Supreme Court Seems Ready to Ban Trans Kids From Playing Sports

The Supreme Court’s conservative majority appeared poised Tuesday to allow states to ban transgender athletes from playing on girls’ and women’s sports teams.

The court heard oral arguments for two cases from Idaho and West Virginia in which lawyers for the trans teens argued that the state laws they’d challenged relied on broad generalization about the sexes, and their supposed biological advantages, that did not apply to their specific clients, The New York Times reported. Meanwhile, solicitor generals from these states insisted that biological sex matters in sports because of supposed competitive advantages.

The first case was from Idaho, involving college senior Lindsay Hecox, who has attempted to drop her case in order to proceed through the rest of school “without the extraordinary pressures of this litigation and related public scrutiny.”

The second case involves Becky Pepper-Jackson, a West Virginia high school student. Pepper-Jackson’s lawyer, Joshua Block of the ACLU, argued that his client did not hold an unfair advantage to her teammates and opponents because she had never gone through male puberty and had been taking hormone blockers.

While the conservative justices acknowledged that there was some scientific disagreement about competitive advantages between the sexes, they still seemed inclined to agree with states. Justice Brett Kavanaugh suggested that Title IX did not protect transgender athletes from discrimination because it prevented discrimination based on “sex,” not gender identity.

“I hate, hate that a kid who wants to play sports might not be able to play sports. Hate that. But we have kind of a zero-sum game for a lot of teens,” he said, arguing that a transgender girl will inevitably take the spot entitled to a cisgender girl.

Of course, it’s not clear that there are that many transgender female athletes to begin with. Charlie Baker, the president of the National Collegiate Athletic Association, reported in 2024 that of the 510,000 total college athletes, there were fewer than 10 transgender students.

Trapped in the minority, the liberal justices suggested that the plaintiffs could seek “as applied” challenges to their states laws, meaning the cases could go back through lower courts separately to demonstrate that the two girls did not possess the unfair advantages implied by their assigned sex at birth.

A woman in Minneapolis was dragged out of her car and arrested by ICE agents on Tuesday after informing agents the street they were blocking to conduct a raid was blocking her route to her doctor’s office.

The woman could be seen arguing with masked agents while they tell her to move her car up the street.

“This bitch just said he was gonna break my window if I don’t move my car!” the woman said from the driver’s seat, pointing directly at the ICE agent screaming in her face before throwing her hands up in frustration.

The ICE agents told the woman again to move along. Then one agent went to the passenger side window and broke it, while two others cut the woman’s seatbelt and dragged her out of her car.

“I’ve been beat up by police before, I’m disabled just trying to go to the doctor up there, that’s why I can’t move!” she says before being pushed against her car and arrested. Protesters scream in disgust, and whistles and car horns blare for the entirety of the clip.

“All you do is hurt!” one protester yelled at the agents, among a chorus of “Fuck you.” The woman was then placed in handcuffs.

“This is what living under a federal siege looks like,” Minnesota state Senator Omar Fateh wrote on X. “This isn’t about public safety—this is terrorism.”

This is just one of many awful scenes that have emerged from Minneapolis since the Department of Homeland Security responded to ICE’s killing of Renee Nicole Good by sending in even more masked, armed agents.

“I’ve been talking to people in Minneapolis, and the stories I’m hearing are traumatizing; people waking up to the smell of tear gas, wrecked cars left in the middle of roadways, businesses locked down, a state of fear,” American Immigration senior fellow Aaron Reichlin-Melnick said. “This is what Stephen Miller wants to bring to every city.”

Six Minnesota prosecutors have resigned from the Justice Department over an investigation into the widow of Renee Good, who was shot and killed by an ICE agent in Minneapolis last week.

Among those who quit Tuesday was Joseph H. Thompson, who oversaw a Minnesota fraud investigation last year that has garnered increased attention from the Trump administration in recent weeks. According to The New York Times, Thompson, a career attorney with the DOJ, objected to senior department officials pressing for a criminal investigation into Good’s wife, Becca, as well as to the department’s decision to shut out state officials from the investigation into Good’s killing.

