Lindsey Graham Calls for Sanctions on Norway After Major BDS Move

Senator Lindsey Graham on Thursday threatened to slap tariffs on Norway for its sovereign wealth fund’s decision to divest from an American company reportedly complicit in Israeli human rights abuses in Gaza and the West Bank.

As part of an ongoing ethics review meant to root out investments that contribute to Israeli violations of international law, the Norwegian wealth fund announced this week that it would exclude the construction equipment manufacturer Caterpillar. The ethics council concluded, “There is no doubt that Caterpillar’s products are being used to commit extensive and systematic violations of international humani­tarian law.” Namely, “Bulldozers manufactured by Caterpillar are being used by Israeli authorities in the widespread unlawful destruction of Palestinian property,” the council found, as the Boycott, Divest, and Sanctions (BDS) movement has long pointed out.

Graham threatened the fund on X Wednesday, writing, “Your BS decision will not go unanswered.” On Thursday, he specified that he hopes to “put tariffs on countries who refuse to do business with great American companies” or to refuse visas to people punishing U.S. companies “for geopolitical differences.”

“To those who run Norway’s sovereign wealth fund: if you cannot do business with Caterpillar because Israel uses their products, maybe it’s time you’re made aware that doing business or visiting America is a privilege, not a right,” Graham warned.

The intimidation tactic is unsurprising from a politician who has proven himself an unquestioning cheerleader of the Israeli government amid the atrocities it is committing in Palestine. In June, Graham summed up his foreign policy approach regarding Israel as follows: “God blesses those who bless Israel.” (And the Republican senator has been blessed abundantly by pro-Israel lobbying groups, reportedly to the tune of $1 million throughout his political career.)

This is not the first time Graham has threatened hefty punishments on countries seeking to uphold international law.

In November 2024, Graham vowed that countries would face draconian sanctions if they complied with the International Criminal Court’s arrest warrants against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for war crimes and crimes against humanity. “If you help the ICC, we’re going to crush the economy,” the senator said at the time. “Because we’re next,” he added. “Why can’t they go after Trump, or any other American president, under this theory?”

Constituents at Ohio Representative Warren Davidson’s town hall drowned him out with boos, jeers, and chants of “tax the rich” on Wednesday night. Attendees were particularly upset about Ohio’s National Guard being deployed in Washington, D.C., Davidson’s support for President Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, and tariffs.

“[How will you lower] the inflated levels of government spending today to a level that is sustainable and will not crush our children with debt?” Read one of the constituent submitted questions.

“Yeah great question, thank you for that. I think that—”

“Tax the rich! Tax the rich! Tax the rich! Tax the rich!” the crowd interrupted, growing louder with each chant.

The town hall later turned to the Republican representative’s support for the Trump administration’s agenda.

“Why would you vote to pass the One Big Beautiful Bill when it raises the national debt to $3.4 trillion, and hurts the poorest of Americans?” A constituent asked Davidson. The crowd applauded in support of the question.

“The One Big Beautiful Bill is a imperfect bill, but it is—it is beautiful,” Davidson answered weakly, pausing between words while the audience groaned and yelled, “Bullshit!” at him. “If we did not pass this bill, we would have faced a default on our debt. [Which is] inacceptable [sic]. Almost everyone in the room, if you pay income taxes, would’ve had your taxes increased.”

The crowd grumbled again.

“And I’d just like to know … who is in the super high income tax bracket that gets tips? No tax on tips. No tax on Social Security. These things are big wins for Americans,” Davidson continued as the crowd grew more and more irate. “And look, President Trump is doing a great job of securing the border.”

“No!” the crowd screamed, booing even more.

Davidson was a bit dismayed by his constituents’ indignation.

“I tried to basically serve the people that wanted to come have an actual town hall,” Davidson told Ohio’s Spectrum News. “It was disappointing that a lot of other people were very disruptive. So hopefully the people that endured and stayed through it all got some benefit out of it.”

Vice President JD Vance is having a temper tantrum over people criticizing the phrase “thoughts and prayers” as a suitable response to a deadly mass shooting.

MSNBC host Jen Psaki called out leaders’ lackluster response to the school shooting in Minneapolis Wednesday, drawing the ire of the vice president.

