Al Green Kicked Out of State of the Union Over Sign on Trump Racism

Texas Representative Al Green was once again escorted out of President Trump’s State of the Union—this time for holding up a sign that read “Black People Aren’t Apes.”

Green’s sign was a reference to Trump’s racist post on Truth Social earlier this month depicting former President Barack Obama and former first lady Michelle Obama as apes—summoning harsh condemnations from Democrats and Republicans alike. The president later deleted the post, claiming that it had been published by a staffer.

Green attempted to hold his sign up in front of Trump as the president entered the chamber, but was blocked by House Majority Leader Steve Scalise.

When Trump boarded the stage, the 78-year-old Houston-area congressman stood in the fourth row and held up his sign again.

As Trump began his address, Republican Representative Troy Nehls, also from Texas, reportedly approached Green about the sign. He was held back by Representative Pat Fallon as the sergeant of arms escorted Green out. Oklahoma Senator Markwayne Mullin also tried to pull the sign away from Green.

As Green was escorted out, the audience started shouting “USA!”

Last year, Green was removed from the chamber after he reportedly kept yelling at Trump, “You have no mandate to cut Medicaid!” The Texas Democrat waved his cane in the direction of the president and was warned to stop several times.

FBI Director Kash Patel’s personal reliance on the bureau’s jet fleet isn’t just costing taxpayers money—it’s also significantly interfering with the agency’s work.

A whistleblower revealed Tuesday that the FBI’s investigation into Charlie Kirk’s assassination was waylaid by at least a day because of a plane and pilot shortage caused by the director’s unofficial escapades, reported CBS News.

Patel’s poor management of resources continued for months, interfering with another FBI investigation on December 13, when the FBI’s shooting reconstruction team was unable to immediately respond to a shooting at Brown University due to a lack of available bureau planes at an airport in Richmond, Virginia, according to Senator Dick Durbin.

It’s a hypocritical development for Patel, a conspiracy podcaster turned government official who used to regularly chastise politicians for needless spending before he joined the ranks of the Trump administration. Patel relentlessly hounded the financial behavior of the man who previously filled his role—former FBI Director Chris Wray—even arguing in 2023 that the FBI should “ground” Wray’s private jet “that he pays for with taxpayer dollars to hop around the country.”

But these are far from the only examples in which Patel has used the bureau’s equipment as his personal play toys.

In December, top Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee opened an investigation into Patel after it became clear that he took multiple flights on a $60 million government jet in order to see his girlfriend, country singer Alexis Wilkins. The jet owner’s listed address, according to its FAA registration, was the FBI’s national headquarters in Washington. Days later, Patel reportedly took another FBI plane to Texas to visit some friends.

Patel has been riding on the country’s dime since he was sworn in as the face of America’s largest national law enforcement agency. Weeks after a Republican-controlled Senate gave Patel the green light to run the FBI, he took several jaunts to different areas of the country, including Las Vegas and Nashville, a lifestyle he hasn’t been shy to advertise amongst the rank and file of the federal bureau.

“If you have golf, hockey, fishing, or hunting and beautiful sights, you’re going to see a lot of me,” Patel once said, according to an internal source that shared the comments with Durbin.

Patel’s flight history became a subject of intense criticism again on Sunday, when a video was leaked of the FBI director celebrating the U.S. men’s hockey Olympic gold medal win. In the video, Patel is seen chugging beers inside the boy’s locker room in Milan, causing some Americans to question if Patel had spent more of their money to trek across the Atlantic for a wildly unnecessary excursion.

The 2028 presidential election could see a painfully familiar face return to the campaign trail.

Former Vice President Kamala Harris told podcaster Sharon McMahon on Tuesday that she has not yet ruled out the possibility of yet another presidential campaign.

“Will you run again?” asked McMahon, plainly.

“I haven’t decided,” Harris said.

“You’re still thinking about it?” McMahon pressed.

“I might,” Harris offered.

Harris served as California’s senator from 2017 to 2021, when she was sworn in as the first female vice president alongside Joe Biden.

