TV News LIES

Sam Rasoul, the Virginia Democrat who is currently the longest-serving Muslim state lawmaker in the US and who faced accusations of antisemitism over language condemning Israel’s assault on Gaza as genocide, scored a resounding victory in Tuesday’s election that he believes shows voters are craving honesty from politicians.

Rasoul, an American Palestinian state legislator since 2014, strengthened his majority as he was re-elected to an area of Virginia where the city of Roanoke leans Democrat and the surrounding areas are deeply conservative. In an election seen as a referendum on Trump’s policies, which have disproportionately affected Virginia, Rasoul increased his vote share from four years ago by more than 5% as Democrats trounced Republicans from the legislature to the governor’s mansion.

“A 70% victory in the Bible belt of Virginia for a Palestinian Muslim is really a validation, beyond just Democrats winning, that you can be bold on the Gaza genocide and still be victorious,” Rasoul told the Guardian.

His win came despite months of attack ads and rebukes from other party leaders in the state. He was accused of hate speech and antisemitism by his opponent, a Jewish Republican party member who ran as an independent, pro-Israel groups and senior members of his own party after he called the killing of at least 70,000 Palestinians in Gaza since October 2023 “the most evil cleansing in human history” and blamed Zionism, which he labelled “a supremacist ideology created to destroy and coronquer everything and everyone in its way”.

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The secretary of the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS), Kristi Noem, reportedly authorized the purchase of Spirit Airlines jets before discovering the airline didn’t actually own the planes – and that the aircraft lacked engines.

The bizarre anecdote was contained in a Wall Street Journal report released on Friday, which recounted how Noem and Corey Lewandowski – who managed Donald Trump’s first winning presidential campaign – had recently arranged to buy 10 Boeing 737 aircraft from Spirit Airlines. People familiar with the situation told the paper that the two intended to use the jets to expand deportation flights – and for personal travel.

Those sources also claimed Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials had cautioned them that buying planes would be far more expensive than simply expanding existing flight contracts.

Complicating matters further, Spirit, which filed for bankruptcy protection for the second time, in August, did not own the jets and their engines would have had to be bought separately. The plan has since been paused, according to the Journal.

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Red-state America has been a big fan of Israel, according to Jackson Lahmeyer, an evangelical pastor in Oklahoma and founder of Pastors for Trump.

"Evangelical Christians in America for the most part, not always but generally speaking, have usually been very strong supporters of the nation of Israel and the Jewish people," Lahmeyer said in an interview with NPR.

That support is deeply rooted in their evangelical faith, he said. But recently, Lahmeyer has noticed the conversation around Israel is changing quite a bit — particularly online.

"Some very influential leaders, all of whom I like — Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, Marjorie Taylor Greene — have taken a very controversial stance in regards to the nation of Israel," he said.

Last week, Carlson hosted a prominent white nationalist named Nick Fuentes on his show. Although Carlson disagreed with Fuentes on his most antisemitic statements, such as American Jews are more faithful to Israel than they are to the United States, he did broadly align with Fuentes on his views about the country itself.

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President Donald Trump was permanently blocked from sending the National Guard to Portland by U.S. District Court Judge Karin Immergut, who delivered her final order in the case Friday.

The case has centered around whether ongoing protests outside the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement building in the city warrant a National Guard deployment. In her ruling, she acknowledged “violent protests did occur in June,” but law enforcement was able to address them.

“Since that brief span of a few days in June, the protests outside the Portland ICE facility have been predominately peaceful, with only isolated and sporadic instances of relatively low-level violence, largely between protesters and counter-protesters,” the judge wrote in her 106-page order, “this Court concludes that even giving great deference to the President’s determination, the President did not have a lawful basis to federalize the National Guard.”

The permanent injunction went into effect immediately.

The decision is a setback in the Trump administration’s effort to send National Guard members to the city, and

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Students, faculty and staff at more than 100 campuses across the US rallied against the Trump administration’s assault on higher education on Friday – the first in a planned series of nationwide, coordinated protests that organizers hope will culminate in large-scale students’ and workers’ strikes next May Day and a nationwide general strike in May 2028.

The day of action was organized under the banner of Students Rise Up, a network of students including both local groups and national organizations such as Sunrise Movement and Campus Climate Network. Students were joined by faculty and educational workers’ unions like the American Association of University Professors and Higher Education Labor United.

Protesters called on university administrators and elected officials to denounce the president’s months-long effort to force US universities to abide by its ideological priorities and urged them to reject Trump’s “compact”, which would give universities preferential access to federal funding in exchange for a commitment to advance the administration’s conservative agenda. Only one university, New College of Florida – a public school that state legislators have turned into a bastion of conservatism – has so far accepted it..

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Former White House senior adviser David Axelrod on Friday said the Anti-Defamation League’s response to Zohran Mamdani’s (D) mayoral win was “shockingly gratuitous.”

“As a Jew & son of a Jewish refugee, I’m alarmed by the rise of antisemitism. The ADL’s mission is to call it out when they see it,” Axelrod wrote in a statement on X.

“But I found their response to Mamdani’s election shockingly gratuitous, inflammatory and deeply irresponsible,” he added. 

Following Mamdani’s Tuesday win, the ADL launched the “Mamdani Monitor,” a public facing tracker to monitor policies, appointments and actions from his administration that they consider potentially harmful to the safety of the Jewish community.

“Mayor-Elect Mamdani has promoted antisemitic narratives, associated with individuals who have a history of antisemitism, and demonstrated intense animosity toward the Jewish state that is counter to the views of the overwhelming majority of Jewish New Yorkers,” Jonathan Greenblatt, ADL CEO and National Director said in a statement.

“We are deeply concerned that those individuals and principles will influence his administration at a time when we are tracking a brazen surge of harassment, vandalism and violence targeting Jewish residents and institutions in recent years,” he added.

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