“Prayer is not freaking enough,” Psaki wrote in a post on X Thursday. “Prayers does not end school shootings. Prayers do not make parents feel safe sending their kids to school. Prayer does not bring these kids back. Enough with the thoughts and prayers.”

Vance, who is known for his emotional outbursts—both online and off—appeared to have been stewing on this argument, and slammed Psaki’s statement.

“We pray because our hearts are broken. We pray because we know God listens. We pray because we know that God works in mysterious ways, and can inspire us to further action,” Vance wrote Thursday morning. “Why do you feel the need to attack other people for praying when kids were just killed praying?”

Vance appears to be willfully misinterpreting Psaki’s criticism. The host was making the point that constituents should expect more from their leaders than some kind of rhetoric—and the “further action” Vance mentions never seems to materialize after mass shootings.

The vice president had offered his own helpless response to the deadly incident on Wednesday. “We’re at the WH monitoring the situation in Minneapolis. Join all of us in praying for the victims!” Vance wrote.

It’s worth noting that the Trump administration is already leaping into action—but not by banning guns, or doing anything that might actually prevent another mass shooting.

President Trump announced Wednesday that the White House would lower the flags to half-mast through Sunday evening. And on Thursday, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said he would investigate whether antidepressants can be linked to homicidal ideation (spoiler alert: the NIH have already found no significant connection between the two).

Maybe it’s the brain worms, but Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. claims he can look at a child and diagnose them with cellular difficulties.

The 71-year-old wellness conspiracist warned reporters Wednesday that America’s children are suffering from “mitochondrial challenges,” an non-clinical term that suggests Kennedy is capable of peering into a person’s cellular health at a glance.

“I know what a healthy child is supposed to look like,” Kennedy said. “I’m looking at kids as I walk through the airports today, as I walk down the street, and I see these kids that are overburdened with mitochondrial challenges, with inflammation, you can tell from their faces, from their body movements and from their lack of social connection.”

“I know that’s not how our children are supposed to look,” he added.

Kennedy then went on to lament the prevalence of autism, which he got wrong. The health secretary told the Austin crowd that one in 25 Texans have autism—a baseless overexaggeration. In reality, one in 31 people are estimated to have autism, according to data based on national averages that was released by the Autism Society of Texas.

Kennedy has waged an unscientific war on America’s public health policy since he took the reins of the Department of Health and Human Services in February.

So far, he has replaced independent medical experts on the Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s vaccine advisory panel with vaccine skeptics. He also warned against the use of the MMR vaccine during Texas’s historic measles outbreak, recommending that suffering patients instead take vitamins. And he founded his new directive for America’s health policy—the “Make America Healthy Again” report—on studies generated by AI that never existed in the real world.

His anxieties surrounding autism are particularly alarming. Kennedy is a part of a growing movement of anti-vax parents who refuse to provide their children with the same public health advantages that they received in their youth, mostly in fear of thoroughly debunked conspiracy theories that, at one point, linked autism to the jab.

The researcher who sparked that myth with a fraudulent paper lost his medical license and eventually rescinded his opinion. Since then, dozens of studies have proven there’s no correlation between autism and vaccines, including one study that surveyed more than 660,000 children over the course of 11 years.

Regardless, Kennedy’s ideologies—and his firm grip on HHS—has already eaten away at America’s vaccine access.

Just this month, he has deauthorized Covid-19 vaccinations for children and adults under 65, and divested $500 million from mRNA research, effectively axing 22 mRNA studies since,according to Kennedy, they “fail to protect” against “upper respiratory infections like COVID and flu.”

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is investigating whether antidepressants can be linked to homicidal ideation after a mass shooting in Minneapolis.

While appearing on Fox & Friends Thursday morning, Kennedy was asked whether he planned to examine the drugs used by the shooter, who authorities identified as transgender. Host Brian Kilmeade appeared anxious for Kennedy to link the shooter’s medical transition to the deadly incident which killed two children.

“We’re launching studies on the potential contribution of some of the [selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor] drugs, and some of the other psychiatric drugs that might be contributing to violence. You know, many of them have black box warnings that warn of suicidal ideation and homicidal ideation,” Kennedy replied.

As head of the Department of Health and Human Services, Kennedy has suggested that the people who take antidepressants—some 11 percent of the population—are more likely to become school shooters. In January, Kennedy said that the National Institutes of Health needed to study SSRIs and video games as potential causes of increased gun violence, dismissing actual guns as a potential cause.

