejudice.” She calls abortion what it is: the ultimate form of idolatry. It is the sacrifice of the innocent upon the altar of convenience and autonomy, the Baal worship of the modern age. In Scripture, the Israelites were condemned for passing their children through the fire to Molech. Today, the fire burns behind the sterile walls of abortion clinics, and we dare to call it “reproductive healthcare.” Corbly exposes that evil with the moral clarity of Elijah standing before the prophets of Baal, asking the only question that matters: “How long will you waver between two opinions?” Her writing draws deeply from both theology and lived experience, merging the intellectual rigor of an apologist with the brokenhearted honesty of a survivor. She shows how the progressive worldview — rooted in godless self-deification — has inverted every moral category. Equality has become equity. Compassion has become coercion. Love has been hollowed out and replaced with sentimentality devoid of truth. Her analysis of “progressive privilege” is devastating. She shows how secular progressivism has become the default religion of our institutions — our schools, media, and even many churches — preaching tolerance while silencing dissent, worshiping empathy while discarding life. “The gatekeepers of the cultural conversation,” she writes, “control the terms of the moral debate.” In other words, the priests of this new religion no longer wear robes; they wear lab coats and judicial robes. They carry TV microphones instead of a staff. And yet, amid this darkness, Corbly’s message is not one of despair — it is one of fierce, radiant hope. Like Jeremiah lamenting over Jerusalem, she weeps over a people who have forgotten God, yet she also believes in redemption through truth. Every page of this book echoes a biblical call to repentance, a reminder that even in the ruins of moral decay, the grace of Christ can restore what the world has defiled. Abortion is not simply a social issue; it is spiritual warfare. For the believer, this book demands a response. It reminds us that our faith is not meant to be polite or passive in the face of evil. The Christian call to “defend the cause of the fatherless” (Isaiah 1:17) is not metaphorical — it is literal. Abortion is not simply a social issue; it is spiritual warfare. It is the very battlefield where the church must stand, armored in truth, against the principalities of death. Corbly understands that abortion is not an isolated sin — it is the visible symptom of a culture that has dethroned God. She argues that feminism’s march toward total autonomy was not liberation but bondage: bondage to pride, to envy, to the lie that a woman’s worth depends on imitating the sins of man rather than reflecting the grace of Christ. In Corbly’s words, “Women have demanded to be treated as gods, thus transforming children from people worthy of protection to either a curse to avoid or an accessory to wear.” The power of Progressive Prejudice lies in its uncompromising truth-telling. Corbly refuses to sanitize her story or soften her message to please the world. Her writing cuts like a conviction-sharpened razor. When she describes the “weaponization of empathy” by the progressive left — how emotional manipulation has replaced moral reasoning — she forces readers to confront how even compassion can be corrupted when divorced from the Cross. What makes this book essential for Christians, especially in the pro-life movement, is that it transcends politics. Corbly’s fight is not left versus right — it is life versus death, truth versus delusion, Christ versus the spirit of the age. Her argument is not that we should simply oppose abortion, but that we must restore a biblical worldview that honors God’s image in every person, from conception to natural death. Like the prophets of old, Corbly exposes the idols of our time, and her message burns with the conviction of divine calling. In a nation where even many churches have fallen silent on the sanctity of life, her voice is a reminder that truth and love are never at odds. “We cannot serve both God and choice,” her pages seem to shout. “Choose this day whom you will serve.” Progressive Prejudice is not comfortable reading. It’s convicting, humbling, and, at times, searingly painful. But it is holy work — the kind of truth that purifies rather than panders. For every pastor who fears speaking against abortion, for every believer tempted to compromise with the world, for every pro-life Christian who needs to be reminded why this fight is sacred — this book is required reading. Leslie Corbly stands reminiscent of a modern-day Deborah in an age of Jezebels — a woman who wields truth like a sword, not for vengeance but for redemption. Her testimony is living proof that even those labeled “unwanted” by the world are cherished by the Creator who knit them together in the womb. Read this book. Then pray. Then act. Because in a culture that calls evil good and good evil, Progressive Prejudice is not just a book — it is a call to arms for the Body of Christ. READ MORE from Scott McKay: We Should Declare War on the Cancerous Cartel in Caracas Five Quick Things: A Bush Family Comeback? Not No. Hell No! ‘Don’t Give Up The Ship’? Seriously?

