Kari Lake Makes Unhinged Plea in Wake of Charlie Kirk’s Death

Arizona Republican Kari Lake is warning parents not to send their children to college because they could turn out like Charlie Kirk’s alleged shooter—who didn’t actually attend university for more than one semester. 

Speaking at a vigil for the right-wing activist at the Kennedy Center Sunday, Lake, a Trump acolyte serving as a senior adviser to the U.S. Agency for Global Media, claimed that alleged gunman Tyler Robinson had been “brainwashed” into committing political violence. 

“I’m not going to say our side is perfect, but damn it, this is coming from the other side,” Lake claimed. “How does a 22-year-old become so filled with hate? Five years earlier, I was told, he was a Trump supporter. And we sent our kids off to college, and they brainwashed ’em.

“I am making a plea to mothers: Do not send your children into these indoctrination camps,” Lake continued. “Don’t do it, do not do it!” 

But Robinson only attended Utah State University for one semester before taking a leave of absence, according to CNN. He never went back. 

In fact, Robinson was a third-year student in the electrical apprenticeship program at Dixie Technical College—exactly the kind of trade school that Republicans are hoping more young Americans will attend.

Either Lake didn’t know that, or she didn’t care. “At one point, that 22-year-old was a baby in his mother’s arms,” she went on. “And by all accounts, they did a good job raising him until he was sent off to be brainwashed.”

Lake is among several other MAGA pundits who have blamed Kirk’s death on higher education, as a means of placing responsibility on the left.  

But if Robinson’s alleged bullet-casing manifestos are anything to go on, his radicalization had much more to do with memes from distant corners of the internet and video games than a university he didn’t attend for more than a couple of months.

Lake is just one of many Republicans using Kirk’s death to boost their own political agendas. She has been targeting education for years. During her failed gubernatorial campaign in 2022, she described schools as “factories to churn out deliberately mis-educated progressive activists.” Speaking at Kirk’s vigil, she lamented that Americans were “living through the most horrific brainwashing campaign in the history of mankind.” 

President Donald Trump won’t say whether he’s planning military action in Venezuela.

While speaking to reporters Sunday, Trump was asked whether he had plans to strike mainland Venezuela, amid ratcheting tensions with the South American nation.

“Well, we’ll see what happens,” Trump replied. “Look, Venezuela is sending us their gang members, their drug dealers, and drugs. That’s not acceptable.”

Earlier this month, the United States launched a deadly extrajudicial strike on a vessel the government claimed was smuggling drugs. Trump claimed that the strike was an act of “self defense,” although the boat had reportedly turned around by the time it was fired upon.

The Trump administration further attempted to justify sidestepping laws about executing suspected drug smugglers, recast as so-called “narco terrorists,” by claiming it was part of a broader campaign targeting cartels in Venezuela, raising concerns that further military action was imminent.

Venezuela’s Foreign Minister Yván Gil said Saturday that military personnel from a U.S. Navy destroyer boarded a fishing boat in Venezuelan waters for eight hours on Friday, in a “direct provocation” against the South American country.

In a rare interview with CNN, Gil said that Venezuela was not looking for a fight with the United States. “We are not betting on conflict, nor do we want conflict,” he said.

The National Guard’s time in Washington is nearly up—but the president doesn’t seem willing to let them go.

In a lengthy post on Truth Social late Sunday night, Donald Trump claimed that he was willing to call a national emergency to keep some 800 National Guard members in the nation’s capital. He blamed the potential overreach on an imagined variant of the city’s crime rate that he claimed could explode if federal immigration agents are not given free rein.

“The Federal Government, under my auspices as President of the United States of America, has stepped into the complete criminal mess that was Washington, D.C., our Nation’s Capital,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “Because of this, D.C. has gone from one of the most dangerous and murder ridden cities in the U.S.A., and even around the World, to one of the safest—In just a few weeks.”

Trump used made-up crime stats to usher the National Guard into the city last month. In reality, violent crime has been on the decline in Washington since 2023, funneling into a nationwide crime drop the following year that saw homicide rates plummet across the country, according to data from The Washington Post. In 2024, crime in the capital was down 35 percent—a figure from the Metropolitan Police Department that was hailed by FBI Director Kash Patel during one of Trump’s press conferences.