Thompson had sought to work with the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, which reviews police shootings in the state, to investigate the shootings, but was shot down by his DOJ superiors. Thompson was also upset that Good’s shooting was not being investigated as a civil rights matter.

Three other senior prosecutors who resigned were Harry Jacobs, Melinda Williams, and Thomas Calhoun-Lopez. Jacobs was Thompson’s deputy on the fraud investigation, while Calhoun-Lopez oversaw a violent and major crimes unit. Thompson, Jacobs, Williams, and Calhoun-Lopez declined to discuss their resignations with the Times.

Federal agents were already known to be investigating Good’s previous activism in a grotesque attempt to blame her for her own murder and exonerate the ICE agent who shot her, Jonathan Ross. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem has described Good as a “domestic terrorist,” President Trump has called her and her wife “professional agitators,” and Vice President JD Vance has said she was “brainwashed.”

Now, it seems that the Trump administration’s handling of Good’s shooting, and desire to target her rather than charge any federal agents, is getting backlash from within the DOJ. While that might not dissuade the White House, it will at least expose how much the president’s immigration enforcement is violating the law.

Greenland’s Prime Minister Jens-Frederik Nielsen firmly rebuked Donald Trump Monday, saying that the people of the Danish territory don’t want to be part of the United States.

At a joint press conference with Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen in Copenhagen, Nielsen said, “If we have to choose between the USA and Denmark here and now, we choose Denmark. We choose NATO, the Kingdom of Denmark, and the EU.”

On Wednesday, the foreign ministers of Greenland and Denmark will be meeting Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio at the White House, and Nielsen and Frederiksen sought to set the record straight.

“It has not been easy to stand up to completely unacceptable pressure from our closest allies for a lifetime. But there is much to suggest that the hardest part is still ahead of us,” Frederiksen said.

That probably won’t dissuade Trump, who told reporters on Sunday that the U.S. would have Greenland “one way or the other.”

“If we don’t take Greenland, Russia or China will, and I’m not letting that happen,” Trump said. This has been disputed by Denmark and other international observers.

Greenland’s political parties, as well as leaders from countries across NATO, have all condemned a possible U.S. seizure of the territory. But Trump claims that taking the territory is “psychologically important” for him. And we all know Trump’s ego is never satisfied.

Former President Bill Clinton and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton have refused to testify on the Epstein files before Congress after being subpoenaed by Republican House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer.

The Clintons wrote a lengthy letter addressed to Comer declaring the subpoenas “legally invalid.”

“You claim your subpoenas are inviolate when they are used against us yet were silent when the sitting president took the same position, as a former president, barely more than three years ago,” the letter reads. “You have done nothing with your Oversight capacity to force the Department of Justice to follow the law and release all its Epstein files, including any material regarding us as we have publicly called for.”

The Clintons also pointed out that Comer refused to support the bipartisan bill to release the Epstein files that Representatives Thomas Massie and Ro Khanna put forth.

Comer has responded with threats to hold both Clintons in contempt of Congress, which could carry a maximum penalty of a $100,000 fine or one year in prison. Bill Clinton has already missed his scheduled deposition Tuesday, and Hillary is scheduled on Wednesday.

While former President Clinton certainly had an alarmingly close relationship with deceased sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein, the exact same can be said about our current president, Donald Trump. But Comer has refused to pursue him at all, suggesting that this is a politically motivated attempt to deflect scrutiny of Trump’s relationship with Epstein onto the Clintons.

“Will you rule out bringing in Donald Trump for an interview?” a reporter asked Comer on Tuesday.

“Well … President Trump has answered thousands of questions about Jeffrey Epstein,” Comer said. “You all ask him questions every day, he answers questions every day about Epstein. Every day! You can’t bring in a current president of the United States, and you all know that.… To my knowledge, former President Clinton has never answered questions about Epstein.”

Trump has only avoided and attacked the questions he’s been asked about Epstein, and anyone who’s been paying attention would agree that both he and former President Clinton need to answer more—and if they really cared about transparency, they would.