Ken Burns has come in for some deserved criticism for pushing the line, in his new documentary on the American Revolution, that the Founding Fathers got their ideas about confederative government from the Iroquois and the Six Nations.  From what I have been able to gather, outside of his dutiful reportage of treaties and conflicts, Benjamin Franklin himself, put forward as the best case for Iroquois influence and generally friendly to the Indians, mentions them only a small handful of times in writings that take up many thousands of pages, and never with any specificity as regards governmental structure. But colleges … have a duty to transmit these bodies of knowledge, and to develop them if they can.  If they do not, they are pointless. Historians who take the trouble to read through all the debates, newspapers, broadsides, letters, and contemporary books on the new nation, and who immerse themselves besides in what the Founders read — Scripture, ancient historians, political philosophers, Milton and other politically minded poets, the great jurists such as Coke and Blackstone — and who familiarize themselves with well-governed nations that could serve as examples for the Founders to imitate, such as the Dutch republic — do not take the notion seriously.  To put it another way, if you do not know who Polybius was, or why George Washington was considered the Cincinnatus of his country, or what the governor of the Plymouth Colony, William Bradford, was referring to when he scouted the impracticability “of that conceit of Plato’s and other ancients, applauded by some of later times,” concerning the elimination of private property, you are in no position to express an opinion on this matter. Meanwhile, I have seen a clip in which the historian Victor Davis Hanson explains what was going on with the Romans and the Jews in first-century Judea, and why Pontius Pilate, as Hanson interprets the matter, was content to have Jesus executed and to pin the blame on the Jewish leaders. His questioner is the fitness coach and podcaster Jillian Michaels, who throughout the clip looks at Hanson with blank disbelief, as if he were speaking madness. That is because she takes for granted that only Christians believe that Jesus really existed; that the gospels were written “hundreds of years” after the events described; that there is no evidence for his existence outside of the gospels; and that the faith only really began at the Council of Nicaea. These are opinions she may have picked up socially, as a dog in the woods picks up burrs, because, again, anybody who reads history, not to mention the New Testament, knows better. My point is not to criticize our poor schools and colleges, but to note a shift in what it has come to mean to think you know things. Knowledge is hard-won.  That is why we used to have intellectual disciplines, defining what was to be studied, the methods of investigation, the criteria for judging probability or certainty, and the ancillary fields the scholar needs experience in to help him make sense of his own.  If you were going to study Renaissance English literature, you had to familiarize yourself with the poetry, the drama, the prose fiction, the essays, and many other works, such as Hooker’s Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, or Hakluyt’s Voyages.   That in turn would require a broad knowledge of English literature generally, to be at ease when you judge what an English poet can do with words of various provenance, or with the typical meters of English poetry, or with the various “voices,” direct or suggestive or ironic or self-critical, that a poet may use while writing in the first person. Especially you must be well-acquainted with what the poets read, both in English and in other tongues. Because no one can learn all the languages in the world, we must often rely on good translations.  Still, certain foreign languages might be, for practical purposes, recommended or required, such as Italian at least for the study of Edmund Spenser, or Latin at least for the study of Milton. Nor could you settle your focus on literature alone.  The most influential scholar of medieval English literature in the last 100 years, D. W. Robertson, devoted his A Preface to Chaucer to the study, among other things, of medieval iconography, to show what Chaucer’s audience might have seen in their minds when, for example, the two roguish scholars in the Reeve’s Tale describe the action of the grain and the hopper in the mill they have gone to, to make sure the miller does not cheat them. Robertson shows us the “mystic mill” on one of the capitals of the basilica at Vezelay, with the figure of Moses pouring grain from a sack into a mill, with the figure of Saint Paul gathering the meal below.  To understand the thought behind the image, and to understand Chaucer’s allegorical art, you must be familiar with New Testament exegesis of the Old Testament, as in Saint Paul’s letter to the Romans: you must separate the wheat of meaning from the integument of the letter.  As Chaucer’s Nun’s Priest says at the beginning of his tale, we are to “take the fruit and let the chaff be still.”  To read Robertson’s work is to encounter, on every page, artists, poets, critics, philosophers, and theologians, spanning two thousand years.  His knowledge was both encyclopedic and acutely specific, and his skill at interpretation was careful and subtle and yet always productive of clarity. Now, such work is exceedingly difficult.  Nor is there anything in our current universities that encourages it, or that reliably produces scholars capable of appreciating it.  There are several causes of this cultural and intellectual decay.  I will bring up only one of them here.  We have, in the humanities and the social sciences, given over the notion that our central task is to impart a clear body of knowledge, with the intellectual skills necessary to understand it. “Programs,” ill-defined, often determined by political advocacy, produce graduates trained in no discipline at all, with a shallow and scatter-shot approach to a set of items that otherwise have little to do with one another. An American Studies graduate will be neither an historian nor a literary critic nor an economist, but he will be encouraged to think he is all three.  Unfortunately, a little of this and that and the other adds up to less than nothing — to someone trained up in skimming, and thus peculiarly susceptible to academic fads and pretensions. Nor is the problem limited to such programs. It infects departments too.  Few of our graduates with a degree in English know much about English poetry, or about literature written before 1900 generally. The creators and writers of the old Star Trek series could quote, without fuss, Hamlet and The Tempest in a single episode whose title comes from the 17th century poet George Herbert: “Is There in Truth No Beauty?”  I would now be pleasantly surprised to meet English majors who know who Herbert was — and Herbert, for my money, is the greatest writer of religious poetry in English, and one of the two or three of our language’s greatest lyric poets. Is over-specialization the problem?  Yes and no. Abandon general knowledge, and you end up with idiosyncrasy: an English professor who focuses on cross-dressing in Renaissance drama, but whose knowledge of English literature and language generally is scant. But such a “specialist,” in our time, is not even a specialist, strictly speaking, because he has not been brought up in any clear discipline. The remedy, again, is not to be “interdisciplinary,” or rather sub-disciplinary, flitting from one flower to another, like a butterfly. It is to return to the disciplines, which, as I say, always required broad knowledge of matters beyond one’s field.  The Shakespeare scholar, as such, should read Plutarch. The Tennyson scholar, as such, should read Newman. How can you read Robert Browning’s “Andrea del Sarto,” or Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun, written when the Hawthornes and the Brownings lived in Italy and became good friends, if you know nothing about Renaissance and Greco-Roman art? Most people will not incline toward such painstaking work, supposing they are capable of it.  But colleges — and ancillary institutions of public learning — have a duty to transmit these bodies of knowledge, and to develop them if they can.  If they do not, they are pointless.  If they do, the knowledge does not remain trammeled up within ivy-covered walls.  We would get people outside of the colleges, saying, “But separation of the executive and the legislative came from republican Rome” and not the Iroquois, or, “But Luke leaves off Acts before the death of his friend, Paul,” and so forth.  We would know too much to fall for the barrage of nonsense aimed at us from all sides, every day, on all subjects, world without end. READ MORE from Anthony Esolen: A Dome for Man ‘Magical Keys’ Are No Substitute for Real Knowledge At the Tip of Your Fingers