She has failed twice to enter the White House on her own terms. She dropped her first presidential bid in late 2019 due to low polling numbers and dwindling financial resources. Harris’s luck changed drastically in 2024, when the Democratic National Committee formally backed her as their candidate of choice to face off against Donald Trump—though her campaign blitz, which was sabotaged in part by Biden’s reluctance to leave office, wasn’t enough. Harris ultimately lost that election by more than two million votes.

A secret postmortem of Harris’s performance by the DNC found that her major issue with voters stemmed from Biden’s poor handling of Israel’s massacre in Gaza and her own refusal to break with him on it, a policy choice that fundamentally soured support from progressives and young voters.

The DNC report has been under lock and key since the loss, but details of its findings became public on Sunday after staffers with the pro-Palestinian IMEU Policy Project met with the project’s authors in a closed-door meeting.

“The DNC shared with us that their own data also found that policy was, in their words, a ‘net-negative’ in the 2024 election,” Hamid Bendass, a spokesperson for the IMEU Policy Project, told Axios.

The Democratic Party further incensed Gaza’s sympathizers when it rejected a request to feature a pro-Palestinian speaker at the 2024 Democratic National Convention. In lieu of a dedicated activist to call for an end to the genocide, the DNC had major party figureheads, such as Biden and New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, make quick mention of the ongoing conflict, while efforts to cover up mass protests of the American-funded atrocities quietly took place behind the scenes.

Two years on, the scene is shaping up in an all too familiar way: Pro-Israel groups have already spent millions funding the 2026 Democratic primaries, while Trump and his allies chip away at a plan to redevelop Gaza into a Dubai-style luxury resort.

The Trump administration is considering requiring banks to track clients’ citizenship status in order to find more people to deport.

The Wall Street Journal reports that the White House is looking at signing an executive order or some other means to compel financial institutions to gather the data. Banks would likely have to ask for identifying documents, such as passports, from both new and existing customers who want a bank account in the U.S.

Banks are reportedly alarmed at such an executive order, according to the Journal. They already have legal requirements to collect certain information for law enforcement to fight against financial crimes, including money laundering. But those requirements don’t specifically include gathering citizenship information, and there’s no law against noncitizens opening bank accounts in the U.S.

A White House official told the publication that the new requirement hasn’t been approved and is only being discussed within the Treasury. A division of the Treasury Department that enforces laws against money laundering and counterterrorism financing could be used to collect the information, an unnamed source told the Journal.

Last year, the Department of Homeland Security forced the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to turn over the personal information of immigrants enrolled in Medicaid, and the U.S. Postal Service has also been enlisted to identify targets. The goal seems to be not only increasing the number of deportations but also to force all immigrants, even those with legal status, to the fringes of American society by making them afraid that basic services, government or otherwise, can be used against them.

The Department of Homeland Security is threatening to put legal observers monitoring ICE activity on a domestic terrorist watchlist, according to a new lawsuit. 

Politico, citing the lawsuit, reports that DHS agents used facial recognition technology and license plate readers to monitor observers in Maine who were keeping tabs on federal immigration agents. The federal law enforcement officers would then threaten protesters. 

The lawsuit against the department and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem was filed Monday by two of those observers, Colleen Fagan and Elinor Hilton, who are hoping for an injunction that would stop the department from using the technology to threaten legal observers.

Hilton and Fagan allege that agents scanned their faces and license plates in two separate instances last month while they were recording ICE in Portland. In one occurrence, the lawsuit states that an agent told Hilton, “I hope you know that if you keep coming to things like this, you are going to be on a domestic terrorist watchlist. Then we’re going to come to your house later tonight.”

The lawsuit cited other Maine incidents documented in news articles, such as one ICE agent driving to a legal observer’s home and repeatedly honking their horn. Another time, a federal agent drove to the home of a protester and told her, “This is a warning. We know you live right here.”

The federal government is resorting to Orwellian means not just to identify people for deportation, but also to surveil protesters and legal observers who oppose the Trump administration’s mass deportation agenda. Companies specializing in surveillance, such as Flock, are being used to gather data, and the recent purchase of TikTok by Trump-friendly owner Skydance has ensured that the social video platform’s data is now in government hands too. 

ICE is currently using an app developed by Palantir that provides agents with a digital map containing potential deportation targets. That company also happens to be creating a master database in order to collect data on every single American. It seems the Trump administration is not above creating a police state to accomplish its goals.