But the documented downward trend was not good fodder for Trump’s D.C. takeover. Late last month, the Justice Department announced a criminal investigation into the Washington police department to determine whether the law enforcement bureau had manipulated data to make crime in the city seem lower than officers have claimed.

Whether the troops have actually made the city better is unclear. Crime is down, homeless encampments have been cleared, and hundreds of people accused of being in the country illegally have been detained by ICE, reported CNN. But tourism is also way down, restaurants are suffering, residents have sparked protests raging against the military occupation, and National Guard members have picked up hundreds of bags of trash—apparenly due to a lack of relevant work. But that version of Washington has seemingly not been witnessed by the big man in the White House.

“The ‘place’ is absolutely booming, with restaurants, stores, and businesses packed and, for the first time in decades, virtually NO CRIME,” Trump insisted. “It has been a beautiful thing to watch but, now, under pressure from the Radical Left Democrats, Mayor Muriel Bowser, who has presided over this violent criminal takeover of our Capital for years, has informed the Federal Government that the Metropolitan Police Department will no longer cooperate with ICE in removing and relocating dangerous illegal aliens.

“If I allowed this to happen, CRIME would come roaring back,” Trump emphasized. “To the people and businesses of Washington, D.C., DON’T WORRY, I AM WITH YOU, AND WON’T ALLOW THIS TO HAPPEN.

“I’ll call a National Emergency, and Federalize, if necessary!!!” he added.

Keeping the National Guard in Washington is not free—the crime crackdown is costing the country at least $1 million per day, according to early estimates.

As details began to surface about Tyler Robinson, the 22-year-old suspect in the fatal shooting of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, MAGA partisans online scapegoated the higher education system, which they claimed must have radicalized the alleged gunman.

Robinson was enrolled in an electrical apprenticeship through Dixie Technical College, and attended Utah State University for a single semester in 2021, according to the Utah System of Higher Education.

Nonetheless, some far-right influencers on Friday defaulted to the right-wing trope that universities are hotbeds of “woke” indoctrination.

Upon reports of Robinson’s connection to Utah State, for example, some users began posting purported evidence of left-wing influence at the school he attended only briefly—and which notably has a reputation for being among the most conservative in the country, per numerous online rankings.

“I’d like to know the names of the professors who radicalized this young man,” posted right-wing author Dinesh D’Souza on X. “I wonder if they too could be charged with abetting this political assassination.”

“Higher ed is a scam,” tweeted Katie Miller, a prominent MAGA figure and wife of Trump’s deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, in response to a post alleging Robinson was “brainwashed” at college.

“From a regular middle class family. Good grades. Went off to college. Became an extremist Antifa kiIIer,” wrote a popular right-wing X account with the display name “End Wokeness.”

“Tyler Robinson didn’t just ‘snap.’ He was manufactured,” a user with another sizable MAGA account posted. “Classrooms became factories. Professors became engineers. And out the other side comes another radical, programmed to hate.”

Pro-Trump commentator Joey Mannarino asserted that Robinson “was radicalized at college because colleges are liberal indoctrination centers.”

The baseless claims recall how, in the immediate wake of Wednesday’s shooting, even before anything was known about the suspected gunman—and despite widespread Democratic condemnations—MAGA Republicans sought to blame the entire left for Kirk’s death.

Ghislaine Maxwell has spent years attempting to distance herself from Jeffrey Epstein. 

Although she’s currently serving 20 years in the clink for recruiting and grooming women for Epstein’s sexual abuse, the well-connected British socialite has insisted that she too was a victim. Framing herself as a onetime girlfriend of the deceased child sex trafficker, Maxwell has tried to reposition her public image as his clueless former property manager, insisting that their relationship had corroded by 2008.

But 18,000 never-before-seen emails between the pair via one of Epstein’s personal Yahoo accounts tell a different tale, revealing that Maxwell was intimately intertwined in his vast sex-trafficking network, according to a sprawling new Bloomberg investigation. In 2008 alone, the criminal accomplices were sending at least two messages per day to one another.

The typo-ridden emails include a spreadsheet cataloging gifts to Epstein’s associates and victims—organized by Maxwell—as well as suggestions from the Oxford-educated media heiress on how Epstein could nurture his ties with the rich and powerful. The emails also document the couple debating consequential details relating to Epstein’s first brush with the law in 2004, when he fielded Maxwell’s opinion regarding his potential criminal charges.

