Democratic Congressman Was at Temple During Mass Shooting Attempt

A 19-year-old man tried to carry out a mass shooting at a Hindu temple in Aurora, Illinois, on Sunday while Democratic Representative Raja Krishnamoorthi and his family were inside.

Alexandros Paporakis, 19, was thwarted in his attempt to open fire on the Sri Venkateswara Swami Balaji Temple thanks to his rifle jamming, Krishnamoorthi said in a statement, citing Cook County prosecutors. Paporakis allegedly told his co-workers about what he did and said he planned to try again.

His co-workers contacted police, who arrested him at his home nearby. Investigators later found a manifesto that Paporakis allegedly wrote titled “Why I Fought: A.K.A. (Aurora Shooter’s Manifesto)” showing support for white supremacist ideas, the Chicago Tribune reported. They also found weapons, hundreds of rifle ammunition rounds, body armor, a patch with a white supremacist picture on it, and tactical equipment.

“I am horrified that a white supremacist attempted to carry out a mass shooting targeting Indian Americans at the Hindu temple in Aurora where my family worships,” Krishnamoorthi said in his statement.

Racism against South Asians has ramped up in recent months, spurred on by right-wing politicians and media. Bo French, the Republican nominee to lead the Texas Railroad Commission, made a racist X post attacking a picture of several South Asian students at a University of Texas football game.

“The problem is now obviously far worse than anyone imagined,” French posted.

The picture quickly became conservative fodder. It was the topic of discussion on a September 26 episode of the right-wing podcast Rufo & Lomez, hosted by right-wing ideologues Christopher Rufo (famous for pushing attacks on critical race theory and DEI) and Jonathan Keeperman. The pair discussed what they called the “Indian Question” and defended French’s post, making the racist claim that the Texas students had not properly “assimilated” into American culture.

Krishnamoorthi criticized the episode in an X post, saying that “Indian Americans are not an ‘Indian Question’ to be solved.”

“Treating any American community as a problem because of their ethnicity is racist, xenophobic, and fundamentally un-American. We are a nation born of ideals, not bloodlines. No race, religion, or ancestry has a greater claim to America than another. Indian Americans are as American as anyone. This country belongs to all of us,” Krishnamoorthi posted.

Meanwhile, Rufo and Keeperman’s ideas are being amplified by their fellow travelers in the Trump administration, who turn a blind eye to incidents like the one in Aurora.

Nearly 600,000 people in Texas had their voting registration delayed due to a computer glitch. Now state election workers are trying frantically to register them before early voting starts on Monday in one of the country’s most consequential electoral battlegrounds.

A lawsuit filed by two voting rights groups, the League of Women Voters Texas and Move Texas Civic Fund, alleges that a software update initiated by the Texas Department of Public Safety malfunctioned, leaving 600,000 new voters unprocessed. They also claim that the voter registration program had long had issues even before the software malfunction. The lawsuit names Republican Secretary of State Robert S. Howden, the Department of Public Safety, and DPS Director Freeman F. Martin as defendants.

“Since at least October 2025, Defendants have breached and continue to breach the contract by failing to maintain the procedures that ensure simultaneous online voter registration with driver license renewal or change of address transactions,” the lawsuit reads.

The lawsuit states that people who registered to vote while applying for their license between October 2025 and February 2026 were affected, with their information never actually recorded. The groups are requesting that a judge activate a 2021 settlement agreement that allows Texans to register to vote online with a driver’s license.

The Texas DPS has declined to comment.

The fact that this is all happening in Texas makes this situation particularly urgent. While voter registration issues anywhere present a genuine constitutional threat, it’s especially alarming in Texas—a state where a Democrat has a real chance to win the Senate for the first time in over 30 years. The race between embattled MAGA Republican Ken Paxton and populist Democrat James Talarico is incredibly close, and a win for Talarico would deliver a crippling blow to President Trump and the national GOP in the process. If this massive voter registration malfunction isn’t remedied by November 3, it will present any outcome with real issues of legitimacy.

Kimberly Guilfoyle is having a rough week.

MAGA donor and former congressional candidate Eric Deters announced in a video Thursday that he had filed a defamation lawsuit against the disgraced former U.S. ambassador to Greece and her lawyers.

“This might just bring down the entire Trump administration,” Deters said in the video.

Deters became ensnared in Guilfoyle’s fall from glory last week, when The Wall Street Journal reported that she had begged him to pay her $100,000 American Express credit card bill in exchange for special access to Trump administration officials who could take care of Deters and his personal tax problems.

“You could just send it here. It won’t show up anywhere if you wire money to American Express, that’s all that will show,” Guilfoyle wrote to Deters on July 3, 2025, ahead of her confirmation hearing for ambassador. “Please. And I have you down as one of my special guests for my hearing in DC on Wednesday.… I can get you in for a meeting on the matter we discussed please get back to me ASAP.”

“Honey please I need you to get this done for me today,” she added. Guilfoyle was once upon a time married to Democratic California Governor Gavin Newsom, and later engaged to Donald Trump Jr. before they parted ways in 2024.