As we gather to celebrate Thanksgiving, with many worrying about the impossibly high cost of health insurance, let’s play a game of What If? What if healthcare dollars currently going to insurance companies were paid instead to the consumers themselves? Would good things result, or bad? This “what if” exercise was prompted by President Trump’s offhand suggestion to give ACA subsidies “directly to the people … [instead of] … BIG, BAD insurance companies”? (Republicans are currently considering this idea but only for the ACA.) What if healthcare dollars were given directly to We the People? That would be an awesome Thanksgiving gift! Specifically, what if all the money called employer-sponsored health benefit that presently goes to insurance companies were paid instead directly to employees? What might happen? According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, “The average annual premiums for employer-sponsored health insurance [paid to insurance companies] in 2024 were … $25,572 for family coverage.” Approximately 165 million Americans receive such an employer-sponsored health benefit. Paying each employee the average premium that currently is going to insurance would put $4,219,380,000,000 in the hands of U.S. consumers. The $25,572 payment to insurers is actually wages earned by the employee but not given to the employee. This is a holdover from a wage freeze accommodation enacted during World War II that was never repealed, even though all other wartime wage and price freezes were reversed. Beside correcting the obvious injustice of denying employees their full wages, numerous other positive impacts would result. To play out the optimal scenario, Congress would have to create a new no-limit HSA in which to put the additional wages. Current medical savings accounts have limits well below $25,000. To project subsequent events, assume Americans could put the $25,572 in such an HSA and use the funds tax-free to pay for medical expenses. Overnight, there would be a huge marketplace of consumers — half the nation — with $4 trillion to spend on health care. They could shop for both care and insurance. Sellers of same would have to compete with each other for consumer dollars rather than large numbers of contracted patients as they do now. Prices for both care and insurance would plummet due to inter-seller competition. Insurers would have to offer policies that consumers want instead of federally mandates policies. Most thoughtful individuals would purchase various forms of high deductible, “catastrophic” insurance and pay from the HSA for routine care, even in-hospital procedures. Procedures like hernia repair, cataract surgery, and childbirth have charges in a direct-pay (not insurance-based) environment well within the available funds in the new HSA. While insurance company bottom lines would likely suffer, these companies would quickly adapt as they are used to aggressive competition. Not so the doctors. Physicians are socialized in school and post-graduate training to eschew both competition and advertising. (Contrast to lawyers, especially in personal injury.) Practicing medicine in a competitive free market with more than 165 million potential patients who have money would initially be distressing and possibly overwhelming. Those who adapt and who publish affordable prices with understandable outcomes, and who offer rapid service would quickly find their waiting rooms and their pocketbooks over-flowing. Hospitals would have to publish lists of competitive prices that consumers not insurance would pay, replacing the current phantom price lists that are full charges, not the actual payments to providers which are much lower. Hospitals and other facilities would have to publish outcomes data in formats that people could understand or risk having empty operating rooms. A large number of federal and state healthcare bureaucrats would find themselves out of work. While this would be unfortunate for them, tax-payers would suddenly be off the hook for much of the cost of healthcare BURRDEN — bureaucracy, unnecessary rules and regulations, directives, enforcement, and noncompliance activities. Last year the cost of BURRDEN was more than $2 trillion. Consider what not spending that amount would do to the federal budget and the national debt. Medicaid/CHIP with 77.7 million enrollees should return to its original design: 50 programs run solely by the states, with unrestricted block grants from Washington. The federal one-size-fits-all approach to Medicaid has never worked and was in fact prohibited in the Medicaid law, Section 1801. What if healthcare dollars were given directly to We the People? That would be an awesome Thanksgiving gift! READ MORE from Deane Waldman: Subtext to Shutdown: Unaffordable Healthcare Where Have All Our Healthcare Dollars Gone? DOGE Is Missing $2 Trillion in Healthcare Waste “Dr. Deane” Waldman, MD, MBA, is professor emeritus of pediatrics, pathology, and decision science; and former director of the New Mexico Health Insurance Exchange. His latest book, Empower – Two Doctors’ Cure for Healthcare, was co-authored with Vance Ginn, PhD (Economics). Follow Dr. Deane on X @DrDeaneW or visit www.empowerpatients.info. 