“Question,” Epstein wrote to Maxwell on May 23, 2008. “Which one do you prefer … lewd and lscivious conduct … or procuring minors for prostituion.”

“I suppose Lewd and lecivious conduct … I would prefer lewd and lecivious conduct w/ a prositute if possible,” Maxwell replied.

All in all, the duo shared at least 650 messages, though there are indications that many emails in the larger trove—either between Epstein and Maxwell, or Epstein and others—were deleted, according to Bloomberg.

The breadth of their communications indicates a much closer connection between Maxwell and Epstein than either had publicly admitted. The emails show that after police raided Epstein’s home in 2005, Maxwell wrote him detailed instructions for a shared fertility procedure: “You can do the sample at home,” she wrote, noting that it “has to be within 90 mins of my procedure” and that “all the ejaculate must be collected.”

Their correspondence also reveals their attempts to strategize against their own whistleblowers: women who had raised allegations of sex abuse before Epstein’s crimes drew national attention. In one exchange, Maxwell said she planned to discredit one of the victims by spreading compromising information about her.

The larger cache of messages also paints a disturbingly vivid portrait of Epstein’s misconduct.   

“Details of his life, by turns mundane and chilling, emerge from the cache: He purchased more than 600 items on Amazon, including an FBI agent costume, teeth whitener, a leather bullwhip, a pair of size 12 Crocs, a prostate massager, girls school uniforms and a box of Nabisco Nilla Mini Wafers,” the article reads.

Read the entire article here.

Utah Governor Spencer Cox expressed regret on Friday that he was unable to blame Charlie Kirk’s assassination on an immigrant.

At a press conference, the Republican governor spoke about the ongoing investigation into the conservative activist’s death.

“For 33 hours, I was … I was praying that if this had to happen here, that it wouldn’t be one of us. That somebody drove from another state, somebody came from another country,” he said. “Sadly, that prayer was not answered the way I hoped for. Just because I thought it would make it easier on us if we could just say ‘Hey, we don’t do that here.’”

The alleged shooter certainly seems to be one of them, though there’s still a lot we don’t know. Tyler Robinson, a 22-year-old Utah resident, was detained Thursday evening for Kirk’s Wednesday murder after his father turned him in.

The FBI reported that the suspect had inscribed the bullet casings with the phrases, “Hey fascists! Catch!” with an up arrow, a right arrow and three down arrows, the phrase, “If you read this, you are gay LMAO,” and the lyrics to “Bella Ciao,” a song created by Italian antifascists after World War II that has gained popularity in video games like Far Cry 6 and Heart of Iron 4.

Cox’s comments were quickly rebuked online. “I was hoping we could blame this on immigrants, or at least a minority. Turns out it was one of us unfortunately,” one user posted mockingly. “Kind of a weird thing to pray for,” another said.

Trump administration health officials are planning to link the deaths of more than two dozen children to the Covid-19 vaccine based on information from a database of unverified reports, The Washington Post reported Friday.

Health officials plan to include the deaths of 25 children as part of an upcoming presentation to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, according to four people familiar with the situation who spoke anonymously with the Post.

The findings they plan to present appeared to be pulled from the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, or VAERS, which collects claims of adverse reactions and results of taking vaccines. But because the claims are self-reported and unverified, the system can sometimes be exploited by anti-vaccine activists. People sometimes submit fraudulent claims, or they deliberately present the data as verified in order to stoke fear around vaccines.

The CDC has previously emphasized that the database is not designed to determine a link between a shot and individual deaths. In fact, VAERS comes with a disclaimer that users must acknowledge they have read and understood before they can use the database: “VAERS reports alone cannot be used to determine if a vaccine caused or contributed to an adverse event or illness. The reports may contain information that is incomplete, inaccurate, coincidental, or unverifiable. Most reports to VAERS are voluntary, which means they are subject to biases.”

In 2021, the CDC condemned efforts to willfully misinterpret the data, asserting that statements that implied “deaths following vaccination equate to deaths caused by vaccination are scientifically inaccurate, misleading, and simply irresponsible.”