The bombshell Journal report, alongside evidence that Guilfoyle had boasted about her close ties to two Greek tycoons who were bankrolling her international travel, spelled the end of Guilfoyle’s tenure as a U.S. ambassador. She was publicly asked to resign from her position Tuesday during White House press secretary Katie Zacharia’s first ever press briefing, and officially stepped down only hours later. In her resignation, she wrote, “I also want to address the recent allegations against me. These allegations are false, and I intend to vigorously defend my name, my reputation, and my integrity,” setting the stage for Deters’s new lawsuit.

Following Guilfoye’s dismissal, she has reportedly been “spiraling” out of control and amassing evidence against the Trump family in a “burn book.” This lawsuit is unlikely to ease her state of mind.

“I possess a solid grasp of Greek mythology. Kim’s Greek goddess match is Apate, the goddess of deceit,” Deters said in his video. He demanded that Guilfoyle and the defendants “apologize to me, admit the texts are fake, admit I did not blackmail her, admit I do not owe Kim money, and with the payment of $1 million.”

Deters then said he had further evidence of wrongdoing: He claimed to be sitting on a “16-minute phone conversation I had from Greece” that “may end the JD Vance-Marco Rubio ticket.” He then promised to release the phone recording on Friday.

“President Trump and the defendants can do the right thing, or pay the price for not doing so by virtue of my never-ending cymbal-banging,” Deters continued. “This litigation will include subpoenas and documents from the Trump administration. I can assure you, by the end of tomorrow, I am going to play for you a phone recording that is the most explosive, most devastating, information about Kimberly Guilfoyle to date.

“It’s my opinion that I have brought down the Greek ambassador. It’s my opinion that Susie Wiles is gonna go. And it’s my opinion that this is going to be the Jack McCall—without the violence—the Jack McCall of the Trump administration. Google Jack McCall if you’re wondering who Jack McCall is.”

We did. He murdered American frontier folk hero Wild Bill Hickok in 1876. Weird.

Katie Zacharia delivered her debut performance as White House press secretary just two days ago, but she’s already made enemies of her colleagues.

The 41-year-old appeared before the White House press corps for the first time on Tuesday, whereupon she stumbled her way through a wordy briefing, took three questions, and fled out of the room after just 14 minutes. Donald Trump was the first to defend her, telling reporters after the conference that he felt Zacharia was “very good.” The White House took a similar position, describing Zacharia’s delivery as “commanding.”

But a series of leaked text messages obtained by the Daily Mail revealed that the newly minted Trump official was getting torched by her administration co-workers before she even left the lectern.

“She looked as if she was handed a sheet of paper at the last minute and wasn’t prepared properly,” one insider said.

A senior administration official told the Mail that Zacharia’s performance wasn’t good enough.

“She should have gone on longer and had substantive answers ready,” the official said. “She could barely read.”

A senior member of the administration’s communications team said that Zacharia’s first briefing was “terrible on so many different levels.” Another official called it “embarrassing.”

Another source told the tabloid that they felt “badly for her,” considering that Zacharia’s “kids and family [were] watching.”

But an aptitude for the job isn’t the only thing Zacharia lacks. The White House confirmed Thursday that, despite her résumé and self-advertised legal credentials, the Pepperdine Caruso Law graduate never actually passed a state bar exam. The Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday that Zacharia sat for the California bar exam after she obtained her law degree, but she did not pass.

For years, Zacharia made a name for herself as a legal expert on conservative airways. Her LinkedIn also lists her as “general counsel” for a California-based organization run by longtime Trump ally Ric Grenell. The caveat: She shouldn’t have been able to do either without passing the bar.

President Donald Trump made a speech to first responders in the Rose Garden Thursday—and spent his time talking about “reskinning” the White House.

After rambling about the upcoming midterm elections and briefly thanking the first responders gathered there for lunch, the president quickly pivoted to describing his pet White House construction projects.

“It’s all perfect now. So we reskinned, basically. It’s a reskinning,” Trump said, looking around the Rose Garden like he’d never seen it before. “And that building is good to go for another 100 years, at least, actually. But even this, you see the, the top sections were—it was so bad I didn’t even like standing under it, the thing was all cracked and broken, all over the place. We put the sign up, solid brass, half-inch thick, as opposed to laminate. You ever see these laminate? They don’t want to spend the money on the brass so they have a piece of brass laminated, just about one-hundredth of an inch thick, and they put in on a piece of wood to save a lot of money.”

Trump, of course, has made no attempt to save money pursuing his vanity projects in the people’s house. Not only did he pave over the original Rose Garden to build a sterile patio (and to ostensibly make it easier for women wearing heels, he claimed Thursday), but he also renovated columns and porticos, repaved the driveway using white granite, covered the Oval Office in gaudy gold, gutted the Lincoln Bathroom, built and then rebuilt a new helipad, and demolished the East Wing to build a $600 million White House ballroom. The building has indeed been “reskinned”—in Trump’s own image.

A clinical psychologist recently signaled that the president’s endless obsession with his construction project might be a sign of cognitive decline.