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

by Joseph P. Farrell, Giza Death Star: As you might have guessed from the headline of today’s blog, I’m on a “theme” this week, and the theme is klepto-currency and the complete and total lack of any security or transparency regarding the whole swindle. And yes, I said swindle, because that’s what I have believed […]

I’m thankful he’s not the president

President Donald Trump has called the Washington D.C. shooting that critically injured two National Guard troops "an act of terror."

President Donald Trump addressed the nation on Wednesday following the “ambush” by an Afghan national of two West Virginia National Guard soldiers in Washington, D.C., placing the blame on the Biden administration. Trump said that Americans are “filled with righteous anger and ferocious resolve” in the wake of the attack, which he said was “an act of evil, an act of hatred, and an act of terror.” “It was a crime against our entire nation. It was a crime against humanity,” he said. The suspect, 29-year-old Afghan national Rahmanullah Lakanwal, entered the United States from Afghanistan in September 2021 under Operation Allies Welcome following the messy withdrawal during the Biden administration of American troops from Afghanistan. “We must now reexamine every single alien who has entered our country from Afghanistan under Biden, and we must take all necessary measures to ensure the removal of any alien from any country who does not belong here or add benefit to our country,” he said. “This attack underscores the single greatest national security threat facing our nation,” the president said regarding illegal immigration, blaming Biden for the hefty influx of immigrants into the country during his administration through both legal and illegal avenues. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem confirmed on Wednesday that the suspect was not properly vetted before entering the United States following 2021 troop withdrawal. “The suspect who shot our brave National Guardsmen is an Afghan national who was one of the many unvetted, mass paroled into the United States under Operation Allies Welcome on September 8, 2021, under the Biden Administration. I will not utter this depraved individual’s name. He should be starved of the glory he so desperately wants,” she said. The president said he would then direct the Department of War to send 500 more troops to Washington, D.C., as part of a federal law enforcement surge that began earlier this summer to crack down on crime in the capital city. WATCH IN FULL: President Donald J. Trump addresses the nation following the horrific terror attack on National Guardsmen in Washington, D.C. pic.twitter.com/5g6xpAYqVw — Rapid Response 47 (@RapidResponse47) November 27, 2025 Trump said that he will make sure the suspect “pays the steepest possible price.” Earlier on Wednesday, West Virginia Gov. Patrick Morrisey said, “We are now receiving conflicting reports about the condition of our two Guard members and will provide additional updates once we receive more complete information.” In a prior post, the governor said that the victims died. National Guardsmen were seen praying outside the hospital where the victims were being treated. Right now, DailyWire+ annual memberships are fifty percent off during our Black Friday sale. Join now at dailywire.com/blackfriday.