Health and Human Services Department spokesperson Andrew Nixon defended the agency’s intent to use the VAERS database. “[Food and Drug Administration] and CDC staff routinely analyze VAERS and other safety monitoring data, and those reviews are being shared publicly through the established ACIP process,” he wrote in an email to the Post Friday. “Any recommendations on updated COVID-19 vaccines will be based on gold standard science and deliberated transparently at ACIP next week.”

The Trump administration’s report is not yet finalized, one source told the Post. The methodology is also unclear.

Meanwhile, Covid-19 vaccine providers around the country are waiting with bated breath to see how the panel will side regarding Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s request to stop recommending the Covid-19 vaccine to healthy children.

While claiming that patients could simply consult with their doctors, Kennedy has taken great efforts to make the Covid-19 vaccine less accessible to Americans.

Kennedy’s efforts to limit vaccine efforts have alarmed health professionals. In June, CDC staff reported that at least 25 children who had Covid-associated hospitalizations since 2023 had died. Of the 16 old enough for vaccination, none was up to date on the jab.

With his feverish fantasies about occupying Chicago dashed, President Donald Trump on Friday announced he’s moved on. He now plans to send federal troops to Memphis, with the blessing of Tennessee Governor Bill Lee.

“We’re going to Memphis,” Trump told Fox and Friends, calling the city “deeply troubled.” The president claimed that Memphis Mayor Paul Young, a Democrat, and Lee, a Republican, approve of the decision.

Young contradicted Trump on Friday afternoon, saying that it was “an overstatement” to describe him as “happy” about the move, per a Washington Post reporter. “I do not support the National Guard; however, they are coming. It’s not the mayor’s call,” Young said. “My goal is to make sure that as they come, that I have an opportunity to work with them.”

The Republican governor, for his part, issued a statement Friday confirming he has been in “constant communication with the Trump administration to develop a multi-phased, strategic plan to combat crime in Memphis, leveraging the full extent of both federal and state resources.”

Lee’s statement represents a stark reversal from his stance two weeks ago, when he claimed there were “no plans” for the National Guard to come to Memphis, citing existing investments in crime fighting and a 15 percent decrease in crime in the city in the past year.

But the governor changed his tone last week, saying, “Nothing is off the table.” According to Trump, that means not even the military. “By the way, we’ll bring in the military too if we need it,” the president said Friday.

Mayor Lee Harris of Shelby County, where Memphis is located, condemned Trump’s decision as “anti-democratic” and in violation of “American norms and possibly US laws.”

“The President sending troops to Tennessee will interfere and have a chilling effect on Tennesseans’ ability to exercise critical freedoms, such as the freedom to protest and the liberty to travel,” said Harris, a Democrat. “We will do everything in our power to prevent this incursion into Tennessee.”

With Memphis in his sights, the president has apparently backed down on his musings about stationing troops in Chicago. In recent weeks, the president has expressed interest in recreating his federal takeover of Washington, D.C., in the Windy City, but wavered amid pushback from local leaders, including Illinois Governor JB Pritzker and Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson. On Friday, Trump said he would have preferred targeting Chicago over Memphis.

Johnson celebrated Trump’s retreat in a statement: “Because of the unified opposition from community leaders and elected officials in Chicago and throughout the state, the Trump administration backed down from its threats of sending in the National Guard to Chicago,” he wrote. “We continue to call on the federal government to send additional resources to help us continue to drive down violent crime, but we reject any military occupation of our city.”

White House border czar Tom Homan is threatening to detain more immigrants than Immigrations and Customs Enforcement has beds for.

“We’re almost at capacity,” Homan told reporters at the White House on Tuesday, after announcing raids in Boston and Chicago earlier this week. “[But] we got beds coming online every day.”

Part of this ratcheting up of immigration raids is due to ICE still not reaching its lofty goal of 3,000 arrests a day, a goal that Trump adviser Stephen Miller and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem set for it back in May.

That goal is, of course, easier said than done.

As of September 7, there are 58,766 people in ICE detention. The government has just under 65,000 beds, making Homan’s push for ICE blitzes on Boston and Chicago a logistical issue. “It’s interesting timing because we don’t have the bed space to support all the arrests,” an anonymous official told Politico.

The Trump administration is rushing to expand its detention space, hastily setting up centers like Florida’s now infamous “Alligator Alcatraz” and another center called “Louisiana Lockup.”