The U.S. Department of State is going to bat against the United Kingdom so Elon Musk can keep getting rich off of AI porn.

In an interview Tuesday, Sarah B. Rogers, the undersecretary of state for public diplomacy, threatened to fight back against the British government’s mounting efforts to combat the prevalence of sexually explicit computer-generated images on social media.

“With respect to a potential ban of X, Keir Starmer has said that nothing is off the table,” said Rogers, referring to the British prime minister. “I would say from America’s perspective, nothing is off the table when it comes to free speech.”

She also stressed that President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance were “huge champions” of free speech—though nothing could be further from the truth. Since entering office, both Trump and Vance have devoted countless hours to undermining the press over its unfavorable coverage of their authoritarian bumbling, and their administration has repeatedly sought to punish its critics for their speech.

The British Labour Party announced Monday that it planned to criminalize the creation of nonconsensual sexualized images, placing legal culpability not only on the creators but on the platforms supplying tools for the images’ creation, such as Musk’s X. British Technology Secretary Liz Kendall said that platforms needed to take measures to become safer for women and girls. “If they do not, I am prepared to go further,” she warned.

Britain’s Office of Communications, the country’s independent regulator for communications, also announced that it had launched an investigation into X over thousands of pornographic images generated by Grok, Musk’s racist AI chatbot that recently admitted to making explicit images of infants.

The Trump administration’s effort to save Musk comes shortly after it sought help from the deposed DOGE czar to reestablish internet access in Iran, to help protesters there circumvent the government-imposed media blackout.

This isn’t the first time that the U.S. State Department has defended Musk’s financial interests. The agency reportedly pressured at least one foreign government to approve a license for Starlink, which is owned and operated by SpaceX, of which Musk owns a $150 billion stake.

While Musk’s short stint in the White House may be over, his friendship with the president is still paying dividends. It’s no secret that Musk spent his time as DOGE czar working to dismantle the very agencies that regulate his companies, and used his proximity to Trump to boost his many businesses in foreign countries.

Financial leaders from Switzerland, Brazil, Korea, the United Kingdom, and more are rallying around U.S. Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell after the Department of Justice served him with a grand jury subpoena.

“We stand in full solidarity with the Federal Reserve System and its Chair Jerome H. Powell. The independence of central banks is a cornerstone of price, financial and economic stability in the interest of the citizens that we serve. It is therefore critical to preserve that independence, with full respect for the rule of law and democratic accountability,” the letter read. It was signed by presidents and governors of central banks in the U.K., Sweden, Switzerland, Norway, Australia, Canada, Korea, and Brazil.

President Trump has long attempted to pressure Powell’s decisions on interest rates, and the DOJ over the weekend announced a criminal investigation into the Federal Reserve chair. It’s a thinly veiled attack on Powell, so that Trump can have minimal resistance to whatever Federal Reserve nominations he wants to make and whatever economic numbers he wants (or doesn’t want) to put out.

“JUST OUT: Great (LOW!) Inflation numbers for the USA. That means that Jerome ‘Too Late’ Powell should cut interest rates, MEANINGFULLY!!!” Trump claimed Tuesday morning on Truth Social. “If he doesn’t he will just continue to be, ‘TOO LATE!’ ALSO OUT, GREAT GROWTH NUMBERS. Thank you MISTER TARIFF! President DJT.”

The international alarm this has caused only underscores the real dangers of a completely partisan Federal Reserve, and is perhaps the most dramatic development in Trump’s long mission to destroy any regulatory independence the Fed still has.

“Chair Powell has served with integrity, focused on his mandate and an unwavering commitment to the public interest,” the letter from the international central bankers concluded. “To us, he is a respected colleague who is held in the highest regard by all who have worked with him.”

Former special counsel Jack Smith is going to get the chance to testify to Congress in the full view of the public.

On January 22, Smith will testify before the House Judiciary Committee as part of its investigation into Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election, said its chair, Representative Jim Jordan, on Monday. In December, Smith testified for eight hours in a closed-door hearing before the committee.