One 2015 study published by the National Library of Medicine, which is run by the NIH, found that “antidepressants should not be denied to either adults or adolescents due to a presumed risk of homicidal behavior.”

Minnesota Senator Tina Smith slammed Kennedy’s comments in a post on X Thursday.

“I dare you to go to Annunciation School and tell our grieving community, in effect, guns don’t kill kids, antidepressants do,” she wrote. “Just shut up. Stop peddling bullshit. You should be fired.”

New York Representative Ritchie Torres—one of AIPAC’s strongest soldiers—left Jewish comedian and talk show host Adam Friedland stunned by the soulless, robotic talking points he kept leaning on to justify Israel’s abhorrent genocide of Palestinians. 

“Hamas murdered thousands of people so,” said Torres in one of the multiple viral clips the interview generated. 

“So what does that mean?” Friedland asked. 

“That Hamas is a terrorist organization for murdering innocent children and civilians.”

“How many civilians have been killed in this war?” Friedland asked earnestly. Torres went quiet for a beat, as if trying to remember how AIPAC taught him to respond to good-faith questions about the carnage Israel has unleashed on Gaza.

“The war is a tragedy—” said Torres.

“Ninety percent of them have been civilians!” said an exasperated Friedland, referring to an IDF database that confirms over 80 percent of the Palestinians murdered by Israel have been noncombatant civilians. “They’ve killed, they’ve killed journalists!” 

“People have been killed in a war, it’s been a tragedy,” Torres said emotionlessly. 

‘They’ve killed people waiting for aid.” 

“But you’re suggesting that it is the policy of the Israeli government to murder civilians, and that’s, that is a notion that I reject.” 

“You gotta like, listen man, you gotta be like a human being about this,” Friedland replied.

“People who are dying in the war, which to me is a tragedy because war is a tragedy—” 

“Do you feel in your heart that what you’re saying is right?” 

“If Hamas, if you remove Hamas—” 

“You don’t actually think that—”

“I told you what I believe,” Torres said sharply, the monotone cadence slipping a bit. “Don’t tell me what I believe, I’ve told you what I believe.” 

“Why would you believe that?” 

“Because there are people who see the world differently.” 

Multiple other clips of the interview also went viral, as Torres struggled to respond to Friedland’s earnest concerns about the genocide, and the impacts of Israel’s actions on the Jewish community worldwide.

“What does it look like to have a flag with a Jewish star, and I’m Jewish, for kids to be starving right now?” Friedland asked Torres.

“It just sounds like you’re justifying antisemitism,” Torres said.

“Are you crazy right now?”

The conversation continued, and tensely. 

“If you have disagreements with the Israeli government, you should voice your criticism of the Israeli government,” Torres said in a later clip. “But there is no justification for intimidation or harassment against American Jews.” 

“I’m telling you as a Jew right now that we are receiving a lot more hate because of what the people with the flag that has a Jewish star on it are doing to other people right now,” Friedland responded passionately. “As a Jewish person … how painful it is for us to say, and it hurts my stomach to say this—and you’re gonna say ‘I disagree, I disagree’—that this is a genocide. And that hurts to say that a Jew could do that. It hurts because we grew up with learning about what hatred is. We grew up learning about this. And the same year the state of Israel was established, 1948, the world saw the Holocuast, and they established standards for what a genocide is. It was the same year. And the world said this shouldn’t be a thing that happens.” 

Torres has been an empty-headed AIPAC mouthpiece for some time now. His first time truly criticizing Israel’s actions over the last two years was last month, and it was uninspiring. His mind-numbingly obtuse interview with Friedland only reinforces just how far gone he is. 

Torres can say the word tragedy as much as he wants, it only makes his loyalty to AIPAC and the other Israeli lobbies that line his pockets that much more obvious. Torres can say that this genocide is so unfortunate, and it’s always so sad when people die, but he still refuses to say anything bad about Israel, no matter how many men, women, and children they bomb and shoot and brutalize, no matter how many hospitals and mosques and churches and schools they destroy.