“The One Big Beautiful Bill provided historic funding to help us carry out this mandate, including $45 billion to support the expansion of detention space to maintain an average daily population of 100,000 illegal aliens and 80,000 new ICE beds,” McLaughlin said.

Others in the administration aren’t so sure they’ll be able to meet Trump’s goal.

“Do they have enough transportation? Can they move people fast enough? There are all sorts of pieces to this pipeline, and if any one of them gets clogged, it slows everything down,” the anonymous official later said. “From teeing up your deportable targets to your detention and transportation plan for them, to keep running it all at scale smoothly—that’s a big management and logistics challenge.”

Homan remains bullish, leveling threats at both Illinois Governor JB Pritzker and Boston’s Mayor Michelle Wu.

“Shame on [Massachusetts] Gov. Healey and Mayor Wu,” he said Tuesday. “Shame on both of them. They should be calling the White House thanking Trump, thanking ICE for making the community safer.”

Homan’s “blitz” is very much underway. On Friday, ICE shot and killed a man as he ran his car into an officer while trying to flee the scene.

Trumpworld is no longer convinced that FBI Director Kash Patel is up to the job.

A multiday manhunt for Charlie Kirk’s killer came to a dramatic close Friday morning when 22-year-old Tyler Robinson was turned in to the authorities by his own relatives, unassisted by the mad-dash efforts of the bureau.

The uncoordinated search left Patel’s conservative allies remarkably unimpressed, taking to social media to openly question his future atop the country’s top law enforcement agency.

“I’m grateful that Utah authorities have captured the suspect in the Charlie Kirk assassination, and think it is time for Republicans to assess whether Kash Patel is the right man to run the FBI,” posted conservative culture warrior Christopher Rufo. “He performed terribly in the last few days, and it’s not clear whether he has the operational expertise to investigate, infiltrate, and disrupt the violent movements—of whatever ideology—that threaten the peace in the United States.”

Rufo rose to prominence among the right for inventing a fiction that the left has taken over America, despite the reality that Republicans hold a majority in every major branch of the federal government and that Fox News and Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp continue to be the largest and most powerful media outlets in the country.

“We would be wise to take a moment and ask whether Kash Patel has what it takes to get this done,” Rufo wrote. “I’ve been on the phone the last few days with many conservative leaders, all of whom wholeheartedly support the Trump Administration and none of whom are confident that the current structure of the FBI is up to this task.”

Over the last 48 hours, Patel has managed to flub practically every component of the investigation, grinding the patience of other MAGA-heads. On Wednesday, he prematurely congratulated authorities for nabbing a suspect who turned out to be the wrong man, earning him the ire of Alex Jones associate Joseph Biggs and Fox News host Laura Ingraham, who criticized the FBI director’s social media dog-and-pony show.

“@FBIDirectorKash you’re the person we are supposed to get the final truth from,” Biggs wrote. “Stop all this click bait shit you keep doing. It’s unbecoming of the office in which you represent and only proves you were a horrible pick for this position.”

Ingraham described Patel’s efforts as “unreal.”

Patel reportedly lost it during an online meeting Thursday with some 200 agents involved in the search as he cracked under pressure to find Kirk’s killer. In the expletive-ridden tirade, Patel warned his subordinates that he would no longer put up with the FBI’s “Mickey Mouse operations,” and was apparently irate that it had taken the bureau some 12 hours to obtain a photograph of Robinson.

Even the $100,000 bounty on Robinson’s head caught Patel flak, with far-right influencer Laura Loomer demanding to know why the sum was less than had been posted for information leading to the potential capture of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro.

“So the DOJ and FBI are willing to offer $50 million for information about @NicolasMaduro, but only $100,000 for information about who killed Charlie Kirk on American soil in a cold blooded assassination?!?” Loomer wrote on X. “This is honestly embarrassing for the FBI and our country. What a slap in the face to Charlie Kirk.”

Former FBI officials questioned Patel’s decision to get so close to the investigation, arguing that his high-profile involvement would only be a “huge burden” on the Salt Lake City FBI field office.

Patel, a former podcast host with conspiratorial tendencies, was roundly criticized as Trump’s top choice to run the bureau. Lawmakers and former officials condemned Patel’s lack of relevant experience during his confirmation hearings and raised flags regarding his vindictive nature, pointing to an enemies list he published in his 2022 book Government Gangsters as evidence.