Smith, who was appointed to oversee Trump’s alleged mishandling of classified documents and efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election, has long sought to testify in a public hearing, but was rebuffed by Republicans in favor of one behind closed doors. In that hearing, Smith said that he stood by his prosecution of Trump.

“If asked whether to prosecute a former president based on the same facts today, I would do so regardless of whether the president was a Republican or Democrat,” Smith said in his opening statement.

In next week’s public hearing, Republicans will likely try to attack Smith’s credibility and accuse him of a political witch hunt against the president, while Democrats will hope to highlight the evidence that Smith collected against Trump and his inner circle. Smith has said that he wants to share the results of his election investigation but was prohibited by the Department of Justice, which is keeping parts of the case sealed.

The hearing will be a good chance for Smith to share information that he hasn’t before directly to the American people, which would not be received well by Republicans or by Trump. They won’t be able to control what the seasoned prosecutor says to the live TV cameras, reporters, and the public, and it could very well be damaging to the White House.

President Donald Trump says he won’t meet with Iranian government officials until they stop murdering their own people.

In a post on Truth Social Tuesday, Trump urged the millions of protesters who have taken to the streets to oppose the Islamic Republic to “KEEP PROTESTING—TAKE OVER YOUR INSTITUTIONS.”

“Save the names of the killers and abusers. They will pay a big price,” Trump wrote. “I have cancelled all meetings with Iranian Officials until the senseless killing of protesters STOPS. HELP IS ON ITS WAY!”

Trump was scheduled to discuss options to support protesters and weaken the regime in Iran Tuesday morning, and had previously indicated a preference toward conducting a military strike, a White House official with direct knowledge told Axios Monday. 

Trump had sent some dangerously mixed messages on how exactly he planned to intervene in Iran’s crackdown on antigovernment protesters. The president previously claimed he was willing to use military force against Iran if the government continued to kill protesters, but also said that he was open to negotiation. 

It seems that Trump hopes to signal that the time to negotiate has come and gone, as his latest message seems to indicate that a military strike could be imminent. The president’s instruction for protesters to start taking names suggests he anticipates a sudden regime change.  

The U.S.-based Human Rights Activists News Agency, which has spent years documenting protests in Iran, estimates that more than 10,000 people have been arrested in the last two weeks, and at least 500 have been killed. The Narges Foundation, dedicated to currently imprisoned Nobel Peace laureate Narges Mohammadi, estimates more than 2,000 people have been killed.

President Donald Trump issued a chilling threat of reckoning and retribution to the people of Minnesota Tuesday after state and city leaders sued the administration over its deadly “federal invasion.”

Following the news that Minnesota and the Twin Cities were suing to stop the Trump administration’s “Operation Metro Surge,” the president took to Truth Social to air his frustration with his besieged constituents.

“Do the people of Minnesota really want to live in a community in which there are thousands of already convicted murderers, drug dealers and addicts, rapists, violent released and escaped prisoners, dangerous people from foreign mental institutions and insane asylums, and other deadly criminals too dangerous to even mention,” Trump wrote.

He claimed that all the “patriots of ICE” wanted was to “remove” these individuals. But last week, the residents of Minneapolis saw something entirely different: an ICE agent senselessly killed a U.S. citizen, Renee Good, and was then defended by every level of government.

Good’s death sparked civil unrest in Minneapolis (and nationwide), as well as requests for federal immigration forces to take their leave. But the Trump administration has doubled down on its occupation, deploying roughly 1,000 more U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers.

“Minnesota Democrats love the unrest that anarchists and professional agitators are causing because it gets the spotlight off of the 19 Billion Dollars that was stolen by really bad and deranged people,” Trump wrote, referring to the federal fraud investigations into the state’s childcare system.

“FEAR NOT, GREAT PEOPLE OF MINNESOTA, THE DAY OF RECKONING & RETRIBUTION IS COMING!” Trump warned.

Already, Minnesota residents are seeing what this looks like: ICE agents have been emboldened toward violence against protesters and civilians—with Good as their rallying cry.