And frankly, it is Israeli policy to murder civilians. How could it not be when an overwhelming majority of those killed are just that? IDF soldiers have admitted to being ordered to open fire indiscriminately at Palestinians desperately rushing to aid sites. Just two days ago Israel bombed Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, waited for aid workers to get there, and bombed it again ten minutes later. Twenty people were killed, including journalists, workers, and doctors. Israel simply called the very deliberate bombing of the same spot twice a “tragic mishap.” And yet Torres remains unflinching in his defense of the genocidal government.

The interview has resonated deeply across the internet. 

“This interview is insane. Adam Friedland wrestles with the profound inner conflict and shame of being raised Zionist and opposing the Israeli genocide while Ritchie Torres sneers at him through the most banal talking points and accuses him of doing a ‘gotcha’ interview,” journalist and podcast host Alex Goldman wrote on X. 

“Ritchie Torres defending Israel by telling Adam Friedland he doesn’t know the Jewish experience is one [of] the most antisemetic statements I have witnessed in recent memory lol,” wrote another user. 

Others pointed out the cold, eerie mannerisms that Torres addressed Friedland with. 

“One thing that struck me abt the Adam Friedland interview with Ritchie Torres is how deeply, unsettlingly strange Torres is as an individual,” another popular account said. “His movements, his expressions, his terrible timing, the way he sits—it’s almost as if he’s literally an alien. disturbing, in many ways.”

“How Ritchie Torres can sit there and argue with a jew, who lived in Israel, comes from a family who went through [apartheid] in [South Africa] and was also a Middle Eastern studies major in college, and is crying from his soul and say this is wild. He’s a fucking robot. Adam Friedland 2028,” another account wrote.

Friedland’s full interview with Torres can be found here.  

Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook, whom Donald Trump is seeking to fire in an escalating campaign of lawfare against his political enemies, is officially taking the president to court.

In a lawsuit filed Wednesday, the Fed board member says Trump’s “concocted basis” for her removal fails to “amount to ‘cause’”—and is an “unprecedented and illegal” violation of her due process rights as well as the central bank’s independence.

Stunningly, the lawsuit also names Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell and the Board of Governors as defendants.

Trump on Monday fired Cook over (seemingly vengeance-driven) accusations of mortgage fraud. The lawsuit, however, says the allegations are “pretextual, in order to effectuate her prompt removal and vacate a seat for President Trump to fill and forward his agenda to undermine the independence of the Federal Reserve.”

Cause, under the Federal Reserve Act, means “inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office.” But even if Trump’s authority to remove a Fed board member goes beyond that, Cook’s lawyers state, he is not allowed to “unilaterally redefine ‘cause’—completely unmoored to caselaw, history, and tradition—and conclude, without evidence, that he has found it.”

“Certainly,” the suit continues, “a policy dispute between the President and a Governor does not constitute ‘cause.’ Neither does a specious assertion that a one ‘potentially’ committed a crime—one which is unproven, uncharged, and unrelated to official conduct.”

So expansive is Trump’s “conception of ‘cause,’” Cook warns, that “it would allow him to remove any Federal Reserve Board member with whom he disagrees about policy based on chalked up allegations.”

The lawsuit also notes that Bill Pulte, head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, has lobbed accusations of mortgage-related misdeeds against others of late (i.e., Senator Adam Schiff and New York Attorney General Letitia James). Notably, Cook’s lawyers note, each of Pulte’s criminal referrals have been “at one time or another, political targets of President Trump’s ire prior to any mortgage fraud allegations.”

This fact has caused suspicions that Pulte is working through an enemies list—perhaps even handed down from the White House. And, as TNR’s Greg Sargent observed this week, the discovery process in Cook’s case against Trump could help reveal potential White House involvement.

This story has been updated.

Constituents in Iowa’s 2nd Congressional District showered Representative Ashley Hinson with boos and jeers for supporting President Donald Trump’s “big, beautiful” bill.

The Republican lawmaker was excoriated during a town hall Wednesday in Worth County, where Iowans urged Hinson to “stop lying” after she baselessly claimed that the president’s key legislation had ushered in “higher wages” and an improved cost of living.

“Higher wages?” shouted one woman incredulously. “For who? For you?”

“Cost of living is higher than it’s ever been,” another woman said.

Hinson, a former TV journalist, has been remarkably unpopular at town halls across her state as she ardently defends Trump’s agenda. She faced even more heat in May when she told a crowd in Elkader that she was “proud to vote for President Trump’s ‘one big beautiful bill’,” eliciting so much contempt from the crowd that they yelled at her until she stopped speaking.

“You are a fraud,” a constituent shouted at her at the time.

Hinson isn’t the only MAGA legislator who has gotten scorched during the last few weeks for voting against the interests of her constituents.

Wyoming Representative Harriet Hageman faced outrage last week for supporting Trump’s tariffs, New York Representative Elise Stefanik was roundly booed by a feisty crowd when she emerged in Plattsburg Monday to rename a county building, and Nebraska Representative Mike Flood was excoriated during a town hall earlier this month for failing to protect SNAP benefits, veterans’ programs, and health care access, which combined with voters’ simmering resentment for lagging on the release of the Epstein files.

Republicans were advised earlier this year by party leadership to avoid engaging in town halls, since the format would give voters the opportunity to voice their disagreement with Trump’s policies.

Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley faced a similarly explosive town hall in April, when he was pressed to defend the president’s flippant attitude toward the Supreme Court when he defied an order related to Kilmar Armando Ábrego García.

Voters blew up at him again the following week in Northwood. Grassley hasn’t hosted a town hall since.

The evening after Wednesday’s mass shooting at Annunciation Catholic School in Minneapolis, Fox News host Sean Hannity proposed a “simple” solution that, in reality, would have done nothing to prevent the tragedy earlier that day.

“School shootings are preventable, and simple, basic, common-sense actions can mitigate these tragedies,” Hannity told his audience. “If we have the desire to stop school shootings, this is the first thing you should do: Every school in the country should have a metal detector. You have them at airports. You have them when you’re around elected politicians.”

It’s unclear what a metal detector would have done to prevent Wednesday’s shooting, in which the perpetrator opened fire from outside of the church, through its windows.

According to the Minneapolis police chief, “the gunman approached on the outside, on the side of the building, and began firing a rifle through the church windows towards the children sitting in the pews at the mass” inside.

Citing a parent who was in the church as the shooting took place, The Minnesota Star Tribune reported that the “shooter opened fire outside the building with some kind of semiautomatic weapon.” The unnamed eyewitness said the perpetrator “just pepper-sprayed through the stained-glass windows into the building, 50 to 100 shots.”

Hannity went on to recommend controlling “the entry of kids and the perimeter around every school,” and placing armed retired servicemembers or law enforcement officers in schools.

“The left’s rush to immediately blame Republicans, race to blame guns, for every tragedy, it’s sad and pathetic, but it’s predictable,” the Fox host concluded—himself racing to blame anything but firearms for what took place Wednesday, to the point of espousing a woefully inadequate solution that could have never stopped it.

Tulsi Gabbard’s title of Director of National Intelligence becomes more ironic everyday.

Gabbard reportedly shocked Central Intelligence Agency officials last week after she revoked an undercover operative’s security clearance and posted their name on social media, The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday.

Gabbard revoked the security clearances of 37 current and former intelligence officials who had been involved in producing intelligence assessments related to Russia’s interference in the 2016 election. She claimed to have done this at the direction of President Donald Trump.

The director was apparently unaware that the CIA officer she doxxed had been working undercover, according to one person familiar with the events. Three other people said she did not adequately confer with the CIA about the composition of the list, but delivered the list to the CIA the evening before she posted it to social media.

ODNI did not seek the CIA’s input about the composition of the list, and the CIA was not made aware of her intention to post it on X, according to two people familiar with the events.

Larry Pfeiffer, a former chief of staff at the CIA, told the Journal that the intelligence director had made a stupid mistake.

“A smart [director of national intelligence] would have consulted with CIA,” he said. “It could potentially put CIA cover procedures at risk. It could put relations with foreign governments at risk.”

Gabbard has dug into a months-long campaign to discredit an intelligence community assessment that found that Russian President Vladimir Putin had aspired to see Trump enter the White House, over Hillary Clinton. (Putin later admitted as much.)

Gabbard also recently announced plans to gut ODNI’s Foreign Malign Influence Center, alleging that it had been used by the Biden administration to “justify the suppression of free speech and to censor political opposition.”

This is another ironic move from Gabbard, who has a history of foisting foreign misinformation on the American public herself.